Dinner, friends, wine

Instead of travelling home to visit family over Easter, Shannon & I stayed here and entertained Sarah, Julian, and a friend who uses computers less often. We visited the Canadian Centre for Architecture, bought maple syrup taffy while buying food at the farmer’s market for an extravagant dinner, and window shopped, but mostly wandered the sunny streets while watching the city come to life after its winter hibernation. After the dinner (red peppers stuffed with quinoa, mushroom-squash casserole, whole artichokes with cream sauce, bean salad, butter chicken, another Pakistani dish whose name I don’t know how to spell, chocolate cake, and walnut-maple brownies) we played trilingual scrabble over red wine. It was a very nice weekend.

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Random recommended reading for the day: this graph of national electricity consumption per capita charted against Human Development Index rating shows that developed countries plateau around 4,000 kWh/person annually, giving an idea of how energy demand will grow as more nations attempt to industrialize and improve their standard of living. Also worth noting is that Canadians use about 16,000 kWh each per year, more than any other nation studied (Americans use about 12,000 kWh, and the median figure for industrialized nations is around 6,000 kWh). I also recently came across an interesting article from 2002 on the “No Logo” brand and anti-consumerist consumption in This Magazine (summary: Naomi Klein should read more Thomas Frank).