Catching Up

Once upon a time, a blog-worthy day is a good day. Now, a sure sign of aging is when posting becomes an afterthought and a chore. Or, more likely, life becomes boring and uninteresting.

Anyway, since I'm old, I think I'm justified in doing a lame recap post.

August highlight:

Consolation for getting older - late summer beauties from co-workers

September highlights:

J-town folk festival, homemade tiramisu (with homemade ladyfingers)

October highlight:

Pittsburgh 250 - Downtown fireworks

Recently:

Before and After: New scarf from soft baby alpaca wool

Today, I discovered the joy of Banh Mi (Vietnamese hoagies). And Mexican jumping beans.

A coworker and I took a field trip late morning for a client visit and decided to swing by the Strip for lunch. While we were there, he wanted to run a few errands, so I tagged along. The first stop was a Mexican grocery store - the mission was tortillas. As he shopped around, I noticed a row of little clear plastic cases at the counter, making clicking noises... there were tiny brown pods knocking each other spontaneously. There was a writeup on bright pink paper next to them - no gimmicks, no trickery, they're... Mexican jumping beans! I scanned the cases for a particularly jumpy group and bought one. There are five beans. I'm going to name them Spunky, Funky, Chunky, Hunky, and Punky. They've been 'jumping' in the box relentlessly all day - when it's quiet, all you hear is the rattling. Makes you think of Miyazaki's kodama (those little tree people) or Geiger counters; sometimes I'd want to tell hubs to stop fidgeting, then I'll realize it's those creepy beans. We'll see how long it takes to drive us batty.

And Vietnamese hoagies are awesome. That's all I've to say about that.

July in a Nutshell - pictures

The accompanying post with pics!

July 4th Fireworks in Pittsburgh



(Taken with the 75-300 - pre-upgrade)

Wedding


It was a Russian-Mexican wedding - interesting blend of culture, languages, and food. Simple DIY wedding but full of love, as it should be.

Dave's plane



The interior - cozy personal space


Here's a vid of hubs flying over Ohio - recorded with his Macbook Pro

N's Wedding Extravaganza


Thursday evening: Mehendi night. Food, music, conversation, henna. It was a fancy backyard party with lanterns and Turkish divans; they were giving out bindis and bangles too. Pic shows me getting henna done by N's cousin.


My hand on the left


Friday evening: Garba-Raas. Dinner and dance event kicked off by a very photogenic pair lighting candles.


Imagine a ballroom of hundreds of people, many in dazzling colorful saris, twirling and dancing in semi-unison. Later, we picked up sticks and did something like a mass dance.


Saturday morning: Ceremony, Hyatt Regency at Penn's Landing. N - beautiful bride! It was a 2-hr long ceremony that started with the traditional baraat, groom's procession, and ended with a delicious (and posh) luncheon.


Hubs and I during the evening reception. A weekend of Indian food culminated in a deservingly fancy and decadent Indian dinner.

Sunday in Philly


With Le at Cosi over a latte, after a satisfying dim sum brunch in Chinatown


Understated entrance along Chestnut St. So cool!


Giddy little foodie. See neat decor in background - it was the coolest design which nearly distracted us from the food in front of us. Here is another view taken by someone else for official press.


My sucky shot of the place. I was trying to be inconspicuous and not too déclassé with overly touristy behavior.

Coming back to Pittsburgh was hard. No dim sum, no world-famous restaurants, and worst of all, after staying in nice hotels for 3 nights, we realized just how filthy our apartment is. I mean, disgusting - we're such pigs. This weekend's agenda is laundry and some hard-core cleaning.

July in a Nutshell

Been a whirlwind of a month. Too busy and too lazy to write. You know the drill - sloppy bullet points, then pictures.

What's new:

* Made our first real attempt to catch the city's fireworks display, which means elbowing through a thick crowd on the West End Overlook. Everyone else came prepared with picnic blankets, lawn chairs, and tripods; we simply stood guard over our little plot of balcony space. For the 20 minutes or so, it was worth it (I think).

* Upgraded my equipment! Retired my 75-300mm (no IS or USM) and acquired a snazzy 70-300mm USM with IS. Also got a 50 f1.8 and 430EX Speedlite, filter and stofen. My family grows. (75-300 for sale!)

* Shot my first wedding. Professionally. I knew nobody but the bride, who 'hired' me. Made a few friends by the end of the night, and learned a whole lot.

* Hubs flew to a conference in Chicago on Dave's plane, and this time I got to see it. It was a mosquito, a Piper Seneca with red velvet(?) interior, almost like an old London cab. Discovered that the county airport is a great place to watch clouds and soak in blissful solitude.

* My flip flops betrayed me. Cheap Old Navy black flip flops, my trusty walking companion - I've trekked a hundred miles with it around the world, from San Francisco to New York, DC, Tampa Bay, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Bali, Singapore... The threads are starting to wear down and it gets tricky to walk on wet and slippery surfaces (the locals say 'slippy'). Last week, it was raining pretty hard, and as I walked down a flight of fire-escape style stairs in the back of an apartment, the blasted sandals gave out and I slid down the entire flight of stairs. It hurt like a bad mofo and I got an awful bruise. I gave the flip flops a little time out in the corner... but I love them too much and wore them again the next day.

* Visited Princeton's campus and the art museum. Mad archaeology department - suddenly made sense that Indiana Jones is at Princeton. Oh, and we got a parking ticket.

* Went to N's Indian wedding extravaganza. 3 days, 3 towns, 3 hotels. 4 events, 400+ guests. The grand finale was in Philly's Hyatt Regency at Penn's Landing... very fancy.

* Had dim sum at H.K. Golden Phoenix in Philly's Chinatown with Le. Lounged around and chatted over coffee all afternoon. Then... an early birthday present from hubs: omakase at Morimoto.

1. Toro tartare in dashi-soy with osetra caviar and chives, Japanese peach
2. Whitefish (red snapper) carpaccio with hot oil, yuzu, and mitsuba leaf
3. Sashimi with creamy yuzu dressing
4. Intermezzo: Strawberry-chili jelly(?) and micro-mint
5. Halibut in yuba and seaweed, lobster, with beurre blanc
6. Australian lamb with hoisin glaze, ratatouille
7. Sushi plate
8. Flourless chocolate cake with creme fraiche and miso

Yeah... something like that. I was too shy to take too many pictures or any notes, though in hindsight, I should have. Every course was phenomenal, the carpaccio and halibut in particular being mind-blowingly orgasmic. Our server was discreet but attentive, and quite knowledgeable. Decor was rad. Hubs was equally excited about this pilgrimage to chez Iron Chef, and he agreed that the food lived up to the hype.

Pics in a future post. Bedtime!

Nosy

Salty knows.

Kitchen Creations

I have been getting a lot of mileage out of my kitchen lately. The cooking bug comes and goes, but I've been on a roll. Hwah! *flex muscles*

First was dinner with Pete and Kevin (and an empty chair where Kit would've been sitting). Caribbean was the theme, to go with the season.



* Jamaican Jerk chicken
* Rice and black beans, Haitian style
* Avocado & mango salsa
* Papaya, lime, pineapples
* Jamaican Spinach Soup
* Boscobel Beach Ginger Cake

There was even Jamaican hot sauce. For kicks, we made blender cocktails too! Hummingbird: Rum cream liqueur, coffee liqueur, strawberry syrup, banana, milk, ice. Sounds très bizarre but it was very yummy.

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The next weekend, we hung out with some S'poreans at Soergel's Orchard in Wexford. Took a hay ride to the farm and picked strawberries for 2 hours.


Our basket - came out to just over 4 lbs

What does one do with 4 lbs of strawberries? Freeze a portion, and make jam with the rest.


Homemade Amish white bread, lightly toasted, with homemade spicy strawberry jam

After reading several recipes that emphasize strongly on storing in sterile jars, we boiled the jar and the whole nine yards before putting the jam away... but in the end we finished it in 3 days anyway. Hehe.

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After the Jamaican dinner, I was still crazy about those Hummingbirds so I bought a lot of ripe bananas. I figured if they didn't become cocktails, I could make banana fritters to go with the other leftovers. We finished all but two lonely dark bananas. Inspired by the desire to spice up Sunday breakfast, I made chocolate chip whole wheat banana muffins.



I think I've graduated from being a tragic failure of a baker to a mediocre so-so one. Not bad! It lasted for a few breakfasts. Great on the go.

That's it for now. Tune in next time for another episode of Kitchen Creations! *fluttering cape and superhero music*

Go Fly a Kite

The weather has been brutally warm and humid. Quite unfortunately, we only have one (very old) window unit A/C, which we have designated for use in the bedroom. Everywhere else in the house is utterly unbearable.

Like nomads seeking new pastures, hubs and I wander our neighborhood, laptops in tow, for a cozy spot with free wifi and cool respite from the muggy heat. For now, we've settled down at Te Cafe.

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Last weekend was the first comfortable weekend after a long string of rainy days - not too warm, either. Pete decided to hold a kite-making party, inspired by Daniel Beard's 'The American Boy's Handy Book', a book that was originally published in 1882 featuring fun boy-scouty activities for youth in pre-consumerist times. (Some of the other chapters include: how to make July 4th balloons, kaleidoscopes, fishing poles...)

We gathered around on a blue tarp in the living room, with spools of string, sheets of paper, cutting tools and wire strewn around us. There were some interesting ideas and shapes - in the spirit of experimentation, E and I agreed on a butterfly kite. The kite's structure consisted of arcing wooden dowels, which was a bit of a challenge; hubs soaked a few dowels in the bathtub and still broke some, but he finally got a good frame together. My job was to make everyone pizza for dinner. :)

The next day, we met up at Frick Park with our kites and picnic gear. (Whose kite will fly, whose kite will reign supreme?!) It was a beautiful sunny day with strong winds. A few of the other kites broke from the wind, in fact, before they got any height. It took our butterfly kite a while before it balanced itself and took flight. In the end, it did fly, and it flew pretty high - because of the way the frame was built, it even flapped like a butterfly. People came up to us to comment on the kite and give ideas (use lighter wood like rattan, attach a longer tail).


E's carefully engineered butterfly kite, with pretty streamers


It flies! See curved wooden frame

I was tickled by how serious hubs was about this kite. After the kite-making party, he did a bunch of research on kite-building, how to rig up the "Y" (string), how butterfly kites should look and fly, etc. All that effort paid off.

When we weren't playing around with our kites, we sat in the shade of a tree and just hung out. Bubbles, sandwiches, ice-cream truck, making whistles with blades of grass... Perfect Sunday afternoon in the park.

Dinner was going to be with a new friend, EB, whom I got to know at the movie shoot a few weeks ago (see previous post). They had gone kayaking that afternoon; in the end, the kayaking group and kiting group decided to join up for dinner at Abay for hearty Ethiopian fare.


Straw mesob for a dinner table, and we sat on little wooden stools


Tikil gomen, kay sir dinich, doro tibs, gomen besiga, and generous rolls of injera. Community platter - dig in with your hands!

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Still at Te Cafe sipping on a tall icy glass of ginger lemonade. Air-conditioning is bliss. After all this time, turns out that EB is sitting right behind me in the cafe! Uncanny...

Happy Birthday Hubs!

... and may we celebrate many more. You know you're getting old when you've to lie about your age to control the skeeze factor. :) But you'll always be 21 to me.

xoxo
Your biggest fan


Igor, E's birthday prez (Lego for grownups)


Oak tree and bluebells - spent the birthday weekend at his parents'


Climbed the oak tree to prove age hasn't made him less limber - E hangin' out


Hot dog roast! We even made our own skewers from tree branches. Had marshmallows afterwards.

Bright Lights, Big City

Taken at the Top of the Rock

Went to NY/NJ for a wedding this past weekend. Spent Saturday evening in the city; only had time to whirl around Midtown. Getting there was an adventure - we had assumed we would catch a shuttle from our hotel in Basking Ridge, but the shuttles don't run on the weekends (d'oh). After some panicking, we ended up driving towards Jersey City, parked at a light rail station, took the light rail to Hoboken, then a Path train into town, and then we got on the metro. Figured all this out along the way.

Hubs had no other agenda than to 'see the sights'. As a surprise for him, I bought tickets to the Top of the Rock. We got there just in time for sundown, and it was beautiful. I'm not a stranger to city sights or seeing the skyline from the 70th floor, but it's different when the sight includes the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge in a distance. The horizon was blanketed in dense little specks of light. We saw a couple getting engaged. :) Pretty cool experience.


Empire State Building and Central Park with a theme...


Another shot of the view at dusk

Dinner was at Chop Suey in Times Square. We were seated right next to the window with an unobstructed view of the square, where Broadway meets 7th. Hubs was bowled over... it was quite incredible, I've to say. It was like watching TV with dinner, except there were over a dozen giant TVs and they were all flashing the same ads. The food was also phenomenal - I had oyster and bacon lettuce cups with kim chi and ginger chicken, while hubs had a watercress and Asian pear salad and a decadent buttery, eggy lobster entree. Then we finished with dessert, sorbet medley and coffee ice-cream respectively.


Hello!


View from our table

Finally got back to the hotel at about 2am.

The wedding was on Sunday. It was small, intimate, and beautiful. The bride and groom actually had Rock Band and DDR set up for post-reception fun - as if that wasn't enough, we hung out with friends afterwards until the wee hours.

Good trip! More to write later...

A Day at the Movies

When we last left our intrepid heroine, she was bored and posting kitty pics. Now, she's back, and she actually has a story or two to tell.

Last weekend, I was an extra in a movie. That was a pretty interesting experience that I never want to go through again.

3:45 AM - Hubby crawls into bed after coming home from a night of fun. Zzzz.
4:30 AM - Alarm rings
5:10 AM - Showered, 'hair and makeup ready', drive to the film location at the airport
5:45 AM - Crack of dawn. Wander through a maze of trailers into a huge warehouse/hangar with cafeteria tables. Sign-in. Surveyed the table of hot breakfast for the extras, fixed myself some coffee.
6:00 AM - Lined up like cattle (or convicts?) along the wall to show Wardrobe our 3 outfits. I got a quick stamp of approval. Carry on.
6:30 AM - People still streaming in, bleary-eyed. Some people look like they're in whatever they wore to the club the night before.
7:00 AM - Spotted a group of pilots. Ridiculously good-looking pilots. Impossible, in fact... and sure enough, they were extras too, in clever copies of the real pilot uniforms. I've a serious thing for uniforms, but somehow, knowing they're fake, they lost their appeal.
7:30 AM - Decided nothing was happening for a while, so I whipped out my Sudoku.
10:30 AM - Kicked Sudoku butt. Still nothing, although the hangar got colder and people are getting restless. Craft service offered pretzels, bubble gum, hot beverages, chips.
10:45 AM - Production crew gave stern announcement about no smoking on federal property, the consequence of doing so being no less dramatic than prosecution, wrath of hundreds, and shutting down the movie for good. Random thought that camp counselors would make excellent production crew leaders.
11:00 AM - Finally! Called into action. Hustled onto a coach that drove across the tarmac, with airport authority escorts, to the set. The scene: a live air show.

The air show was probably the coolest part of the whole thing. Even on the coach, while waiting for the approvals to clear so we could drive 100 ft to the film location, we saw raptors tearing through the clear blue sky, flip, dive, and hover. When we got to the set, which was a small-scale replica of the real air show booths (fake drink stand, radio sponsor, snacks, gift shop, etc.), we were strategically positioned around the filming crew clutter and told to wait for instructions. There was a cargo plane open for tour; it was huge in a surreal way, like a beached blue whale. Every once in a while the roar of an F-16 taking off in the runway in front of us would hold everybody's attention, our eyes following it until the barking orders resume from the director's tent and snap us back to the task at hand.

Very quickly, like trained lab rats, the extras learned to listen for the right cues. "Rolling" means we should be in our places, poised at the starting line. When they yell "background", we start walking across the camera casually and pretend we're really at an air show (which was the truth). No talking - pantomiming. No zombie faces either - act lively, just be quiet. During one of these silent walks, I happened to stroll past the main actors and caught some of their lines. All I can say is, what an idiotic movie. It's produced by Dreamworks, but it's going to be one of those corny teen romance flicks. And you know, when you watch a terrible movie and wonder how the guy in the background didn't wince or break out into a hysterical laughing fit after hearing a stupid line... that was me, that 'guy', trying to keep a straight face.

1:30 PM - Lunch! Due to security constraints, we couldn't be schlepped back to the warehouse/hangar, so they brought lunch to us. The box lunches could've been a nice dinner served at a wedding - rosemary chicken or beef tenderloin, asparagus spears, roasted potatoes. A+ for presentation. But we were standing on the tarmac with styrofoam boxes and plastic forks - I stabbed at my chicken for a good few minutes before I got anything. Got tired of eating after 10 minutes. C- for practicality. They were very, very anal about every piece of litter, for good reason.

Being one of only 2 Asians, I walked up to the other (who was tall, slim, gorgeous) and introduced myself. Turned out she's from China - a model - and we started chatting in Mandarin. She's one of those sickeningly perfect and chipper girls you'd love to hate but can't. I will never forget how the still unit photographer, a pervy older guy, hung around her, and when she introduced me to him, he completely and utterly ignored my existence. It's like I was invisible. She was pretty enough to be worth the attention, and I simply wasn't. I define myself by way more than my looks (maybe anything but my looks), yet that was a pretty ego-crushing moment. All of a sudden, I craved to be around friends, hubs.

4:15 PM - No end in sight. Started getting antsy to go home.
5:30 PM - Crew person noted she hadn't seen enough of me - for the next scene, she placed me behind the group of main actors. Yay! Maybe you'll see my face for half a second. Caught more retarded dialogue... tried not to snicker.

At one point, as I was standing near the group of ridiculously good-looking fake pilots, I overheard their conversation and someone was struggling to recall something. I offered an answer - they thanked me, and one of them actually made a joke about how their collective IQ didn't help them. I appreciated the self-deprecating humor.

7:00 PM - By now, we're masters of pantomime. Exhausted and slap-happy, some of the extras have become really creative with their bit roles. A stranger and I conjured a routine where we pretended to be friends meeting up in the middle of the fair. Made gestures towards the planes in the sky, walked towards the fake snack shop. Pretended to buy a bag of chips. Ran into another group and said hello (silently). Maintained conversation while walking... shadow gossip, if you will.
7:45 PM - Lined us up in a row (again - there's a theme here), thanked us for our time. Showed us the way back to the warehouse/hangar and we walked. (No coach?)
8:15 PM - Turned in paperwork to get paid, said goodbyes to my friends for the day. Drove home.

The next day, we had some friends over for dinner. Told them about this bizarre experience, how cool the actual air show was, and the people - the vain wannabes, the production nazis, the sheep. After a normal dinner conversation about normal things with the ordinary-looking but extraordinarily intelligent company, we sat around and watched the telly. Of all the things they picked from our DVR, we ended up watching an hour-long PBS documentary about Jaglavak ants. Ah... it's good to be home.

Haven't been paid yet... the 14 hours of standing around earned me a pair of shoes, perhaps.

5/30 EDIT: Got the check in the mail! Instead of shoes, I went with this baby for my office. Sweet.


Speakers from the $ made that Saturday