slow ride! take it easy!

Hello. Waiting for a call from the rig that would signal the start of several more hours of work so I thought I’d take a break and post pictures of a recent event that made me happy. Twitter-ing and Tumblr-ing is nice, but I still *heart* WP.

Goes without saying that the happy event was food-related.

That’s where we ate. It’s near the office and on the way home. Guess where I’ll be everytime traffic threatens? Across the street is also another favourite of mine: a nasi padang resto! But we’ll save that for another day.

They cooked these clams with some special voodoo sauce + bits of chilli & garlic. It was a taste explosion at every bite. MC had to tell me to stop groaning during every mouthful. I did – but only to tell him to stop groaning too.

This crab died a meaningful death: we enjoyed you a lot, Mr. Crab. We’d enjoy you more if you weren’t so bloody expensive. $41 ok.

See those mantous? We ordered 4 more 😀 I told MC there were fried versions and his eyes glazed over.

Ah, back to work.

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his hair was the colour of lemons

Last night I finished reading an incredible book. It took me a couple weeks to finish as I was distracted many many times by new Judith McNaught acquisitions (hehe *blush*). Maybe because it was one of those books you fall in love with the more you read and would like to draw out the inevitable end, maybe by the realisation early on that the ending was going to be shattering.

I must admit that the first couple pages of Markus Zusak’s ‘The Book Thief‘ wasn’t that great. I found it a bit confusing at first. Who was the bloody narrator? What were all those paragraphs in bold? Little by little though the characters were drawn out and you wished you knew someone like Liesel and Hans and that Rudy reminded you of your first boyfriend. I think this is the first book I’ve read about the Holocaust that shows what happened to ordinary Germans. Yes, ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas‘ was also about Germans in WWII but it was about a privileged little boy whose parents were in the upper echelons of Nazi society and where Hitler himself came to dinner. ‘The Book Thief’ is so much different: you feel Mr. Steiner’s anger and disbelief when government officials come to take Rudy away to be part of an elite school for Aryan children, you sense the town’s sorrow when Mr. Hubermann and Mr. Steiner get drafted as punishment for being ‘Jew lovers’.

Here’s a great review by John Green of the NYT.

I cried buckets at the ending. I cried so hard that Atti woke up and came to nuzzle my neck and lick my tears. It started slow but ‘The Book Thief’ has already clawed it’s way up to the top of my 2008 booklist.

my favourite thiiiings

Last week a bunch of us from the office went to El Cerdo’s for dinner. El Cerdo is billed as THE pork specialist of Changkat Bukit Bintang and we’d been wanting to go for ages, but you know how hard it can be to get a date and time everyone can agree on. Finally we just said, ‘fuck it!’ and made reservations for 11 people at 6.30pm. 8 made it. 

Everyone was pretty excited. I’d been bombarding them with reviews of the resto gleaned from various food blogs and pigging out was on everybody’s mind.

What did we order? Lemme try and list it out:

• roasted suckling pig
• mixed appetizer plate: french rilettes, pig trotter pate, spanish salami, pork liver pate and pig cheeks in wine aspic
• boquerones
• pan fried goat cheese wrapped in Jamon Serrano
• lentil and vegetable soup with german sausage
• pork shoulder steak
• roasted pork short ribs
• mango sherbets with vanilla licor
• run and raisin pancake ‘kaiserschmarrn’
• alexander grappa
• jagermeister
• hoegarden witbier, and
• the placido tuscany chianti

Took us 4 hours to eat and drink everything. How was the food you ask? It was AWESOME. Just bloody fantastic. By the time the suckling pig main course arrived, we fell on it with our bare hands like savages.

The bill came to a whopping RM1.2K and there were shocked gasps from the locals all around but everyone agreed it was just the thing after a hard month’s work.

We’re already on the lookout for the next resto to pig out at 😀

dear lady please

I had planned to go to a gig at CM’s Annexe this afternoon with MC but woke up from my nap too lazy to even move the various critters lying on top of me. So while MC is at the Annexe getting all sweaty and smoky, I’m at home dancing* to my new favourite band, The Cheeksters.

Their album Movers and Shakers has definitely made me move on from the Juno soundtrack which was on heavy rotation for weeks. Check out the title song and What the Pretty Girl Did. Lovely lovely intro that always gets me up. Happy and clappy, what more could a dancing klutz want? You’ll also love Shannon Hines Casson’s oh-so-smooth vocals in Sideways. Yum, I say. Yum.

So what are you listening to at the moment?

* new fitness plan. LOL.

king of carrot flowers

We watched In the Valley of Elah a couple nights back. I liked it a lot. As usual I’ll leave it to Mr. Ebert to say why I did. Funny, he’s the only one who get’s it right on why I love or hate certain movies (except for Gone Baby Gone, but I won’t hold that against you, sir 🙂 ). A movie about war and its consequences, a lot of other reviewers hated it saying it was heavyhanded, boring or just plain bad.

I love Tommy Lee Jones. Muah!

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MC was really happy yesterday when Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo went on sale. It’s been playing non-stop in the car. Now I can’t get the verse ‘Woo-ee-oo, I look just like Buddy Holly. Oh-Oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore’ outta my head. Whatever. Rivers, you’re gorgeous.

when your mind’s made up

I’ve been lucky enough to watch a string of good movies lately: Juno, Gone Baby Gone, Once and last night, Lars and the Real Girl. I initially wanted to watch it as a way to wind down, something for laughs and also secretly hoping that there’d be a scene where Mr. Gosling strips naked. It’d been a tough couple of days with revenue deadlines at work, negotiating new annual objectives and one of the critters getting sick. I thought it’d be a comedy you know? A guy somehow thinking a blow up doll was his real girl friend. What followed was a 2 hour example of the kindness and love people can exhibit under the right circumstances. I loved the characters in the movie, their expressions when confronted with something socially unacceptable and the awkwardness and hilarity of office relationships. Unlike Gone Baby Gone which I can never watch again (it was brilliant, but just made me too damned sad), Lars and the Real Girl is one of those movies you feel like watching again and again just so you could tearfully smile at the end and be reassured that everyone goes on to a happy existence somewhere in Celluloid Land.

camembert and brie

I watched Juno a couple days ago and even now I’m still blown away by how powerful a movie it is. The theme is teenage pregnancy, the people who will have to deal with it and ultimately about growing up. Hilariously funny, smart, sweet and sad at times, Juno also has a kickass soundtrack which has been on constant rotation in my iTunes. Check out Cat Power’s cover of Phil Phillips’ Sea of Love… mindblowingly beautiful. I know who I’m rooting to win Best Picture in this year’s Oscars.

The week flew by in a haze of meds. If anything, my daily sick parade emphasises even more the need for a change in lifestyle. 7 hours of solid sleep fueled by various chemicals was very nice but it has to end eventually. Plus I’m tired of coughing my lungs out and waking the various critters who then think it’s time for brekkie and start yowling.