It Started with a Journal

Well I was caught up with Fringe, but then I guess they aired another episode the other day (honestly, the idea), so now I need to watch that in order to be properly caught up. /sigh

What I've been watching most recently since catching up with Fringe is Boardwalk Empire, which I loved initially, but waned on midway through. Did you know Mark Wahlberg is an executive producer and Martin Scorsese directed the pilot episode? Sheesh, what a pedigree for a TV series. Anyway, the first couple of episodes were really well done. After that, I thought some of the elements were really rushed and the characterization has been rather uneven. It's sort of trying to be Mad Men, only during the Prohibition era, but it's frankly not as well done.

I also finally started Devil in the White City by Erik Larson. I love nonfiction that reads like fiction (like Jon Krakauer's books). I'm very impressionable, though, and I don't know if it's actually a great choice to read this book right before I visit Chicago for the first time, lol. I'm like, OMG, sewage and corpses of dogs and cats in the streets! Buildings that sink into the ground! Murderers running amok!

I made Flour's Famous Banana Bread last week and I think it might be my new favorite banana bread recipe. It's still incredibly moist nearly 5 days later, the crumb is very tender, and it's full of banana goodness without being too banana-y.

Saw the DG gals this weekend, which is always fab, except that now I have ONE BILLION (approximately) LEFTOVERS. I don't know how I'm going to do it.

This is one of the best flash mobs I've ever seen, probably because it was sponsored by a corporation, but still. Really good. ( Welcome home. )

Jade is catching up with S3 of Fringe as well. Her last email: ( Spoilers. )

:))))))))))))

I've been wallowing in self-pity over my horrendous bracket busting by mainlining Fringe. I'm on the last episode of S2 now. The part I'm on? FAN FICTION WRITER'S DREAM. I may have to write femme slash. There's stuff I've been wanting to talk about, more than the little comments I've been posting, but I think I might as well wait until I'm fully caught up.

I've made the cha-siew (I have no idea why it's called "char-siew" everywhere, it's a Cantonese dish, I speak Cantonese, and it's "cha-siew," damn it)! It turned out delicious, but not restaurant like. The homemade version is more soy sauce-y, while the restaurant version is more sticky sweet. I think I want to play with the recipe on my own a bit to make it look and taste more like the restaurant version. Still, even if I never get there, this was yummy and worth making because it was so easy. ( Photos! )

And since I want to keep a weekly record...

( AeroGarden Week 2 )

Went walking with K. in Lincoln Park today -- with yesterday's walk on top of that, my legs are so sore. I wish I had a really great park near me so I could walk like that every day without having to drive so far.

I've been avoiding talking about this because I didn't want to jinx myself, but I don't think I really have a shot so I'm just going to do it. It's NCAA tourney time, and as has been the case the past few years, I wasn't paying attention to college basketball until March Madness started. It's always fun to participate in the office pool, though -- even though last year I finished dead last. >< This year I read an article in Slate about how to win your office pool by finding the best 'bargains' in the field and betting on those. It uses a combination of computer statistics, national averages (of which teams people in general are voting for), and your own intuition. I decided to try it out, since I haven't had much luck with other methods in the past. I have to admit, as I was making my selections, I still had to fight against the desire to pick the teams I normally would pick.

I'm actually doing fairly well! After the first round (day 2), I was tied with two others for second place in the office pool! I've called 5 out of the 7 upsets that have happened so far (but unfortunately also picked some that didn't pan out). We have 30 people playing this year, so the winner gets around $200 and also 2 tickets to a Sounders game. :P

I don't know if my streak will continue after today. I personally think my picks are kind of crazy and really have no chance (I have Texas winning it all), but it's an interesting experiment. At least I'm doing better at this point in time than I was last year.

The worst point in the tournament was when I was closely following the UCLA-Michigan St. game, and was super excited when UCLA eked out the win. Only to check my bracket and realize that I hadn't picked UCLA! *headdesk* Oh what a high price to pay for my disloyalty!! I should've just picked them to advance from the first round anyway, just to avoid a scenario like this. Losing the point and feeling bad about not believing in them. Sigh. It's just that every year I get overtaken by sentiment and I didn't want to get caught up in that again. But the Bruins did lose their game today, which is annoying because hardly anyone picked them to move on, so if I was going to be wrong about them, it'd have been great if they continued to win and everyone else's brackets got messed up in the process. :P

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In non-basketball news, I've planned out the next 3 things I'm going to cook.

1) Alton Brown's pan-fried chicken.
2) Cha-Siew, which is Chinese BBQ pork.
3) Chili crab, which is supposedly a popular Singaporean dish (according to this blogger from Singapore; I'm sure adelagia will correct me if I'm wrong), except instead of crab (or lobster, which is what the blogger used), I'm going to use shrimp ... and fish balls, because I'm a rebel.

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The walk in Discovery Park with H. was lovely today. We totally lucked out because the sun came out for the first time in like WEEKS so it was a perfect day for a walk. I could totally feel how out of shape I was though, omg.

Also, no more fears on the "misunderstanding" front. As I suspected, I was just being paranoid. :))

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Four little Fringe comments. ( Spoilers. And beware of spoilers in the comments too. )

( Brief thoughts on Fringe, through the first seven-ish eps. )

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Dinner with J. Friday night was lovely. We never seem to run out of things to talk about, and at the end it's like, argh, I had 5 other things to tell her! Pair was cute, but the food left something to be desired. The gougeres were terrible and the mussels were way overcooked. They have nothing on The Stone House.

The dinner party last night was really fun. I generally like every member of my team on a personal level; it's just that our work styles sometimes clash.

My attempt at appetizers didn't quite go the way I wanted. ( My woe and other party details. )

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I've just put in a big Amazon order for the Buffy S8 and Angel S6 volumes that I haven't been keeping up with. I'll need to reread everything from the beginning because I suspect it's not going to make any sense if I don't! One thing I regret from Comic Con is that one of the Buffy artists was there signing comics and I didn't even think about bringing mine. D'oh!

I've been rereading the Hot Gimmick manga, and I'm kind of blown away by how adult themed it is. It was the very first manga I ever read, so I just kind of figured they were all like that.

Next on the manga front I'm going to be reading Skip Beat!, which I may or may not actually get into. Apparently it was going to be made into a TW serial called "Extravagant Challenge" starring Ariel Lin, but for some reason it got shelved. I have all 22 volumes except for 2-4 from the library.

It is so ridiculous that you can't put holds on holds. What that means is that you often get things out of order, depending on when your turn comes up, or else you have to keep a separate list of what you want, rather than being able to conveniently use the library system to keep track of it. Which even then might be doable, except if you want things that are high in demand, because then it behooves you to get on the waiting list asap. If you did it one at a time, it could be months in between! I suspect this also delays people getting books, because as there's no late charges, people probably just keep the later books until they get the earlier ones, then read all at once. The good news is that I wrote to Sno-Isle about it, and the response was that they are going to institute the feature I want in the April timeframe. Yay!

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I saw this on rainpuddle13's LJ and had to share because it is so creepy and COOL! Zombie ants! For real! The fungus that kills the ants takes control of their tiny ant brains and guides them to the ideal location for the fungus's growth. Seriously awesome. I mean, human zombie stories are all so lame and pointless -- all they do is kill with no real purpose.

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I've had the AeroGarden for 1 week now, and 5/7 herbs have sprouted. It's even possible the other two herbs have sprouted as well, but they're in the back, the light's in the way, and I can't really tell. The thyme is ahead of schedule; I could see little sprouts at 4 days and it was supposed to take a minimum of 7 days. I think I'm going to try and take pictures every week to keep a visual record of the growth!

( First 2 pictures! )

So I mentioned in my last entry that I baked a whole chicken ... well, being that I am only one person, I had lots of it left. I considered a number of things to do with the leftovers, but finally decided on ... chicken enchiladas! It's the first time I've ever made them (much easier than I had imagined), but they came out great -- especially cool considering I ended up adapting several different recipes and making my own enchilada sauce. I also made Norwich sourdough, which came out really well, and I was thrilled about that too, because the first time I ever made it, it was a failure. Recipe for the enchiladas and photos of both here.

TV stuff:

I love Ugly Betty, but Betty herself is actually one of my least favorite characters on the show. Everyone else has endearing foibles, but Betty herself is often annoyingly righteous and cutesy. Even America Ferrera made this comment recently that bugged -- it was about Gossip Girl not being a positive show for young women, which from what I know of it, I wouldn't argue against. But you know, not every actress is lucky enough to land the kind of role she did, one in which she gets to advance her career while being on a successful show that spouts (mostly) positive messages at the same time. Such opportunities are fairly rare for actresses. And especially considering Blake Lively is her co-star in the Traveling Pants movies, I just thought it was kind of an uncool public comment to make, even if the criticism is merited. It could have been said far more diplomatically, with the onus of the blame placed on society and television and the lack of positive female characters in general, while acknowledging that working actresses have to work.

But speaking of -- I'm downloading S1 of Gossip Girl. It seems SO guilty pleasure. I can watch it when I OD on the sometimes overly sweet Ugly Betty stuff.

I also watched the pilot of Fringe on Hulu and ... color me unimpressed. It's WAY too like the X-Files without any of the things that made XF great (with the possible exception of Joshua Jackson). I find Anna Torv completely distracting, because she has absolutely the worst American accent that I've ever heard! Her acting seems fine, good even, but I can't get over the accent. As Jade says, if an American did a British or Australian or any other accent that poorly, they'd get eviscerated. Within the first scene or two of the pilot, I was Googling her to discover her nationality, and what a surprise it wasn't to find out she isn't American. Seriously, if they really wanted her in the role, they should have had the character be an American who grew up overseas or something. There isn't a single scene she's in where her accent is convincing and I can't not notice it!