Helping our friend X move and other fun things

Today J and I helped our friends X and G move to their new apartments. So we got up as early as we could manage on a Saturday which means 8 o'clock. It was mildly hot this morning which means it was scorching by Canadian standards. The move went much faster than I thought it would and it was more fun than I originally thought it would be. I guess when you are around good friends even a chore doesn't seem so bad.

Afterwards, we decided to go for a nice lunch in China town and did some grocery shopping. The restaurant that we went to gives out Texas size portions so we usually just order two dishes (of which J and I can not completely finish though we come close.)

China town has the best veggies, as well, its the only place where you can get fresh duck (yummy). I am so glad J and I have a Texas size refrigerator :p

Happy Net

J has been really into Happy Net lately. It is the Chinese version of Facebook. J says she likes it better than FB in that it is far more social and allows her to connect with her friends better. I would honestly give it a try if it wasn't all in Chinese.

I know what you are saying "Hey, this is an excellent opportunity for you to learn how to read Chinese. ", and it would be :). Just at the moment I've been busy with other projects. I actually got to get back to learning how to speak Chinese. I've been off the Rossetta Stone wagon for about a month now :(.

Believe me I want to leave Facebook. Using it feels a lot like renting a Mel Gibson movie these days. Yes, I know Mel Gibson can act really well, it's just I keep feeling that I am helping to enable his own craziness. It's the same with Facebook, there are some great features on it, but when I use it I feel like I am rewarding Zuckerburg (which doesn't seem that cool of a thing to do). Maybe I should just open a Twitter account.

Anyways, when J finds something cool on Happy Net she calls me over and says "You got to check this out". This actually happens with a lot more frequency as compared to Facebook. So I am going to share with you guys some of the cooler pics J has shown me over the past week.

The first one is about the buses in Wuhan. I've actually seen this type of thing before in China. It mostly happens because there are multiple competing bus companies literally racing to get to the bus stops first. Whoever gets there first pretty much get all the passengers. As cool as that seems taking a taxi in China is even funner. I really think some times that the taxi drivers are formula 1 rejects.

This next one is Journey to the West goes to McDonalds. The worst part is that the master is buying ice cream for his pupils (psst. It really should be the other way around). I thought my Dad would like this one. My Dad is a huge Journey to the West fan. I have to say in China I like ice cream better from KFC.

Okay, Twitter here I come :)

Wontons and Spring Rolls

Wow, its been a while since my last blog (hehehe). Last weekend was kind of busy. J and I did a bunch of grocery shopping. As well we made a bunch of wontons and for the first time spring rolls.

In case you didn't already know wontons are one of my favorite foods. I was lucky in finding a wife who knows how to make them :). In fact wontons were one of the first foods J made for me even before she knew I liked wontons. I was hooked after that.

So J and I went to Randalls to pickup wonton wraps; they have the best wonton wraps even better than China town. Randalls is what they call Safeway down here in southern Texas. Its really strange they have the same layout (with the exception of the liquor section) and the same in store radio except with Randalls replacing Safeway.

We were picking up some wonton wraps and we saw some spring roll wraps made by the same company and we decided to give those a try. J and I went back home and being good computer scientist as we are look up spring roll recipes on line. We don't need no stinking recipe books :p.

We found a few a recipes and again like good computer scientists we hybridized them. Oh man, we made the best spring rolls. After that I came to the conclusion that Vietnamese restaurants are really ripping you on those appetizers. They are really easy to make. In our case they went great with noodles :)

Quick Updates

It has been thunder showering here for the past 4 days. It hasn't been constantly raining though :). It seems to get warm for a bit and then thunder show with no discernable pattern . At first I thought I spotted a pattern where if it was sunny for X consecutive days than it will rain for X - 1 consecutive days. (shrug)

I came down with a cold on Monday (might of been Sunday), however it really knocked me out today. It's not too bad of a cold, it seems to be just a headache stomach type thing. Hopefully I'll get over it soon. Sometimes I think colds are God's way of telling you to slow down.

Going to take it easy tonight and watch some Firefly with J. We've been on a Firefly marathon lately. It started out with me wanting to watch Serenity, but you just can't watch the movie without watching the series before hand. Yes, I am one of those sad people who wish they would bring back Firefly.

Anyways I got a fun evening of convalescing to get to so I'm out of here.

H.P. Lovecraft Rocks!

A couple months back I was perusing the bargain book section at the local Barnes & Noble and came across a rare gem, H.P. Lovecraft: The Complete and Unabridged. I was shocked when I saw it and started jumping for joy while thinking "Finally a publisher got it right! I must have it!".

This was like one of my all time luckiest finds. I snatched it up (make sure everything was in pristine condition) and ran to find J. Holding my soon to be treasure before me I said to J (totally unable to conceal my excitement) "Look what I found and it's only 10 bucks!." To which J just stared at me blankly like the crazy person I was and gave me a high five.

Back home in Canada I couldn't dream of finding a book like this. I swear it was like a conspiracy born with in the depths of the evil monolithic publishing houses to make sure that no Lovecraft fan could get all of Lovecraft's stories in one book.

You could buy piece-meal anthologies that covered parts of the Cthulhu Mythos (I was never able to find ones that covered the complete Mythos and I tried). I ended up with like seven Lovecraft books before I had an almost complete Cthulhu Mythos, but there was always some stories missing and lots of redundancy :(.

I remember one summer going to Van and trying to find orignal Weird Tales/Strange Tales pulps. That was when I learned that pulp magazines cost a small fortune. I did see a cool first edition of At the Mountains of Madness in my searches though (again small fortune).

When I was young, I used to read lots of horror stories. I started by reading Stephen King (To this day I still love Firestarter). But, where Stephen King really shone in my opinion was in his short stories. They always seemed to have an edginess that kept you reading until 3 o'clock in the morning (which is incidentally the best time to read horror stories).

After King I got into Clive Barker's writing (mainly because of the Hellraiser movies). He is really into gore and alternate worlds with all sorts of gruesome monsters. I stopped reading his stuff after Weaveworld though.

Both King and Barker both highly praised H.P. Lovecraft's work and so I decided to give it a try and boy was I not disappointed. The first book of Lovecraft's that I read was At the Mountains of Madness and it was just brillant. I've been hooked ever since.

So now I am bound and determined to read my Lovecraft book from cover to cover and go insane from the revelations that it holds (evil laugh follows).

Movie Night :)

Movie night! Man we love Redbox! Video stores here in southern Texas seem to be going extinct. You really have to search to find one. In Canada we always rented from Blockbuster. Here they aren't popular. We have to try Netflix some time!

Generally we don't know what's good to rent so we scan through the video selection and see what's available (We are not big TV fans despite how much AT&T try to make us ones.) and rent ones that have interesting covers. We do have some rules though:

1) No Mel Gibson movies (That guy is becoming too crazy).

2) No Jessica Alba movies (She never makes good movies and if she is in a movie with other decent actors she is usually the anchor dragging the movie down).

3) We flip a coin on Tom Cruise movies (He seems to becoming less crazy by comparison).

4) No Sarah Jessica Parker movies (We have yet to see a movie that she is in that contains a plot).

5) No Ashton Kutcher movies (We admit he is funny, but suffers the same curse that Sarah Jessica Parker has in being in movies with little to no plot).

Well off to make some popcorn and snuggle up on the couch :).

81st Month Anniversary

I didn't post anything yesterday (My goal is to try to post something once a day), however, I have an excellent reason for not posting. Yesterday was my 81st month anniversary of being with my wife.

Yes, my wife and I celebrate anniversaries monthly :). It started when we were dating back in graduate school, neither of us had a lot of money at the time so we decided to go out on dates at least once a month (we did hang out a lot though). And we thought what better day to go out on a date than the day we met :).

Back home in PG we explored many of the Chinese restaurants there our favorite restaurant was a place called "Jade Dragon" (sadly its no longer there :(). They had in my opinion the best Chinese food in PG (The "Pan Am" was a close second though (they are still around)) . During that time my wife and I primarily went out for Chinese and Vietnamese food.

It wasn't until we moved to Cow town that we started exploring other types of cuisine on our anniversary dates. We got into Thai and East Indian food there. Also we finally found a Dim Sum restaurant :).

I've been digging Dim Sum since I was five years old. When my family would go down to Van to see my Nana and my Aunt, we would always go out for Dim Sum. Some of my best memories of Van were the times when my family would go out for Dim Sum (Hey, when you are a little kid, Dim Sum is this a magical thing where you get so many food choices you don't even know what to go for and you get to use chop sticks. Believe me Dim Sum kicked the crap out of McDonald's (even when they gave you a toy)).

As you can guess in Cow town we went out for a bunch of Dim Sum on our monthly anniversary. Ah, good memories :).

When we first got to Texas it took us a while to find some decent restaurants. Restaurants are kind of different here. Almost all of them have a take out system. There is one close to us that is solely take out even though they have tables an chairs there. We made the mistake of thinking it was a normal restaurant and ended up eating off of styrofoam plates and drinking out of styrofoam cups and eating with plastic utensils (yuck....) .

We ate at another restaurant that had good Chinese food, but I kid you not it looked (both outside and inside) like a roadside diner. The waitresses there looked like they were out of a stereotypical diner movie (except they didn't have names like Marge or Flo, etc....). It was packed though and the food portions were good. The roadside diner thing though just blew my mind.

We quickly learned that if you want to have really good Chinese food (in a place that doesn't look like a roadside diner) you need to go to China town. We found what I would consider one of the best Dim Sum restaurants in North America (At least from my limited Dim Sum sampling). The food there is really good and that is where I took my wife on our monthly anniversary :).

I picked up my wife from work and we drove the 35 minutes it takes to get to China town. We were both really hungry by the time we got there and couldn't wait to eat. Oh boy, we ate until we were stuffed, and leaning back in our chairs. Afterwards we walked around a little bit and did some shopping (we bought a whole lot of vegetables (actually more than the fridge could handle) and then went to a really good gelato ice cream shop nearby. It has been really hot here lately so having some gelato ice cream was awesome. That was our date in a nutshell :)

I Miss Chinese Tea Shops

Since coming to the States I've really missed Chinese tea shops because when my wife and I moved to the States we had to give up a lot of our loose tea stash that we had accumulated over many China trips (some we got from Chinese tea shops and others from pillaging my in law's stash). Anyways there was a lot that my sister inherited from us :).

The best way to describe a Chinese tea shop is to think of a place like Starbucks (except serves nothing but tea) and then imagine that the Baristas are there to help you sample teas (you end up drinking a lot of free tea), and when you find the particular flavor of tea you are looking for you buy a couple pounds.

Chinese tea shops are also cool in that they sometimes have neat tea tables made out of stumps of trees carved into dragons or phoenixes. All the Chinese tea shops I have been to have fun rituals for when they are preparing the tea samples. For example when the tea is cleaned they will usually pour the wasted tea over a tea pet or a money frog. Also they have special tea sets they use for serving the tea.

Last month we finally found some decent "High Mountain" Oolong (I am not sure that it is High Mountain Oolong but it is definitely Oolong) tea at a Chinese grocery store. For a while I was getting worried that the meager stash of tea would run out before we found some replacements. I was teaing out man.

I would really like to get my hands on some Taiwanese Oolong (by far the best Chinese tea I have ever had). Cloud Mist tea from Mount Lushan comes very close to Taiwanese Oolong though :p.

I didn't really get into teas until I met my wife's parents. They are really into tea. Whenever I go to my in law's place they always have good tea ready to serve. My father in law is always like "Hey, Kevin try this out" and my mother in law always sets up serious discussions over tea :) And after a while Chinese tea really grew on me to the point that I just can't go back to English teas or bagged teas that I grew up on (shrug).

I like almonds

I like almonds. I didn't really eat them until I moved down to the States from Canada. I can't say why I was indifferent to them before. Maybe its the warmer climate down here (shrugg). My wife got them as a snack from the local Walgreens. My wife likes sweet snacks usually but when she saw the wasabi/teriyaki flavored she had to try them. Of course after she got them I started munching on them too (It was one of those "Hey, you got to try this kind of thing").

I should mention I really enjoy hot foods. I am the type of guy that will go to Sichuan chinese restaurant and order the hottest thing on the menu and get strange looks from the waitress (typically the "wow that white guy is loco" look).

Anyways I was bad in that I ate the majority of the those spicy almonds (my wife didn't mind so much since she likes sweets better). After that I was kind of hooked on almonds. My personal favorite flavor is the smoked almonds which are evilly good. Mostly nowadays though I stick with the plain almonds mostly because I was beginning to worry about my salt intake. They are good though :p.