Meal in the City: Top 5 Gamer Grub

Got tagged today in a question of great and crucial import by my good friend Joel Tan over yonder at MMOtaku:

Let’s talk about what you, massively multiplayer online games fanatic, like to munch on while playing your favorite titles? Liquids count, too.

So I've decided to make my answer into a bit of a Meal in the City post. Of course, clicking on the actual MitC tag will bring up lots of things that I've eaten at the computer, but let's go and answer the question right.

So, in no particular order:

1. Dinner, usually rice and whatever I felt like buying or making. Sometimes, dinner is as easy as opening a can of tuna or sardines or corned beef. It might be more complicated, like a fried egg, some quickly-made instant noodles, or, for a change, bread instead of rice and any of the aforementioned accompaniments.

Sometimes dinner comes from the neighborhood mom-n-pop kitchen; sometimes we make a massive nice meal at home and spend the rest of the day eating leftovers. Either way, YUM.

2. Cheetos.

I know, I know, junk food BAD. True that I can eat a whole big bag in one sitting, but it's not like I eat this stuff on a daily or even weekly basis. Once in two weeks feels over-indulgent already.

3. Chocolate, the darker the better. I have a particular fondness for Meiji's Black Chocolate and for those Hershey's dark-choc-with-almonds concoctions.

4. Cereals or oatmeal.

While I quite love oatmeal, I also am partial to a bowl of good old Kellogg's Corn Flakes, or, something I could eat for three meals in a day straight, Post's Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds.

5. Lipton Milk Tea.

My favorite drink. End of discussion.

Hmm, it's early on a Sunday morning...time to make breakfast. :D Cheers to Joel and I'm looking forward to reading the answers of all the others he tagged for this meme.

The Scarf Project 02: His-and-Hers Scarves: COMPLETE!

Previous posts:
The Scarf Project 02: His-and-Hers Scarves, His Version
The Scarf Project 02: His-and-Hers Scarves, Her Version + Prepping for Future Projects

Right, all done:

Completed "His" scarf, for my brother.

Completed "Hers" scarf, for my brother's girlfriend.

As a shocked aside, I guess I should be proud of myself. Each of the two scarves is about 70-something inches long: "His" is 75 inches; "Hers" is 72 inches.

Let me repeat that in another set of terms: each of those scarves is SIX. FEET. LONG.

OMGWTFBBQ.

Julia Child's Life in France

Yeah, I know, this post lacks a photo of me reading this book while getting ready to sleep, but you should know that this is what I read when I'm trying to ease out of the working day:


My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme.

If you saw the recent film Julie and Julia then you will remember that the movie was based on Julie Powell's memoir and Julia Child's books Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volumes 1 and 2, some portions of The French Chef Cookbook, and this memoir of her life-long love affair with la belle France.

My Life in France *talks* extensively about food and the process of making the monumental Mastering cookbooks, but it is definitely NOT a cookbook itself. Julia here tells the story of how she and her husband Paul Child lived in various places in the US and in Europe, including details of their long French sojourns. They lived in Paris and in Marseilles, and also were posted to places like Germany and Norway, so they definitely had a lot of cosmopolitan European experiences.

Small Projects: Sakura no Hana Saku (Sakura Blooming)

In between the long sessions of creating His and Hers scarves I've been spending my down time trying to create a good facsimile of a cherry blossom, or sakura, in crochet.

I took the base pattern from here, and have found that Marte's pattern works really rather well and very quickly. However, I couldn't resist tinkering with the steps to completing the project. Notes so far:

- I haven't yet mastered the magic adjustable ring, so I instead start with a foundation chain, 12 stitches long. I join it into a ring with a slip stitch to the first chain, then go on to make rounds one and two as normal.

- Pointy petal variation was accomplished by modifying round three as follows; see instructions in boldface: Chain 1, sc in same stitch. *skip 1 stitch, [3 dc, 1 tr, 3 dc] in next stitch, skip 1 stitch, sc in next stitch* repeat between * 4 more times, 5 petals total. Join to first sc, weave in ends.

- First sakura variation was accomplished by modifying round three as follows; see instructions in boldface: Chain 1, sc in same stitch. *skip 1 stitch, [2 dc, 1 tr, 1 hdc, 1 tr, 2 dc] in next stitch, skip 1 stitch, sc in next stitch* repeat between * 4 more times, 5 petals total. Join to first sc, weave in ends.


Here is a close-up of that first sakura variation. I'm not sure if the notch in the middle of each petal can be easily seen, though, so I'm thinking of doing another variation later, when I get home. Maybe I'll modify the 7 dc petal into [1 dc, 1 tr, 1 dc, 1 hdc, 1 dc, 1 tr, 1 dc] or something. Tried that, didn't work.


I sewed the first sakura variation onto a length of black ribbon and am wearing it today as a choker. See?



Whew, crochet is fun! Also, I never thought I'd be a designer of patterns myself, but the scarves and the upcoming projects might disagree with me.... :D

Meal in the City / Quick Photo Post 4: Fried Rice Zombie-Style and Scarf Project 02

Last night I proposed to do a clean sweep of the refrigerator's contents - and there were a few, since we had gone on a small cooking binge last week. Chicken thigh fillet, pork chop, kimchi from the last Mashitta visit. So I made a large batch of fried rice to eat early this morning.

Why "zombie-style"? Because I brought the leftovers back to life. Yummy.

Added to the rice and meat were a garnish of eggs and a can of good local corned beef. We finished off the kimchi, too. Good meal. Have to do stuff like this more often. Yes, I know the pictures don't do it justice.

Here I am modeling the black scarf that was my first completed crochet project. Yep, it's the boyfriend's, and yep, that's him taking this photo and the next.

And here I am with the completed "His" scarf. This means I'm halfway through the project. I'm now working hard on the "Hers" scarf. You can tell I learned my lesson between one scarf and another; I'm better at estimating how long or large a project is and am now buying yarn accordingly.

The Scarf Project 02: His-and-Hers Scarves, Her Version + Prepping for Future Projects

Companion post to The Scarf Project 02: His-and-Hers Scarves, His Version.

The next crochet project I'm tackling is both very easy and very challenging at the same time. I'm making a set of his-and-hers scarves, the intended recipients being my younger brother and his girlfriend. As they'll be visiting from Singapore in late March to help celebrate our youngest sister's graduation from high school and entry into a top-flight cooking school, I'm making these as "welcome home" gifts.

Here is the scarf for my brother's girlfriend in progress. It's 15 stitches wide and is also intended to end up at 80 inches long.


This scarf is in a green-on-green tweed, using a heavy worsted-weight yarn in dark forest green and a light lace-weight one in green-and-gray heather. The challenge is as usual: to tension correctly enough for both types of yarn.


Playing around with a decorative insert led me to making two rows of a really tall stitch, called triple triple crochet. Each insert will be ten rows in from the ends of the scarf, so I'll do a second band.

Future projects below the jump.

Meal in the City: "Meatball Siopao and Cold Milk Tea" from Chowking, Tomas Morato

There are cravings, and then there are cravings.

In this recent case, I'd found myself in dire want of some good old-fashioned 燒包, or siopao. That's what we Filipinos call 包子, or baozi, those wonderful steamed filled buns that they have so many variations on both in China and here.

So when I found myself early at work this week, I decided I'd better nip over to a Chinese fast-food place and pick up something to satisfy my siopao need.


The fast-food place is called Chowking and it's damn popular in my country. My breakfast consists of a meatball-filled siopao and a regular serve of cold milk tea with ice and tea jelly cubes, something that Chowking calls "nai cha".

Around these parts the most popular type of siopao is still the one with "asado" in it, or what Chinese folk might call 叉烧包, char siu bao. But I'm one of those other people who vastly prefer meatball siopao, partly because the meat is a pretty neat single entity that won't flake out or spill from the bun, and partly because Chowking's version is so nice (containing both Chinese sausage and part of a salted egg).

And of course, there's me and my absolute love for milk tea. I like the Chowking version but wish that sometimes they didn't put too much ice in it. I love the tea jelly bits in the bottom, though.

The idea of this being a "breakfast of champions" gains some sort of heavenly/legendary humor when I read that it was none other than Zhuge Liang himself who invented these things.

IT'S A SIGN! *trumpets*

Most of the time, Fandom Secrets can be just plain infuriating.

Some days it is uplifting and inspirational.

And some days it actually has something to do with my main fandom at present, the Takarazuka Kagekidan.

Today, however, it contains within a sign of craftiness and nerdiness and the beauty that happens when these two things come together.


From today's secret post. Here are the comments.

Yes, I will make at least one of those, and quite possibly two. It will have to be in crochet because I can't knit to save my life, but at least there is this: crochet instructions halfway down the page.

Look out, world.

The Scarf Project 02: His-and-Hers Scarves, His Version

The next crochet project I'm tackling is both very easy and very challenging at the same time. I'm making a set of his-and-hers scarves, the intended recipients being my younger brother and his girlfriend. As they'll be visiting from Singapore in late March to help celebrate our youngest sister's graduation from high school and entry into a top-flight cooking school, I'm making these as "welcome home" gifts.

What makes this first of two scarves, the one for my brother, easy? Well, there's only one stitch involved, the double crochet, so it's really more of "no-brainer pattern is a no-brainer".

The scarf is 17 stitches across, for a total of about 5.5 inches; and its intended length is 80 inches.

And right there in the picture is the reason - or rather, reasons - why this is a challenging pattern. I'm using two yarns at once: a heavy gray worsted one and a thin teal-blue lace one. You can see how the pattern lies mainly in the interaction of the two colors:

This close-up also shows a few of the stitch markers that I bought recently; I'm using them in this project to mark off every time I complete ten rows.

I took the third photo in macro mode to show how the two yarns look when worked consistently in double crochet to make a scarf.

The other reason why I'm making my brother's scarf first is because I'm also using it as a gauge/dry run for his girlfriend's version, hence the use of the stitch markers. Since I'm going to do decorative stitch inserts in her scarf, I'll use his as a way of figuring out where and how to place the inserted rows.

I'm making rather rapid progress on my brother's scarf and well I should, the "pattern" being hysterically easy and all. It's just that I have to adjust the yarns every now and then so they go attractively together, and that takes a few seconds every time I make the adjustments. Still, this is very therapeutic work and it makes me feel good to know that my hands are adjusting gradually to this very manual craft.

Onward, then.

Mizu Natsuki announces retirement.

Photo credit

Official Press Release from the Takarazuka Kagekidan

I thought this would happen - but I was hoping that it would not....

Well, there she goes. The speculation had been going around in both the Japanese and Western fandoms for a while, but now it's been made official: Mizu Natsuki, the current otokoyaku (male-role actress) Top Star of the Takarazuka Kagekidan's Yukigumi (Snow Troupe), is retiring on the 15th of September this year.

This news comes one month after her "second man", the otokoyaku Ayabuki Mao, announced *her* retirement for the 25th of April.

I hope that after their retirements Mizu and Ayabuki go on to fulfilling careers or to whatever it is they want to do after the Kagekidan - maybe Mizu could do a J-Rock kind of album, and Ayabuki go full-time into photography?

*goes off to listen to 水夏希「Ｒｕｎ」 on repeat*

Hyperbolic (Hypergirly) Scrunchies, Version 01: COMPLETE!

Well, I seem to be accumulating my crochet skills at a turtle's pace, but it IS satisfying indeed to complete a six-piece project in only three or four days' work. The previous post contains the pattern for these little beauties, Cayenne Boyer's Hyperbolic Scrunchie.

I just modified the pattern for use with these ponytail holders: the colored ones are actually only rounds 1-3 of the pattern; the black ones only rounds 1-2. I realized as I was making the first scrunchie that following the entire pattern would result in something rather large, considering the weight of the yarn I was working in, so I had to cut down a bit.

My sister seemed happy enough when I presented them to her yesterday as a you're-graduating-soon-congratulations gift; I do hope she finds an occasion to use them all, whether as ponytail holders or as bracelets or...or something. :D

I'm going to try to make a pair of his-and-hers scarves next and then I shall tackle THIS: Jayne Cobb's Hat!



A man walks down the street in that hat, people know he's not afraid of anything.

Scrunchies and a meditation on crochet-based geometry

[Warning, this post contains mathematics. :D]

My sister is going to be graduating from high school in March, and will hopefully be going on to cooking school after that. Since both her school uniform and her love for cooking require her to keep her longish hair under control, I'm making her a series of gifts that will see much use in the days to come: scrunchies, and quite possibly a headband or two.

In particular, there are these: a set of six hyperbolic scrunchies - three in her favorite colors, three more in black. [I SAID there was math involved, didn't I?]




These photos show two of the three colored scrunchies; I'm making the violet one later, and then the black ones. The pattern is based on Cayenne Boyer's Hyperbolic Scrunchie; I've modified the pattern by taking out the fourth and final round. [Pattern remains © Cayenne Boyer.]

The scrunchies take the form of a hyperbolic plane [see Wikipedia entry on hyperbolic geometry here]. For some reason, the craft of crochet has been used, in particular by the Institute for Figuring, as a way of visualizing this non-Euclidean form of geometry; they're the folks behind the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, based on the techniques of hyperbolic crochet created by the mathematician Daina Taimina.

In crochet terms, it actually comes down to a definite pattern of increases in a piece made in the round, causing the edges to ruffle up.

I don't claim to understand the math behind the scrunchies I'm making, but it makes for a fascinating crafting experience.

I hope my sister enjoys using these.

"Richard's big chopper" and my life's adventure

While browsing the good ol' social networking sites yesterday I was pointed to a link on the Top Gear website. Apparently, Richard Hammond [a/k/a/ Hamster] has been learning how to fly a helicopter. Here's the link to the column:

Richard's big chopper

And here's my favorite paragraph from the column:

[Flying a helicopter is] by far the most complicated thing I've ever tried to get the hang of - I'm still pretty useless at it - it's deeply, deeply frustrating, gives me a hideous headache and I am hopelessly addicted to it.

A lovely autographed photo of Richard Hammond, from http://www.music4.com.

After reading the column, I thought about it for a bit and then wrote a note to myself on my work computer:

flying a chopper is like speaking a new language is like taking up a craft: it doesn't work if you're not all there and paying all the attention in the world - but when you get good at it, well, you actually CAN let your attention wander (just a teeny bit....) :D


Picture taken from http://www.knittersaddiction.com/_blog/The_Crochet_Chain.

Yes, the time it takes for me to get started, keep going, and soldier on to the end in writing and crochet both can sometimes leave me very frustrated. I've been writing for a long time and it completely ticks me off when I get writer's block; in parallel fashion, I get angry when my newbie hands refuse to make one more double crochet because they're cramping like fury, or hold the hook wrong and thus force me to work very hard on getting a single chain stitch done.

Still, I share Hamster's sentiments: I am addicted. These are the things I will still like doing even on the days when I'm so angry with what I'm doing that I'd rather bang my head against a brick wall rather than make another stitch or write another paragraph.

It IS an adventure. I'm still having fun. And I'll keep going.

The Scarf Project 01: COMPLETE!

Previous posts:
Starting on the scarf
Halfway through the scarf


And now my first crocheted scarf ever is DONE!

I finished my first scarf last night! I'd been working on it during the downtimes at the office for the past couple of days or so. Last night I measured the scarf out of curiosity - and when the tape measure said "51 inches", I GASPED and decided I'd do the last few inches right there and then!


I finished the scarf at around 10:30 in the evening last night, almost exactly one week from its starting date (30 December 2009).

Instructions after the break!

Meal in the City: Variety Meats on Sticks at Mang Larry's, UP-Diliman

[Variety meats?]

In the previous blog entry I mentioned going out to UP-Diliman to spend a Sunday afternoon with my boyfriend. As we were packing up to leave, we decided we'd eat dinner before heading home, and started thinking of suggestions.

And then we remembered that we were in UP, and night was falling. Time to see if a certain favorite, much-loved, and well-visited grill cart was on campus.


Okay, here's the drill. If you study at UP-Diliman/Ateneo de Manila/Miriam/Kostka, you will hear the name "Mang Larry's" bandied about by hungry, happy students. He owns this sort of grill cart thing, which he sets up in the late afternoon near the UP-Diliman post office. The charcoal-fired grill is where he and his assistants cook all sorts of chicken and pork innards and organs skewered on sticks. And he's there, on campus, most days - as he was on that Sunday night, on the last day of holidays.

People come from all over - and I mean all the way from places like Manila and Pasig and San Juan - just for his variety meats on sticks. The space where Mang Larry sets up shop often tends to become a parking lot for all sorts of cars, some with very respectable marques. And in the darkness you see all sorts of people in groups, happily chatting and downing sodas and iced tea, and breathing in the savory smoke that wafts off the always-full grill.

Mang Larry's been doing his grilling thing for more than ten years now and he's practically an institution in UP-Diliman, and he's done very well for himself out of it.


The menu at Mang Larry's always includes pork barbecue, the cleaned-up small intestines of pork [chitterlings] and chicken [we call 'em "isaw manok"], chicken gizzards and livers, pork tripe, and other assorted innards. Everyone loves the isaw manok, Mang larry's best-seller, though I'm more partial to the chitterlings my own self.


Quick close-up on the tripe, which we call "goto" regardless of whether it came from a cow or from a pig.

They say that one is not a student of UP if one does not know of or eat at Mang Larry's.... I'm glad we managed to catch the cart on that Sunday night. I think we'll have to go back soon.

The Scarf Project 01: Halfway There

Previous post: Beginning my first crocheted scarf

I spent yesterday, the last day of my holiday vacation, with my boyfriend at UP-Diliman. It being the Sunday before everyone goes back to work, lots of other people were also taking advantage of the breezy weather to catch a last hurrah with their families. There were kids and dogs and people flying kites and a whole bunch of bikers. We sat in the Sunken Garden, watched the soccer and touch football players, took in the air, and talked, and all the while I was happily working on the scarf. Here's where I was when we packed up:


(Apologies for the grainy picture quality; this was taken with the dinky 1.3MP camera on my mobile phone.)

And now, here is the result of three days of on-and-off work on the scarf. I have to say, it's VERY satisfying to have gotten this far already.


That, folks, is the scarf at the halfway mark (and change). The intended length is 60 inches, so I'm really getting there.

There was much celebration in the air before I went to sleep. Having all that progress to show - and I'm not even working full-time on the scarf - has really made me happy. Remember, this is my first project. And it makes me even happier that its intended recipient seems pleased with its looks.

I hope to finish the scarf within the next week, and present it proudly to the boyfriend to wear to...well, to the office, for going out, and for all occasions.

Next projects: a hat for me - preferably a beret, for which I am already shopping for patterns; probably one more scarf for my brother, and a pretty bag for his girlfriend. Oh, and the Jayne Cobb hat. Mustn't forget that!

Meal in the City / Quick Photo Post 3: Ringing in 2010

Here is the dinner that my boyfriend made to ring in 2010 with. Yes, it's a bit of a mashed-up thing, with lamb chops and new potatoes and bread and cheese and mushroom soup and...oh, lost of other tasty things.

We didn't quite manage to finish everything in just one meal - we'd have to be more prodigious in our stomach capacities - so I'm having fun "recycling" some of the leftovers. Just last night, for the first meal cooked in 2010, I chopped up the remaining lamb and made fried rice with them.

I'm looking forward to a year that could be better than 2009. Yes, I realize it's odd to hedge my bets, but after how turbulent last year was, I think this is the safe option for now.

Happy New Year, and let's all make the most of it! :D