Category Archives: Life

Greetings from Thailand?

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So I’ve been here for a few days now, and I’m not actually sure what I can write about, since not much has really happened.

Yesterday we had food at a Thai buffet. The food was rather bland, but at least they had a large selection (including a few things I had never eaten before). Nom nom.

I bought the first season of Torchwood and the Planet Earth series here, as they are cheaper (and region free). Unfortunately, the other 4 movies I bought that were marked as all regions are actually region 3, so I will likely want to buy an external DVD drive at some point so I can watch them without changing the settings on my laptops’ drives.

Turns out that I was right, and the shutter on my D50 is shot and needs replacing. This will run upwards of 5000 baht ($150), so I’m basically going to be getting rid of it once I return to the US and buying a D90. It’s not worth the repair cost.

I still find it silly how full-service everything is. Buying something at a department store involves one person to hold the merchandise, one person to scan it, one person to bag it, and one person to take your money and give change. Restaurants aren’t much better… one person to refill water, one person to remove plates, one person to take your order, and one person to bring you food (often on a per-table basis), not to mention the people who bring you to your table, park your car, whatever. I guess labor is so cheap here that you can afford to basically hire a 1:1 ratio of staff to customers, but it feels kind of wasteful.

Besides that, we’ve been driving around getting some legal issues resolved and eating lots and lots of food. Mmm food. Mmm tasty Thai fruit.

Greetings from Hong Kong

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I’m sitting in the Hong Kong airport right now waiting for the flight to Thailand. I have no idea what time it is… my internal clock is so screwed up right now. The flight last night left SFO 1:40 AM or so, and they pretty much immediately served dinner (as it was dinnertime in Hong Kong). After eating, I wasn’t particularly tired anymore, so I watched a movie (the Benjamin Button one, which was kind of weird but decent), eventually falling asleep. Woke up at some other hour (not sure when, exactly) and watched Milk and played games and had breakfast, and then we landed. I think the time here is around 7 AM, but my body is generally very confused since it thinks its around 4 PM but I just woke up (and the sun just came up).

The flight was uneventful. The food was decent… dinner was a beef and tomato stew with veggie mashed potatoes, smoked salmon, potato salad, and pear cheesecake. Breakfast was a croissant with egg and canadian bacon, yogurt, and fruit. There was also plenty of ramen and peanuts. I hope they serve a second breakfast on the Thailand leg. Food is tasty.

I brought along my mostly-broken camera with my mostly-broken lens, which is resulting in rather interesting photos as I can’t shoot at high shutter speeds, nor focus at faraway things (and certainly not at infinity). The goal is to get them repaired in Thailand (assuming repairs are significantly cheaper there), use it for photos, and give it to my parents so I can buy my new D90 in the US once I return.

Whee.

Bleh MSN and Breadcake!

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Your little bit of stupidness today comes courtesy of MSN Messenger.
When you add someone to your blocked list, you are apparently also adding them to your contact list. What this means is that, if you block sufficient numbers of people, you can’t add people anymore.
This by itself wouldn’t be too terrible… except you actually can’t delete people from your blocked list. This basically means that, once you block someone, that space on your “contact list” is filled forever. (At least, it is if you are using any normal MSN client to connect, since you can unblock and such, but can’t actually delete entries through the UI.)
Bleh.
Fortunately, I found this tool that will do it for you… but since MSN imposes additional limits on things, you can only remove 40 blocked SNs at once and have to keep resubmitting the page to clean everything out.

Today’s adventure in baking is breadcake.
I had a ton of bread crusts from making finger sandwiches this morning. I decided to try a culinary experiment with them, and it actually turned out really good. Em says it reminds her of cinnamon bread mixed with french toast, which makes sense because it shares most of those ingredients.

Crusts from 1/2 loaf of bread
4 eggs
1/4 cup milk
Cinnamon and sugar to taste

Beat eggs and mix in milk, cinnamon, and sugar. Rip bread crusts into tiny pieces and gradually mix in until crusts are thoroughly coated. Place mixture into small baking container and bake at 375 degrees for 35 minutes. Let cool and slice. Serve with honey.


Also, as promised, here are two of the new Student Wars v2 cards with the redesigned templates: Tim’s FA character card and the new Attachment card type (this particular one attaches to GPA cards).

Today was also the Bay to Breakers parade, which was quite interesting. I have a ton of photos from it, which will eventually be posted to photos 2.

Moar foods

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I made salsa chicken today. It’s really easy: bake a chicken breast at 350 for 25 minutes. Place on a microwave-safe plate, douse in salsa of your choice, and lay thin strips of cheddar across. Microwave for 30 seconds to melt the cheese and heat the salsa. Nom nom. Tasty and pretty, since the cheese gives it stripes.

I also made the blackberry muffins again so I could take some into work tomorrow. I cut the blackberries into thirds (crosswise, so each piece is a little disc) and they came out much better. I also got one less muffin out of the process, but this makes sense, since there is less room for air when you don’t have lots of whole blackberries in each muffin. I topped each one with a whole blackberry and they look rather nice, as well.

I made french toast for breakfast. It always surprises me how simple such things are to make (muffins, pancakes, omelettes/breakfast sandwiches, french toast) and how much of a premium they can fetch in grocery stores or restaurants ($1.25 for a preservative-laden muffin?! $5 for an omelette?!). Besides, cooking is fun and tasty.

Today Dan and I went to see the How Weird fair (which, appropriately, is on Howard street). It was rather tiny, but amusing… there were 5 or 6 different DJs in various areas, arranged such that their music never overlapped. There were also a bunch of weirdly dressed people. Overall, it was smaller than I think either of us were expecting, but still interesting. I just wish I had taken my camera and attempted to shoot with it :P

Mmm food.

Muffins!

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I made blackberry muffins today, since Safeway has blackberries for $1 this week. However, I wanted something relatively healthy, so I made them without oil or egg yolk.

1/2 cup fat free milk
1/4 cup + 2 tsp unsweetened applesauce
2 egg whites
1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 container (~6 ounces) blackberries

Beat egg whites and mix in milk and applesauce. In a separate bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt. Combine the liquids and dry ingredients, stirring until well mixed. Stir in blackberries. Fill cupcake cups and bake at 400 degrees for 25 minutes.

They came out really tasty.


Cooked blackberries look more like raspberries than blackberries. Weird.

Changes I would make after eating 3 (they’re really good and I can’t stop ahhh):
Cut up the blackberries so the muffins don’t end up with huge chunks in them.
Grease the pan and bake them without the paper because they are really difficult to peel off.

Lately I’ve been making tasty sandwiches for lunch with ham, spinach, and cheddar cheese. They’re really simple and really delicious.

Also, our rent is going down next year by about $240/month. That’s pretty nice.
The $120/month I save will almost cover food for me… since I’ve been cooking more often (I’ve eaten out once in the past 2 weeks), I’ve been spending far less on food and eating healthier. I suppose part of this is that I plan my meals around whatever is on sale that week and always save at least 50% on my bill each shopping trip, and stock up on nonperishable basics (soup, canned veggies, pasta) when they go on massive sale. Yay food.

Tomorrow I will be making salsa chicken II: baked chicken breast covered in spicy salsa and cheese. (Last time was salsa verde over chicken drumsticks.) I should go buy some rice to go with that or something.

…I wonder what would happen if I substituted applesauce for oil in things like rice-a-roni. This might be worth an experiment to see how terrible it is.

Life is awesome.