Be thankful for your toilet

Yesterday, there was a water leak in our building in the apartment just below us, flooding several apartments. We were lucky enough to escape that, but our cold water was shut off for the day until the plumber came in this morning to fix it. We did have hot water, it wasn't too much of a problem. Except for the toilet. Every flush of the toilet required two trips to the kitchen sink to fill the bucket with hot water, opening the toilet tank, pouring the water in, etc. Because of this, every toilet use was carefully considered and weighed - is it worthwhile to go right now? Can it wait? So today I am particularly thankful for having a functioning toilet. (Seriously, if there's a flu pandemic or some sort of massive emergency and we lose our water, we are so screwed.)

Something old, something new, something seasonal

I start planning a menu from the moment a dinner party is in the works. There are several factors to be considered: the number of guests, any dietary restrictions, how much time there is to prepare, etc. The main dish - usually meat - is generally the first to be decided. The appetizer and the dessert are generally settled upon next. With the general framework of the dinner menu set up, I start filling in the details - what kind of soup? what kind of salad? what vegetables to serve with the meat? I consult recipe books and recipe notes, and start making lists. A list of ingredients, a list of courses, shopping lists tailored to shopping destination, to-do lists ... I would be lost without them.

Most courses are made up of old standbys, foods we have made before and are confident of pulling off successfully. However, I do try to include at least one new thing in the menu that we haven't tried before. For our big dinner last week, our new thing was the trou normand. A trou normand can be considered as a palate-cleanser or refresher between the first and main courses of the meal. It is also thought to aid digestion and stimulate the appetite in the middle of a long meal. The traditional Normandy version is a shot of Calvados (apple brandy), although more recently it's served as a bit of Calvados poured over some apple sorbet. These days there are many variations, although the common factor is the combination of a sorbet with a spirit. We decided to go with a lemon sorbet and vodka combination. We made the sorbet the night before. The important thing about making sorbet without an ice cream machine is to take it out of the freezer every once in a while, to break up the ice crystals with a hand mixer.

I also try to include at least one seasonal food item in the menu. This time, we decided to go with asparagus in the soup, as in a cream of asparagus. The soup was also made the night before - if I may add, with the chicken broth I made a few weeks ago.

So the final menu we settled upon looked something like this:

Cheeses
Moules Marinière (mussels in white wine sauce)
Salade de Chèvre Chaud (grilled goat cheese salad)
Cream of Asparagus soup
Trou Normand
Roast Beef with gravy
-baked potato with sour cream and green onion sauce
-maple-caramelized carrots with almonds
Crème Brûlée

We always question whether to serve the cheese at the very beginning of the meal, or at the end like the French do. (I like to serve them at the beginning, because people are generally too full to enjoy the cheese by the end.) We were a bit lax with the roast beef and the crème brûlée, resulting in an overcooked roast and water in the crème. (I confess I was rather tipsy by this point in the meal as well.) This was rather unfortunate, because the rest of the dinner went off rather splendidly. (Well, I guess there was also that problem with miscounting the number of guests.) Fortunately, our guests were gracious about it. We topped it all off with a bottle of Canadian ice wine. Delicious.

I can't count

We had a dinner party on Saturday evening. Giving nice dinners is something we like to do, and generally it takes several days of preparation. So I was going to write a series of rather pretentious blog posts on planning and hosting a nice dinner party, from menu planning, shopping for ingredients, preparing the food, etc. I even took a few photos of the preparation process. The cooking started in earnest on Friday evening, and all day Saturday. By Saturday at 5pm, I had laid out a nice tablecloth on our dining table, and Seb had set the table for 8 people (the maximum possible, as we have only 8 chairs in the apartment).

Saturday evening just after 7pm, our guests start arriving. When about half our guests were assembled, is when the realization hits me. Holy crap, we are NINE. NINE people. Now, I'm rather prone to full-blown panic in these kinds of situations, but luckily Seb stepped in before the panic-meter got too high. "I'll just go borrow a chair from our neighbours," he said, cool as a cucumber (never mind that we barely know our neighbours). And thus, disaster was averted. Thankfully, the food worked out. The only number-specific food that we didn't have enough of was the baked potato (I had only made eight), but the table was so crowded that I don't think anyone noticed. In retrospect, I can't believe I could've mistaken the number of guests: I counted them last week, more than once. But I laugh at it now, and it's situations like this that remind me never to be so cocksure of myself.

Brrr

Two weeks ago, it was 27 degrees celsius in Philadelphia, the flowers were blooming, and people were out and about in shorts and t-shirts. We were even obliged to turn the air-conditioning on a couple of times. Then, spring stopped dead in its tracks. The temperature dropped down to 5 degrees. "Ah," thought I, "a little cold snap. Well, I'm from Canada, I can take it. Besides it won't last long." People went back to wearing their winter coats and scarves. It snowed. It's been two weeks since we had warm weather. Today I went out with a scarf and gloves, and I WAS STILL COLD. Là, c'est assez. Give me back my spring!

On unexpected guests, and tidy apartments

I am not a cleaning kind of person. While I do prefer clean to mess, and I have made several resolutions to clean more often and more regularly, I just don't enjoy it. Our apartment has a tendency to devolve from tidy to messy, and stay that way until we're expecting guests over. Only then am I sufficiently motivated to clean the place.

Thursday evening, as I'm making supper (Japanese curry, if you're curious), I got a call from Seb:
"Plam's at the airport. He'll be arriving as soon as he figures out the public transport to get to our place."

It had been a few weeks since we had anyone over, so our apartment was starting to be on the messy side. Moreover, this was rather short notice. I confess I was rather panicked. Plam undoubtedly remembers the unholy mess of Seb's bachelor apartment days but ... well, I have certain standards to uphold. Cue Benny Hill music as I tidied up the apartment on speed, cleaning the bathroom in record time, vacuuming the kitchen with one hand whilst stirring the curry pot with the other. Plam arrived just after I finished my frenetic cleaning session. We had a nice dinner, and I hope he is none the wiser. (Until he sees this blog post, I guess.)

There is a lesson here, which I hope I will take to heart, about keeping the apartment presentably clean at all times.

Sake Festival

Seb and I went to the Sake Festival tonight. It's one of the events in the Cherry Blossom Festival that's going on right now. It felt a bit like a convention slash buffet. There were tables serving food, and other tables serving sake. You basically went around, picked up a small plate of food here, a little cup of sake there, etc. I would have liked to ask more questions, but the people behind the tables were pretty busy serving people. And there were A LOT of people attending. I suppose this makes it a success. The first table I approached was serving little cubes of yellowtail with a cilantro/olive sauce (I think) which was quite yummy. But I asked the girl behind the table what kind of sake I should have it with, and she said "that's a good question. Honestly I have no idea." Hmm, I thought I would be learning about sake/food pairings here?! Some tables did have little tasting notes such as "try --- sake with the teriyaki chicken from *** restaurant!" but I wasn't about to fight my way through the crowds just to find it. Can't say I learned much about pairing sake with food, but there was good food, and there was good sake. I can't complain much. One of the most popular foods was the sushi from Genji Sushi. They were making an endless stream of salmon nigiri at their table (salmon in Japanese is sake), and people were eating them faster than they could churn them out.

Tooth extraction update

I'm sure you're all fascinated. :) I went to the dentist's again this morning to get the sutures out. I had to go to the other office because my regular dentist is on vacation. (Incidentally, he only works three days a week as it is. Nice life he has, no?) There was some minor difficulty in cutting the sutures; they hadn't loosened during the week, and my gums were swollen in that area. It pinched a bit, and the dentist mentioned that he might have to numb the area, but he got it in the end. It actually hurts less now. I still get something of an ache in my jaw, but nothing the Motrin can't handle. Seriously, I am impressed by the effectiveness of the Motrin.

Hey cool

Just now, I noticed that peope have been leaving comments here and there on my blog for the past couple of years. I hadn't even seen them until now. Wow, there are more than 2 people reading my blog??

Broth

I started making a chicken broth this morning from the bones and bits of the roast chicken from a few days ago. After a few minutes of cooking, it started to smell so delectable that I was compelled to take a picture:














What? You say you can't smell it?

UPDATE: This is how it looked a few hours later:

Mmmm.

Countries I've been to

*sigh* I guess I've still got a ways to go ...



create your own visited countries map

Wisdom tooth-less

Today, I got my fourth and last wisdom tooth removed. I've been getting wisdom teeth removed for the past three months or so. The top two were not too bad, it was just like getting a regular tooth removed. The bottom two were impacted, so it was a bit more complicated. It involved more numbing, more time, more dentist tools, including the one that makes the whirring chainsaw noise. The previous one (bottom left) took significantly longer to heal than the top ones, so I'm guessing it'll be the same for the one that got taken out today too. Since this was the fourth time, I knew more or less what to expect. I don't really know what the dentist is doing in my mouth though, because I can't see or feel anything. So I occupy myself in the dentist's chair trying to guess what he's doing. "Hmm, what's he going to do with that hook thing?" As far as I can tell, he seems to have sliced my tooth apart using the whirring tool (releasing a pungent smell of burnt tooth?) before pulling it out today. I'm rather interested in how it was done, but I didn't want to know beforehand - the less you think about it in advance, the better. But I may ask at my next appointment. Seb told me last week that you could see what's happening in your mouth reflected in the dentist's glasses. I didn't want to see - I'm sure it was all rather bloody, and it made me quite thankful for local anesthetic.

So I will likely be on a steady course of Motrin every six to eight hours for the next week or so, if it's anything like last time. Thank goodness for ibuprofen.

Changing the time

When I got this laptop - oh, just over 3 years ago - I was spending several months in Japan. My first time living in Japan as an adult. Naturally, the clock was set to Japan time, or GMT+9. When I returned to Montreal, I didn't change the time. When I went to Switzerland, I didn't change the time. When I arrived here in Philadelphia, I didn't change the time. Until today. Just now, I set the time zone to GMT-4 (due to daylight savings time). So for the first time in 2.5 years, my laptop is showing the correct time.

Update: Damn. One reason why I changed the time on my laptop is because blogger keeps giving an incorrect post time for all of my posts. I thought this might fix it, but apparently not. As far as blogger is concerned, I'm still in Europe. So unless I fix the time manually, you should mentally subtract six hours.

Update2: I found it. In blogger Settings -> Formatting. So now you should be mentally adding six hours to the times for any previous posts.

Washable sofa

We bought our off-white IKEA sofa second-hand. While the colour is not ideal (it shows dirt - any dirt), it was the only comfortable sofa in the used furniture store that wasn't covered in grotesque flower patterns. Fortunately, all the cushion covers are machine washable, so whenever we get something on it (chocolate is a frequent culprit) I throw all the covers in the washing machine. After several washings though, a new problem is becoming apparent. While the cushion covers are becoming whiter and whiter, the rest of the fabric covering (which did not look particularly dirty to begin with) looks dingier and ... much less white in comparison. This is unfortunately most apparent where cushion meets rest-of-sofa.

"Do you see a difference? I see a difference."

I suppose an upholstery cleaning is in order.

My laptop is dying: a profile in procrastination

My laptop has been dying for the past nine months or so. Our apartment in Geneva was pretty dusty (you should've seen the mounds of dust that came out when we opened the desktop), and my poor laptop choked. The fan sounds like it's stuck on something. Like, try imagining how it would sound if a semi-large insect flew into a small fan. Yeah, like that. So since then, I have tried various remedies, mostly temporary in nature, from aerosol dusters to ice packs, to holding my laptop at just the right angle, to using a laptop cooling pad. These have offered a temporary respite from the cringe-inducing fan choking noise, but it always comes back. You may be tempted to say, ah, the solution here is simple: just open up your laptop and clean it out. Well, I tried, several months ago. My laptop, which is a Toshiba dynabook C9/214LDEW, opens from the keyboard. There are a few screws in the bottom that I took out, I snapped out the plastic cover just above the keyboard, took out the screws holding the keyboard in place, lifted out the keyboard. To the left were some slots for extra RAM, and screws all around the base of the keyboard. I took them all out, being careful to note where they came from, and then ... nothing. I could not get any further. I could not reach the fan, despite it being only half a centimetre away. So I put it all carefully back, and have been living with temporary solutions ever since. Opening it up and cleaning and/or replacing the fan is likely the only permanent solution. The worst is that each temporary solution eventually stops working, and I'm forced to look for something new. But each time I find something that works, I am lulled into a false sense of security, thinking maybe this time it will keep working. And so I put off backing up the important stuff on my laptop, so I can open it up for surgery again, putting it off and putting it off, oh it'll be okay for another little while, until ... the fan has another asthma attack. And I immediately feel guilty for not having backed up my stuff because after all I KNEW this was coming, and then I have to look for a new solution. Rinse and repeat. So what does this tell us about human nature, or my nature at least? (Well, I tend to procrastinate a lot, but we already knew that.) I don't feel like coming up with a pithy moral for the rest of you, but I can't help but feel the force of procrastination, to the point of destruction. How is it that I know that I should do something, and that doing it will bring positive consequences, and I know in addition that NOT doing it will bring very negative consequences, and yet I still don't do it? And when I get a temporary reprieve, why do I STILL not do it? It's pathological and self-destructive.

Anyway, today I finally copied over my photos, my work, my music, and various other odds and ends onto Seb's shiny (relatively) new 500 gig hard drive. With the fan squeaking and sounding like it was going to die the whole time, I gritted my teeth and was determined - DETERMINED - to open my laptop up and fix it damnit. After hitting it on the rear though, it went back into remission. So once more, I feel the tug of "oh, it'll be okay for a while now, I'll just go surf the web for a little bit..." At least this time my stuff is backed up.