Sep 10, 2006

Mellow Yellow

In celebration of a Costco shopping trip yesterday where I found a whole ounce of saffron for $23.99 (rather than the normal $10 for a few threads), I decided to try to whip me up some paella for dinner tonight. And as a celebration of me actually cooking, I'm blogging about it.
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Following the 5 step recipe in my cookbook, I neglected to stir the rice. Actually, it said not to stir the rice, but the idea is to stir it in when you pour in the uncooked rice, but don't stir it once it starts cooking. So instead of having nice, crusty, caramalized rice at the bottom of the pan, I just had some caramelized onions and fish, and since onions and fish don't really caramelized, it just meant burnt. However, it still ended up tasting pretty good (it's hard to go wrong with saffron at your disposal!), just a bit more of a cleanup job.

I've been meaning to post of the various events and thoughts of the summer so far, but putting photos up on flickr seems to be all I've succeeded with. You'll have to surf over there and check out the sets. I think to blaze through it, I think it would go something like:

Vince and Shuk-ka came over to visit JayZ, which was the first indication to me that summer had even came. We drove them up to SF for the turbo tour, where we whipped through SF and ended the evening with an all-you-can-eat-and-drink shabu-shabu extravaganza at Cafe Mum's near Japantown (great fun for a large party of drinkers, and you're guaranteed to be full, 3.5/5).

Later in July, as our lease was ending, I decided to move on from pretty much 9 years of roomates (the last 4 with the same two other guys) to get my own place, which was pretty much the original idea, 4 years ago, except that I was too cheap for that. I had barely moved into my little studio when Al and Denise came down for a visit. We checked out Limon (disappointing Peruvian, nothing spectacular here, much like most other tapas places 2.5/5), Tartine (the most excellent croissants (4.5/5), and Kirala (some winners and losers, but overall good, the miso marinated black cod is a must 4/5) in SF. We also took a trip up to Napa (extremely disappointing due to the mass of summer tourists, I suspect Napa's time is up, it's just too touristy).

That overlapped slightly with Steph and I checking out Gary Danko's (can't find much to complain about this place, simply excellent food 4.5/5), and later that week we ended up going out for Amnon's birthday at Myth (huge restaurant, some good dishes, notably the pork chop, along with a number of poorly executed dishes, and a really poor job at desserts 2.5/5).

Soon after was our small group's third annual backpacking trip, this time to the Loch Leven lakes up near Tahoe. Being at the absolute end of the crew and falling far behind during the hike on this one convinced me that the past year has contained too much work, and too much eating out, and not barely enough exercise. The subsequent resolution worked for a few days as I went swimming in the morning, but that's faded off.

I ought to go swimming tomorrow morning. And bike to work.

Had a quick trip up to Redmond for work, and then the Labour Day weekend was a road trip to Lassen that included too many bags of chips and not enough miles of hiking.

Phew, these "what I did" blogs are long but seem kinda dull. I'm actually pretty happy with a weekend of hanging out at home. I still need to do vacation planning for October.

Time flies. Especially when you're old.

Sep 9, 2006

Eggshells

I heard this artist (who sounds like a bit like Keane, with the Radiohead frontman's accent) on the radio a couple of days ago and surfed to look him up. Free streaming music is great. Anyways, this song seems to reflect my frame of mind for the last few months.


Dodging dried vomit on the sidewalk as I walk
I'm singing some stupid song I heard on the radio
Strolling down the most important street in Nashville.

Holding in my left hand the weak man's hammer
I always keep an extra set of nails in case I break one
But nothing ever seems to get broken in my world.

That's just the problem with me these days
I'm walking on eggshells
Nothing ever goes wrong and nothing ever goes right
I don't know how to get help
I'm walking on eggshells.

And I can't feel a thing
And nothing ever happens to me

Nothing in this world it seems can sweep me off my feet
Everything's amazing, but only in theory
Someone help me cause I'm losing it quietly.

That's just the problem with me these days
I'm walking on eggshells
Nothing ever goes wrong and nothing ever goes right
I don't know how to get help
And everything is perfect
But nothing ever moves me
Nothing ever goes wrong and nothing ever goes right
Give me feathers or give me nails
I'm walking on eggshells.

You might be the one for me but I will never know
I can't fall in love if I've fallen asleep
Will I ever wake up?
I'm walking on eggshells.

Nothing ever goes wrong and nothing ever goes right
I don't know how to get help
And everything is perfect
But nothing ever moves me
Nothing ever goes wrong and nothing ever goes right
Give me feathers or give me nails
I'm walking on eggshells.

Give me feathers or give me nails
I'm walking on eggshells.

Everything is perfect
I can't feel a thing
Everything is perfect.

- "Eggshells", Landon Pigg