Let's Celebrate!

I bought another pair of $20 pants! That were originally $80! Oh holiday sales, you're so great.

Other than that, not much has happened. A couple trips to the dentist (stupid inferior J-filling fell out), and some small errands.

Sometime this week I let go all the stress of Figuring Shit Out and just let myself float again. It's nice. Soon I'll feel that halfway terror of floating untethered, and I'll buckle down again. But I just might wait until after New Year's.

Happy Holidays, eat lots for me.

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Dinner at a Japanese Restaurant

Tonight we went out to a Japanese restaurant in town. Nothing fancy. I went there a few months ago with my dad. Here are my thoughts.

Points in their favor:
When we walked in, three asian people, they ask in Japanese how many people. Real Japanese people with a real Japanese kid (exclaiming about the scary goldfish) were eating there. Kirin on tap. Shichimi brought out when necessary. Pretty decent nigiri sushi. They even have natto. Edamame comes with the beer. An actual sushi bar, with the sushi guys making it in front of you.

Points for authenticity, while not in their favor:
They still play American pop music. Acceptable ramen. Japanese menu that I'm afraid to ask for, because I know I won't be able to read it all. The edamame was crap.

Points against them:
Poor ass udon. Lumpy California roll. Dragon roll on the menu. Disappointing gyoza.

I could go on, but in summary, good, but not good enough. Authentic, but the cooking is average. I could take (non-Japan) friends here, kind of order izakaya-style, and have a good time. They can order teriyaki chicken or fried rice.

But during dinner, this lovely topic came up. Here's a (poorly quoted, abridged) snippet of conversation concerning G's hair. I mentioned that it was longer before. My mother doesn't think so, but she never saw his hair in those first few months. Neither has my dad, but he had this to say:

"Yeah, he looks like Mick Jagger."

(Me:) "What? David Bowie, I'll give you that, but Jagger?"

"Yeah, like Mick Jagger" he says.

"Because he's skinny and it looks like he does drugs? Which he doesn't, by the way." I counter.

"He looks English. Is he?"

"His dad is from Seattle, his mom is from Montana!"

"He looks like Mick Jagger."

This whole exchange was hilarious. I even googled to see what Mick Jagger looked like when he was younger. Surprise, he still looks like Mick Jagger. If you squint, he looks like Matt Damon. But his head is still freakishly long. G has a small head! And that's かっこいい！(Really awesome supercool great, according to Japanese people.)

But the only way this photo resembles G is if you put your finger on the face. The hair actually matches, but why my father would know what Mick Jagger looked like in his high school basketball uniform, I don't know.

So thank you, passable Japanese restaurant, for provoking this conversation. Here's your parting shot, decide for yourself.

Can David Bowie even do that with his lips?
Does he even have lips?

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Look at me look at me look at me *TALK* to me.

Oh yeah, and comments are totally okay. The usual rule, no full names. (My name is on some random blog because some other girl asked if that blogger knew me. Good thing it's a clean blog.)

And Happy 1 Year to this blog! Yay! 1 year, two days, 102 posts!

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Rice Post!

My brain is stuck on research mode. After researching apartments and jobs and traffic and weather, my brain just can't let go. I try to distract it with other internet distractions (boingboing! zefrank! gofugyourself!), but it just keeps plunging ahead. I think I started with clothes, and then ended up on food. And the net is full of interesting things about food. For example, someone took the time to explain why fried rice needs to be made with leftover rice. And they even stuck in a few big words. It just struck me as funny, that it needed to be explained. (For once, we hit a topic that I comprehend--fried rice. I guess it's because I've grown up with it. Well, if you tried it, you'd probably consider it bastardized, but it's the way I like.)

On the other hand, I had to look up the difference between salted and unsalted butter, and learned that it all just comes down to control. I'm pretty sure I've looked this up before, back when I loved baking the same cookie recipe over and over and over again. (I'm still certain that recipe was terrible, even though I got requests for it. I guess I'll have to try and replicate it for L some day. She'd tell me if they were horrible, I'm sure.)

The goal for this week? Make molasses cookies. I think I've wanted to make them for a number of years, but I've always been too lazy to figure out what kind of molasses I needed. (Molasses=foreign to me. Back then, I wasn't even sure grocery stores in the suburbs sold it.) Well, thanks to research brain, I'm ready to go. This recipe requires freshly grated ginger and pepper. Awesome. I'll let you know how it goes.

Bonus rice fact! (from the first link)

Apparently, science says rice should be refrigerated an hour after it's cooked! (Or kept above 140F/60C.) One, I don't think my rice cooker kept rice that warm. And two, let's all pause to think of the long journey kyuushoku rice often has to make. No, thank you Mr. Scientist.

And one last thought: I had a Rubio's fish taco combo tonight, and the sodium is killing me. Swollen feet. What the hell? I'm not that old!

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Bake me a cake.*

On relocation: It's really quite baffling to have so much information available to me. Like just now, I wanted to know where the Costco in Seattle was. And two seconds later, I knew. Two seconds! Not 30 minutes of googling and translating and digging through broken Japanese websites. Yes, it'd probably go faster if I were more proficient in the language, but that doesn't help a broken or outdated website.

Current freakout: I can't go back to grad school. I have no letters of recommendation, and no reason for any professors to remember me. I skated by with a letter from my boss that worked in the library. Can google help me there?


*This is post 100. Pardon me for not landmarking it.

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Small goal to tuck away for now

Dear Future Self,
Someday you will have a home that has a backyard, a place where you intend to stay for a goodly period of time, and then you can buy yourself a yuzu sapling so you can make yuzu tea, or a yuzu bath, or even get your act together and make a meal that requires ponzu sauce. If you don't kill it, you can get a sudachi tree too. Because thank goodness, you can buy them in the states. (Hey, if you can't import black pines, and some mikan species (so says my grandfather)...)

PS: Don't confuse yuzu (C. ichangensis x C. reticulata var. austera) with something trendy like a Meyer Lemon, whatever that is.

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Three Snippets

Moon Shadows
Last night was the full moon, and I went outside (in zori and a light jacket at 2am, eat your heart out) to experience moon shadows. It's been a long time since I've been outside in an unlit area for the full moon. Usually it's a look out the window sort of thing--"Hey, isn't it a full moon?" "Eh, sure."--but it was nice to just sit and look at shadows. And it was so quiet! The suburbs are nice like that. I didn't wander around the 'cho at night, I'm sure that was even quieter...except when the frogs were out.

Moving Crap
I've been trying to hash out moving to Seattle (get an apartment first, then a job), and was looking at uhaul rates. $900 for 6 days (it really takes 6 days? I was guessing 3.). Ouch. And then I walked through the house, and tried to figure out if that was enough space. Then I realized that all of my college furniture went to my sister, and the only thing left is my bunk bed frame and an alright set of table and chairs. Oh, and my father's college desk that I used in college. Maybe a small TV. The rest is clothes, books, and computer. Baffling, but such a relief. That does mean I'll have to get a lot of stuff delivered once I get up there, but I can get new things! And I can even justify $900 worth of new things!

Now Retro
Since I spend all of my time at home, my brain has become warped. My parents' dishes look different now. Before, they were just outdated dishes, with a band of olive green that had flowers on it. Olive green to match the avocado green shag carpets. Embarrassingly out of date. Now, I see the dishes through the eyes of those indie people who delight in everything retro, and they don't seem so bad. Inheritable even.

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Five Delicious Foods (+1)

I need to cheer up, or at least distract myself from how overwhelming this relocation/find a job process is. And I'm still on the research phase! To stop my thoughts from snowballing, here are five delicious foods that I like, in no order.

1. Tempura shrimp tails. They taste like popcorn. Sometimes restaurants cheat and hold the shrimp by the tail or something, and then it just tastes like dirty plastic. Sad.

2. Ferraro Rocher chocolates. You know, the ones wrapped in gold that crunch.

3. My grandmother's raspberry jam. Sometimes the proportions aren't right, and instead, we get raspberry syrup. Absolutely not a problem, that just means you have to be more careful with the sandwiches.

4. Perfect medium rare steaks. I had one in at some restaurant and it was beautiful. It was barely warm in the middle, with crusty pepper bits. It was so good I didn't care about the possibility of food poisoning.

5. Choco-peppermint smoothies. At the 50s diner downtown, they used to serve it in a tall fountain glass, along with a tumbler of what didn't fit. They don't do that anymore, which is a bummer.

Now I want a snack. And I feel much better. Goal accomplished!

(+1) Stuffed sole with whipped potatoes. Awesome. It's even good microwaved a few days later. On Friday, we went to some bar and grill on the Chula Vista Marina. (The South Bay Fish and Grill to be exact.) My dad ended up with something crap--mustard crusted salmon, which was a bland piece of salmon with a crust of mustard. With shitty white rice. Like someone decided to whip the rice to make it fluffy, and instead turned it into rice mush. It probably had butter in it. ::shudder:: But mine was good, and that's what counts.

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