Uncut triptych

Lazy Sunday lie-in

Not the same this time

I kept telling myself that elective, scheduled surgery is not the same as waiting outside an ICU room wondering what is wrong, but the hospital corridors are still long, cold and scary.

I knew L would be prepped for surgery this morning by 8.30am, with the procedure scheduled for 10am. By 9.30am, I received a text that it was already over and he had been moved into recovery. I think that was only when I properly fell asleep.

And since it was over so early, he was fine by lunch time and asked if he would like to go home. Well would he! :)

I think both of us need to sleep it off this weekend.

Enough already

Biting my tongue and not responding to what's trending on my Facebook and news feeds for 48 hours hasn't cut it. So I haven't posted anything hasty and peppered with typos, but I'm fed up still.

Angelina Jolie is pissing me off.

Admittedly, she had high probabilities to weigh and hard choices to make. But everything else is PR machinery for a boob job. And I'll give top marks for her PR agent for getting her on The New York Times. And sweeping the Australian Budget off their newspaper websites on the same day. Even the British Guardian, which could usually be relied on for acerbic observations, was gushing like a fan girl.

I didn't see that badge of courage pinned on Sharon Osbourne when she had a double mastectomy, and after actually fighting cancer. What, your boobs don't matter when you're middle aged and you're not Lara Croft?

The whole crux of the matter, to me, isn't so much the preventive mastectomy, but making the US$3,000 gene test that she had affordable and accessible to all women. When we all have the resources that she has, only then it's worth gushing over what she's done.

OK, my personal context is that the news of her preventive double mastectomy came two days after news of a friend who had to have a mastectomy emerged with nerve damage from the operation and now cannot move an arm. There is a flip side. There is always a flip side. But nobody is talking about that.

L has the best last words: Let's see if Brad Pitt cuts his balls off. That could prevent a whole lot of things too.

In case of emergency

Last weekend, I ran out of chocolate. So in the course of this week, L helped me to build up a stash. I'm hoping it's a crescendo to Mother's Day.

Out shopping

An oldish guy is gingerly clutching a pretty posy of yellow mums as if they would disintegrate at any moment, while checking out a rack of greeting cards. Clearly, he doesn't buy flowers very often.

Equally clearly, someone in his life is having a birthday. 

Lucky lady.

Healthy eats

Brunch today was fruit and yogurt.
There was too much feasting over the weekend on stuff baked with blocks of cheese and butter. 

Good eats

A long weekend means there's time to muck about in the kitchen. :) 

All this was done over a couple of days. I'm so not a daily cook.

Beef bourguignon over egg pasta (just because I found a packet of pasta in the store cupboard, otherwise I would have steamed rice). Drank with dinner the other half of the bottle of cab sav that the beef wasn't stewed in.

No-knead cheesy beer bread. It was gone overnight.

Easy Nutella cookie, with maple ice cream on top.

Crustless salmon and spinach quiche.
Did a conventional one, that's a wodge of it on the left.
And used a muffin tray for the rest of the batter. I think the mini sized ones are nicer because the cheese crips up better
-- you want a crispy edge to them since there isn't a crust. 

Long weekend

There's nothing like starting the weekend on Thursday. It's just rewards for working on Wednesday, which was a public holiday. I kept thinking yesterday was Sunday, because I was working on a day when most people were off. As it so happened, I wasn't the only one. Some colleagues were also thinking that way because they were expecting a Sunday night lineup, and when it didn't materialise, we had to keep kicking ourselves in the head that it was mid-week.

How work befuddles us!