5 Days Before Christmas

  1. The food train continues. But did you know that aside from its cholesterol content, fried chicken is not a bad food item if you’re watching your carbs?? This is what makes KFC special- because you only have it once a year.

  2. As I’m writing this - off to the airport in about two hours- I’m running a mental check of what I may have forgotten to pack. Mental note next time to ask for an additional checked bag. Another mental note to pare down (yes, two shoes will suffice if you’re just running around Binmaley lol).

  3. We had a pre-Christmas gift-opening just so we could have that satisfying feeling of being pleased at what a no-children lifestyle can allow you to afford lol. One of my friends who is an accountant (which says a lot about her pragmatism), complained about her kids’ Christmas wish-list. “Asking for so much, when I get really low returns,’ she said and I totally get it. Growing up, my mother always pointed out the effort and expense spent on our upbringing and it’s years later, as an adult, did I realise what that really meant. For me, it means an obligation to myself and to my parents to do better. Because when that works out well, it’s a win-win right?

21 Days Before Christmas

  1. I’ve just been busy the last two weeks that I didn’t notice that all I was eating was protein, which lately, is so easy when it’s everywhere. Protein wraps, protein water, protein canned soup and my favourite, protein-dense coconut yoghurt which has the consistency and flavour of really soft cheesecake, yum! And then one day, boom! You’re on the toilet doing a dump and you can feel it- your shit is as dense and heavy as a damned brick!

  2. So many treats popping up but at this point, I’ve gone far beyond the initial plateau, the constant, irksome cravings. It’s a feeling of triumph tinged with a bit of sadness to stroll through a Dutch deli on Black Friday and leave with NOTHING (pistachio stollen bites, tres leches stroopwafels and Gouda cheese half-price).

  3. Finished my test packing, and it came in at 14kgs, 16 kgs more stuff to possibly put in. Now how am I going to fill it up on my return? Clothes aren’t necessarily cheap in the Philippines (the good kind anyway) and there’s nothing I hate more than going to the mall during the holidays looking for stuff. Maybe I’ll get canned tuyo or bangus or something and tons of dried mangoes.

  4. We found a drowned wax-eye bird in the pail of water on the deck. I read somewhere that curing the browned tips of my indoor never never plants involved only watering them with distilled water. So we’ve placed a couple of buckets around the house to capture rain-water. Our hypothesis is that the wax-eye flew onto the glass sliding door, got knocked out and fell into the pail which sits just in front of the door. Poor bird. Don’t know which is a worse fate, drowning or being eaten by the cat.

(last working) weekend

I thought I was going to get sick. I had this scratchy, niggle in my throat and I’ve lived long enough to know what that meant, so I got ahead of it by buying over a hundred dollar’s worth of (anti-bacterial) lozenges, throat-drops, paracetamol drinks and immune-shots.

I was describing it to my colleague and I told her to picture the illness just outside your door trying to get in, but you’ve barricaded it. But it’s there, waiting, this heavy, slightly stifling and itchy presence inside your head, right behind your eyes and nose.

I think it was Sunday- pack-up day- when I woke up and it was gone. I looked under the door just to make sure and there was no shadow, just the glare of the bright Taupo sun as it reflected off the lake. But it left a parting gift; I felt a congestion in my throat and nose as if I had eaten marshmallows in my sleep but didn't manage to keep it down.

I tried to hawk it up and didn’t really care if people in the other rooms heard me (I was doing it in the privacy of my own room anyway), and after a few tries when I thought I was going to throw up, it was expelled, a golem of a phlegm, green and grim. Bye!

Separation anxiety

We had to go away for a couple of days so we had to leave Lily at a cattery. She had been there before with no issue, but we still requested daily reports on how she was doing.

Friday’s one was funny; we brought in her specialist food, but being in a space shared with other cats presented an opportunity. She was probably sick of her own food that she gently pushed the other cats away and sampled their meals.

When we picked her up Sunday, all the other cats came to the screen partition at the first sign of human visitors. But not Lily; she was sitting inside one of the hutches up until we called out her name and she let out this cry that broke my heart before running to where we were.

Mondays

  1. Did you know that a size 14 chicken only takes an hour and a half to cook in the oven?? So why not a roast chicken on a Monday? I usually do a whole clove of garlic mashed into olive oil flavoured with Old Bay seasoning, pepper and garlic-herb salt. Two hefty wedges of butter are inserted into each breast, just under the skin. I don’t normally do gravy, but since I’m having rice for this one, I’ve kept the juices and spiked it with a few lashings of Maggi seasoning.

  2. Ugh, the gym is starting to smell (uhm, from the people working out) because the temperature is a bit warmer.

  3. Spring is in full swing.

  4. Rice and chicken take-away meals at the supermarket! (we live a part of Auckland where the ethnicity is partial to rice).

The (working) Weekend

  1. Over-salted margarita glass

  2. HATE manual labour

  3. Do cleaners look at your stuff and judge you?

  4. Cambridge is a great town

  5. Indian without much of the omnipresent curry flavour is refreshing

This week

I must admit that I’ve always felt a little miffed when someone asks me how my weekend went because:

  1. Equally good stuff also happens on the weekdays

  2. A failure of imagination about how else to greet a co-worker

  3. I’m not really inclined to share how my weekend went (it has never, ever been my greeting on a Monday or Tuesday at work).

  4. I’ve never been curious as to how people spent their weekend.

But now, I’ve fallen into the habit lately of just highlighting my weekend (and sharing it to the world lol) because admittedly, we’ve been planning it a bit better which makes all the difference in feeling that not only have you accomplished something, but that you somehow triumphed over time itself and its ever fleeting nature (more so it seems when you’re absolutely doing nothing).

But I still wallow in not caring about time at all- I normally sleep past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, I wake up just before 9am, I take leisurely naps.

But weekdays are also a goldmine of pockets of time where you can move things along and not be stuck in the cycle of your 9 to 5 or 8 to 4:30 in my case. If you’re fortunate that you’re in charge of your own time, then get as much out of it as you can.

The Weekend

We’ve been a bit ‘remiss’ with our respective dieting regimens so we figured that ugh, before we went back to it again, we’ll have a great weekend eating anything we fancied which ended up more or less, actually still being healthy anyway.

  1. Cafe Koko is our go-to local for home-made Japanese food. Run by an actual Japanese couple whose relationship status we’re still trying to figure out as tactly as we could, the space looks like a typical Japanese neighbourhood eating place. You can’t fault the food for price, presentation or flavour.

  2. Restaurant Month 2025 has wrapped up (runs all through the month of August), and I won’t being doing another round of I could haves and should haves. But we did manage to get a good five-course meal on the last day at Hello Beasty; I dithered between their famous Prawn toast and sashimi, but I ended up picking the latter.

  3. There’s a shop called Martha’s Backyard that sells American food stuff and it’s funny how in a different lifetime, Cheerios, Hostess Twinkies, Lays, Kraft Mac N’ Cheese singles and Candy Corn were stuff you thought you’d be eating the rest of your life. I got a Butterfinger bar and a popular Chik-fil-A sauce which fulfilled its promise of being great on everything.

  4. Found a bag of glutinous rice flour after my pantry clean-up; so had to make mochi.

  5. Goodbye to winter, hello spring.

How are you?

I have an acquaintance who’s asked me regularly for years how I was- it was always, hey how are you? And for years, I replied every time with, I’m fine and just so busy. And that was that which is really so stupid if you think about how regular it is (once a month at least).

I could blame myself for reciprocating with such a lack of enthusiasm, but it was actually always the truth. I guess I could tell them of milestones or big events, but there are no such things in my life. I don’t have a family of my own for one thing, where a child’s achievement (or failure!) or a spouse’s adventure (or misadventure) could be passed off as my own doing. I could make things up- I’m good at this when I need to be - but elaborate fictions are probably better written down instead. I could say something about my day, how it’s almost always okay; how I look forward to dinner because it’s something I had planned for a week in advance; about how maybe I should try sleeping earlier, or reading a book instead of perusing what’s on offer on all the streaming channels as if I was on a night in town, hunting for a hook-up to waste two hours of my time on (and inevitably, predictably logging off because nothing caught my eye).

But that takes a lot of energy that I honestly, simply don’t want to spend. Sorry D, you could always read my blog you know.

But I am willing to spend energy for the precious few friends that I have, so…

  1. Yes Lei, I have been truly busy..

  2. With work (before end of financial year housekeeping stuff), and with pre-spring cleaning stuff. Had to sort the burgeoning pantry and found a) duplicates of condiments; b) unopened condiments more than two years old; c) strange condiments such as blue-berry and orange liqueur sauce and creme de menthe flavoured miso.

  3. Have you ever tried ‘tricking’ your body by having meals that you would normally have for breakfast or lunch as dinner, such as French toast and granola with plain Greek yoghurt? The trick there is that you feel less guilty because you had the naughty food earlier in the day and would have had a chance to burn it off.

  4. I have spent enough on glasses to buy a 2nd-hand shitty car.

  5. Apparently, there’s such a thing as sustainable cycling. There’s a local place run by cycling enthusiasts where you can bring your bicycle to get serviced, as well as sell it if you don’t have any use for it. The bikes are nothing fancy, but we could tell after testing them that they’ve been soundly fixed and have a few more good years left. As someone who’s had really good (read:$$$) bikes, I feel a bit ambivalent about hopping onto a $65 beauty. They also sell helmets for just $40 if you feel like cycling home with whatever bike caught your fancy. That’s just over $100 for the whole lot. In contrast, the sneakers I was wearing that day were over $400. So am I a bike snob?? Is it fair to equate its quality to its price?? Probably, but does it really matter when you’re just using it around the damned neighbourhood??

The Weekend

  1. We had to drive over 30kms to get to this food truck that sold pork-belly slices. It was great. It was deceptively hefty, well-seasoned and warm as if it had only come out of the deep-fryer minutes ago. I’m done trying to fry pork-belly. I’ve boiled it first, kept it in the fridge overnight, to disappointing results. And a pot full of oil ends up sitting on top of the stove until I eventually throw it out because I rarely deep fry anything.

  2. Made marmalade for the first time. The experience is akin to that of diving over a cliff, surviving it as you would, only to realise that you could have done it correctly, a hundred million ways. Well, FUCK THAT. It tastes great - I like the rind and the slight bitterness- and I will only ever try to eat it once or twice anyway because it has too much sugar (10 CUPS) and we rarely ever eat bread.

The Weekend

  1. Funny that we can stick with dodgy friends literally for life and yet totally disown something like white bread. Ruth’s up for a couple of days so the pantry and the fridge have been stocked up with her ‘essentials’ such as white (toast) bread, full-cream milk and spreadable butter; items we’ve put on the black-list because of a combination of second-hand information, possibly bogus ‘scientific evidence’ from social media and snobbery.

  2. I miss white bread. My go-to sandwiches are either a cucumber one with the crusts cut off, or toasted with mayo and a thick slice of cheese. Yum.

  3. When will we ever learn that lists don’t work at Costco.

  4. Wagyu beef ribs redux. I picked the wrong SKU- whole ribs- and there was no way I could cut them unless we had a band-saw or something. So they were seared on the George Foreman grill which worked quite well.

  5. Yes you can brulee a cheese-cake, recipe here