zing!

woohoo!

this should make draggy mondays a little less painful. only 75 cents to a dollar for some crappy-yet-get-it-done caffeine goodness.

... this, of course, assumes i carry any kind of cash around at all.


*************************


*sigh*

the weekend flew by all too quickly. anthony has started taking classes and this semester has been forced into taking 4 courses. thankfully, he's only working part-time, however, he's been studying non-stop since last monday. he's taken maybe 2 hours of "relax" time, but otherwise he's doing classwork. so. sucky.

the upside is that i am actually motivated to do work around the house! so i sewed curtains for the bathroom, for the kitchen extension and for the kitchen pantry area. one more small valance thing to complete for the kitchen extension and i'm done!

for now.

i may start priming the living room and dining room this week.

on a roll!!

meet rosco

this is my in-law's boxer puppy rosco! well, not so much puppy anymore, but definitely still young and fiesty. he's adorable!!



our favorite dogs (other than cutie mutts at the pound) are boxers and rotties. big and lovable and slightly smooshy. also? great eyebrows!

store egg vs. fresh farm egg!

those farm fresh eggs were seriously delicious.

like whoa.

pretty pretty

did i mention that i am off tomorrow?! hence the late hour. also, i am actually typing this out on my iphone - hurry for two finger typing!

here's part of what i did tonight: like any good artist nerd, i want, nay, need my recipe binder to look good. not only is it pink with pages encased in plastic to protect it from inevitable spills, but... ta da!



it's now going to be hand written! only the recipes we really love, of course. most of the binder is full of pages from magazines or hastily scrawled recipes from books here or there. this way i know which ones are super delicious.

ok, bedtime! fingers tired and eyes droopy.

dad

sometimes, the lives of my parents feel so much more varied and stronger than mine. not that their lives are more valid, or (i shudder to use the word) "authentic", but they've experienced so much more during their lifetimes than i ever will. they are very strong. our middle class lives are easy and coddled.

my father was born on june 20th, in the small town of peng san, china. it's just outside of shenzhen, across the border from hong kong.

as a child, he'd ride bulls and water buffalo and tried to join the red guard. his mother locked him in the bedroom so he couldn't run away.

at 19 he escaped across the border to hong kong. it floors me that he'd literally risked his life to get out of china - the border was guarded by men with guns.

back then, it was much smaller than it is now. not that it's presently large or modern, by any means. when i visited in the 80s, i was about 8 and my brother 5, there was only 1 running toilet, conveniently located at the house on the top of the hill.

we ate copious quantities of pineapple and other fruits and played at night by knocking sleeping birds out of trees and tying red plastic ribbons to their legs. my brother and i caught grasshoppers to tear apart and feed to a baby bird our cousin had found.

the buildings crowd together and doors have large gaps. bugs are normal and roaches didn't seem to inspire the same amount of fear as they do in the US. walls are streaked and dirty, pictures are pragmatically taped to walls and mirrors - it's all very utilitarian. i remember (and have amusing photographic proof) of myself taking a bath in a bucket of water heated on the stove.

even now, while there are more toilets (manually "flushed" by pouring water from a pot into the toilet bowl; plastic barrels of water are kept in the bathrooms), much is the same. people brush their teeth early in the morning on their porches and rooftops while squatting over a bowl of water.

have you seen the movie 'kung fu hustle'? life in pigsty alley is not far from the truth.

perhaps this paints a dirty picture, but it isn't really that bad. or maybe i'm just used to it?

i had asked anthony for a little blurb of what he thought of our trip, as i'm sure that my family vacation is far different from a regular tourist's approach to china:

i thought that mainland china had a crazy gradient from pseudo-rich city to uber-poor country. the urban centers were way more shallow/hollow feeling, but that could have something to do with the language barrier.

everything felt dirty to me too. and not to sound like some jerk american, it was just a level of dust/smog/grime that was worse in the cities.

i enjoyed it for the most part, though if i had my choice, i'd prefer going to hong kong since there seems to be more pride in that city, say, than shenzhen, which was like some crazy overbuilt set for a movie.

THREE ONE

earlier this month, anthony caught up to me and celebrated his 31st birthday. our friend amy made the most amazing cake ever.

don't believe me?

check this fucking bad boy out:



it's a god damned kuato cake! it does NOT get any better than that, folks. plus, it tasted delicious; much better than i thought a psychic conjoined mutant twin would taste.



the amazing amy, cake-maker extraordinaire.



my family had come up, we went out to breakfast and then we partied into the night with friends. which is our way of "painting the town red" - we're utter homebodies. and who doesn't like to party with their shoes off?

happy birthday love!

hi, my name is kim and i have a problem

and that problem is striped shirts.

taken this morning in a bleary, less-than-ideal, half-alive/dressed state.

this weekend i was able to go thrifting with the incomparable yen and i found a rather large amount of clothing for $40; less than the price of one shirt at anthro! (i know, anthro is a sickness. a wallet-debilitating, beautiful, hipster sickness.) needless to say, at least 3 items were added to my collection of striped shirts. i tend to go through phases when thrifting - buying only men's long sleeve button up shirts, buying only black items, buying only white items, buying only brown and/or earth tone clothing. i have now moved on to striped clothing. no clue what it is, but they entrance me and i immediately add to my collection.

they're just so graphic! i can't help myself.

goals: more thrifting for clothing. do it.

no, no, not again!!

these monday photos make me chuckle. maddox just ran out of monday ammo; oh noes!

wampee

last weekend, for anthony's birthday, in addition to red envelopes, my parents brought a BUNCH of fruit. a box of lychee, a box of mangoes and a bag of wampee.

"wampee?" you ask? yes, wampee. they're small and soft like grapes and barely fuzzy, like a peach. they are also the perfect blend of tangy and sweet.

my family doesn't eat the skin, but i think that you could, if you were feeling lazy. you peel it and sometimes there's a pumpkin-seed-like... seed in the bigger ones. the taste is like... a tangy citrus-y peach. maybe peach with a bit of pineapple. it's sooo delicious and leaves your fingers mighty sticky. don't you just love a good natural sugar juice? licking down the forearms and dripping off the elbows? makes you long for bare feet in the grass, warm water out of the hose and the hot florida sun making the top of your head bake and radiate heat.

here's a little play by play of the peeling:







kind of looks like a little alien larvae. assuming they have a larval form. ... assuming they exist.



i'm going to attempt to plant some seeds and see what happens. it's SO RAD that we now own a house where i can actually plant this bitch.

check it

so, i'm mostly sure that these are from the pecan tree in our front yard. i'm not really sure what to do with them, so i've been picking them up and saving them near the garage (much like a squirrel would do, but with less nibbling and rabies and more open storage). the images on wikipedia show what i assume to be much bigger ones, cracked and still on the tree. these are rather small, the largest being not much wider around than my thumbs. they are green and soft and kind of fuzzy.

i am, however, very sure that these are not loquats.

(can't remember if i wrote about it before, but we thought our loquat tree was the pecan tree and subsequently did not eat any of the fruit all season, instead letting them drop to the ground and "ripen". we are idiots. we realized what what up was when our friend amy gave us the 411 without laughing at us too heartily and i was able to eat maybe 3 fruits, which of course, made my mouth itch. but we'll be ready next season, damnit!)

well, that didn't work out so well.

today is actually monday. maybe i tried to schedule that post ON a monday. that must be it. argh.

bleary.

my uterus also knew it was monday by waking me up with stabbing knife pains in my gut at 6 am. thank you, uterus! without my glasses i stumbled, arms outstretched, to the kitchen where i choked down some naan, gulped down water and ibuprofen and zonked out hard for 20 minutes. ah... the bliss and wonder of modern medicine. <3

*tmi alert* i'm totally trying out the diva cup. so far so good.


this weekend, however, was fabulous.

friday we got ice cream at bo's, where i discovered that i can eat way more ice cream if it's on a cone, rather than in a cup. saturday, my mom, dad and niece came up to visit for anthony's birthday. we met and had dim sum at chopstix and then they napped in our guest room. vince came up later in the day and we all had dinner at... (drumroll) chopstix! my parents are wonderfully predictable. we had a really great party for anthony on saturday night, kids ran around the backyard, people meandered, shots were taken and delicious beers and wines were consumed.

vincent stayed the night and sunday we relaxed, watched hot fuzz, got tea at kaleisia and FINALLY watched predators (not too bad!). and lastly, we started vince on true blood after a big meal of homemade pesto from homegrown basil. he opted to stay a second night and is, most likely, just waking up.

more weekends, please, with family and friends, thanks.

oh, mondays

starting to get antsy over here, if i don't go on a mini-vacation soon. *twitchy*