Shorts

The weather has been swinging among hot/mild/warm/perfect/chilly this past week. It’s confusing. Yesterday was utterly perfect. We spent part of the day at Temescal Park with Mobi.

Our friend C is starting his new job at my (now our!) company in the first half of June! I am very excited. W00t! U&C’s baby (little D as I think of him in my head) has already hit his 1 month mark. Whoa. I’m sure it feels like forever for U&C but I can’t believe it’s been that long already. Wow. U&C report that he is quite fussy — poor D and U&C, but he’s definitely a little cutie pie. Seppo gave him raspberries on his baby gutulence (sorry, I’ve been reading a lot of CuteOverload), which made me laugh. He has enormous eyes and is totally into staring. He’s really very cute, which is easy for Seppo and me to say, since we get to drop in and see his royal cutiness for a short time then run away, while U&C don’t have that luxury. 😉

This past week, I cooked up little what amount to little hot cakes with a cinnamon, brown sugar, and crushed toasted walnut filling. They are called “ho dduk” (long o, short u) and are a great winter street snack in Korea. They sell them frozen and in mix form at the Korean store, but I wanted to try it on my own. I had to substitute in whole wheat for wheat flour because I ran out, which made the dough much less tender than it should have been. It was a light yeast dough, which reminded Seppo of English muffins. Anyway, the dough is formed into flat discs, filled with the filling, then pinched closed, forming a little ball, which is then flattened onto the cooking surface. I made like 30 of them. They are great reheated in the toaster over straight from the freezer, with the caramelized filling oozing over everything.

The other Korean dish I made this week was spicy chicken & potatoes stew, which had three different sources of spiciness. Ooh, the burn. It was ok. I brought in some for a packed lunch. The next thing I’ll be making is homemade dumplings (with store-bought skins), filled with mostly tofu and chives. I might also figure out finally how to make my own galbi and bulgogi marinades. Everyone has a different recipe, so the trouble has been in finding and adapting one to be similar to my mom’s versions.

Seppo and I have been taking Mobi for longer together in the mornings. It’s nice to spend that little bit of extra time in the mornings together. 🙂

I hadn’t played drums on RockBand for like… weeks, possibly months, but suddenly, I can play on medium mode on some of the much easier songs. Whaa–? The visual mumbo-jumbo suddenly makes sense, and I can translate the stuff I am seeing into stuff I am supposed to do. I played 16 songs on medium drums and about 8? songs on hard singing for my solo tours yesterday, after about 3 solid hours of playing as a team with Seppo, K, and N. Heh.

Sleepy. I have concluded that my weekly Sunday brunch ~2.5 cups of coffee must be interfering with my ability to fall asleep on Sunday nights. I am a genius. 😐

Must buy tickets for little bro to visit this summer.