SELMA Café

It can't be a lovelier day for this time of the year- the sky is a bright, cloudless blue, there's a nice brisk spring breeze but nothing unbearable, and the sun, oh yes, the sun :) And Jude and I kicked it off with a lovely breakfast at Selma Café. We've been meaning to go there for a couple of weeks now but only managed to do it today. Selma Café runs out of Lisa Gottlieb and Jeff McCabe's beautiful light-drenched home on the west side of Ann Arbor and is aimed not only at supporting seasonal and local foods but also creating and sustaining a community of people committed to the same ideals.

What draws Jude and I to Selma is the warm, down-home Ann Arbor vibe and also the fact that the whole outfit is completely volunteers- and donation-run. All proceeds go directly to the local farmers and producers that supply the ingredients and to non-profit groups working to expand access to healthy, sustainable food resources. Every week, people who'd like to help out can sign up online and help with the prep work on Thursday night and as wait staff on Friday mornings. The chefs (as well as the menu) rotates weekly and these are people who are either presently or formerly chefs in some of Ann Arbor's swankiest restaurants (like Logan or Eve) volunteering their services at Selma.

And all this out of a house, not that it's an overly huge house at that. The house was B-U-S-Y, many eating, many cooking, many serving, and all were in a great mood. Apparently, on busy days, they serve up to 160 meals out of Lisa and Jeff's kitchen. And not just milk and cereal- we're talking all-American breakfasts, big waffles, bacon, and fruit, and this morning, Spanish tortillas with chorizo, and house-cured ham with biscuits and gravy. The food was great— hearty and delicious. And there was granola, milk, bread and eggs for sale if you wanted. But even greater was the obvious fellowship and the sense of being connected to a community and the way in which the room buzzed around the shared love of food and place.

Jude and I will be back for sure- both as patrons and as volunteers. On top of joining the CSA this year, we think this is another good way for us to support the local food community and to reinforce our commitment to eating and preparing food more thoughtfully and wisely :)

1. Breakfast: Spanish tortillas with home-cured chorizo, 2. Self-serve bread, eggs, and firewood station, 3. Menu for 27 March '09, 4. Selma Cafe

The Boat That Rocked- MUST WATCH!!

Bold, exuberant, irreverent, and fantastically brilliant! Ladies and gentlemen, it's Radio Rock and you can't miss it!!! :)

Where the Wild Things Are trailer

Debuting on Apple Trailers today, the Where the Wild Things Are trailer is a complete delight! Marked indelibly by the magic realism of Spike Jonze and set to the wondrous strains of my favorite Arcade Fire song, "Wake Up", this trailer gave me goosebumps in anticipation of October :) And yes, you saw right, Arcade Fire-- an inspired choice for Maurice Sendak's story-- whose songs are at the end of the day all about child-like abandon, adventure, and escape...

Somethin' filled up
my heart with nothin',
someone told me not to cry.

But now that I'm older,
my heart's colder,
and I can see that it's a lie.

Children wake up,
hold your mistake up,
before they turn the summer into dust.

If the children don't grow up,
our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up.
We're just a million little gods causin' rain storms turnin' every good thing to
rust.

I guess we'll just have to adjust.

With my lightnin' bolts a glowin'
I can see where I am goin' to be
when the reaper he reaches and touches my hand.

With my lightnin' bolts a glowin'
I can see where I am goin’
With my lightnin' bolts a glowin'
I can see where I am, go-go, where I am

You'd better look out below
-"Wake Up", The Arcade Fire

Wake Up - Arcade Fire

Getting to know the onion/turnip

According to the maternity websites that I follow, this week, our baby's roughly the size of an onion (or a turnip, depending on which website you look at...) That doesn't seem particularly big (and still far from the watermelon it's expected to become in August), but considering how just a month or so ago, the little thing was the size of a pea, I'd say it's definitely going through a growth spurt. Not only has the baby developed fingers, toes, teeth, and tastebuds (!), this week, it's developing sweat glands. Sweat glands, people, sweat glands!

Also, sometime in April, Jude and I will be getting our second trimester ultrasound, which is when we could potentially find out the gender of our baby if we so choose. And that has been *the* question everyone's been asking us lately. To know or not to know? We were talking about it today and began thinking that back in Singapore, almost all our friends chose to find out the gender of the baby in advance. I don't think I knew anyone who didn't. And so at home, the question was less, "Do you want to find out?" than "Boy or girl?" Here though, the question has invariably been whether or not we even want to know in the first place. And our answer: we haven't decided.

On the one hand, there's something romantic and mysterious about the not knowing, about that one last surprise at the end of the journey. If labor is as painful as I'm imagining it to be, then maybe on top of being gifted with our baby at the end of the trauma, the added bonus of finally finding out whether it's a girl or a boy will make the process a little more bearable. We also won't have to deal with gift baskets full of all blue or all pink onesies... On the other hand, finding out the gender of the baby is a way of getting to know the little one that much more as it continues to grow in me, a kind of bonding, if you will. I mean, if it's already peeing and perspiring in me, and using up 15% of my calorie intake, I should at least know if it's a boy or a girl and stop calling it "it". Besides, it might seriously help the naming debacle Jude and I constantly find ourselves in (right now, our girls name list is almost twice as long as the one for boys- in Sam's words, though, they both need work...)

What about you? Did/Would you choose to find out?

Why it's ok to feel stupid - especially in Science

Some comforting advice for myself ... and perhaps for a few of you out there.

I was amazed that the Journal of Cell Science has the wherewithal to publish an essay like this. Kudos to the author of the essay and the editors of the journal.

Justification for recent bouts of self-flagellation and insecurity ;)

The importance of stupidity in scientific research

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Essays Academic Work stupidity science

Our first lullabies album?

I've loved The Innocence Mission for a while now. They make the kind of music you want to listen to on a lightly rainy day, curled in bed with your sweetheart, a book, and a mug of hot chocolate. Their music is delicate, wistful, and radiant like little fireflies of magic. And sometimes tinged with the delicate soft ache of sadness. My favorite song of theirs so far, "Tomorrow on the Runway":

Tomorrow On The Runway - The Innocence Mission

Then I came across their album, Now the Day is Over. The album is a collection of tunes that vocalist Karen Peris is fond of singing to her children, lullabies of sorts, if you will. Her husband Don is the guitarist and while we can never know such things for sure, you get the sense they are lovely, soft-hearted parents. There is such shimmering beauty in these simple songs-- songs you and I already know-- that it makes me look forward even more to when the time comes for swaddling blankets, tiny fluffed pillows, hushed singing, blurry eyes, and even cries for milk at 3.00 in the morning. Listen to how she's remade the often cheesily sung "Moon River" into an entirely different being altogether:

Moon River - The Innocence Mission

And then there's this one, "Bye-Lo". As one reviewer said, he listened to this track when he and his wife found out that they were having a baby, and for the first time in his life, he cried:

Bye - Lo - The Innocence Mission

I think our baby just got his/her first lullabies album :)

The Year of Eating Locally

Close to a year ago, in commemoration of Earth Day, we posted something about doing more to eat locally, seasonally and sustainably. This year, we've finally taken a decisive step in that direction. Together with our friends, Tanya and Wil, we joined a local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmshare. A CSA is a way for the food-buying public to create a relationship with a farm (for us, it's Tantré Farm in Chelsea, MI) and to receive a weekly basket of produce. By making a financial commitment to a farm, people become members (or "shareholders," or "subscribers") of the CSA. The cost was a little high upfront, but between our two households and at the prospect of getting fresh, locally-grown organic vegetables, fruits, and herbs for much of the rest of the year, it actually works itself out in the long run.

I'm excited to receive our first batch of produce come May/June- I think veggies like arugula, peas, and chard come first. It'll be inspiring to cook based on what's at its peak of flavor, freshness, and seasonality. Alice Waters said it best when she writes that cooking seasonally also gives you an appropriate reverence for place and time, for what Nature had intended for us to eat at a certain point of the year. While I appreciate being able to get tomatoes even in the winter, nothing tastes better than the burstful sweetness of heirloom tomatoes smack in the middle of July.

Also, I'm really looking forward to trying vegetables that we may not otherwise buy on our own from the market. I have no idea what to do with beets or kohlrabi, but we'll soon have to learn if we're going to be getting a basketful of them every week. It'll be an adventure to explore new flavors and ways of cooking, or maybe even eating them raw because they will be so fresh and flavorful. Our friends who've joined CSAs in the past warn that it's a lot of veggies for a week even after you share it between two families (for instance, with Tantré Farm, each week we'll expect to get 1 to 4 salad greens (lettuce, arugula, etc.), 1 to 4 cooking greens (collards, Swiss chard, spinach, etc.), 1 to 4 root vegetables (carrots, potatoes, etc.), 1 to 4 fruiting vegetables (tomatoes, corn, squash, etc.), 1 or 2 alliums (onions, garlic, etc.), 1 to 3 brassicas (broccoli/cabbage family), and 1 or 2 herbs), but maybe this will be a way for us to simply incorporate more vegetables into our diet, and learn how to dry, cook, or preserve them in ways that will allow them to keep longer. The possibilities are endless and we can't wait! :)

Elmo, meet your match...

[Typing this as I crawl back up onto my chair having virtually fallen over from laughing too hard...]



Only Ricky Gervais would dare give the eternally 3-year-old reigning prince of Sesame Street a hard time for the incongruity of wearing pajamas when he's naked the rest of the time; only he would give Elmo such a jab the poor muppet looked like he was going to fall over himself; and only a brilliant British comic would broach the subject of necrophilia on a children's show on public television.

I love Jude soooo much for forwarding this to me... :)

(via The Huffington Post)

Not a Facebook poke

SO- I may or may not have felt the baby move last night. Jude and I were watching the Season One marathon of Breaking Bad when I felt a bit of an ache in my abs. Not like a sharp stabbing pain, but it sure was uncomfortable. Maybe it was the baby's way of protesting that I was unglamorously and awkwardly slouched over a throw blanket and two pillows. Apparently the kiddo's limbs are developing fast this week so perhaps it needed to make that known, like a polite "Erm... excuse me mom, but I'm kinda growing in here and you're squishing me" poke.

Or it could have been the little one reacting against my decision to have a triple Blimpy burger with grilled onions, mushrooms, Swiss cheese, mayo, ketchup, tomato, lettuce, and a side of veggie fries at 4 in the afternoon (Yes, it would seem that my appetite is back with a vengeance of epic proportions...). In which case, it was probably a less benign "Good god, woman! You sure this much grease is OK for me?" jab.

Or maybe it was just indigestion... ;)

"I'm not locked in here with you, YOU'RE locked in here with ME!!"

Otherwise known as the best line in the movie/comic and spoken by our favorite character, Rorschach (played by a brilliant Jackie Earle Haley who so boldly and uncannily embodied Rorschach that I can't imagine that had Terry Gilliam's directed the movie, he would have been played by Robin Williams), the most compelling and complete of all the characters in The Watchmen series, if you ask us. The movie was very good- for what it was able to do. The last time I felt vaguely the same way was when we watched the film version of my favorite novel, Possession and hated it. Like The Watchmen, I think it's unfilmable. Layered storylines, narratives within narratives, flashbacks, complex characterization- all things that are hard to capture on film no matter how advanced your CG or skillful your editing. To make The Watchmen work on film, the film-makers had no choice but to pick out the master narrative from the lot and concentrate on that, but in the process, lose the depth, complexity, and intensity that is so much a part of why we love the comic (or comics, depending on how you look at it).

I genuinely appreciate how faithfully Zack Synder abided by the aesthetic of the narrative- to the point of being almost too much of a moving storyboard for some very iconic frames of the comic. Meaning the movie managed to capture the devastating vision of the story, but not quite its tragic soul. Constrained by the film medium, it left me just a little cold at the end, and not quite with the all-consuming bitterness and bleakness I actually felt in a very real way at the end of my challenging week-long struggle with reading it (let's just say it's not the best thing to set aside for bedtime reading if you want to be flipping back and forth between pages, looking for hidden connections, and drawing connections between the various narratives- an experience I re-visted last night at 4 in the morning after returning from our midnight IMAX advanced screening.).

Whether or not you've read the comic, I'd still recommend that you watch the movie- it did the best it could given the difficulty of the source material and I'm glad we saw it. But for those of you who haven't read it, please don't take the movie as a representation of what The Watchmen is- it's so so so much more than the film, and then some...

"Dark was the night" - an awesome compilation

I have been hearing raves about this compilation for sometime now, but it was only recently that I made the time to look for it. And .. oh my... what a compilation this is - not only do the contributing artistes read like a who's who of indie music, each of the songs stand on their own and with repeated listening (as evidenced by my Last.fm status). Produced (or in the Art world - curated) by The National's Aaron & Bryce Dessner - in association with the Red Hot Organization, famous for their stellar charity compilations benefiting HIV and AIDS related projects. Unlike most charity albums, this comp exudes a slow, contemplative mood that has interesting shades of grey.

Red hot allows you to embed up to 3 tracks from the compilation on one's website. Here are my 3 favourites (you have to give Riceboy Sleeps a listen!).

A DIY cooking weekend

1. Topped with homemade crust, 2. A dream fulfilled..., 3. Homemade pizza Layer 1, 4. Homemade pizza Layer 2

If there was anyone who knew what it means to dream of pie, it would be my husband this past week- the kind of deep, profound yearning that one must not take likely. And we're not talking about just any kind of pie- no, not a sweet, syrupy apple pie nor an eggy, dessert-only custard pie. People, we're talking the kind of hearty, rich, alcohol-infused, gravy-drenched, stick-to-your-bones-because-it's-winter, feel-it-in-your-gut-the-next-day kind of meat pie. Ever since reading this article in the the NYT Magazine last week about Fergus Henderson's Guinness and Steak Pie, Jude's been dying for us to try making our own meat pie, trotter gear and all. And since the article advocates a whole large communal pie instead of insipid individual ones, we decided to make it a whole social event with Molly, Jason, Rick and Emilee. It helps too that I'm now graduating into my second trimester and am slowly picking back up my desire to cook (which I thought I had all but lost at Week 6...)

It was a little intimidating initially to think that we would be making everything from scratch, including the crust (which after my sad attempt at Thanksgiving, did not give me much confidence...). Thankfully (or not), Ann Arbor ran out of trotters this weekend (Sparrow Market sold out and the guy behind the meat counter at Whole Foods- believe it or not- had no clue what trotters are! Was everyone equally inspired to make meat pies this weekend?). And so we had no choice but to use another recipe and I settled on this one by Jamie Oliver which got plenty of good reviews. The entire process from prepping the veggies to us actually sitting down to our first bite of pie probably took a little more than 4 hours, but I think it was well worth it. The Guinness ended up smelling and tasting more like a very rich red wine, and the beef was cooked till meltingly tender. Plus, thanks to Rick's patient coaching, my second attempt at making my own crust was a veritable success- light, flaky and tasty! The pie was an all-round hit and I'm glad I helped to fulfill my husband's meat pie dream :)

Inspired by the success of the Guinness steak pie, we decided to experiment with making our own pizza for dinner tonight, although not really from scratch. We bought fresh uncooked wholewheat pizza dough from Trader Joe's, rolled it out and topped it first with a little tomato sauce, baked breaded eggplant (yum!), and fresh mozzarella. We let that bake for about 15 minutes and then added arugula, shaved Parmesan, drizzle of olive oil and sea salt and threw it back in the oven for a couple more minutes. I have to say, I could eat that pizza forever and ever, and ever- deliciously tasty from the eggplant and cheeses, light and crusty (not chewy), a little bite from the arugula, and just so fresh out of the oven that nothing store-bought or delivered even comes close. I'm not sure if it's my appetite slowly coming back after weeks of nuts- and cereal-craving, but honestly, dinner was really quite delicious :) Besides, I don't really like my pizzas heavy with too much cheese, meats, or sauce like it's typical here in the Midwest so the fact that we could choose what and how much we put on the pizza was just perfect! Jude now thinks we should totally invest in a pizza pan (we had to borrow Rick and Emilee's) so we can make the kind of pizzas we love every week :)

Baby names conversations

At Borders a couple of weeks ago:
Serene: So it says in this book that it's always iffy to name children after celebrities.
Jude: You mean like Benicio? I like Benicio.
Serene: Benicio Yew???
Jude: No, Benicio del Yew.
Serene: His last name is del Toro. I don't think del is part of his first name.
Jude: I like Benicio del. Or maybe Gus van.
Serene: as in Sant?
Jude: No, Gus van Yew.

Last night while falling asleep:
Serene: What about Liam if it's a boy?
Jude: But that's so Celtic. We're not English. And if it's a girl? Sinead?
Serene: Hahaha, or Siobhan.
Jude: And then they're going to join Riverdance?

I foresee naming our baby to be a long, painful, process... :) Coincidentally, Jude then found this article on BBC News today: 'Most unfortunate names revealed'.

Post-mortem

It was worth the wait. To hear two genuinely moving speeches that didn't sound too pre-rehearsed, tweaked, or edited. The rest of the Oscars had its moments, I have to admit- Tina Fey and Steve Martin should totally co-host next year's Oscars, I loved the Judd Apatow directed short with Seth Rogen and James Franco, and I hope everyone saw/heard Best Animated Short director Kunio Kato's a brilliant haiku of an acceptance speech (he thanked his pencil! And domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!) But our favorite new twist on the award ceremony was how they replaced the snippets of all the acting nominees' film with a tribute from past winners in the category. For the most part, it was a really nice touch, to be commended by the actors who had come before you, and to be given personal validation. We wondered if the past winners had written the tributes themselves; if they did, then you could tell for sure who who didn't seem to mean what they said (I'm talking to you Michael Douglas), and who did. Like Robert de Niro:

How did he do it? How for so many years did Sean Penn get all those jobs playing straight men? Being a movie star can get in the way of acting. But not for Sean. Sean Penn the actor loses himself in every role so we can discover a man named Sam, Mystic River Jimmy Markum, the surfer dude Spicoli, a dead man walking, and Harvey Milk. Sean brings the same commitment to his off-screen life; you see it when he campaigns for human rights, respectfully advises world leaders, and gently, gently reasons with the paparazzi. Tonight, it's important to be a great actor; in life, it's more important to be a great human being. That's my friend, Sean Penn.
-Robert de Niro's, 2009 Academy Awards

Sean Penn returned the gesture with an acceptance speech that had the perfect combination of graciousness, humor, self-awareness, gravitas, and political righteousness (especially in light of his role and the current status of Prop 8 in California):

You commie, homo-loving sons of a guns... I did not expect this. And I want to be very clear that I do know how hard I make it to appreciate me often. But I am touched by the appreciation and I hoped for it enough that I scribbled down the names in case you *were* commie, homo-loving sons of a guns. [thanks a bunch of people...] Finally, for those who saw the signs of hatred as our cars drove in tonight, I think it's a good time for those who voted for the ban against gay marriage to sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren's eyes if they continue that way of support. We've got to have equal rights for everyone. And there are these last two things, I'm very very proud to live in a country that is willing to elect an elegant man as president and a country who for all its toughness creates courageous artists and this is in great due respect to all the nominees. But courageous artists who despite a sensitivity that has sometimes brought enormous challenge, Mickey Rourke rises again and he is my brother. Thank you all very much.
-Sean Penn, acceptance speech, 2009 Academy Awards

In the nick of time...

This is probably the latest I've ever posted my Oscar choices for the year but it's a tradition this blog has maintained over the years, and so nothing, not even two naps, a pot-luck dinner, and more sleeping, is going to get in the way of me putting this up- even if it is an hour to the awards... Besides, this is one of the few years where we've watched most of everything that's been nominated so there's particular excitement in the outcome :)

Best Picture
* Slumdog Millionaire

Director
* Danny Boyle

Actor in a Leading Role
* Sean Penn

Actress in a Leading Role
* Kate Winslet
It's about time!

Actor in a Supporting Role
* Heath Ledger
As srah noted in one of her Facebook/Twitter updates, everyone in her Oscar pool chose Heath; if he doesn't win, there might be a worldwide riot...

Actress in a Supporting Role
* Penélope Cruz

Original Screenplay
* Wall-E
The fact that my favorite film of 2008 (and possibly my favorite animated movie ever, next to Tombstone for the Fireflies) wasn't nominated for Best Movie means that I'm going to root for it for almost every category it's nominated in.

Adapted Screenplay
* Slumdog Millionaire

Foreign Language Film
* The Class

Animated Feature
* Wall-E
Duh...

Original Score
* Slumdog Millionaire

Original Song
* 'Jai Ho'

Art Direction
* The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Cinematography
* Slumdog Millionaire

Costume Design
* The Duchess
For the past few years, I've gone with more iconic, understated fashion statements like in Atonement, but I've come to realize that when it comes to Costume Design, it's almost always what's most elaborate, most intricate.

Makeup
* The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Documentary Feature
* Man on Wire
For the first time in a long time, we've actually seen a nominee in this category and Man on Wire was beautiful. Elegiac because of the context of Philippe Petit's feat, but also a wonderful testimony to persistence, inspiration, and just the living out of one's dream.

Sound Mixing
* Wall-E

Sound Editing
* Wall-E
I know these are very unconventional choices and I've never had very much investment in the sound categories, but apart from the fact that I believe Wall-E should win everything it's nominated for, did you see the first 30 minutes of the movie? It's all about the sound, people!

Visual Effects
* The Dark Knight

Film Editing
* Frost Nixon

Short Film, Animated
* La Maison en Petits Cubes

Short Film, Live Action
* Manon on the Asphalt

Documentary Short Subject
* The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306

Yew(s) are pregnant!- Part Deux

So as the dust settles from our little announcement, after receiving almost 150 congratulatory emails, messages, and comments (thanks everyone!), and having had our first doctor's appointment and coming to terms with the fact that yes, come August, there will be indeed someone else sharing our lives, I thought it probably is a good idea to share a little about how things have been evolving these past month or so. So Jude and I actually found out about the little kiddo on New Year's Day itself. It was a wonderful way to usher in 2009 :) First there was surprise (in an extremely good way of course...), then euphoria, and then a deep profound panic when I realized I had had a ridiculous amount of raw salmon and tuna sushi the night before. What if the baby ingested too much mercury from all that raw fish???!!! Then there was more panic at the thought that I would no longer be able to have coffee for the next eight months. Oh the agony... For Jude, it was more like, "OK, we so need to get some books..."

Since then, things have been slowly changing around the house. Our shopping habits are definitely different, for one- instead of scouring for earphones or music online, Jude's been looking at strollers and cribs instead. It's adorable, really... :) We're trying to be really good about the kinds of food we're buying so that I can eat healthy, although, that's been the biggest stumbling block so far. Not the eating healthy part, just eating at all. As Jude likes to say, I've been almost always hungry, but I actually feel little inclination to eat. Food just hasn't had the same allure these past months. What an irony... Oh, I'll eat because the baby needs to eat, but I haven't been deriving much pleasure from it. Honestly, if I could eat the fortified cereals from Trader Joe's or Kashi with milk for every meal, I would. And of course, there's the whole coffee thing. I haven't even been taking much decaf. I think I love coffee so much that going decaf is like some kind of infidelity... I'd rather go without it altogether than to compromise.

Physically, I've been completely fatigued out. It's getting better now, but initially, there were days when I actually took TWO naps, on top of a solid 8 hours of sleep at night! It felt overindulgent and almost ridiculous until someone put it in perspective for me that I'm making a person in my body- I am literally someone else's life support system and that's hard work! Besides, once the baby arrives, neither one of us will ever be able to get that much sleep again so I'd better savor that as much as I can now :)

Right now, it's just taking little tiny baby steps (pun FULLY intended...) towards preparing the house and ourselves for August- buying a new mattress, planning on how to reconfigure our house for baby furniture, registering for classes (because really, despite what many people think, no one is a born parent- it's a learning and growing process...), reading up on as much as we can (for both Mommies and Daddies), slowly buying some baby clothes, and leaning on the wonderful support of our family and friends who've been such lifesavers!! Thank you for all your warm wishes, advice, and recommendations- you guys are the awesomest best!

Right now, our baby's only the size of a peach (although it already has teeth, a spine, and this week, fingerprints!!) but it's already very real to us. When I heard its heartbeat this week, I thought my heart was going to burst and I almost starting crying...

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.
-Elizabeth Stone

Interesting followup to Serene's Trader Joe's post

Just found this article on the Freakanomics blog about the owners of Trader Joe's:

So, let me ask those of you who fall into categories 2 and 3: Who owns Trader Joe’s?

1. Some great California family full of surfers and gardeners.

2. A small band of communal farmers in Oregon.

3. A huge German discount-grocery chain best known in the U.S. for no-glamor stores often located in marginal neighborhoods.

Yeah, it’s No. 3. The company is called Aldi and, though I’d seen one or two of its stores in the past, I didn’t even know it was a grocery store. Then I read this very interesting Wall Street Journal piece about the company’s ambitious new plan for the U.S., which calls for 75 new stores this year. The article claims that Aldi is so good at selling cheap goods that WalMart couldn’t compete with it in Germany.

I did a little more investigating about Aldi. Apparently, Aldi specializes in running low-cost, discount stores - mainly selling house brands - in marginal neighborhoods in the US. But in Germany, according to Aldi's wikipedia page, :

95% of blue-collar workers, 88% of white-collar workers, 84% of public servants and 80% of self-employed Germans shop at Aldi.

That's some market share!!!

Would it be safe to say that Trader Joe's has cornered 80% of the YUPPIE market? A lot of people we know shop at Trader Joe's. Do you? Let us know, it would be interesting to find out ...

Song of the week: The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - A Teenager in Love

A Teenager In Love - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

A wonderful new band that I discovered via pitchfork. Just because ...

Yew(s) are pregnant!!

:)

The anti-valentine's day mix

I waited till valentine's day was over to post this mix - didn't want to be lynched yet still wanted to maintain the street cred of this here blog. I found this mix on stereogum and found it too good not to reproduce here.

Florence And The Machine - "Kiss With A Fist" (MP3)
Black Lips - "Starting Over" (MP3)
Vivian Girls - "Where Do You Run To" (MP3)
Handsome Furs - "I'm Confused" (MP3)
Lissy Trullie - "Boy Boy" (MP3)
Papercuts - "Future Primitive" (MP3)
The Decemberists - "The Rake's Song" (MP3)
Julie Doiron - "Consolation Prize" (MP3)
Ferraby Lionheart - "Dear Corinne" (MP3)
Port O'Brien - "Is This Really What It's Come To" (MP3)
Neko Case - "People Got A Lot Of Nerve" (MP3)
Bon Iver - "Your Love (Live)" (MP3)
Nick Thorburn - "Used To Be Funny" (MP3)

Valetine's mosaic

To love...

My Funny Valentine
Sweet Comic Valentine
You Make Me Smile With My Heart
You're Looks Are Laughable,
Unphotographable
Yet You're My Favorite Work Of Art
Is Your FigureLess Than Greek
Is Your Mouth A Little Weak
When You Open It To Speak
Are You Smart
Don't Change A Hair For Me
Not If You Care For Me
Stay Little Valentine Stay
Each Day Is Valentine's Day

-"My Funny Valentine", Chet Baker

Oldie but goodie...

So as you can see, dear readers, ghetto of our mind has reverted back to Blog Template #4. Blog Template #5, a.k.a. Birds on a Wire met an untimely demise when the header image disappeared on us. I suspect either the template designer deleted the image not knowing that people were using it or their image hosting account got deleted. I should have known better and saved the image on our own. But oh well, the pomegranates are still adorable I still love the fresh, clean aesthetic of the design. It was our longest running template so there has to be something enduring and endearing about it :)

Ode to Trader Joe's

I love this video so much it's ridiculous :) Everything we love about our wonderfully quirky favorite grocery store where we find all the stuff we need and then some we never knew we'd like but now adore. Things are always fresh, easy, healthy (most of the time), delicious, and most importantly, interesting. And often value for money too.

Things in the video that appear frequently in Jude and Serene's shopping cart:
- organic milk
- bread (we just discovered their naan and it's wonderful!)
- peanut butter filled pretzels
- chocolate covered nuts
- soup in cartons
- 2 buck Chucks (Charles Shaw wines)
- Thai Lime & Chili Cashews
- bananas sold singly (so we can buy just three if we wanted to...)
- peeled baby carrots (I never eat them whole but I'll chop them up into tiny pieces and throw them into stews or soups so I'll get the nutrition but I can't really see that they're there)
- Fuji apples
- Mochi ice-cream (mango, of course!)
- organic eggs
- cereal (because their cereal selection rocks!)
- $0.99/can tomatoes
- flavored lemonade
- Airbourne (nothing staves off an imminent cold/flu like this Vitamin C booster)
- mini watermelons (perfect for just two of us)

I could go on about our other favorite TJ products like their frozen Orange Chicken, guacamole, pear sauce, frozen tamales, pasta sauces, cheap cremini mushrooms and arugula salad, interesting simmer sauces like Chicken Marsala or Cacciatore, cheapest saffron anywhere, and so many many, much much more. And just like it is in the video, we never pass up the food samples, always take a small cup of their coffee or tea, and have had the handles of the TJ paper bags rip on us so many times, we now bring our own shopping bags. I have to say though, that the only time I've had problems finding a parking spot in the TJ's here was the day before Thanksgiving last year. And really, I should have known better...

What's your favorite thing about Trader Joe's? :)

Let the river run

Sometimes, nothing beats an old song to remind you that classics should always have a place in your playlist. By some quirk of the channel-surfing karma, I watched the last hour of Working Girl again yesterday after a really long time. It's all '80s in it's big-hair, shoulder-pads glory, and in a time when Harrison Ford still looked like he could play Indiana Jones without getting a cardiac arrest. The acting isn't the greatest-- least of all Melanie Griffith's-- but the last scene is worth it all.



I think it's the combination of how director, Mike Nichols pans out of her office into a panoramic view of the cityscape and Carly Simon's uplifting "Let the River Run". The song hits such a euphoric note that it gets me every time. The movie may be dated but the song definitely isn't. Moving, inspiring, and triumphant, it's a call to dare, to dream, to desire, to demand, and to declare.

Listen "Carly Simon let the river run"

Download for free "Carly Simon let the river run" mp3

Silver cities rise,
The morning lights
The streets that meet them,
And sirens call them on
With a song.

It's asking for the taking.
Trembling, shaking.
Oh, my heart is aching.

We're coming to the edge,
Running on the water,
Coming through the fog,
Your sons and daughters.

We the great and small
Stand on a star
And blaze a trail of desire
Through the dark'ning dawn.
-Carly Simon, "Let the River Run"

Coraline

Oooh! Oooh! Neil Gaiman! Stop-motion animation! Henry Selick! It's like The Nightmare Before Christmas meets Mathilda meets Alice in Wonderland!



And check out the most wonderfully delightful (albeit slightly macabre) website :)

You're about to enter a world where everything you'll see has been created by hand;
Like a forest of cherry blossoms made from painted popcorn;
500 handmade scottie dogs that fill an entire theatre;
And 3500 handcrafted flowers that all light up.
-Coraline website

Comforts from the kitchen

I know from reading our blog, it sometimes seems as if I'm the only one who does the cooking at home, but really, Jude's a pretty mean cook himself. Especially if you get him craving something enough, or inspired enough, he'll take over the kitchen and whip up something so cool, it'll knock your socks off :) Like a couple of weeks ago when I was fighting a cough and cold from the crazy weather- he wanted to make me something soupy and also happened to be craving Soto Ayam after reading this NYTimes article about soups from Southeast Asia. So what does my husband do? He puts me to bed and orders me not to get up till he tells me to, and 3 hours later, I wake up to this:


It was delicious, comforting, evocative, and just most wonderful. Really, there is no better cure for the flu than your husband making you any kind of soup, especially one that almost immediately floods you with memories of home :) It helped too that we have the actual book from which the recipe comes: James Oseland's Cradle of Flavor, a birthday present from Jude a couple of years ago.

Tonight, we decided to try recreating another soup from home from the book. No, neither one of us is under the weather; just greedy and missing home during the Chinese New Year season. Besides, for some reason, we've been craving this one particular soup for the past couple of weeks. Itek Tim is a tangy Peranakan duck soup simmered with salted mustard greens (kiam chye) and preserved dried plums (sng muay). This is one of my favorite soups from home and I beg my mom to make her definitive kick-ass version every time we're home. Unfortunately, we couldn't find fresh duck here (we're going to check out Plum Market tomorrow) so we used a combination of chicken and pork ribs. Once again, the force was strong in Jude, and he was prepping the ingredients before I even had a chance to step into the kitchen. He bruised the ginger and nutmeg, I chopped the chicken; he measured out the seasonings, I washed the mustard greens. Following Oseland's recipe almost to a T (we didn't have brandy and had to use whiskey instead, though...), between the two of us, I think we pulled off a pretty decent version. My mom would be proud :)


The soup has to simmer for an hour and a half but by the hour mark, the two of us were finding it really hard to resist the delicious smells wafting through the house. It's a wonderfully complex tasting soup- the combination of the flavor of the meats with the sweet-saltiness of the vegetables, mingling with the tanginess of the dried plums, and then there's the added layer of that certain something something that dances at the back of your throat from the nutmeg, pepper, ginger, and whiskey that was used to briefly marinate the meats.

Truly, people, it was pure soup bliss... :)

25 Random Things About Me

Because I've been tagged too many times on Facebook to not do this...

1. I'm making this list because I'm clearly bad at resisting peer pressure: "But mom, all the cool kids are doing it!..."
2. My favorite fruit is the mango.
3. I love Oasis even though Jude thinks they're the ah bengs of Brit rock.
4. I have no wisdom teeth. The dentist took them all out when I got braces at twelve.
5. Accord to a personality assessment report, my literary counterparts are either Hero in Much Ado About Nothing or Dr. Watson from the Sherlock Holmes series.
6. I haven't had a sip of caffeinated coffee in the past month.
7. I make a pretty mean roast chicken.
8. If I had to choose one food to eat for the rest of my life, it'll have to be sushi.
9. Jude and I first bonded over The Virgin Suicides- the novel, not the movie.
10. I never buy bottled water unless we're traveling.
11. I've met and spoken to (sort of...) two of my favorite writers, Nick Hornby and Salman Rushdie.
12. I've seen four of my favorite bands live- U2, Coldplay, Broken Social Scene, and Death Cab for Cutie.
13. I sleep on the right side of the bed. Even when I'm sleeping alone.
14. One of the best decisions I made last year was to take my running more seriously.
15. I don't eat carrots unless they're too difficult to remove, like in spring rolls or coleslaw.
16. 1999 was my favorite year in movies because it gave us The Matrix, Iron Giant, Fight Club, Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
17. My favorite color could be green, orange or lavender, depending on my mood and the context.
18. I look more like my mom than my dad.
19. I'm shortsighted like my dad. My mom has perfect vision.
20. When I was six, I danced in my kindergarten "graduation" ceremony. The song was "Morning Has Broken" and I was a purple orchid.
21. My first Hollywood crush was Ke Huy Quan, the little boy in Indiana Jones: The Temple of Doom and The Goonies.
22. The first car I ever drove was my dad's silver Mitsubishi Galant.
23. My favorite TV day is Wednesdays because it has Lost at 9pm and Top Chef at 10pm.
24. I love polka dots.
25. I hate celery.

恭喜发财, 牛年快乐

Another year of not being with the folks and family for the Lunar New Year. And another year pining for crumbly pineapple tarts, melt-in-your-mouth kueh bangkit, and sweet-salty bak kwa. We've become used to spending mellow new years here, but it doesn't mean we miss home any less. Like any other huge holiday, Chinese New Year is a big deal for my family- apart from my parents and sisters (and now brother-in-law!), it's also about my grandparents, uncles, aunts, and army of cousins, nieces, & nephews; it's about just being with them and basking in the warm glow of family.

We ushered in the Year of the Ox quietly- there was a Chinese dinner at Middle Kingdom on Saturday with Lian, Kabi and Rick, and where our server recommended a gigantic steamed whole walleye for auspicious reasons ("fish" sounds like "prosperity" in Mandarin). Despite there being only five of us, we gamely ordered it anyway and practically cleaned the entire dish on top of everything else we ordered :) "Reunion" dinner last night was at Macaroni Grill, most decidedly un-Chinese and deliberately so. We figured all the Chinese places would be crowded so pasta it was. Besides, we could just about pretend we were having traditional Chinese New Year noodles for good luck (even though I ordered bow-tie pasta which look nothing like long, thin noodles...) And today, on the first day of the new year, instead of a day-long affair of jumping in and out of the car visiting relatives, stuffing our faces silly with new year goodies, and playing cards with the cousin, I'm bound to my desk, triple-backing-up data, transcribing, and trying my hand at website design.

All in all though, we are hopeful for the Year of the Ox- it's my dad's zodiac sign, and if nothing else, that suggests good things to come :) Here's wishing all of you who celebrate the Lunar New Year many bovine blessings for the year, whether that be wealth, health or just all-round good cheer!

The 7-month wait is finally over!

No prizes to the person who guesses correctly what we'll be doing tomorrow at 8pm EST :)

Feels like the Arctic? Then live like in the Arctic

Look what we saw on our walk around the neighborhood this evening:


Love it! :)

Crazypants weather...

The forecast for tomorrow-

In Fahrenheit


In Centigrade


The weather report says something about "LONG DURATION ARCTIC VISIT." What the heck does *that* mean? A visit? Who invited the Arctic chill? Is this a long-term stay or more an illegal squatting situation? Does it understand how unwelcome it is?

Mr. Bus-Driver Man II

After six years of living in family housing and having taken the internal Blue Bus shuttle almost everyday all this time, Jude and I like to think that we know almost all the bus drivers who drive our route. We don't know each of them personally of course, but six years is long enough to develop an opinion about each of these individuals who are responsible for getting you to school in the most inclement weather (a.k.a. This Past Week). There's the lady who's always a little gruff with you but is really a softie when it comes to babies and old ladies; that one guy who never seems to be in the official UM PTA uniform but wears a sweatshirt instead and only talks to undergrad girls; the Bus Driver From Hell who NEVER stops in front of the bus-stop but several meters away just so you have to walk for your ride even if it means trudging through 10-inches of snow. And then there's Mr. Bus Driver Man. Almost four years ago, I had blogged about the same bus-driver and how he had plucked flowers for his wife while waiting for his scheduled time to leave. It's been a while since I saw him and I thought maybe he had retired.

But no, I realized today that it probably has more to do with the times I take the bus- I usually leave the house at 9-ish in the morning and catch the late evening bus home. But because of the weather advisory today, I thought I should leave school early and actually made it out of the building before 3pm. Lo and behold, I hop onto Mr. Bus Driver Man's bus :) He looks exactly the same and just as sweet. Despite the cold and snow, he personally stood outside his bus to wait for people who might be rushing for the bus just so they'd know he was waiting for them and he literally jumped off the bus when it looked like a girl who had just alighted had sprained her ankle. If he could, I really think he would have taken her to the doctor's himself.

I know it seems odd to blog about a bus-driver who hardly knows who I am but it was moving to see little acts of kindness unfold before you. Especially from people who are so much a part of your everyday life that you don't often stop to think of them as individuals...

Day One

So today marked the first day of the second half of my dissertation data collection. I worked with the children in Singapore all through our time back home last summer and it's now time for the U.S. half of my study. It was actually my first time in an actual U.S. classroom (well, three classrooms, specifically)- I've been in and out of preschool classrooms the past six years but until today, I haven't stepped into an all-American K-12 school.

Some things are different from home- architecturally for one, schools in the U.S.-- or at least the ones I was in today-- are more enclosed. I'm so used to schools being constructed around a quadrangle, classrooms arranged along open corridors, sunlight flooding in from everywhere and things just being really open. Here, classrooms open up into labyrinthine indoor hallways, with exits only at specific points at the end of them, and little outside light except from main entrances, designated nooks, or one wall of windows in the classrooms. I know this paints a picture of schools here being dark and depressing, but quite the opposite. Every wall is covered in children's art-- and there's A LOT of wall space, teachers' decorate their classroom doors, handmade public service posters are everywhere and it's obvious that children are encouraged to personalize their school in ways that extend far beyond school-sanctioned notices or sanitized, laminiated displays of the multiplication table.

Children everywhere are fundamentally the same though- a ten-year-old in Singapore and a ten-year-old in America may wear different things to school, have very different choices of food for recess, and are educated in some very profoundly different ways, but at the end of the day, they respond to humor, they think celebrities are more famous than politicians, and when given the choice, they will happily choose to welcome a researcher into their classroom and subject themselves to her crazy questions than do any actual real schoolwork.

If today's an indication of anything, the next six weeks look like they're going to be fun :)

Tune of the week: Alfie - People

How have I not heard of Alfie?

Alfie were a short lived (2000 - 2005) but much loved band hailing from Manchester. Love this description of the band on their last.fm page:

"none of these albums sold particulary well so the band did their best and put together their 4th long player, ‘crying at teatime’. this record was much bolder but still bore their, by now familiar, lacadaisical, unpretentious, soothing, yada, yada, yada sound, soooo… as this was supposed to be their debut into the pop world everybody decided that it was all much too odd, all round, so they did the decent thing, (rather than bending to the celebrity ruled world of a.o.r.) and split up."

I have not carefully listened to Alfie's other output yet, but I do love this track - having found it on the edition of Late Night Tales' compilation featuring tracks chosen by The Flaming Lips.

Advice for writing in the age of distraction

If you are like me, constantly checking email, facebook statuses and worse of all getting sucked into chasing the latest online deals, then perhaps Cory Doctorow's advice for maintaining writing productivity might help. I've summed up his main points below, but you can get at the original blogpost he put up here.

* Short, regular work schedule
When I'm working on a story or novel, I set a modest daily goal — usually a page or two — and then I meet it every day, doing nothing else while I'm working on it. It's not plausible or desirable to try to get the world to go away for hours at a time, but it's entirely possible to make it all shut up for 20 minutes. Writing a page every day gets me more than a novel per year — do the math — and there's always 20 minutes to be found in a day, no matter what else is going on. Twenty minutes is a short enough interval that it can be claimed from a sleep or meal-break (though this shouldn't become a habit). The secret is to do it every day, weekends included, to keep the momentum going, and to allow your thoughts to wander to your next day's page between sessions. Try to find one or two vivid sensory details to work into the next page, or a bon mot, so that you've already got some material when you sit down at the keyboard.

* Leave yourself a rough edge
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you're in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you're in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day's knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the "hint." Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it's hard to build on a smooth edge.

* Don't research
Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.

* Don't be ceremonious
Forget advice about finding the right atmosphere to coax your muse into the room. Forget candles, music, silence, a good chair, a cigarette, or putting the kids to sleep. It's nice to have all your physical needs met before you write, but if you convince yourself that you can only write in a perfect world, you compound the problem of finding 20 free minutes with the problem of finding the right environment at the same time. When the time is available, just put fingers to keyboard and write. You can put up with noise/silence/kids/discomfort/hunger for 20 minutes.

* Kill your word-processor
Word, Google Office and OpenOffice all come with a bewildering array of typesetting and automation settings that you can play with forever. Forget it. All that stuff is distraction, and the last thing you want is your tool second-guessing you, "correcting" your spelling, criticizing your sentence structure, and so on. The programmers who wrote your word processor type all day long, every day, and they have the power to buy or acquire any tool they can imagine for entering text into a computer. They don't write their software with Word. They use a text-editor, like vi, Emacs, TextPad, BBEdit, Gedit, or any of a host of editors. These are some of the most venerable, reliable, powerful tools in the history of software (since they're at the core of all other software) and they have almost no distracting features — but they do have powerful search-and-replace functions. Best of all, the humble .txt file can be read by practically every application on your computer, can be pasted directly into an email, and can't transmit a virus.

* Realtime communications tools are deadly
The biggest impediment to concentration is your computer's ecosystem of interruption technologies: IM, email alerts, RSS alerts, Skype rings, etc. Anything that requires you to wait for a response, even subconsciously, occupies your attention. Anything that leaps up on your screen to announce something new, occupies your attention. The more you can train your friends and family to use email, message boards, and similar technologies that allow you to save up your conversation for planned sessions instead of demanding your attention right now helps you carve out your 20 minutes. By all means, schedule a chat — voice, text, or video — when it's needed, but leaving your IM running is like sitting down to work after hanging a giant "DISTRACT ME" sign over your desk, one that shines brightly enough to be seen by the entire world.

What's cooking?

Ever since the fiasco of the latest season of Project Runway (which if people were observant enough, I didn't even bother blogging about... Don't even get me started about Kenley and how no one-- *no one*-- should ever be rude to Tim Gunn), I was beginning to have my doubts about Bravo's reality-TV formula. Admittedly, their less than imaginative production of Project Runway might have to do with the fact that they're losing the show to Lifetime this year, but still, you'd think that for the swansong season, they'd do something more inspired that making clothes out of car parts or based on zodiac signs.

But since the new Top Chef season began-- and every week since-- my faith in my next-to-favorite cable channel is being revived. I love this new season, make that *adore*. Each challenge has been fun, exciting, and unexpected-- who would have thought Foo Fighters and Thanksgiving?! ("No more barfait!"- Taylor Hawkins) But the episode that really sealed it for me was the Christmas one where no one got sent home because everyone had chipped in to help Radhika and Hosea who's food had gone bad the night before. There was a genuine camaraderie and respect for each other that I hadn't seen in previous seasons. Even smarmy, arrogant Stefan admitted that it does him no good to compete under such unfair circumstances. It was nice to see that kind of momentary selflessness in a genre of television that is not known for forgiving relationships between competitors.

The addition of Toby Young this week as the new judge was a touch of genius- the show really didn't need the bland and boring Gail Simmons anyway. Acerbic, brutal and funny as hell, he made Jude and I cringe and cackle all the show tonight. My pick to win is Fabio, the Italian Stallion :) I love his accent, the way he talks about his food, his grandmother, the judges, and his fellow cheftestants. Like tonight about Jamie making scallops again, "This is Top Chef, not Top Scallop!"

The UN Inspectors were looking in the wrong place. I have found the weapons of mass destruction and they are in this dish.
-Toby Young, Top Chef

Tweet tweet...

Goodbye pomegranates.


So to usher in the new year, ghetto of our mind has taken on a new look again. It's been close to a year and a half since the last change (the post describes the evolution of our blog) and with little to do while we were in Wisconsin, I occupied my time by searching for, finding, tweaking, Photoshopping, Illustratoring, and tweaking some more this final blog template you see now. As some of our more frequent readers know, this birdie design has been up for about a week or so now-- a soft release if you will ;)-- but from then till now, there have been little things I've been playing around with, like the tree image at the bottom of the page, the letter and line spacings, the blockquote code, fixing Jude's last fm widget, etc... But as of 4.47pm, 1/2/09, I think this is about as final as it's going to get for now. For a while, I got a little obsessed with correcting every little quirk, error or flaw I noticed in the formating till it frustrated even me. But like Emilee said, there's a bit of a obsessive-compulsive-perfectionist in every PhD student, so I'm just going to have to embrace that side of my personality whether I like it or not.

Besides, I really don't mind putting a little work into the blog. Ever since we started it, it's become a fairly important part of my life in terms of putting into words thoughts that would otherwise have remained internal. It's probably as much for myself as it is for the people reading, sort of like therapy if you will. And for that I thank you, our dear readers, for allowing us to inflict on you all our verbiage, no matter how mundane or banal :)

Retrosepctive

These were the things that defined the blog-- and by extension, us-- this past year. Thanks 2008, you've been good to us :)

[click for larger image]

Thanks to wordle.

I Believe in a Thing Called Love

It was a rollicking good time watching and laughing through VH1's 100 Greatest Hard Rock Songs last night. Some of it was just so ridiculously silly that it actually became entertaining :) Do these people take their rock personae that seriously? And our favorite had to be The Darkness and their video for "I Believe in a Thing Called Love". In the words of MTV, the band struck enough classic and cliché heavy metal poses to make Mötley Crüe look like Oasis. I'm convinced I've heard the song on the radio before, but the video is a whole other crazy creature altogether. A spot-on parody of the glam-rock '70s, it's like a lovechild between Queen, David Bowie, and Van Halen. It is magnificent in its complete and utter ludicrousness :)

And we haven't stopped watching it since last night...

[when asked if they're a parody rock band]
"We're not a 'parody' of anything. Don't use that word...We're the fresh new sound of rock music."
- Justin Hawkins, frontman, The Darkness

"You will never go hungry..."

...something Emilee & Rick failed to mention when they invited us to spend Christmas with Emilee's family in Wisconsin. Over the course of a week, there was *never* a moment when I was genuinely hungry. Peckish, maybe; greedy, for sure; but a real, honest-to-goodness level of starvation? Nope.

Monday
Lunch: Double mushroom-swiss burger at Culver's off the Oshtemo exit. Best Culver's I've tasted, worst Michigan town in terms of ploughing (or lack thereof).
Dinner: Homemade chicken pot-pie and biscuits (plus lots of holiday snacks strewn everywhere...)

Tuesday
Lunch: Mushroom-pepperoni pizza from Rocky Rococo and one-and-a-half pound of wings from Sentry, a Wisconsin-based grocery store.
Dinner: Sweet sour pork with fried rice. Did I mention the holiday snacks? Cranberry pretzels, white chocolate peppermint bark, red and green M&Ms?

Wednesday (this is when the holiday eating madness begins...)
Breakfast: Scrambled eggs with bacon. One-and-a-half pounds of bacon, to be exact. Plus buttered toast. Of course.
Lunch: Fresh cheese curds and more wings from Sentry. If you haven't realized by now, Sentry has some fairly profound chicken wings.
Dinner: Homemade lasagne (yummmm...), garlic Texas Toast, Caesar salad.
Desserts (yes, plural): Homemade chocolate cake with mocha frosting and Grandma Wolfe's ridiculously addictive date bars.

Thursday
Breakfast: Skier's french toast and sausage fried in bacon grease. Because nothing says "Merry Christmas!" like complete abandon in the cholesterol-counting department.
Lunch: Really, lunch? I had room for lunch? I didn't but I had Brie and crackers anyway...
Dinner: Surf & turf Christmas dinner- steak, crab claws, scalloped potatoes (Rick using an Elise recipe is always foolproof and delicious!), and corn. And desserts from last night. Plus lots of Asti Spumante.

Friday
Breakfast: Oatmeal, bacon, eggs, toast, grapefruit. It was like being at an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet, a.k.a., foodie heaven.
Lunch/Dinner: Friday fish fry at 4.30pm at the 5'O Clock Club, so it was something in between lunch and dinner. It was our first taste of the Wisconsin tradition and completely transformed my conception of seafood in the Midwest. Lake Perch- gooooood...
Supper: Watching the extended Fellowship of the Rings makes a person hungry, and makes five people even hungrier (don't question my logic!). It was 9.30, we had just finished watching the first disc and pizza was in order. Even if it meant placing the last order for the night and Beth having to drive to Rocky Rococo's to pick it up herself.

Saturday
Breakfast: English muffins. Yes, I know, how modest in comparison. But we had all set our alarms to wake up early to start The Two Towers and slack was not to be cut for breakfast. Although the smell of eggs and bacon sometime in the middle of Disc Two was magnificently distracting...
Lunch: More Culver's. Fried chicken. And ButterBurgers. Plus fries, cheese curds and coleslaw.
Dinner: Rader anniversary dinner. Rick & I made dinner of grilled pork tenderloin and mac & cheese. 3-quarts of mac and cheese to be precise. That's 12-cups, folks. Made with close to six cups of milk and four pounds of cheese. Black Diamond Cheddar rocks. More Asti Spumante.
Dessert: Homemade banana cream pie. Because Emilee's dad hadn't stopped asking for it. It was definitely pie worth waiting for.

Sunday
Breakfast: Homemade pancakes and more bacon than should be allowed on a breakfast table. And really good Trader Joe's maple syrup.
Lunch: Jude and I *had* to make a pit stop at La Pasadita in Chicago on our drive back to Ann Arbor. *Had* to. Yes, it is a physiological need, people. We could barely contain our excitement as we exited I-94E into the city. You'd understand if you've tasted their awesomest tacos...

Top that with a copious amount of Mario Karting (this is one area where mediocrity is okay with me...), the extended LOTR trilogy, lots of dog giddiness (we are now intimately acquainted with the routines and habits of the canine species), and tons of laughter and good cheer, and you have our wonderful Christmas holiday with the Raders. With the exception of going home to Singapore, I really can't think of a better way we could have celebrated Christmas :)

[click for photos]

1. Jude and dogs action shot, 2. Grandma Rader loving her white elephant present, 3. Serene wondering what's inside, 4. Sisters hiding, 5. Opening presents, 6. Table setting, 7. Present corner, 8. The Raders' beautiful home, 9. Christmas Eve dinner

Happy, happy holidays!

As I type this, I'm watching whirling snow come down like powdered sugar over Emilee's parents' place in Wisconsin. They generously invited us to spend Christmas with them and we're glad we get to be with family-- even if it's our friends'-- rather than no family this holiday. And we're even more happy that we made it here before the insane snow storm Wisconsin is going to get today- 6 to 10 inches apparently. Driving through west Michigan was harrowing enough yesterday with stretches of unploughed freeway and being able to go only at 20/mph...

But we're indoors now in the Raders' beautiful home and are looking forward to a week of doing absolutely nothing except watching the four dogs drive each other giddy with playing, eating lots of good home-cooked food, playing cards, Taboo, and Scrabble with Emilee's grandmas, and watching the beautifully insane snow come down while keeping warm and dry.

Jude and I want to also wish all our blog-readers an equally wonderful Christmas and New Year! Here's our greeting card this year- it was Jude's awesome idea to create a video greeting on his website. Happy holidays to all!

[click for card]

Guess what came through my fatwallet feed tonight?

Ever the consummate (and addicted) online shopper, I noticed the above ad that came through the fatwallet feeds tonight. All I can say is WOW! And notice the recommendations that come with this product ...