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Archive for February, 2006
Woodland Park Zoo
We visited Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo last Sunday.
Pictures at Flickr (click on the pic to go there!)
Loose Change
Anyone watched this documentary yet? Amazing allegations, to be sure.
But not surprising. Beware: Loooong video.
’nuff said and done
Someone asked me if I’d heard of the whole inappropriate European comic and Singaporean phone porn fiasco that people have been blogging about this last couple of weeks, ‘coz if I did, why hadn’t I posted my opinion on the matter.
And I’m not linking those either for the same reason.
I think enough has been said already and those who can’t stop talking or blogging about it are just traffic whoring, right (been waiting all YEAR to use that phrase LOL – c’mon lighten up. You can blog about anything you want!)?
I have other things to worry about, like trying to settle down in my new home, and wondering if my stuff’s okay at sea, and missing my friends and family back home in Malaysia. Minding my business, that is. There’s been enough over-reaction over both issues.
Truth be told, I did DO something about the comic. Just that it wasn’t on this blog. I emailed a certain someone about how I felt he should’ve handled the NST whole matter. He responded in kind. And that was that.
And that’s why my blog will never see the business end of WordPress’ fastest growing list or top blogs ever!
ps. For another perspective on the comic issue, read New Yorker’s The Talk of the Town comment called Images by Jane Kramer.
Pulled pork and the BJ Shea Experience
So my Pulled Pork experiment was a success. Pulled Pork is just a name for very soft pork shoulder cooked slowly with onions and barbecue sauce in a crockpot for about ten hours. After that, you shred it to pieces and eat with bread and/or coleslaw. Used an About.com recipe and it worked well. Yummy.
This morning, while fetching Lokes to the office, I turned on to my favorite morning show, the BJ Shea Morning Experience on 99.9 KISW. This bunch of burly guys are a hoot, great to give you that morning boost with a belly of laughs. Today, they were talking about drugs (again!) and this time, it’s because BJ went to Peru and did some ’shrooms called the Teacher Plant or Ayahuasca.
Now the closest I’ve come to a chemical high is when I had my two girls and was given Nitrous Oxide or laughing gas to cope with labor. As a child, watching a neighbor poison himself with heroin in a communal outhouse, plus those Filem Negara ads, was enough to convince me that drugs were the devil.
But what about a natural plant high? Now that’s interesting.
After hearing BJ’s experience with Ayahuasca, which is just you imbibing this hallucigenic drink or a plant I think, and then experiencing visions (with no bad come-down after) about issues in your life (may be good or bad, depending on what affects you most I think), I wondered if after all this time, I would be game to try. How BJ described his experience was just amazing because he’d gone with his wife.
“I felt what it was like to be a woman,” he’d said in his show, amid an awkward silence, followed by the expected masculine jabbing by his crew. What BJ meant was that he’d felt how it was to be in his wife shoes, somehow, the pain she felt about the issues they had, and came out a better man who was a little more compassionate about his partner’s perspective on things and so on.
And apparently, this sort of learning and healing happens on a regular basis with these plants.
So I’m going to add one more thing to my list of things to do before I die:
4. Go to Peru for the Ayahuasca experience.
I heart New Yorker
My first copy of my first real subscription of The New Yorker has arrived.
Lokes: What magazine is that?
Me: It’s the magazine you read if you want to write.
Oo, comics!
Slater, bitches.
DDO: An update
So I started playing my preorder account, for real and not on the beta servers, yesterday. Created a rogue called Jennemede Swift on Thelanis (there are 14 servers up now). Here are some things I observed:
- they added a few things. For one, you can now see die rolls at the bottom right of your screen, above the focus orb. Quite nice.
- machine still freezes up despite turning everything off. What the hell is wrong? Anyone else is experiencing this? I use an ATI X800XT card and have updated all my drivers. Sent all the error reports to ATI already. Let’s hope they do something.
- discovered how you can lock on to a mob and auto-attack quickly. Auto-attack is toggled on/off each time you d-click, so when it’s on, all you have to do is press tab and you would’ve selected the target and attack (no need to frantically try and d-click on a mob in the heat of the moment).
- clipping problems: my gold fell into a wall and I couldn’t get it. Kena conned!
- DDO is NOT a game you solo so might as well get used to it. Very, VERY few of the quests/instances you can survive alone and Potions are expensive. And since regen can only be done in a tavern, it’s probably best to make friends. It’s D&D after all.
- playing a rogue is very fun, if you have high Spot and Search abilities, you get secret door/device messages. Hide and Move Silently lets you avoid mobs altogether if you’re good.
- Effective combat (versus efficient combat) requires practice and skill. And active participation. You can’t just auto-attack and go get a beer. Block and tumbles help you live longer.
- chat is still frustrating. /tell and /reply are all I’m using now. I still don’t know how to announce my WTS trade messages because there are only General, Party and Guild tabs, so I’m just vending all of it to NPCs for now. Blur man.
- you can complete, abandon and do the same quests again, although the XP will depreciate over each time you do it.
Anyone else playing, look me up. Thelanis, Jennemede Swift. See you online.
ps. See this story on DDO in the New York Times. Needs registration.
Knowing, and doing, what you want
In our world (the Malaysian woman’s world, that is), it’s rare that you hear of a girl who voluntarily gets married when she’s in her teens.
Oftentimes, it’s because she had an ‘accident’ and had to get herself hitched for religious or social reasons, or that she comes from a conservative country like Indonesia, where both my ex-maids are from, who got married at the tender ages of 13 and 14. Today, they are grandmothers. My last maid, Yati, has gone home to plan the wedding of her daughter, who’s 16. The latter isn’t pregnant nor is she unemployed.
“It’s better to get her married before she gets pregnant, you know,” Yati said to me when I asked her why the women in Java get married so young.
Yesterday, I met an American mommy who told me she’d gotten married at 17. Needless to say, I was surprised. She said she’d always wanted to marry young and start a family. Now, this lady has two kids and living the life she’d always wanted (plus she looks gorgeous doing it!).
On my way home, I started wondering about what I’d wanted to do with my life at 17. In Malaysia, we are also fortunate to have education pressed on us before anything else at that age. Sure, some of us – in fact, a LOT of us – make mistakes when we were 17. You know how it is. Hormones rage. World at our feet. We feel, in many unexplainable ways, invincible and untouchable at that age.
At 17, I knew the only thing I wanted to do was to get away from home. I was to go to fashion college (yes, can you imagine?) in Ipoh and then do the last year in London where my aunt and uncle could keep an eye on me, and that prospect just made me want to escape. I wanted to study civil engineering because I was quite the whiz at math and physics then but my parents told me I’d never find a job as a woman. In a fit of anger and frustration, I told them okay, I’ll read law. I’d found a college that offered the External LLB degree where I could finish the degree here in Malaysia – but in KL.
And I never ever wanted to be a lawyer in the first place.
Instead, I became a writer. I dropped out of college during my last year and became a junior reporter for a small trade magazine. I’d somehow found my calling. Today, I can’t even remember why I’d wanted to be a civil engineer.
We do crazy things at 17. We think we know everything and nothing can touch us. And the truth is, we often get our way. Our parents can only watch helplessly as we begin our lives as the adults that we desperately want to be.
The sad truth is that we inevitably succeed more quickly than we expect.
My first Lokes-less social outing in Seattle
I think I deserve a clap. A pat in the back. A freakin’ award even.
Five weeks in a new country and I’m already going out with technically total strangers for a movie and drinks/dessert. Without Lokes.
W00t!
Not that I’m antisocial but there are more enjoyable things to do than be all awkward and self-conscious. But not only did I survive an evening with people who behaved, spoke and thought differently (I felt like one of those Globetrotting travellers!), I actually became one of them.
Now how about that? It’s truly a big step for me, because I’m not much of a socialite, as some of you may know. My hobbies involve sitting in front a computer or curled up to a book. True that I spent more than ten years partying my socks off after secondary school, but my last day of drinking, smoking and basically enjoying my youth, came on my hen’s night five years ago. And five years is a lifetime when you have kids.
Tonight, as I sat talking and laughing with eight other mommies, learning so many things about Americans and parenting, I felt oddly (but pleasantly) at ease. I should be all nerves and wondering if I’m somehow rude or offensive by eating or drinking a certain way, you know, just being myself, but I was okay. Even for me.
Certainly, it’s not home. But I am finally liking it here.
Look at me. I’m growing!
Thanks, mommies of the 3’s AM class of the Redmond Cooperative Preschool (especially you, Nikki), for making me feel welcome. You don’t know how comforting it is to be in the company of friendly faces.
And what I hope will be friends in time to come.
Today’s top ten stories
Have to run for a movie later (am going with the preshcool’s mommies for Pink Panther!) so here’s a quick rundown of what I found interesting/fun/hilarious in my inbox today:
1. Maaaaaa-aaaa-aaaarry me!
2. First disposable digital cameras. Now this.
3. History in motion
4. Gladwell you’re here.
5. Disemvowelling
6. Einstein writes
7. Asus notebooks go LV
8. Casual games reviewed
9. Toldja the best stuff is still the real stuff
10. No more piracy? Maybe for a while.
Slater ladies.
Value buy indeed
Went to the Children’s Hospital Thrift Store today and got these for a bargain. Three hard covers, three soft, all good.
I’m actually trying out the egg bacon rollup tomorrow from that Costco cookbook. Will post a pictorial.
Guess how much I paid for the whole stack? Only a trifling US$13.50! The top two classics were only a dollar each!
And for a good cause too!
I’m reading Steven Price’s Freedomland now (yea, that Samuel L Jackson movie). Psycho-thriller buff that I am, I’m getting the feeling it’s going to be a little disappointing. Well, don’t judge a book by the movie trailer I guess!
New video of Skyler, 15 months
Long due is our first MTV of my second girl, Skyler (excuse the messy house).
Enjoy!
