— DANIELLE O'HANLEY

Soooooo I love living on my own, but sometimes it’s easy to get in a rut when you’re only cooking for one.

Late last year, a few girlfriends and I decided to start a dinner club. We get together once a month and rotate hosts. Each month, the host makes dinner, while everyone else supplies a wine pairing.

It’s a great excuse to get together and catch up without your typical night out at a bar. We’ve also taken the opportunity to experiment with new dishes/ingredients (because really, there’s no better way to ruin a new favourite recipe than having to eat it for two meals/day for four days straight in order to get through the leftovers).

If you find yourself rotating through the same few recipes every week, then I’d suggest giving this a try.

Tips for hosting dinner clubs:

• Try new and challenging recipes…then you can impress everyone with your skillz. I always like trying out the latest Food & Drink recipes. It’s a bit of a risk, but it can be really rewarding.
• Experiment with interesting ingredients. We had bacon-wrapped lavender chicken at our last dinner. I’ve also made pumpkin curry at another one.
• Keep the menu a surprise, but give everyone some hints for appropriate wine pairings.
• Don’t try to host too often. Once a month seems to work for us. You want to make sure it never becomes a chore.

Since the ROM launched their Friday Night Live series a few weeks ago, I’ve been itching to check it out. $9 to for wander around a museum without any kids around, munch on local eats and sip on beers? Sign me up.

Friday night, I headed over after work with a crew of lovely ladies. And I made friends with this guy!

We were a bit disappointed that you couldn’t bring your drinks upstairs through the museum (we realized this right after ordering a drink), but in retrospect it makes complete sense. So, we checked out the outfits on the catwalk, chatted in the gorgeous entryway and then headed up to the second floor in search of dinosaurs. We found them!

We took a stroll through the bat cave (it was so much scarier when I was a kid). The museum closes at 9:30 and then the part continued downstairs. Before that, we managed to sneak into the textile section. I wish we had spent a bit more time here. This was one of my favourites:

Next week, the theme is photography, but I’m also holding out for the culmination party at the end of June. Fun fun fun.

I’ve been zooming across the city all week, but it’s been a flurry of awesome things and inspiring people. Monday through Wednesday, I was at FITC (special thanks to Ladies Learning Code for sending me!). A quick rundown of the highlights:

• Hung out with these awesome ladies for three days
• Caught up with the uber talented Efehan, who I hadn’t seen in eons.
• Cheered as attendees leapt onto this bear
• Got a little reminder to carve out time for personal projects from James White (also had a great chat with him at the opening party!)
• Learned about Processing from Randall Church. This is going to be my next learning project and I’m really looking forward to delving into the world where coding meets art.
• Got my mind freaking blown by Aaron Draplin‘s tips on living the good life.
• Learned how to foster creativity from Denise Jacobs and Jason Theodor (I really needed these talks– I’ve been in a creative rut lately).
• Gave and received lots of life/career advice (whaaaaaat!)

Key takeaway from the week: being creative is hard. You have to work at it. If really want this conference to be a turning point, I have to stop putting things off and work on the skills I want to have now. That means catching up on my Javascript and HTML/CSS courses in Code Academy, finally signing up for those digital arts courses I’ve been eyeing, and doing everything that’s been sitting on my long-term “to do” list.

And overall:

A few months ago, I was over at my parents’ place for dinner and my father mentioned that a store on Danforth had closed recently, and their sign had come down. Underneath was a reminder of exchanges — way back when, two letter-four digit (and later, two letter-five digit) dialing was used.

If you grew up in the city (or know a few people with landlines), you’ve probably noticed that phone numbers in the same neighbourhood tend to start with the same two digits. Those used to be letters, which corresponded to an exchange name. The system was used from 1923 to 1958.

So, people in the Beaches would have lived in the OXford exchange (number starting with 69). I grew up in HOward (46). In the Annex, WAlnut (92). The Grover restaurant in the Beaches was likely named because of the 47 GRover prefix, which was later amalgamated into the 69 OXford exchange.

Kind of an interesting tidbit about the city’s history. If you’re interested in seeing what your exchange would have been, you can take a look at Toronto Telephone Exchange Geography. There’s also an old article from the Globe and Mail that discusses phone exchange names. These are hard to come by in the city nowadays, but here’s a shot of a storefront that shows a two letter-four digit number:

image via Spacing