Come On Baby Light My Fire

I got home early this afternoon. The sun was about to set. The air felt fresh but still a little chilly. It was one of those days in the Pacific Northwest: it was not warm enough to stay outside; It was nice enough that you didn't want to stay inside. Solution: sit outside around an open fire.

That was the plan. It should be an easy plan to execute. We have built a brick fire pit a few years ago. Next to the fire pit, a big pile of chopped logs from us falling the trees on the property  are neatly lined up painstakingly by me. They are an eyesore to the surrounding environment. We have offered the logs to our friends free of charge and some of our friends have expressed interest in taking them but none of them has acted. We figure we will have to burn them all this summer. It's just March. I know. But let's start a fire now.

I brought a long bench by the fire pit, preparing myself to a leisure afternoon around a warm fire into the night. Richard stacked a few logs in the middle of the fire pit and tried to light them. No luck. Then he sprayed some lighter fluid on the logs and threw a match inside the fire pit. The logs caught a big fire instantly and went strong for a couple of minutes, and then the flames went out leaving only the smokes rising from the blackened logs. He took out some of the bigger logs and chopped them to smaller pieces, and added some more Cedar wood because Alderwood is harder to ignite. After rearranging the stack, he tried lighting, aided by lighter fluid. All ended with the same result. "What happened?" I was just asking, not questioning. "I know my shit. I have done this a thousand times". He said. I know my math: many = 0; 100 = 10; So do the match. 1000 times is equalevant to, say 100 times. That's a lot even after the deductable. "Have you?" He asked (questioned). "Many times. I invented fire" I replied. I know my math as well as my history (I = We: Chinese).

We finally decided it was either because the logs were too wet, or there was too much moisture in the early spring air, there was no chance we could light a fire in this damn fire pit this afternoon.

We transitioned into the house. While settling tonight on the comfy sofa inside the house, I relived the short-lived flame in my mind, feeling the heat over my cheeks and ears against the cool air, watching the fire burning until the dying embers catching up with the stars in the starry night, and listening to the sound of the fire crackling, mixed with the coyotes' howling in the distance.

Nose knows...It's Spring!

Washington State had the mildest winter this year. We only got a few hours of snow for a couple of days the entire winter, during which time the snow flakes didn't even stack into any measurable snow. In early February, it started to look like spring, which is very unusual. Now, spring is showing its signs of full arrival: spring bulbs blooming into flowers, new shoots growing out of the trees, green grass breaking from the ground, and humming birds slapping their wings around their feeders...It's official: Spring is here!

Nose knows it too. My nose gets itchy, stuffy and running as we enter into March. Washington is the evergreen state. The thick evergreen landscape and the blooming floras bring up heavy pollens in spring. I'm so blessed in spring than in any other season. "Bless you" comes in double, triple and multiple every time I step outside.

So do eyes. They know it too. My eyes get dry, itchy and red. Forget about eye makeup in spring. The second I finish putting on wet mascara, I sneeze. They always happen in perfect sync. The mirror reflects a new eye shadow effect that resembles a pair of panda eyes. I hope one day a fashion forward designer should integret that effect into spring eye makeup fashion. Since I can not single-handedly start a new fashion trend, I have to face the world with my bare eyes. The only eye makeup kit I need in spring is eye drops. Burn ban is not in effect yet but be prepared to switch your song from "Smoke gets in your eyes" to "Pollen gets in your eyes" on every outdoor attempt. Gazing upon the flowers, I "cry me a river". Why so sad? You ask. Coz I'm so in touch with the nature. Eyes can't lie.

My mom in China told me some trivia about sneezing one time. She says at the moment when you sneeze, your heart actually stops beating. She also says the violent act of head shakes from frequent sneezing affects memory. No wonder I'm getting forgetful. It's a relief to know my short memory is caused by my sneezing, not by Alzheimer’s disease or mad cow disease as I suspected. My mom is not a doctor but she reads a lot of magazines and papers in her post-teaching retirement in China. I usually dismiss her source of information as being Chinese folklore. However, I believe she might be right about sneezing. I even want to add to that trivia: sneezing can cause deaf. My sneezing produces the sound of ear-shattering thunder which can rupture the eardrum and result in hearing loss. If I missed your phone calls, it was because either I was busy sneezing or I didn't hear the phone rings. God's truth.

Can't smell; can’t see; can't hear; and can’t remember. Spring, as a season of new life, turns me into seasonal disability. When I finally seek treatment in hospital, the doctors tell me: There is nothing wrong with you. It’s just spring fever. The symptoms come with spring season for some people. Funny I also came with spring - I was born in spring. On one spring day in old China, I broke out of my mother's womb. I smelt, saw, heard,  and remembered (ok "remembered" is a stretch. Who knows, maybe subconsciously I remembered being slapped on the bottom at birth and that's why I have had an urge to strike back with sneezing every Spring ever since).

There is no need  to check a calendar. I can tell Spring is here. My nose knows. I just love Spring - a season that I can feel with all my senses. Yeah, I have the Spring fever.

Shrimp Spaghetti

Many times I found myself standing in the middle of a grocery store, confused. I didn't know what to buy but I just knew my refrigerator was empty. Many times I pushed my empty shopping cart aisle after aisle in Costco, followed by some shoppers with their empty carts. I needed to wear that T-Shirt with the print on the back that says "Don't follow me. I'm lost too" in Costco. Then other times I found myself staring at my packed refrigerator, wondering "what's for dinner". "What's for dinner?" I knew that was the question but the question was what was the answer.

In an effort to avoid such confusion in the future, I thought about putting together a home cooking recipe book - my kitchen Bible that contains all the food recipes I've tried and loved. So next time when I need inspiration in the kitchen, I can resort to that Bible to take me out of Egypt. Eventually, I need to have a separate site for my food recipes.

Here is a dish I have cooked many times before. Each time I changed the ingredients a little bit depending on what I had to work with at the time. They all turned out delicious. How could you go wrong with spaghettis as long as you don't use the usual red tomato sauce? No offense if you are a ketchup person. Ha-ha. I just like white sauce in my spaghettis. That attached photo was taken from the dish I made yesterday.

Ingredients:
- 1 lb thin spaghettis
- 1 pound raw headless shrimp. Skin off
- 3 teaspoon olive oil
- 1/8 tablespoon butter
- 1 tablespoon half and half milk
- 1 tablespoon white wine
- Four cloves of garlic, chopped
- One green pepper, chopped
- 4-6 mushrooms, sliced
- 3 green onion
- Cilantro
- 5-6 Sichuan pepper (prickly ash), optional
- Grounded black pepper
- Salt

Directions:
- Heat 1 teaspoon olive oil in a pan. Add chopped garlic and green pepper, stir until carmelized
- Add Sichuan pepper (optional). Add shrimp. Cook until shrimp turns color
- Add sliced mushroom.
- Add green onion and cilantro
- Put all the cooked shrimp mixture in a bowl

- Meanwhile, in a separate cooker, boil water to boil and add thin spaghetti.
- Cooked spaghetti to almost soft (about 10 minutes) in medium heat. Dump the cooked spaghetti in a drainer in the sink. Spray with cold water. Let it drain.
- In the empty pan you used to cook the shrimp, heat 2 teaspoon olive oil and butter, half/half milk and white wine under medium heat until simmering.
- Add the drained cooked thin spaghetti and mix well
- Add salt to taste
- Take them out to your serving plate
- Spread the cooked shrimp mixture on top of the spaghettis. Spread some grounded black pepper before serving.

The meal serves 4 if it's in a restaurant. At home it serves two.

How to Decorate Easter Eggs at Home

Easter is almost here. It's decoration time! There are so many ways to decorate Easter eggs at home. If you want to paint on edible eggs, you'd better use food colorings. Otherwise any types of paint will do. Below are the photos of some of the Easter eggs I made last Easter. I will show you how. Read on.

What You Need:

- A dozen fresh chicken eggs in an egg container 

- Water color paint

- Thin ribbons (easier with hard ribbons)

- A pair of small scissors

- A hair blower

Step by Step Instructions:

- Poke two tiny holes on the two opposite tips of each egg shell using one scissor blade.

- Blow air through one end of the egg using your mouth and allow the egg contents to flow out the other end.

- Let the emptied egg shell sit in the egg container to dry for at least 2-3 hours. It's very important to make sure no drips coming from the holes before you start to paint. Otherwise it will mess up your painting. 

- Paint the egg shell according to the design of your desire. Some simple strap colors as a starter, or paint names on them. You can always use stenciles/stickers for cleaner and better results. They are not permanent artwork you'll have to hang in your living room all season long, or to be featured on a Martha Stewart's magazine cover. So they does not have to perfect. Just make them colorful and have fun with your hands.

- Air blow dry the painted egg. Place it back in the egg container. Let it air dry.

- If you want to add the hanging ribbons to the eggs, you will need to push the ribbon through the holes from one end to the other. Tie a cross at one end. Pull the ribbon straight and then tie the other end.

Remember the decorated Easter eggs are fragile. I find the best place to store them are the same egg container I got the eggs from.

The Secret - Law of Attraction

One of my friends lent me the "The Secret" DVD the other day. Prior to watching the DVD, I was just instantly drawn to the icon image as shown on the left when I first saw it. As it turned out, my visual attraction led to the learning of the "Law of Attraction", a school of thought started from the book "Secret" written by an Australian television writer and producer Rhonda Bryne in 2006.

 I still would like to read the book soon.  So far, the video clips have resonated with me in the following aspects:

- Thoughts are energies. Energy attracts like energy. 

- Every thought has a frequency. Thought becomes things. What you think about, you bring about.

- Everything coming to your life, you are attracted to it.
- What you resist persists. Always think what you want, not what you don't want.
- Feeling is the feedback mechanism for your thoughts.

As with every school of thought, "The Secret" has its merits. At the very least, it promotes positive thinking. However, "The Secret" suggests that the infinite and resourceful universe do not fail to deliver what we want. We need not to be concerned about how it's done. Our only job is to think what we want and visualize our thoughts. I'm not convinced that thoughts alone will bring in results, as suggested by "The Secret". Maybe it's more of a chain reaction: Positive thinking triggers the attention in that direction, then further triggers the positive action, and finally the positive results. This positive chain reaction echoes three of the Buddhism's Noble Eightfold path: Right View; Right Action; and Right Livelihood. So "The Secret" is really not a new revelation since Buddhism is dated back to 6th century BC. Even in Buddhism, it calls for right action. That's more like it.

I don't know whether there is such a thing as "The Secret" from the universe (for the lack of better words, let's call it universe). If there is, I have a hunch it has to be revealed to me directly, not through a third party, such as the author and the publishers of "The Secret", who made a fortune out of the people who have believed in "The Secret".

Mango Chicken Salad

If you are a meat-minded person like me, you need an entree (usually a warm cooked dish that contains some kind of meat ingredients) besides salad to call it a real meal. Salad is a side course in your dictionary. Even after you pig yourself out with their all-you-can-eat salad in an Olive Garden, you walk out the restaurant stuffed but unsatisfied. Your taste buds for meat are insatiable and they can not be fooled.

Remember a few times when you ate out with your friends, after the waitress took your order, you overheard your friends ordering their vegetable salad. When their dishes were brought over to the table (For some reason, their food was always served before yours.), they poked their forks on the platefull of vegetables, making that crunching sound, a sign that they were really digging their meal. You wondered what in the world could make their salad more tastier than the steak you were about to receive. At the mouth level, you had no doubt you had made the right choice. At the head level, you were not quite sure, doubting whether you should have ordered a green salad like everyone else. You made a mental note that next time you would try salad instead of meat. You told yourself that you'd better start a healthy diet and also start exercising soon. Just before you were about to mentally denounce meat, the waitress brought out your sizzling hot steak order. Yeah. Diet; Exercise. Die anyway. The ends justify the means. At home, I have a decorative ceramic plate on my kitchen counter that reads "Eat what you want. Let the food fight it out inside". If that's the case, my food will have a better fighting chance. In the food chain of command, their food was what my food ate.

However, this salad which recipe I'm about to disclose changed my above salad belief. As it turned out, I made the salad a full course dinner one evening, and afterwards I was settled for the remainder of the night. I think part of the reason is that this salad dish does contain meat. After all, my integrity as a meat-eater is still preserved. The recipe for this salad is truly my creation because I just mixed and matched what was left over in my refrigerator one day. The odds that someone else has the same leftover in his/her refrigerator is almost zero. Of course, I'm aware that nothing can escape the internet scrutiny nowadays. Anything you've ever said or done, someone has perhaps said or done it before you, online. Without further adieu, here is the recipe:

Ingredients:

- Chicken thigh (1 thigh)

- Luttuce (1/4 of a whole luttuce). Cut into smaller pieces

- Sweat Onion (a few slices). Cut into thin slices

- Avocado (ripped, one). Smash it

- Mushroom (5 or 6). Slice it

- Cherry Belle (5-6 of them. It's a small round radish with red skin and white meat). Slice them

- Broccoli (3-4 heads)

- Mango (one). Cut to cubes or slices

Ingredients for Salad Dressing:

- Soy sauce (1 tablespoon)

- Apple Cider Vinegar (1 teaspoon)

- Honey (1 teaspoon)

- Sesame Oil (2 teaspoon)

- Sesame seeds (1/2 teaspoon)

Instructions:

- Chop the chicken thigh to cubes

- Pan fry the chicken cubes with a few drops of olive oil until golden brown

- In a separate large blow, Mix all the vegetable ingredients

- Pull salad dress in the vegetable mixture and mix well

- Add mango and cooked chicken cubes

Blogging on Blogging

I don’t know who invented this word blog. I googled the origin of blog everywhere including Wikipedia, all to no avail. One site suggests that the word blog takes from weblog: we(blog). However, I like to believe the word blog comes from blah log: (bl)ah+l(og). It's only fitting if that's how the word blog came into being.

Just as all the movies have ratings and some TV shows such as "24" and "No Reservations" have the "Viewer's discretion is required" warnings, here are some disclaimers about my blah logs - blogs:

- It's typing not writing. I don't have a typing certificate to prove it but I type relatively fast. My typing skills might have deteriorated over the years but even at the lowered speed (probably instead of 70 wpm, it's in the 50 wpm range), it's impossible to multi-task to include thinking. So I give away thinking to typing when I blog.

- "It’s not you. It’s me" – My blogs are for my own personal indulgings only. They represent partly my own opinions or thought flows at the time when I type, which may or may not evolve over time. Therefore, I can not solemnly swear I'm telling the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. I'm not interested in, nor qualified for taking upon the role of informing, inspiring, or educating you as the readers. If you dislike or disagree with anything I say in my blogs, remember I'm not blogging to you. It's me, myself and I that I blog to.

- I am not serious with blogs. I can not make myself serious, seriously. I am easily amused, even at the occasions where I'm not supposed to. That's why I've been afraid of attending funeral ceremonies since I was a child. Laughing was indeed an improper behavior at occasions like that but serious people do amuse me. I concluded that all my sufferings all boil down to the moments when I forget NOT to be too serious.

- Blah unlimited. I'm glad that blog is in the forum of unlimited monologue. Twitter is a form of monologue but it has a 140 character limit. Facebook also has the character limit. I don't think blogger sites have a length limit for a blog post. So far none of my blogs have been bumped unfinished in spite of the length. I have heard the saying "Brevity is the soul of wit". But for someone who is not aiming high for the soul or the wit, length is all I've got and length does its work for me. Lengthy blogging takes the same therapeutic cure as seeing a shrink. Blogging is a self therapy, a much cheaper (free is cheap enough) means of releasing dung. Hopefully, with length, depth will come.

- It's not a popularity contest. With Twitter, you are a loner suspect if you follow 1000 people but only 100 of them follow you back. With Facebook, besides being a loner suspect if you only have fewer than 1000 friends, you also run into a loser suspect if no one interacts with your newsfeeds by commenting or liking back.Blogging does not make you feel like a loner or a loser if there are no followers, no comments, or no viewers. Even if it's just for the people, by the people and of the people, the people in this case is just me, from me, to me, and for me. Finally, I have a place to save grace, thanks to blogging.

Book Review: Possum Living - Live Well Without Job and Money

I grabbed the book titled "Possum Living" over a cup of coffee at the Barnes and Nobles, one of my best pastimes on a Sunday afternoon. The book title immeidately attracted my attention. Did I just name possum one of the annoying animals in my last blog? They sneek around my yard sometimes, leaving their dog-like dungs. Yike. What is possum living?

The author of Possum Living is an 18-year old girl who lived off the land with her father on their half an acre. They managed to spend about $1700 a year in the 70's. She argues in the book that even the most stupid and laziest animals like possum can live off the land, why can't us humans. "The Gods gave man an easy life, but man has complicated it by itching for luxury", says she.

For a lot of us, our well-being is at the mercy of fluctuations of the economy. This living off the land notion, especially in this economy, is very appealing. No more taxes and insurance. Layoff? No, you are fired first! Republicans or Democrats? Who gives a rat's ass! You build your own house from scratch using the resources off the land (that's to say no electrical, plumbing or inspection required for this type of primitive house). You grow your own vegetables, and go fishing and hunting. Of course there are still some essentials such as toilet paper or tooth paste you will need to buy from stores, but you'll have to do so very frugally. In return you live free and independant from the money economy. Shall we say greener too? It's not an utopia. I guess some people are really living like that. In my past real estate dealings, I have run into a couple of the buyers who asked me to find them a cheap remote rural parcel of land. They didn't care about whether the land had improvements or not because they didn't need power and septic to live. One of them showed me a book on how to identify edible berries, claiming he could live off the land. This kind of off-the grid self-sufficient possum living is eaiser than you think. It's for you if you are a combination of the following people:

- do not want to work as a work stiff in the 9-5 rat race
- do not want to accept charity/welfare/foodstamps
- do not have interest in joining a hippie communue
- do not intend to pioneer into the boondocks
- do not want to committ crime
- do not want to wheel and deal in business

Yes, I can identify myself to be one of  those "do not" groups. The book was an interesting read until I moved on to the step-by-step possum living instruction pages half way through.  The advice started to get on my nerves. The "Living Well" (so she thought) means reading her account books for evening entertainment since TV, car and vacation are out of the question. Ouch! That hurts. They won't work for me and most of the people who are flipping the pages of this book because of the promised title. Possum are really just giant rats. Even for all the "do not" people, we'd choose living with mortgage and marraige over living like a rat any day. I think the correct title for the book should be "Rat Living". Somehow I suspect if that book was titled as "Rat Living" instead of "Possum Living", it would have had a hard time hitting the bookshelf or ever becoming a hit.