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The day before my school we rented a car and drove down to Washington to do some shopping. The line ups at the border weren’t too bad but then we had to go inside so Scott could get finger-printed, so it ended up taking us over an hour to cross. Bummer.

It was pretty funny after we crossed the border when Scott was driving 70 km/hr until I suddenly remembered that the speed limits are in mph, not kph. Haha. I bet people laughed at us. TAKE YOUR TIME GRANDPA, EH.

We got off the highway to get me some Taco Bell right before Tulalip but I changed my mind when I saw the Five Guys sign. I had heard about Five Guys before on the internet and really wanted to try it!

We got a small size burger each and one small fries and one small drink. The guy at the cash actually told us to just get one fries and one drink. They are so generous there they give you tons of toppings on your burger lke mushrooms and peppers and a bazillion fries and unlimited refills on drinks! It was definitely tastier than any other fast food I have had, the burger tasted like real meat and the fries were perfecto. They had one of those wacko pop machines with dozens of kinds of pop. We tried Lime Fanta, Mello Yellow, and Grape Sprite.

The people working there were super nice too. The guy at the cash noticed that we must not have been there before and asked if we wanted him to explain the menu to us (which we did!). Also he made sure to tell us that if we wanted more fries to take with us in the car they would refill the bag for us. And to take as many peanuts as we wanted. He even came out to the patio when we were eating to ask if it was good and reminded us that we could have more fries!


The small burgers were so big we didn’t need any refills of fries, haha.

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Only 22 more days left for me to complete my summer goals list!!

  1. Finally paint the cheapo wooden drawers we got from IKEA. I think I’m going to go do this RIGHT NOW.
  2. Make delicious popsicles in my new popsicle mold. once (strawberry lemonade). twice (strawberry frozen yogurt). thrice (strawberry raspberry vanilla frozen yogurt).
  3. Go swimming in the ocean for the first time in Vancouver. done!
  4. Ride the rides at the PNE. well we went on ONE ride. :/
  5. Watch fireworks. done.
  6. Finish my Settlers paintings.
  7. Sell a pair of shoes or a shirt or a painting.
  8. Go to one of the night markets in Richmond. done. twice, actually!
  9. Regularly visit the farmers market on Saturday mornings. once. twice. thrice.
  10. Read some books while I actually have the time. Insurgent (Veronica Roth), Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (Jenny Lawson), The Art of Fielding: A Novel (Chad Harbach), Geek Love (Katherine Dunn), currently reading Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn).
  11. Make a nicer looking menu planning board. done!
  12. Find a new person to play board games with. done!
  13. Try a new fruit. I guess fresh figs counts for this one.
  14. Do a successful venipuncture on a real patient. I’ve done about 75 now.
  15. Make a new blog header.
  16. Take more pictures. completely failing.

Last night was lots of fun. We drank enormous drinks that had candy in them and I ate SEVEN KINDS OF CHEESE in one meal!! (Our table shared a trio of fries [poutine, fries with gorgonzola, and truffle oil fries with parmesan], I had a three cheese grilled cheese sandwich, and my salad had feta in it). EPIC MEAL.

Scott stealing some of my drink.

I hope I can get a job at VGH next year. They are really fun/great people there.

Thinking of another challenge for me to do this month: take a photo of every dinner I have. I know I already post food pictures here and there on this blog but I only ever really post the special stuff. I think this month I’ll try to document every dinner so you can see some of our more regular dishes. We’ll see how it goes.

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PARTY TIME SATURDAY NIGHT IN POST. Scott is out at a Metallica concert and I’m in watching Gilmore Girls 2.0 I mean Bunheads. And I’m ok with that!!

We went out to the PNE earlier today. Scott’s work was having an event so we got in for free and they had a BBQ for everyone. I didn’t eat much there though because what is the point of eating boring BBQ stuff when there are so many other interesting food options to be had at the fair!!?!

It ended up being a double hot dog day. That’s a pepperogi hot dog. It had perogies and stuff on it. I had read about it on the internet last week and was pretty excited for it, but it ended up being pretty disappointing. It was so dry. I regretted choosing it. We didn’t finish it. We also had a slushie but that was it, I even passed on deep fried Oreo’s. Dunno why I’m so boring lately.

We also only went on one ride (Gravitron). Gah everything was so expensive!! And it didn’t make sense to get a ride bracelet on a Saturday. So we went home. :/

It is really hard to take a picture of the back of your own head!!! Also I should probably take pictures of my waterfall braid BEFORE I go to an amusement park.

Anyway so today didn’t end up being the most fun day ever, but it did make me even more excited to go to Six Flags Magic Mountain on the way to Fiji (hopefully).

Side note: I just saw on the Magic Mountain website that they now have the WORLDS TALLEST DROP RIDE. Scott is going to LOVE THAT!!!!

ALSO, what the heck, tickets only cost $39.99?? That’s like the cheapest good amusement park ever! I CAN’T WAIT!!!!

Lastly here is a creepy picture of myself doing a coconut oil hair treatment. I guess it made my hair a little bit softer but not really a significant amount. I think I’ll just stick to putting coconut oil on popcorn. (That is really good by the way.)

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I achieved another one of my summer goals this weekend! We had some friends-of-a-friend to come over to play board games with us on Friday night and it was fun. We played two games of Wasabi and one game of Ticket To Ride. I totally smashed them at Ticket To Ride, I somehow managed to complete Vancouver to Montreal, Seattle to New York, AND Los Angeles to New York. That’s a lot of points.

We went to the Vancouver farmers market again yesterday. We didn’t buy that much because it is SO EXPENSIVE! We just bought 6 figs, a loaf of cheddar jalapeno bread, and one corn cob (Scott doesn’t really like corn). I am extremely excited to try cooking with figs for the first time. I’m going to make a pizza with figs, goat cheese, and prosciutto.

The farmers market is nice because everything is good quality, but I’m not at the point where I want to spend a lot of money to get organic products and fancy stuff. I would prefer a farmers market where everything is dirty, I don’t need perfectly lined up tents and neatly stacked up pyramids. I just want cheap produce!!

We also went swimming at the outdoor pool near our house. It’s a pretty big pool, and it wasn’t crowded. Too bad we didn’t really know about it until the very end of the summer!

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It’s been a pretty quiet week/weekend. Scott’s been working on a puzzle and I’ve been reading and cooking and watching Olympics.

Have you noticed that there is almost never lemon or lemonade flavoured bubble tea available? Well since lemonade is pretty much my favourite beverage OF ALL TIME, I decided to go about making lemonade bubble tea at home. With pearls, of course.

The recipe takes a while, but none of the steps are complicated.

1. That’s not my picture but that is the exact kind of pearls I bought from T&T. The bag was something like $2 and has enough pearls for about 6 generous servings. They come dried.

2. Boil a big pot of water (the pearls need lots of space to move around). When the water is boiling, dump in some pearls. Stir them immediately if they are sticking to the bottom of the pot.

1 serving of cooked pearls is ~1/4 cup dried pearls

3. When the pearls float up to the top, reduce the heat to medium and let the pearls and water simmer for about 20 minutes.

4. At the same time you can prepare your sugar syrup. I use a 1:1 ratio of sugar and water (disgusting, I know). I use half brown sugar and half white sugar but I don’t think it matters what you choose. Simmer that on the stove until the sugar is totally dissolved.

5. Put the sugar syrup into a container and use a slotted spoon to get all of your pearls out of the boiling water. Put the pearls in the syrup and let it soak in there on the counter for at least 15 minutes.

6. The pearls are ready to be eaten! If you have extra pearls you can store them in the syrup in the fridge, but they will definitely need to be heated up again before you can eat them because they turn rock hard again when they are cold. The pearls are nice and chewy when they are still slightly warm.


My gross looking homemade lemonade bubble tea. Looks yuck but tastes YUM.