Goodbye, friend

Wherever you are, there will be raucous laughter, lots of wine, good food, snazzy shoes, bright hair dye. And lots of animals, especially dogs.

All I have of you now are two dogs, both who came my way via you, one way or the other. I'm thankful for that. Every noselick from them is a like blessing from you. It is like having a little bit of you with us.

Every time you stepped into the house, the welcome that Queeni gave you was the sort that she would reserve for family members. The only other person she treats that way, other than the immediate pack, is my mother. That says so much. That you're more family than friend.

We sent you a card just two days ago, Les made a drawing of the dogs. I'm sad you won't see it. Sad that you were taken away from those who love you.

We will miss you here.

RIP, Christopher.

Children these days

I don't eat children for breakfast. Sometimes, I even get along with them.

Just last week, L and I were out at lunch and had a very nice conversation with an eight year old who was sitting at the next table with his mother. We already had our meal, and L had asked for the menu, trying to decide if he wanted a dessert. The young lad next to us was ordering his meal, and his mother let him decide on his appetiser, mains and dessert, and he was looking at the remains of our plates and working out if he had room for three courses -- maybe if he had a small appetiser and a manageable mains, there would be room for dessert. And then he started to work out what was manageable. L had a discussion with him on the merits of various desserts, and then the two of them made their respective choices. The boy had the gravitas of someone much older in his decision making (all kudos to his mother, who let him work things through on his own), though when his food arrived, he was squirming in his seat with anticipation like someone his age.

We said goodbye when we left, and L jokingly told the boy's mother to let him know if he was ever up for adoption.

"What's adoption?" the boy asked.

"It's when you live with someone else who's not your real mother and father, but they look after you and love you and they become your mother and father," she explained. "Maybe when you're a teenager," she raised her eyebrows at us.

"If I lived with you, you wouldn't be my father. You'd be my grandfather," said the boy, looking at L's white hair.

Touche. I've never seen L silenced by a child before

And then there are other children. The sort that run around and scream. Which was what happened today. When the tyke looked up at me in mid yell, I told him mildly: "You're a horrid little boy."

His reaction was one of astonishment. I don't think he's ever been told that before. I can't think why. But at least he fell silent.

"I don't know you. I don't have to like you. Especially when you're noisy."

His mother could hardly object, not after his public tantrum.

Maybe some children deserve to be eaten.

Didn't cook this weekend

(A frozen pizza doesn't count.)
This was the reason why.
Closest thing to a church on Sunday :)

Baking today

Might as well, the house is clean, the husband is cooking dinner tonight, there's nothing else to do.

Staying in on Saturday night

Udon in chicken and mushroom clear broth is reason enough. The bowl is so full of stuff, betcha you can't even see the udon.

Breakfast at 4pm

Bread and eggs, so it's breakfasty stuff. There's a fancy name for it, but I've long forgotten. I call it bread and egg muffin. You shape a slice of bread into a muffin pan, pour beaten egg into the hollow and stick it in the oven till it sets. Nice change from the usual toast.

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!

The darling buds of (almost) May

Spring isn't a clearly defined season here since everything stays in bloom all year round but buds are always welcome, all the same. This is the flowering tree downstairs, the one with the leaves just outside our living room window.

Neighbourhood watch

The family on the ground floor have taken in a few semi-feral cats and kittens. That is, they set down food, water and a cat bed on the corridor outside their flat. Of late, they've taken the cat bed indoors, and now the cats are free to wander in and out of their flat.

What the cats don't realise is that the invitation isn't extended to every house. Just a few days ago, I saw a ginger unceremoniously booted out by their next door neighbour. Now, he's tied mesh netting to his gate to block the cats from getting in.

So what's an adventurous cat to do? It climbs up the stairs one floor. Our front door is always shut so that the dogs don't become a nuisance and bark every time someone walks past. But most people here leave their front doors open (though the gates are usually closed) for better ventilation.

So Mr Cat strolls into the flat across the landing, leaps up on the sofa and makes himself at home. The wide-eyed five-year-old ran to the kitchen to report to his mother, "Cat watching TV!" to her bewilderment. The two-year-old thought it was a stuffed toy with batteries included and tried to scoop it up. Mum however, would have none of it.

So now our dogs have been seconded to cat sentry duty. Our front door is propped open, and they're encouraged to bark loudly at anyone who walks past, especially if the passer-by is feline.

New guy

We have a "new" vet. He's been in the practice more than 10 years and leads the team of vets, but I last saw him two dogs ago. When Queeni developed a string of medical issues, the practice owner and senior vet took us over, and we saw him exclusively. Now, he's retired to tend his fruit trees and relax with his koi (and I'm pretty sure we paid for all that), he handed us back to the next most senior guy. He won't even do referral consultations anymore, he won't start what he can't follow up. We said goodbye to him sorrowfully last year, and made an appointment with the highly recommended "new" one for Queeni's vaccination today.

We're going to get along with the "new" vet just fine. HRH didn't growl at him, and that's the benchmark. Previously, the senior vet was the only one she didn't try to bite; he had a Doolittle way about him, one of the junior vets said to us.

New guy is nice and chatty, which is what you'd want. Not someone who pokes a needle in and "see you next year". He looked at the dynamics between Queeni and Rupert, and told us how about his two dogs, one smart and one not really -- "some dogs, you know they're not altogether there", looking at Rupert. Sweetest dog ever, just without the smarts. Yup, he's got Rupert down pat and won Queeni over.

We're all going to get along.

Monday breakfast

Again, nowhere near morning. Coffee and toast is all I can manage before I crawl in to work.

(MGW, you're turning me into a food diarist.)

Sunday dinner

We did a full fledged Sunday roast last week (which drove the dogs crazy as the chicken was roasting) so we thought we'd do an easy-peasy hamburger today. Not your greasy spoon fast food though, this one came with roast vegetables -- and yes, that's broccoli on the plate. A healthy burger!

Breakfast at tea time

This post is for MGW in KCMO. This is a picture of the chwee kuay that I wrote about a while back. It really isn't much to look at, it's quite simple fare really. The brown bits are the salted preserved radish. It adds flavour to what would otherwise be tasteless rice flour cakes.

This unassuming chwee kuay is comfort food to me. It brings me back to my childhood. When I was very young, my mother would buy some back from the market on Saturday mornings after she had done her weekly food shopping. Years later, when I was a teenager, we moved, and the market where she then did her shopping had a McDonald's next to it. Saturday breakfasts then became burgers and milkshakes. Funny thing is, a Big Mac will never bring me back to childhood breakfasts the way chwee kuay does.

Now, it is the husband who buys home the chwee kuay after he's gone for a morning power walk. I'm still being spoilt.  :)

And then I had a slice of toast after the chwee kuay. That's definitely breakfasty.