Happy Chinese New Year!

Happy New Year to all! Here's wishing the Year of the Ox will be bullish. ;-) As per tradition in the family, we had a steamboat style reunion dinner. The photo below was taken near the end of the meal, where vermicelli is used to soak up the soup flavoured by all the ingredients that went before. Yummmmyyyy. The pot was lugged over to the US by Lee Kiang last summer (thanks!) and we bought the little tabletop burner just for this occasion. It worked real well and removed the constant need to be careful of the power cable, as with the previous electric wok. There were many of the usual chinese new year treats available in the oriental markets but we only picked up a few boxes of egg rolls (no, not the sort you eat at chinese buffets here in the US!) and mandarin oranges. Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Fun with Snow

Snow. It's Heavy.

The news in Singapore probably gave it a passing mention: the sky dropped a huge amount of snow on Michigan yesterday. At least 10 tons of which landed on my driveway. How do I know it was 10 tons? I'll skip the math, but suffice to say, I feel the weight with every muscle in my sore body. I started winter thinking that shoveling snow would be good exercise. After all, there is no need to mow the lawn in winter. The first snow with enough accumulation to need shoveling was this Wednesday. I shoveled the driveway, Jia Nin did the sidewalk and the walkway up to the front door (aerial view of the house from a previous post). The only indication that I might have future trouble was that it took 2 hours. Then it snowed yesterday for 10 whole hours, from 4am to about 2pm. Following the advice of experienced friends, I tried to keep ahead of the snow pile by clearing the driveway at about 10am, before it got too deep to lift a shovelful. About 6-8 inches had fallen by then. (No, I didn't go in to work. When there is a severe weather warning in the U.S. telling you travel is discouraged, you listen very carefully. But I digress.) Three words describe the effort: tiring, cold, oh-i-see. Tiring because the snow was wet and heavy and there was alot of it. Cold because the temperature was -4 degrees celcius and the wind kept throwing snow in my face. oh-i-see occurred around 10:30am when every single one of my neighbors rolled out their motorized snow-throwers and were all done clearing snow within 30 minutes. After 2 whole hours, I had only cleared enough to ensure my car could get to the road, roughly 1/2 the driveway. I didn't even have the energy to clear Jia Nin's side of the garage. And the snow kept coming. So I started to do research on snow-throwers. Lots of research, very fast. By 3pm, it was clear that the snow was done. I went out and cleared the sidewalk (by law, the homeowner has 72 hours to clear the sidewalk of snow, or risk fines), the walkway to the front door, and re-shoveled the 4 additional inches which came down on the driveway. That took another 90 minutes. That was I when called the nearest vendor and placed a order for a Honda HS520AS snow-thrower. I picked it up this morning, did some grocery shopping, had lunch and came home. Fired it up and was done in 20min. Holy. Cow. The ease. The speed. Why oh why did I ever think exercise was a good thing. :-)

These photos are of the walkway to the front of the house. I did this part manually, hence the very lumpy surface due to snow shoveled and thrown there. (Check out shots of the house without the snow for comparison!)

This side of the driveway was packed full of snow (including snow shoveled over from the other side of the driveway) before I started today. Now, all clear. Moral of the story: A chore is a chore first and exercise last.

Thanksgiving 2008

It was Turkey Day here in the U.S.A.. Spent it sleeping. ^_^ Then we spent Friday cleaning because Jia Tyan (Jia Nin's sister) and her colleague from the Michigan State University joined us for a turkey meal on Saturday instead of Thursday, giving the usual traffic hassles and last minute shopping rushes a miss. I roasted the turkey, Jia Nin made the cabbage casserole, croissants, pasta salad (not in photo) and gaucamole (not in photo) while her sister and friend brought the relish, stuffing and beer. For my first try at cooking a whole turkey (turkey burgers don't count!), it turned out pretty good. I adapted a recipe from the Good Eats cooking show (highly recommended!). Used the drippings from the turkey to make the gravy (add a cup of wine to dissolve the drippings, reduce in a sauce pan on high, add 1/4 cup of vinegar and 1/4 cup of heavy cream). The photo above was just after carving, before being picked clean of meat. The carcass is now in a pot, being rendered down for stock. Looking forward to Jia Nin's borscht soup. Yummmmm.. We didn't escape the final Thanksgiving Tradition though: Leftovers. The wings and drumsticks will make great snacks and the breast meat (and scraps) are to be used in the coming week's lunch sandwiches (yes, a whole week! 5 working days!). Next goal: surviving Christmas.

Watching the Olympics Online

The National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) has bought up the rights to all Olympics coverage here in the US. So while I can try to jump through hoops to obtain live coverage, the 12 hour time difference just doesn't make it worth while. The TV coverage also tends to be US-centric. Events that the US don't dominate is not likely to make it to the screen. Luckily, NBC has put most of its videos online at its Olympics web site. One has to install the Microsoft Silverlight (version beta 2) plug-in, but so far, it is working out well enough. The events I like to watch (archery, swimming, diving, etc) tend to have a short bit of intense action between long periods of waiting. Silverlight thankfully allows skipping around the video by dragging a timeline marker, almost like watching youtube). One feature I would like is to able to skip forwards/backwards in 5 second increments, but Microsoft seems to have something against things like that. p.s. Michael Phelps is a University of Michigan alumni, so I'm rooting for him to go for that 8-gold record!

Movies Watched So Far

Just watched The Dark Knight, the latest Batman flick, yesterday. Wow! Big Wow!! Reshuffled my "Top 3 Movies Watched This Year" list:

1. The Dark Knight (a perfect 10 - great story, flow, action, acting, ending)
2. Iron Man (just missed a "10" with that weak ending fight)
3. Wall-E (another great Pixar movie, could have used more fleshing out but who could resist that robot)

Others watched but didn't make the list (either only OK or just plain bad):

• Jumper (could have been great if there was more character development rather than emphasis on the special effects. Samuel L Jackson was wasted in this movie)
• Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (lacked the omph of the first movie)
• Wanted (Angelina Jolie and the terrific ending saved this movie)
• The Incredible Hulk (predictable but still OK)
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (George Lucas should have been banned from writing sequels after he made a mess of Star Wars Episode 1)