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.

CA joins 21st century; sadly still leading many other states who are in the 18th

W00t!!!!!! The title of that article is “State Supreme Court says same-sex couples have right to marry“! Wait… didn’t we do this before?

In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the “fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.” The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when the decision takes effect in 30 days.

“The California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples,” Chief Justice Ronald George wrote in the majority opinion.

Allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry “will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage,” George said.

In addition, he said, the current state law discriminates against same-sex couples on the basis of their sexual orientation – discrimination that the court, for the first time, put in the same legal category as racial or gender bias.

The ruling set off a celebration at San Francisco City Hall, where nearly 4,000 same-sex weddings were performed in 2004 before the state high court put a halt to the marriages while challenges to the California law worked their way through the courts. Today’s ruling has no effect on those annulments.

I am extremely hopeful that this time, it’ll stick.

Inside jokes

Before I get to the whole “inside jokes” business, I need to wish three awesome friends happy birthday! HA was yesterday, CT is today, and HK is tomorrow! Crazy business, this getting old thing. I called my friend CT today and she told me that I needed to update my blog more often because she (and this is why she’s a total geek) reads my blog via her Treo while doing night feedings for her baby girl. LOL.

She’ll be going back to work on Monday, so I wish her luck and fortitude! 😀

—

Seppo and I, like many couples and friends who have been together for a long time, have some inside jokes. One that we refer to often started when we researched Paris before our honeymoon. According to several sources, it is a faux pas to order a cappuccino past breakfast hours. A cafe au lait is ok for before lunch, but a cappuccino is a strict no-no after early hours. Apparently, only babies drink such watered down, foamy stuff after breakfast. I don’t even know where I read this, or if it’s even true, or if I am remembering what I read correctly. Regardless, anytime Seppo or I want to accuse the other person of being a big baby, we say, “Oh, do you need a cappuccino?” followed by mocking baby-crying sounds.

Hmm. I thought I’d have more. I must. Until I remember, I beg you to amuse my friend-who-is-feeding-her-infant-at-night with your own inside jokes.

Buddying up

Seppo and I have buddied up to get motivated. I am Seppo’s buddy to encourage him/kick his ass/help him for his independent project, and Seppo is my buddy for learning to cook more Korean dishes.

There has already been progress! On the project front, Seppo has given me a list of engineering requirements as I had demanded, and I have started to set up my dev environment. I’ve given him a list of things I need from him in order to proceed further.

On the food front, Seppo and I cooked dinner for S & H tonight. Seppo made a zucchini & shrimp dish and grilled up the pork belly for lettuce wraps. He also mixed up two different accompanying sauces: a bean paste-based one and a salt, pepper, and sesame oil slurry. Meanwhile, I made brown & white rice, fake crab & cucumber salad (dressed in a soy & wasabi dressing), a spinach side, a bean sprout side, and a cold cucumber w/ rice wine vinegar dish. We served these with red leaf lettuce, cabbage kimchee, pickled julienned turnip & carrots, and three kinds of sliced pickled turnips (one was wasabi-infused, one was plain, and the third was mustard-infused, I think), all of which was store-bought. This was accompanied by some awesomely tart limeade supplied by S&H.

Dinner was followed by little shots of a ginger & cinnamon drink that Seppo made. This drink was extremely tasty but BURNED inside the mouth, so we ended up watering it down a bit. It was potent and delicious. After a short break, we shoveled some home-made Philly-style (no eggs) vanilla ice cream into our gaping maws.

As if this weren’t enough, at around 10pm, I decided I wanted to make this one Korean dessert that I had looked up in my new Korean cookbook. It’s a ginger-y fried “cookie” that is dipped in a cinnamon-honey-sugar syrup, sprinkled with ground pine nuts. The recipe is really quite unusual, calling for the following ingredients in the dough:

– flour (so far, so good)
– sesame oil (I knew this would be in there, so no surprises yet)
– ginger (yup)
– sake (really??? sake? in a doughy cookie??? ok…)
– maple syrup (whaaaaa-? ok, so clearly a Westernized recipe… it did give light corn syrup and golden syrup as alternatives)
– white pepper (OMGWTF?!)

The dough is an elastic dough and really reminded me of biscuit dough or even beignet dough. It certainly fried up like little beignets. I realized after I dipped the little guys in syrup that this was like the Korean version of gulab jamun, my favorite Indian dessert.

I am looking forward to more cooking adventures! Who wants to come over?! As we get photos off the camera, I’ll post them to flickr and to the woefully neglected food blog as well.

I come out of hiding…

… to take a breath of air and go back.

Lots of stuff has happened, mostly baby-related.

In January, my college friend (and coworker at my last job) S and his wife (also a friend) V had their first baby! She is a beautiful little girl with some amazing eyes.

In February, my friend C who I’ve known since the 3rd grade gave birth to her first baby! She had some incredibly red lips as a newborn. My friend had prepped me, but even then, I was like WHOA! 😀 She really looks like a T-family baby, so I know she’s gonna be an ass-kicker. No need to buy a shotgun for when she hits her teens — she’ll be taking care of business herself. 🙂 Apparently, she’s been sleeping up to 7 hours at night, so congrats! It’s so amazing to think of C as a mom — I’ve known her since she was a little kid herself, so it really hits home that a large chunk of time has passed. I hope I get to meet little C sometime this year.

Yet another friend I’ve known since 9th grade (she is in MA now) gave birth to her third kid in February! It took most of the high school friends by susprise. I think she had hinted when I had seen her back in the summer, but I wasn’t 100% sure. Congrats! I’m so glad to hear that she’s an easy baby! I have no idea when I’ll see her again way up in MA, but I hope she comes out again for the doc convention like last time. 🙂

*Another* friend (a Bay Area one that I met through a dear friend R) expanded their 2-people family w/ their first child, just barely edging out a common internet friend’s baby’s birth by a few days. Both of them were girls, whose videos I’ve watched on Flickr’s new video feature. 😀 Ah, the internet.

There was a break in the baby news at the beginning of April for a wedding! 🙂 S & H got married! I am so happy for them. I could not be using more exclamation marks (without looking like a Myspacer…) to express how happy I am for them!!!! Woo hoo! I love how they are with each other and for each other. They are also both so supportive and involved in each other’s families. W00t!!!!!!!!!!!

Now back to the baby news… My dear friends U&C’s little family have been joined by a beautiful baby boy, breaking the incredible streak of girls! I held him within 1.5 hours of his birth after rushing to the hospital after getting a call from the friend C. From the East Coast! 😀 U&C are being visited and attended to by U’s mom & sister, so I am trying to give them some breathing room, even though I want to be nosing in everyday. I’ve been able to squeeze some details on the baby’s progress though. Hee hee. He was so tiny, yet to big considering where he came from. *runs in fear* Actually, he is a “little porker” according to U&C, according to his birth weight and the voracious way he gulps down milk. Heh.

In non-baby news, my dear friend R is enrolled in a month-long program to get her new career path started! And it seems like she’s really grown from the experience. Congratulations on taking the step and hang in there!

On less fun news, my friend that I’ve known since the 6th? 7th? grade just underwent major surgery for thyroid cancer. 🙁 She had to get both of her thyroid glands removed on Monday. Apparently, it went really, really well and they found no spread to anywhere else, which I am so relieved about. My high school friends really rallied and almost everyone showed up to the hospital. I wish I could have joined them. I think the only people missing were me, my friend up in MA, and my other friend in Korea for a job. You take care, A, and get better! She will be facing radioative iodine treatment in about 6 weeks.

As for me, I have neither good new nor bad news — and no, this was not a lead-up to announcing a pregnancy or anything like that, in case I’ve misled you with all the good news. I just wanted to write some of it down! We also have three different sets of friends getting married at the end of May and beginning of June. It’s a crazy year!

I wonder what the rest of 2008 will bring. While I ponder this, I leave you with this video clip from Planet B-Boy, a documentary about b-boying. And HELL YEAH, I am going to see this. Hehehe.

Kitchen

You may or may not have read Seppo’s blog entry with photos, but I figured I’ll post my own here.

Before:

After:

More here.

ETA: More views!

Before:

After:

Before:

After 1 (slightly different angle — you can’t see what’s happening between the fridge and outside door):

After 2 (this shows the missing area):

Kitchen!

I think it’s supposed to be done today. DUN DUN DUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today is two days longer than the original estimate, but I think they were largely eaten up with our glass subway tiles, which did not come on 1ft sheets, but had to be laid out separately. I am glad they took their time with it, because it looks so pretty I could weep.

We skimped on light/electrical fixtures, but they are easily replaceable in the future. Plus, I don’t really care too much about how they look in general. We also skimped on floor tiles, but they look fine and as long as I can stand on top of them without puking due to ugliness, I don’t care.

The stuff I DO care about, the stuff that I didn’t think we’d be able to swing on our budget, all are awesome: the sink & faucet, the glass subway tiles, the granite counter. Yowza. We could easily have spent 2-3 times the amount we did on those things, but we were pretty insane about our comparison shopping around the Bay Area and on teh intarwebs.

I am so excited to see the kitchen today. I am bouncing around in my seat like a kid on sugar.

Sneaking in a quick post

I have no time for a real update, just a quick one.

Here’s the kitchen timeline so far:

Last week
Thursday: Demo
Friday: Start electrical work
Saturday (they came in because they wanted to resolve the wiring issues): Do more electrical work

This week
Monday: holiday
Tuesday: Finish eletrical and plumbing — we put in insulation Monday night and that night
Wednesday: Start drywall — everything that goes behind cabinets is taped and plastered
Thursday: tape & plaster remaining walls, drywall part of diningroom as a bonus, start putting cabinets in — they say they will be done w/ almost all of the cabinets today
Friday: sand and plaster remaining walls
Monday: mystery?

We need to decide on a sink by tomorrow morning! Egads. Things are going at a breakneck speed. It is both exhilarating and a bit much.

My work is also going at such a speed. And I feel the same about it as I do about the kitchen.

Last Day

I lied about the next post in my last post. This post is not a comparison of GTD implementations, but a lamentation of the end of my 12 week hiatus from the working world. Some have referred to it as “semi-retirement”. It has been woefully short, yet I am still extremely grateful for the break. I have no idea how the time flew by so quickly, but it has flown indeed.

Tomorrow morning, I start my new commute. My trusty iPod will help make the drive fun.

Now, I go to bed. See you on the flip side.

Getting Things Done: What I’m Learning

Yes, like everyone else 25-45 years old, I have been reading Getting Things Done by David Allen. It lays out a very straight-forward, even — dare I say it — trivial system of dealing with the things/tasks that come into your life. The thing I’ve found about every new learning experience is that honestly, the best lesson are straight-forward and trivial. It just takes having been exposed to the idea and trying it out to see how “obvious” it seems. For example, the two main things I’ve learned about personal finance are:

1. Spend less than you earn – duh!
2. Do something smart with the difference – duh!

But honestly? Those two perfectly obvious things are great lessons to implement. I was already doing 1, but not enough of it. And I wasn’t being very smart with 2. So I learned to be better at both.

So being straight-forward and trivial is not a diss on GTD; it’s a bonus. 🙂

The other thing I’ve learned about life is this: Things happen when you do them.

Ok, now I sound like a jerk. 🙂 But here it is again:

Things happen when you do them.

That is probably the most profound thing I learned in the last ten years. That makes me sound like an idiot. Or an asshat. Or something. But I guess what I’m saying is that I really internalized it and have seen it to be true in my own life, as opposed to have thought about how obvious it is.

It’s the single biggest thing that NaNoWriMo has done for me: to make me understand that writing doesn’t happen in bursts of inspiration and that waiting until I felt like it is not the right thing for me, but that writing happens when you sit your butt down and write.

Getting Things Done is fundamentally about sitting your butt down (or getting up and about, as the case may be) and getting things done, off your checklist, out of your life, off your mind. The big tools the GTD system provides appears to me to be the following:

1. Giving you a concrete idea of where to physically (or electronically) file your stuff.
2. Making you dump out every single thing on your mind (from big work projects to watering the plants) into a single location, so that you know it’s written down somewhere so you don’t have to remember it yourself.
3. Forcing you to define the very next physical action you have to take in order to accomplish something.

The first thing is nice because you need to know where to put “stuff”, whether it’s pending emails responses or a list of phone calls you need to make or reading material that you need to get through. I never know where to put stuff, which is why my life is so cluttered. Having someone say concretely that these are the things you need makes it easier, but this hasn’t been the best thing about GTD.

The second thing, however, has been absolutely awesome for me. I dumped out everything that is even slightly, remotely on my mind as a thing to get done, either now or in the next year or in the vague “someday” timeframe. I don’t have to remember anything, so I’ve been feeling really relaxed in the last three days as far as feeling that vague poking in the back of the mind. When something comes to mind, I just write it down. I don’t have to worry I won’t remember it.

Even sorting through the mess is nice.

The third thing is really great too. “Get house fixed up” is a good thing to think about, but it seems like an unapproachably large project. Well, what’s the very next physical action I need to take? It might be “Search through Berkeley Parents Network to read about locals who have recently renovated.” The next item might be “Call 3 of the contractors they recommended.” At any given moment, thinking about the house in general can be really stressful. However, thinking about doing some Googling and reading is really easy. Just one step at a time.

Things get done when you do them, and doing them becomes much, much easier when you can list all the things you want done, and having a system where you can sit down at any given moment and know what “next actions” you can take. When I’m sitting at a desk, I might have 5 different phone calls I need to make. If you took the time to “process” your list correctly according to the GTD system, then you don’t have to waste any time figuring out who you need to call and for what. There should be one single clean list in front of you, even if they are for 5 different areas or projects in your life.

My next post will review four different GTD Mac implementations that I am looking into.