fried neurons
anything | everything | nothing

And He's in the Semis

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:17:00 +0000

GO MARAT!!!

Down with Federer!!!

Wanted

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:52:00 +0000

Saw Wanted earlier this evening with some coworkers. It was awesome summer movie fun.

For those of you who have been living under rocks over the past few months: Wanted is about a meek, nondescript pencil pusher (James McAvoy) who because of his lineage gets recruited by an old fraternity of assassins (called, funnily enough, The Fraternity). He is mentored, protected, and trained by a female assassin called Fox (the unbelievably hot Angelina Jolie).

I'm not sure how much of the story to talk about without giving the entire movie away. It is, after all, a summer action movie, so the predictability quotient is quite high. Suffice it to say that the movie has humor, ultra-fast action, and special effects reminiscent of The Matrix.

Oh, one more thing. The assassins receive the names of their "kills" via woven fabric, in which is hidden binary code that contains the victims' names. Now, this band of killers is big on tradition, and they have been around for a thousand years. So I couldn't help but wonder... were the secret fabric messages encoded in ASCII or EBCDIC?

Anyway, head on out to your friendly neighborhood multiplex to see Wanted. Get a big tub of popcorn, a 64-ounce soda, and some Whoppers. Suspend your disbelief for a couple of hours and you'll have a great time. Guaranteed.

Welcome Back, Baby!

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:40:00 +0000

Marat Safin reaches the quarterfinals - Wimbledon 2008

Show us some of that fire you had back when I saw you in Paris at the Masters Series!

:-)

Random bits, 30 June 2008

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 07:04:00 +0000

I can't sleep and I don't know why.
Isn't it ironic that the Philippines now imports bajillions of tons of rice from Thailand, when we helped them develop their rice industry decades ago?
After about a year of no updates, the blog is still getting hits from people Googling Raffy Ladao. LOL
I'm hooked on The Next Food Network Star. I'm rooting for either Shane or Adam. Lisa is too Victoria-Beckham-crossed-with-Dallas-new-money-pretension while Kelsey is too bubbly and perky. Adam is better looking and more charismatic, but Shane seems to be the better cook.
Believe it or not, I'm wishing for a day or two of rain. All this smoke from forest fires around Northern CA have made the air so smoky and hazy lately. It almost looks like Manila now. A nice rain would put out the fires and cleanse all this filth from the air.
Le Creuset just sent me a postcard offering 35% off any purchase of $100 or more. Hrmmm... New french oven? Braising pan? Those two types are really the only ones I would want from LC right now.
My friend April posted an awesome picture of her walking in the sand dunes around Dubai. I'm SO jealous.
I can't sleep and I don't know why.

I Like It Just So

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:15:00 +0000

Earlier today I washed the outer case of Devon's bed. It was dirty, stinky, and full of hair. The great thing about these LL Bean dog beds is that they come with washable covers and waterproof inner casings, so owners don't have to put up with years' worth of dog funk.

Anyway, for most of the afternoon Devon walked around wondering what I had done to it, looking none too pleased when he saw the cushion and bolster laying "naked" on the floor. Even after the bed case finished drying, I just left it strewn on my bedroom floor because I too lazy to work on it.

I finally put his bed back together a short while ago, after which I sat down at my computer.

Devon comes in my room, looks at his now-clean, now-strange-smelling bed, and looks at me. He just stares. Then he gets on his bed and proceeds to spin 'round and 'round. Legs flailing, face intently staring at the bed, body flexing, stretching, and flexing again. He stops for a while, stares at me again, and then starts spinning on his bed.

He hears me chuckling and sees me watching him, so he stops. Then he starts up. Again. And again, for well over five minutes.

Finally, he had the bed just the way he liked it. He promptly plopped down and fell fast asleep.

I swear sometimes that he, Mr. Snorty McDoggelsson Sheddy von Stinkelstein, has OCD. Oh, and he snores.

Bounty

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:41:00 +0000

Farmers' Markets.

One of the best things about living in the Bay Area is the great number of them in all nine counties. Here in Silicon Valley, we have quite a few that are open one day a week year-round. In summertime, the number of markets swells, and even more neighborhoods get their own once-a-week treats.

I went to Sunnyvale's earlier, after getting a haircut. My problem is that I always want to buy a little bit of almost everything, but I was a good boy this time around.

Our loot:

organic red onions
organic white onions
white nectarines (incredibly sweet)
white peaches
smoked duck breast
duck and peppercorn mousse (I wanted foie gras mousse but they were out)
blackberries (a little bit tart, but very plump and juicy)
chicken and garlic sausages (incredibly good, highly addictive)

What's all this food for, you ask?

Bill has already used some of the red onions and smoked duck breast to make pizza, along with some manchego cheese. The blackberry samples at the market were very sweet, but the ones I got weren't. So I turned them into jam when I got home. I'm going to make a cobbler or crumble with the peaches. The mousse will be for me and me alone, to enjoy with crackers and maybe some sauvignon blanc. The sausages and nectarines are for munching.

Yum. It's no wonder I'm fat.

Disclaimer: The wine and Manila mangoes were from Whole Foods.

Great Day In the Morning

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 06:07:00 +0000

We have mangosteens!

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord in Heaven! We have mangosteens!

I read a post on MarketManila sometime ago, which mentioned the fact that mangosteens had become available in the United States. I got excited then, but I pretty quickly forgot about it and moved on to other amusements. (Hello, ADD.)

Anyway, Bill recently found an online store that sells them. Apparently, there are two legal sources of mangosteens that are available in the US: Thailand (irradiated ones) and Puerto Rico. Yes, Puerto Rico. I guess some enterprising entrepreneur figured out that the climate in that Caribbean territory of ours mimics that of Southeast Asia pretty closely.

We received our shipment day before yesterday (8 smallish fruit for $34.99 plus shipping - FedEx 2-day required). So, yeah, it's very expensive, but well worth it for something so good. It was an excellent coming-home treat after our Tahoe trip.

We're eating them s-l-o-w-l-y. Only two mangosteens a day. Must savor the flavor.

I'm too lazy to take pictures, but trust me when I say they look really good both inside and out. Deep brown-violet outside, pearly white inside. No bruises on the "meat" whatsoever.

Mangosteen! Mangosteen!

Getwaway

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 03:32:00 +0000

It's been a long time coming. This weekend - well, actually Wednesday to Sunday - we were in Lake Tahoe for a much-needed break. We toyed with the idea of going someplace farther away, like Montreal or Vancouver or England, but in the end we decided to save money and go up the Sierra Nevadas instead.

We rented a 2-bedroom cabin at this nice little place called Spruce Grove. Not deluxe accommodations by any means, but it was still very good. The cabin was cozy and spacious, with a full kitchen, dining area, living room, and bathroom. There was a cast iron fireplace in the living room, a nice deck, and rustic Native-American-inspired decor. The deck had a picnic table and a gas barbecue.

On the grounds of Spruce Grove, they had a few swings, a couple of hammocks, plenty of room for the dog to run, and an outdoor spa. Tall pine trees dotted the grounds, and flower beds ringed the trees.

My coworker Cathey spent most of the time with us. She stayed with us longer than she had planned because her car broke down. She had to bring it to the nearest dealership for service and was effectively stranded. It was time well spent, though.

It wasn't a hectic vacation at all. We barbecued, napped on the hammocks, dined out, played with Devon, drank wine (lots of wine), barbecued some more, relaxed in the spa, gambled, shopped for souvenirs, walked along the lake shore, and went kayaking at North Lake Tahoe.

At the casinos, I lost a couple of hundred dollars, mostly at the blackjack tables but also at slots and roulette. Cathey broke even, I think, while Bill won quite a bit at roulette (which shall henceforth be known as "spinny ball"). Bill ended up giving all his winnings back to the casino via the dollar slots, though.

Oh, wait. We didn't go gambling. We went gaming. Apparently, "gambling is for people from New Jersey."

The kayaking was the highlight of the trip. I had never done it before and was a bit apprehensive. After all, I can't swim.

Bill had arranged for the kayak trip. It was a three-hour guided "tour", which we got through Tahoe Paddle & Oar. Bill was in a solo kayak, the guide was in another one, and Cathey and I were in a double. It was a blast.

The sun was shining, the temperature was perfect, and the waters were calm. Lake Tahoe's legendary water clarity allowed us to see the lake bottom almost the entire time, whether we were in water two feet deep or thirty feet deep.

Notice how I said "almost the entire time"? Well, at one point we went paddling through an area of the lake that was very deep. It was quite disconcerting. One second I'm looking at rocks strewn along the lake bottom, and the next second all I could see is a deep, dark blue. Then our guide says that we were above more than a thousand feet of water.

Egad! One thousand?! I kept waiting for my kayak to capsize and for Nessie to suddenly surface from the deep. Nevermind that Loch Ness was over 5,000 miles away. I have to admit that I was very nervous while we were in that area, even though I was wearing a life vest.

It was fun, though. I was actually surprised that almost three hours flew by so quickly. Before I knew it the guide was telling us to row back to our starting point. I was so sure I would be panting, winded, and wheezing by the end of the trip, but I wasn't. Must have been thanks to the cool, clean mountain air. It sure as hell wasn't due to my awesome athleticism.

Anyway, here are some pictures...

Nuestro Perdido Eden... ¿Tienes Hambre?

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:43:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago we were at Whole Foods to buy ingredients for dinner that night. Meat, vegetables, some spices, manchego from Spain, provolone from Italy, and a bottle of California wine. After paying, I looked at my receipt, winced, and said, "Damn! Food's getting really expensive! Pretty soon we're going to have to start food shopping at Wal-Mart! THE HORROR!"

Then we had a good laugh.

...fast-forward to this evening...

A clip on the evening news talked about the rising prices of food, especially now that huge swaths of the mid-west and plains states are under water from severe flooding. Acre upon acre of corn and soybean farms lie ruined by flood waters.

Apparently, the United States produces over 50% of the world's corn, and over 25% of the world's soybeans. The sudden drop in corn and soybean supply, coupled with the diversion of hundreds of billions of pounds of corn into ethanol production, puts extreme pressure on food prices. This is especially true because most of the world's meat is now obtained from grain-fed livestock.

(And by the way, in terms of energy efficiency, corn ethanol sucks. Bigtime. But the US government is too stupid to understand facts and figures and too beholden to the powerful corn lobby to acknowledge it. So now peasants in Mexico can't afford tortillas.)

We have a perfect storm: the bio-fuel craze sweeping North America, Europe, and Brazil, floods in the mid-west, drought in California, rising prosperity (and therefore food demand) in China and the Indian sub-continent, and insanely high prices for the fuel needed to transport food to all corners of the world.

Eureka moment: Aha! That's why shopping at Whole Foods is beginning to hurt my wallet!

Then came the reality check: comparative statistics.

According to the news clip, the average American household now spends 10% of its income on food. In contrast, the average household in the Philippines spends 55% of its income on food. Fifty-five percent! That was a real shock.

I mean, I always knew that food was a lot more expensive in the Philippines, especially when calculated as a percentage of income. I just had no idea it was that much more expensive.

Kawawa naman talaga ang Pilipinas. I sometimes wish I could just wave a magic wand and fix the ills of the Philippines. All that poverty is heartbreaking. Ninety million people, the vast majority of whom are poor.

So, I won't whine anymore about not being able to shop at Whole Foods as much. I will try to keep my complaints about food prices to a minimum. I'll remain thankful that I live and work here in the United States, and that I have access to some of the cheapest food on earth.

*But I will never, ever, do any of my shopping at Wal-Mart. tee hee

I'm Voting Republican

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 16:53:00 +0000

Pictionary - NYC Dec'07

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 18:36:00 +0000

This was just before Christmas last year. I visited my cousin and her family for a couple of days.

With the Brooklyn Bridge behind me.

The tree at Bryant Park.

Lord Vader in the flesh! Er, scrap metal...

South Street Seaport.

My cousin Liza and me.

Stuffed with my favorite steak in the whole wide world!

Food For Thought

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:39:00 +0000

I just watched a video of J.K. Rowling's commencement speech at Harvard. It's very good.

Watch the video here on the Harvard Magazine website. You can also watch it (in bits and pieces) on YouTube.

Full text below.

Text as prepared follows.
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is �??thank you.�?? Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I�??ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world�??s best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can�??t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the �??gay wizard�?? joke, I�??ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called �??real life�??, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents�?? car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person�??s idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone�??s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International�??s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country�??s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people�??s minds, imagine themselves into other people�??s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch:
What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people�??s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people�??s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world�??s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children�??s godparents, the people to whom I�??ve been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I�??ve used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

The Way We Eat

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Wed, 21 May 2008 06:01:00 +0000

Home-cooked meals in our neck of the woods...

No-bake cheesecake, fresh blueberries, home-made caramelized graham crackers.

Croque monsieur, chipotle tomato bisque.

Baked Alaskan halibut, steamed broccoli with beurre blanc.

Beef and veal meatloaf, steamed broccoli, smashed potatoes.

Stuffed pork chops, haricots verts & garlic, potato gratin.

Peach tarte tatin.

*This is all Bill's work. The only thing I've cooked in recent memory is pork adobo. :)

¡Buenos Aires!

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:27:00 +0000

Inside the cathedral near Plaza de Mayo...

Cathedral dome...

Puerto Madero by night...

Ben and me after watching the tango show...

Why is there a house on top of a building???

Rio de la Plata! Looks more like mud than silver to me...

Pedestrian bridge by Santiago Calatrava...

Casa Rosada. Where is Evita?

Plaza de Mayo...

The tomb of General San Martin, the liberator of a huge chunk of South America...

A busy street in Recoleta...

Feels like Paris...

Plaza San Martin...

A gorgeous austral autumn day...

Puerto Rico - 10 Pictures

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 05:50:00 +0000

Arches at the plaza, Fort San Cristobal.
New as seen from the old (looking out from San Cristobal).

This fort is over 400 years old!!!

Another view of the arches.

Balls! Lots of balls!

Where we stayed.

Do you watch The Office? Here's Dwight Schrute enjoying some sun and beer!

Playa Condado. Caribbean sand is nice. The water's not as warm as I thought it would be, though.

Dwight again, at the rooftop pool of our hotel.

Inside the bowels of Fort San Cristobal.

Pictionary - Shelter Cove Trip

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 00:06:00 +0000

Recently, Bill and I went to Shelter Cove, along the Lost Coast in Humboldt County, for a couple of days of beach camping. We brough Sheddy von Stinkelstein with us. It was fun. Too lazy to write an actual post, so we'll play pictionary instead.

Wow, this blog is stale!

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 08:47:00 +0000

Pictionary post, just to keep the embers burning...

Sudden Urges

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Fri, 11 May 2007 18:51:00 +0000

Thursday evening.

We're in front of the TV. Bill and I are on the couch and Snorty McDoggelsson is curled up between us. The Office is on. In the show, the characters are all offsite for "beach day", on the shore of some lake in Pennsylvania. One of them is eating a sandwich.

I get this sudden, very intense craving for a sandwich of my own. PB&J! So I walk over to the kitchen to make one. We only have chunky peanut butter, but it'll do. Then I stare at the fridge. We have so many different kinds of jelly and jam. What to do? Which to pick? I decide on guava jelly, which I got from a Hawaiian store. It is sickeningly sweet, but the sandwich is good. Very good. So good that I had another one right after scarfing down the last bit of the first.

Praise PB&J!

In Praise of Analgesics

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Wed, 09 May 2007 16:14:00 +0000

I had a horrible headache yesterday afternoon at work.

So I pumped my bloodstream full of analgesics.

Last night I slept like a baby.

Gotta love OTC drugs!

What would you do?

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Tue, 08 May 2007 07:31:00 +0000

That's the tag line used by the California Lottery (I think).

So, what would you do? Let's make this a little bit less cliché. No typical answers like "I would buy a house in Atherton" or "I would go on a round-the-world tour" or "I'll get a bright yellow Lamborghini Murcielago".

No "I'll buy my mom a mansion" or "I'll eat at every single restaurant that has 3 Michelin stars".

No "I'm getting a 500-inch ultra-super-duper high-def TV" or "Prada will clothe me from head to toe".

Limit it to self-improvement endeavors. If you won the lottery jackpot and never had to work a day in your life again, what would you do?

My list is fairly short.

Cooking lessons, either at the California Culinary Academy in SF or at Le Cordon Bleu in France. Or maybe I'll go to Italy and find a live-in school in Tuscany. Or maybe I'll go to all of the above.
Singing lessons. Yes, you heard me. I'll hire a vocal coach to improve my chicken-squawk singing voice. So I can go to karaoke bars and actually sing in public.
Liposuction. Gotta get rid of this excess mass in my midsection somehow. And money allows for shortcuts.
Personal trainer. This would be after I got the lipo. LOL
Total foreign language immersion. Spanish. In Spain. Madrid, to be exact. I thought about French, but Spanish is more useful in the US. Of course, being Filipino, I have to do Castillian instead of Latin American. Which is why I'll go to Spain instead of Mexico.
Braces. Invisalign. 'nuff said.
Maybe I'll have my ears pulled back (pulled in?) just a tad, so they don't stick out like handlebars. These damned flappers are the reason why I can never wear ballcaps.
Some kind of wine appreciation class.
Piano lessons.
Baking lessons. Yes, cooking isn't the same as baking. Actually, I mostly just want to learn the art of breadmaking. Cakes, not so much.

Eh. I guess the list ain't so short after all.

Caption this pic

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Sun, 06 May 2007 03:10:00 +0000

Ditz

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Fri, 04 May 2007 16:11:00 +0000

Friday last week I went with a few coworkers to Nola's in Palo Alto for drinks. There, a coworker told us about camping at Angel Island and how cool it was. My interest was piqued, so I sort of filed that bit of info away in my noggin.

Last night I remembered my coworker's story so I told Bill about it. Bill knew all about camping at Angel Island. Apparently he had already told me about it a while ago. He'd even done the research about campgrounds and activities there. I felt silly.

He must think that I don't listen to the things he says. The thing is, I do. Unfortunately I'm scatterbrained and borderline senile half the time. So I forget a lot of things. And then I end up sounding dumb sometimes.

That makes me a ditz, no?

Monday

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 15:17:00 +0000

It's 6:30 AM. I arrive at the office to find the lights turned off. There's no coffee, so I start a fresh pot. I walk over to the corner and turn the lights on, then settle in my cube. I plug my laptop in and turn it on, then walk downstairs for some vitamin N. The coffee's ready by the time I get back upstairs. I take a sip, fire up Outlook, and start wondering why I'm here this early.

Why am I here this early?!

I have no clue.

Last night I told Bill I would go to bed early. Around 7 PM I sit on the recliner and watch TV. Before I know it I am asleep. Drifting in and out of consciousness, I sort of sense that Family Guy is on. But I can't wake up. Bill wakes me around 10 PM. Lord of the Rings is on TV. I stare at it blankly for a couple of minutes, then head to bed.

At dark o'clock, I wake. Hop on the web, check email, check my bank statement, then feed and poop the dog. I take a shower. A very long, steamy shower. Brush my teeth, have some Airborne, eat a single cube of cheddar cheese. I brush again, and head downstairs to my car.

And now here I am. Why???

Sunday Dinner

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 01:27:00 +0000

Tonight we had a nice, rustic Italian dinner, with a bit of the Philippines thrown in for good measure. Recently Bill saw a TV show that featured a traditional Tuscan beef stew called peposo. Earlier this afternoon he decided to try making it. Good thing he did.

Peposo is very simple. The only ingredients are beef, tomato sauce, garlic, chianti, salt, and black pepper. Lots of black pepper. Lots and lots of black pepper.

Since we don't have a slow cooker, and the stove pretty much sucks for dishes that have to simmer forever, we cooked the peposo in the oven. It sat in there for four whole hours, bubbling and making the entire apartment smell like pepper.

We had steamed rice (that's the Philippine part - as if I had to tell you) and garlic bread with it. The rice and garlic bread helped to cut the spiciness a little bit. Still, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna have to take some antacids a little bit later from now. We had some frozen ice cream pie for dessert, and that helped to cut the spice a little bit more.

It was very good. The meat was falling apart after having spent all that time in the oven. You don't really taste the chianti in it at all, although I'm sure that it added a lot of flavor to the stew. The main flavor, of course, was black pepper. The recipe actually said that whole peppercorns can be used instead of ground. Bill decided to use ground pepper because he didn't want to bite into whole peppercorns. Next time, I think, we will not grind the pepper to see if it makes any difference in the flavor.

I took a picture of the table just before we sat down to eat. I guess I'm also supposed to email it to Cathey to make her mouth water. LOL.

Passport Weekend

noreply@blogger.com (fried-neurons) — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 15:27:00 +0000

Last Saturday was Passport Wine Weekend in the Santa Cruz Mountains. On weekends like this, almost all of the wineries in the Santa Cruz viticultural region throw their doors open for wine tasting. Customers buy a "passport" for $30. Armed with that passport, you can go to all participating wineries and taste their wines and eat their food.

Bill and I went with a bunch of people from work. Leo, his fianceé Kareen, Tim, his wife Katrina, Cathey, Valerie, Tim's brother Jeff and his fianceé Lauren all went. We rented a van and driver from a limo company to drive us around, so we wouldn't have to worry about watching our alcohol intake.

Bill came up with a list of six wineries to visit. We gave that list to the limo driver and left it up to him to figure out the best order. We hit Bargetto, McHenry, Burrell School, Silver Mountain, and Testarossa. Cinnabar was also on our list but we ran out of time, because we only paid for 6 hours' worth of van time.

All of the wineries were pretty cool in their own way.

At Bargetto we commandeered a picnic table and ate our box lunches. Bill (who shall henceforth be known as Martha Stewart) made a lunch of grapes, salami, pepperoni, and three different kinds of cheese. He put them in individual containers so each person can have his own lunch. We also brought bottled water for everyone.

Everyone thought McHenry was kind of weird. If you read my previous post about it, you'd know what I mean. "Rustic" is probably the kindest word I could use about the winery. The good thing, though, is that everyone liked the McHenry wines. A bunch of us even bought bottles to take home with us. They had four wines for tasting, and it was nearly unanimous that three out of the four were very good, and that one was icky. To me it smelled like a damp basement. But Leo, for some strange reason, liked it enough to buy a bottle to take home.

All other wineries had good wines for tasting. Silver Mountain had the best view of all. One could see the ocean from their deck. Testarossa (which Valerie insisted was Italian for "red balls") had the most well-organized setup, while Burrell School had the friendliest staff.

As we hopped from winery to winery, we of course all got progressively drunker and drunker. Which is why the van-and-driver idea was excellent. Kudos to Valerie for uncorking and pouring wine in a moving van, traveling on bumpy and winding mountain roads, without spilling a single drop!

After the wine tour we all went back to our place. Tim, Katrina, Jeff, and Lauren left for home. The rest of us went to Poor House Bistro for dinner. That was another hit. Everyone seemed to like the place and the food. After dinner Leo and Kareen left while Cathey and Valerie hung out for a little bit longer. I attempted to make kamikazes but used too much lime, so they weren't very good.

It was a great Saturday. Everyone had fun, and some of us already started talking about doing it again. Maybe next time it will be in Santa Cruz again, or maybe we'll do Napa instead.

We'll see...

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