Straight Talk About Slipcovers.

There was one aspect of grown-up reality that only hit me recently: slipcovers. C's wonderful parents gave us the most gorgeous set of couches last year and second only to the thought "Oh my goodness I'm an adult with nice furniture now!" was "Holy God, I need a slipcover."

These are seriously nice couches. Antiques, even. White. White antique couches. C and I are that lazy brand of couple who own a kitchen table but use it more for putting mail on than anything else - we eat at the coffee table, sitting on the couches. Very risky.

"They're purrrfect... I can shed all over this!"

Trouble finding a slipcover aside [good luck finding something that will work for antiques without paying an arm and a leg for custom fitted!], I spent the nearly $200 and ended up with two chocolate-brown generic stretchy slipcovers. Stretchy was necessary if I wanted them to look like they fit whatsoever.

Turns out? They're a tremendous amount of work. I am constantly re-tucking and lint-rolling, all to almost no avail. C wiggles and wriggles and scooches and slides and by the end of the day my couches look like the sofa version of the Paper Bag Princess [if that's a thing].

Even worse: polyester and spandex do not a happy home make. This fabric collects everything it touches. We have hardwood floors throughout our apartment, and heaven forbid I accidentally touch the bottom of the slipcover with the broom while I'm sweeping! Every speck of dirt and dust and dander that was stuck to my broom is now hopelessly clinging to my slipcover.

I invested in lint rollers. Dozens of them. Once a week I'd spend an hour or more lint-rolling these damn slipcovers. Rosie loved it - at the first sign of lint-rolling she'd come running and try her best to get in my way so I'd accidentally roll over her. This is not help with my cat-hair-all-over-the-slipcovers problem. Rosie aside, lint rolling was not working.

Enter the mightiest tool yet known in the fight against slipcover lint: the dampened hand.

I kid you not. Rosie helped, showing absolutely no remorse whatsoever.

I decided to maximize my productivity by washing a load of dishes while I cleaned the couches. Wash a few dishes, pat hands dry, rub down couches, repeat. I ran out of dishes even before I had finished with the loveseat, but I set up a little dampening station nearby and sallied forth!

None of the dust/fluff/hair sticks to your hand whatsoever and it completely solves my static problem that I have with the roller. I'm about to show you something truly horrifying; you may never look at your couch the same way again. This:

...is from the loveseat. Yuck!

I know it's terribly mundane but I am so excited to finally have a solution for these stupid, necessary slipcovers. So excited that I'm still only halfway through, blogging this. I've got our loveseat all tidied up and it's on to the sofa next!

No longer are my couches unfit for dress pants! Rosie has already tried her funny business but I shall be discouraged no longer. Now that I've got this under wraps it'll be a quick tidy once a week, instead of two futile attempts a day!

Ah, domestic bliss!

DuoLingo

Okay, okay, I know it's a big late in the game for New Year's Resolutions, but for some reason I always wait a bit before decided what I'd like to accomplish in the upcoming year. Keeps me from hastily making goals I'd never reach. Such as "go to the gym three times a week since you are paying for the membership anyway." Ain't nobody got time for that! Maybe my goal for the year should be self-discipline. Sigh.

Regardless, this year, with my twenty-fifth birthday looming over me like some kind of gravemarker [dramatic, I know, but I've been dreading the big two-five since I can remember. Picture seven-year old me, panicking about one day being twenty five.] I wanted to focus on self-improvement and enriching my life. Luckily for me, my wonderful friend Paul turned to me mid-way through January and said "Do you want to learn to speak German?"

Well! Sure, I said. Why not? I was floored when he turned his phone towards me and showed me the app he had been using to learn Portuguese for the past few weeks. "It's free," he said. Say no more, my friend. Say no more.

Duolingo is an incredibly innovative free program available on your iPhone or on their website. I've read articles that have said their method is better at teaching adults new languages from scratch than the Rosetta Stone program! ...but for free. Did I mention it's free? It just does not get better, folks. An independently conducted eight-week study found that 34 hours spent with Duolingo is the instructional equivalent of one full, eleven-week semester taught at university level. Check out their website here for all sorts of press, fun facts, and more.

To start, you pick your language. French, Spanish, Italian, German or Portuguese. If you already have a knowledge base in a language, you can immediately test out of as many lessons as you need.

Here's why they can offer this amazing learning tool for free: They use their users' brainpower and collective knowledge to provide translation services to the online world! At the end of each lesson, if you are able, there are real-world translations. DuoLingo asks a large number of users to translate real-world text from your learned language to your native language, and actually has you cross-check the work of other users in order to arrive at the most accurate translation possible. Sheer genius, says I.

I'm several lessons into German and I am finding it incredibly intuitive. Aside from the directed lessons, there's a practice area that notes how far along you are in your lessons and incorporated everything you've learned up to that point in a review. It feels like a game - you start each lesson with a certain number of hearts and for each incorrect answer you lose a heart. Bonus point are awarded for any hearts remaining at the end of the lesson.

Each of the lessons are divided into areas of language - there's basic & phrases, grammar, vocabulary, and more than I haven't even come close to unlocking. You complete the first half of each lesson in order to move on with the instruction, and when you've mastered enough to tackle some real-world translations you head back and complete the second half of the lessons!

You can have more than one language on the go, too, for those of you who have brains that can multitask like that. You probably read five books at the same time, too, don't you? I will never understand.

What I find most helpful about this particular teaching model is not only the repetition of vocabulary and verb conjugation, but the variety of methods you are required to understand it in. From my schooling in French, I can read and speak fairly well but my verbal understanding and writing is practically nonexistent. This platform requires you to read, write, speak, and listen, often all at once! Though I am still a beginner when it comes to German, my comprehension across all four mediums is level and that contributes a great deal to how quickly you can pick it up, I believe.

Sometimes the sentences and phrases they have you translate can be a bit goofy...

Check it out - if nothing else, it's something to keep your brain active and happy in your downtime! No more rubbish $1.99 games and time wasters. Find it available for download on their website, or on iTunes here.

SPiN

In case you missed The Londoner's recent post, here's the latest and greatest in themed bars: ping pong.

London's Ping hit the scene with a splash late summer last year and I was surprised to find that Toronto had its very own ping pong bar! SPiN opened late in 2011 as the Toronto installment of SPiNGalactic - there's three other North American locations. [Their website boasts plans for SPiN on the Moon in 2022!]

The walls are adorned with a gorgeous array of artwork from local artists - all original and all available for purchase.

As if the atmosphere and ping pong wasn't enough, their menu completely blew me away. The group I was with ordered a small array of appetizers and sandwiches and I struggled with the urge to order way more than I could possibly ever eat.

The 5 Step Fries were amazing. Potato wedges gone hulk. They were thick, skin-on, crispy-on-the-outside-fluffy-on-the-inside deliciousness. So far from healthy and best eaten hot or warm - I splurged for the last wedge at the end of the night and ended up with all of the grease that had pooled in the bottom of the dish. Ick. Their take on a simple grilled cheese was refreshing! A sharp mix of Swiss, Monterey and Cheddar cheeses along with fresh tomato slices, crispy pork belly and sprouts. These were sliced for sharing, devoured, and a back-up tray was quickly ordered.

I love creative remakes of simple, basic dishes. SPiN's "Chips and Dip" was just that: warm deep-friend tortilla chips [no pretense of healthiness in this joint!] with three dips. One was a basic tzatzki, another was a sweet tomato salsa, and the last was [as far as I could tell] yam or sweet potato with caradamom. All delicious, but none of them held a candle to the dip that came along with the grilled cheese.

Looks like ketchup, tastes like heaven. I schmeared this sauce on everything. baked tortillas, potato wedges, grilled cheese... all got healthy dunks in this sinfully sweet sauce. A magic blend of tomato paste and honey that I can't for the life of me understand why it was so delicious. I would never have thought to combine the two but I suppose, in the end, that's what ketchup is! Tomato paste and sugar and vinegar, right? My not-so-seasoned tastebuds loved the sweet hit of honey in this sauce. I'll definitely be trying to make my own version of this sometime soon.

The veggie chips were a brilliant palate cleanser, and definitely helped me to mentally offset the obvious grease-factor in the wedges and chips. Long, thin slices of heirloom carrots and coloured beets were crisp and surprisingly flavourful. I too-often find that raw veggies in restaurants are bland and either dried out or way too watery. These were neither! This is the first time I've seen raw veggies presented in such a creative and eye-catching manner. It almost made the $8 price tag worth it.

We had a birthday in our little group, but forgot about it until the bitter end and had missed our dessert-ordering window! This happened instead. Cheese dip beats cake any day of the week, anyway.

I'll definitely be grabbing some girlfriends and heading back into the city for a proper night at SPiN! Just too much fun.

They book up fast, and are usually slammed on weekends and Thursday/Friday evenings, so make a reservation! 461 King Street West [don't be fooled by the enormous Firkin on King Street proudly proclaiming itself as 461. Sneak around the side of the building, through the little iron gateways and you'll see the glow of ping pong not too far down!] 416.599.7746