Jananas

Its pretty well known that I’m a sucker for animals. I used to be heavily involved with Toronto Cat Rescue – I fostered for several years, organized adoptathons, and answered phones when needed. I also built their adoption record database, which allowed us to pull reports monthly or as needed to support the rescue group. I’ve been less involved lately, both as I had a full household’s worth of cats and more recently as I’ve been travelling too much to be able to do date work.

However, an email went out this week about some animals (8 cats & 6 dogs) that desperately needed help, as their owner was being evicted. The cats (except one) were all 10+ years and I’m a sucker for senior animals. Sucker! Now that life is calmer post-school, the household held a quick conference and we decided that we could foster a cat.

Boo Boo (the name he came with, honest!) arrived this afternoon. He’s a lovely 10 year old neutered male, up to date on his vaccinations, and with a clean bill of health (teeth included). He’s a tad pudgy, but his lovely colourings make up for it. He’s white with a black head and tail, also known as a Turkish Van based on the pattern of markings which is neat because its rather rare.

Right now he’s pretty freaked out, as he’s been moved from his home for the last 10 years, been poked and prodded by the vet, and then dropped off into new surroundings. He’s hiding behind a large mirror that leans against one wall in my living room at the moment, with the other cats dropping by occasionally to check out our latest addition.

He needs a new home & a cool, suave nickname to match his handsome good looks. Let me know if you can provide either!

p.s. I promise better pictures when he’s out and about.

As mentioned in the last post, we had to cut New Orleans out of the trip due to windshield problems. We had to figure out the best way to get to our next ‘have to’ destination – North Carolina. We google mapped it, and the result was driving up to Dallas and then onto North Carolina through Atlanta.

After the windshield had been replaced, we started the trip. The tape was supposed to be on for 48 hours and of course we immediately ran into rain (and therefore terrible traffic!), which made the tape peel and curl. Thankfully the windshield held! We made it into Dallas and grabbed lunch with some friends at Kalachandjis at the Hare Krishna temple. After lunch, our friend Allen had to go back to work at Fade Fast (his tattoo removal business). We went back to our friend Jay’s house (who owns Obscurities) to hang out for a few hours, where we played with his dogs and cats and lots and lots of rare earth magnets.

Finally though, we had to head out for the evening. Jason really wanted to eat at Soul Veg in Atlanta and they were open on Sunday. It was lots of driving between Saturday night and Sunday in order to get there on time. So we eventually had to part ways with Jay, and get back on the road so that we could make some progress on our quest to find good food. In  the usual way that things work, we drove on the Saturday evening until Jason was tired and ended up grabbing a Motel 6 in Louisiana (thanks New Orleans for rubbing it in our faces!!).

The Motel 6 sucked! Our mattress was terrible (damn you springs) and the wireless was pretty much non-existent, which is made even more annoying by the fact that we’d paid for both of us to be able to connect (as we each have laptops). After a night of nightmares and bad dreams, we got up the next morning and got back on the road.

On the Sunday we drove through 5 states – Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and finally South Carolina. We stopped in Atlanta, Ga to visit my friend Sean and to grab dinner at Soul Veg (we’ve also visited their Chicago location). All the good is vegan. We had great lasagna, collard greens, sweet yams, and corn bread. I had strawberry watermelon soda to wash mine down. We were stuffed after dinner, but were unable to pass up the chance to get dessert so we took blueberry and carob cake slices with us. After dinner, w parted ways and kept driving so that our Monday would be a little easier (hence why we ended up in South Carolina that evening).

Best thing about buying cake for dessert and not eating it? Getting to eat it as breakfast in bed the next morning!! That almost made up for the fact that we’d both bought wireless at a Motel 6 again and it didn’t work!! At all…

On what was supposed to be our last day in Austin, we got up and had a family breakfast with Jason’s aunt and his cousin’s wife (his cousin is currently in Iraq). After breakfast, we got the car packed back up. We decided to run a few errands before leaving the city to head to New Orleans where we were planning on spending the weekend. First, we went to both Spec’s and Grape Vine so that I could try to find some Damiana Liqueur,  which is a liqueur made in Mexico from the herb damiana. Its difficult, if not impossible to find in Canada so I grabbed three bottles in Austin. After that, we were hungry so decided to stop by Veggie Heaven for some lunch. It reminded me of Buddhas here in Toronto, although with better portion sizes.

We stopped to fill our gas tank, which was when we noticed that the small chip in the windshield was now on its way to becoming a large crack, 20% of the width of the windshield. We drove to check out Fry’s Electronics and while there talked to Jason’s dad about the crack. The end result is that it may or may not get worse, but it wasn’t something that I felt like chancing while on the 7-ish hour drive to New Orleans.

So, its now Friday afternoon and we have a cracked windshield. We made the call to not go to New Orleans and instead to try to get the windshield fixed. We make a bunch of calls and the dealerships are quoting us $1,200 for parts plus labour and the earliest they can get the part is Monday. Another few calls and people are telling us that it might be up to 10 business days to get the windshield ordered. Negative awesome! We had dates that we had to be in other cities and a lot of driving still ahead of us, so this was super bad news. Jason’s aunt came through though and found Low Price Auto Glass who were able to get us in the next morning and able to replace the glass for a total or $259 (including labour). Seriously, life & trip savers!

The other night, Jason made homemade bread. He found a vegan focaccia recipe somewhere online and attempted his hand at it. The end result was whole wheat focaccia with caramelized onions, rosemary, garlic, and red pepper flakes on top. It went amazing well with the homemade hummus he’d made earlier that day.

Sadly, my teeth hurt too much after yesterday’s dentist appointment to get to enjoy his homemade bread on day two. Instead I got to drool over his dinner while he ate some last night.

From Mexico & El Paso, the drive through Texas was long. As in looooong. I still think that one of my favorite views was driving past a small oil field and seeing a wind farm in the background. Bad news was that a semi kicked up a rock which hit the windshield.

We arrived in Austin sorta late the first evening. We were lucky that Jason’s aunt was letting us crash at her place, so shortly after we arrived we went out for dinner (real food, not road food) to thank her. First though, we got cleaned up She took us to Mother’s Cafe & Garden, where we had good healthy food. We had initially planned on meeting up with our friend Emrys later that evening, but ended up being too tired to feel up to it. Driving will do that to you.

The next morning we got up and puttered around for a bit (including getting to do a load of laundry, which was awesome). Jason had been craving some south Indian food. We found Madras Pavilion online. On our way there, we took a wrong turn. Thankfully, it took us past Hey Cupcake, so I got to indulge my sweet tooth – before lunch even. We also spent some time talking to their awesome staff. They also had vegan cupcakes so Jason was pretty stoked. From there, we went over to Madras and stuffed ourselves on dosa and veggie buffet goodness. Somewhere in there, we also stopped by the Bell of Lost Souls‘ real life store (Battleforge Games) so that Jason could indulge his inner gamer.

We headed downtown to meet up with Emrys at the shop he’s working at. He didn’t get off work until 5pm, so we headed down to 6th street to wander around the downtown area of Austin. We found parking and started wandering the main strip. We stopped into the Museum of the Weird, which was a blast. We both agreed that being a taxidemist must have been awesome in the heyday of sideshows. Hey, I’ll just take these two animals and stitch ‘em together, and presto a Jackalope!

On our walk, we stopped by pretty much every tattoo/piercing shop on the way as we’re both shop nerds. One of the strangest things was that all the tattoo parlours were open air, i.e that everyone can see you while you’re getting tattooed. Not something that I’m comfortable with at all! Interestingly though, was that there were at least three shops with awesome & diverse jewelry selection (high quality to boot!), which is something that we don’t see in Toronto. We ran into our friend Rick at his shop Industrial Primitives, and he changed out my medusa jewelry for me so that the post was a better/shorter length.

When Emyrs was off work that evening, we dropped by his apartment and chilled for a bit. His puppy Nora is super cute! Before dropping his lady friend off at work, we dropped by Toy Joy so that they could all grab vegan soft serve. We had a blast walking around the toy store and laughing at all the ridiculous stuff. The kids all grabbed peanut butter soft serve. I had a lavendar lemonade, as I’m not a fan of soft serve in general.

He hadn’t seen the bats at the Congress Bridge and I wanted to go, so we dragged him along. Sadly, I forgot to check what time sunset was that day, so we made it down to the bridge like an hour earlier than we needed to be but we had fun hanging out and catching up anyway. My camera stopped working (Jason managed to fix it that evening), so I don’t have any pictures of the bats when they finally came out. But man, it was amazing! We all agreed that it looked like smoke floating off into the distance and were amazed that it just kept going. After we watched the bats for a while, we decided to head out.

Unfortunately, it was already 9pm so most vegan dinner places were closed. We ended up at Kerby Lane Cafe for dinner, as they have vegan options. We all ended up getting breakfast for dinner, because that’s really what you do ad diners. Sadly, my dinner wasn’t great but I still enjoyed being there. After dinner, we headed back to Jason’s aunt’s place for the evening.

I think that’s long enough for one entry, so the rest of our Austin visit will be covered in the next entry.