Saturday night. Have a taste for steak for a few days now. So off I go and picked bistro since I haven’t been there for a while and I always liked the place.
The place is bubbling with people and I picked a table by the lounge. It’s so busy the waitor took a while before he got my order. With podcast in my ear and some pop music playing in the background, I proceeded to have a nice dinner.
Maybe off to dance later.
Watched Easy Entertaining with Michael Chiarello and got a recipe for Spicy Martini. Basically Martini with a few drops of hot sauce. I tried it and can’t tell that it’s spicy but the alcohol provides an easy buzz.
s invited us to a bbq this sunday. T is coming home for a week and she asked for a bbq. So S gives one What we do for our kids. E texted and called tonight. It felt good to talk to her and get to know what’s happening in her life.
The conversation started when I asked why I don’t call those I love and ended up in a simi fight where I was questioned why I didn’t give more. Yeah, it’s just what I was asking for. A self search ended up in a finger pointing episode. Still don’t know when it’s going to unthaw.
So a loving person can point a finger and go into a deep freeze at minutes notice. And someone who you appreciate suddenly becomes a source of pain and irritation. So is there a true nice person and is there a true love that will never break and never cease?
Hey, if all fails, a good Martini will always give you a buzz no matter what.
Isn’t life a give and take story? There is no purely good person or possibly a pure bad person. It’s in the interaction between them that creates the label ‘good’ or ‘bad’. You label a person good because that person ‘give’ more for the preceptor at the time. You label a person ‘bad’ because that person ‘takes’ more for the preceptor during that time. So there is no absolute good and bad, it’s all subjective.
Now for each of us, we will give or take at a particular time when the circumstances dictate. We give more when our life gives us a smoother ride and enables us to be more generous and giving. We take more when we feel there is an entitlement because we have given or when we are lazy.
There is guilt when we take more there is anger when we give more. Is there a true giver that is never selfish and is there a true taker that feels no guilt?
I’ve picked up the Rona Shawl again lately. For a while it was not something that I enjoy knitting. The yarn I picked is too thin for the fingers to hold it comfortably. The pattern is complicated so you have to be on top of the pattern repeats for each row. And if I made a mistake, fixing lace is not my cup of tea. So that often gets frustrating. But in the past 20 rounds or so, I started to memorize the repeating pattern for each row and found that I actually could remember it and knitting became a bit easier. It has 153 rounds in total. So i’m getting close at round 124. Doesn’t seem that it is going to be a very big shawl but this is the first circular shawl I’ve ever made. So I have no idea how big it really will be.
Thinking about possible projects to bring for the trip. Although shawl is a good one to bring, I like to have one that doesn’t need much attention while I try to catch the next connecting flight and listening for the boarding announcement. I have a lot of my hand spun yarn in brown. Maybe I can find a pattern to take that with me for the trip. I don’t know if the Rona shawl will be finished or not by the time I leave for the tirp and whether that will be enough if I bring it to last the whole time.
And what do I load my iphone up with to listen to on the way? What presents to bring? Ahhhh, the dreaded trip….
Tried to call mom tonight but she was sleeping so I told the care taker that I’ll call again next week. It has not been the same since she moved into the nursing home. The intimacy is gone. The phone call is always a hassle of talking to strangers and waiting and trying again when the phone is not picked up. And the conversation has become a series of repeated subjects that have been said numerous times before and now being itereated again. It’s sad when you can’t really talk to your parents any more in any reasonable fashion and the calls to them is just a form of courtesy. I miss the vibrant person that she used to be who could initiate an international call on her own and just called me to talk and Dad was in the background yelling about things. His hearing was very bad already and it’s not possible to talk to him on the phone. He couldn’t hear me and needed mom to translate. But she was on top of things and we could carry on a conversation. All that is gone now.
I will be visiting her in two weeks. Got the airplane tickets, made the reservation for the hotel. And I dread it as I dread it every other time in the past few years. It’s not going ‘home’ any more. It’s a foreign place where I don’t have many ties and the relatives are not really related in any sense of the word. I go back and forth between the hotel and the nursing room spending a few hours a day with mom or go to one of those dinner parties for formality’s sake with those relatives. Although mom gets to see me, we don’t really connect any more. She is drifting more and more to her younger days. She tells stories of her past, of ghosts that she sees, of made up, imagined affairs. And I don’t have the heart to point out the impossibilities, so I sit there listening to her and making agreeing noises. Is this the road I will be on as I get older? Do my children need to put up with me when I slowly lose my sanity when I am old? It’s sad.
S and C came over for dinner. I made spinach and artichoke dip, corn salsa, jerk shrimp and a salad. She brought stuffed zukini and a cocktail mix. We talked, ate and drank. Topics changed to children and parents. S calls her mom every week. C talks to their daughter every day. In comparison, I talk to mom once every few weeks, and the same with ey. em lives close by but we seldom talk on the phone, sometimes a few text messages is all we manage to connect with. I must not have that connection gene in me to keep in touch with mom and the kids. I dread calling mom, I don’t want to disturb the kids’ life. So I don’t call them much. But they are on my mind a lot. I wish I know more about kids’ daily life but that is a thing for the past when they were young and living with me. Now they both have their own places and lives to live, even when we talk on the phone, I feel disconnected with them. Maybe that’s how it is when the kids get older like I am with mom.
So it’s been a bit depressing lately. Life is still full though. Danincg, knitting, spinning, working. Something is missing, however. And I can’t put my finger on it.
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| From Condo |
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| From Ohio State Fair |
And it’s funny that the only things we got were cleaning stuff, a steam cleaning mop, some shame-wows. Ha ha. But in the international building, I saw the Taiwan flag and had to take a picture of it.
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| From Ohio State Fair |
The walk tired us out so L took a nap and slept till 7pm when I woke him up to go to dinner. I found this little italian restaurant near our hotel called Cafe Davinci that has good reviews on the iphone. So we went there. L thought we were going to have expensive Japanese food and was pleasantly surprised by it. Their ordering system was quite different. As soon as we walked in the door, the waitress knew it was our first time cause we were waiting to be seated. You don’t get seated. You just find the table you want to sit at and go to the counter to order your food. The waitress will bring alcohol and the food to you when it’s ready. And you help yourself to the bread and olive oil. I was very hungry so I was pigging out on the bread which was very good focaccia. I ordered Shrimp and clam in an alfredo sauce which was very good and L had veal parmasan. The portion was not huge so I almost finished it even after I pigged out on the bread. Then we had italian ice cream for dessert. All in all it was a good dinner. We stopped at the hotel bar for a drink when we got back. And the lady was going to put L’s Margurita in a small wine glass which turned out to be too small and ended up in a tall glass as it is supposed to be. I had a Dewarts with soda. We sat outside in the patio and talked for a while. That was a great ending of a good day.
We didn’t have an appointment but we almost walked right in the next morning at the OPERS. Got answers to our questions and left for home. No sweat no hassle. A mini vacation out of some business trip.
L and I went with S and D to Pittsburg yesterday. Wow! We thought we were going to get some Chinese food there, that’s all. But they took us to the Strip District and wow. First of all, it only took S 1.5 hour to get there, which speaks for the speed and it was a good thing they drove. Finding a parking spot was a nightmare. She had to circle around, U-turn to be exact back and get going in a hurry when a spot freed up. I don’t think either L or I could have done it. We are simply not fast or competitive enough to fight for a spot like that.
There were tons of people at the strip. I didn’t expect to see so many people there. It’s almost like the shih-lin night market only it has an internatinoal flavor to it. We found Italian grocery store, restaurant, Mexican street food, salsa, coffee store with a huge roaster in the middle of the store, of course a Chinese grocery store, fresh bread, clothes, fish market, arabic store where L found his favorite Lebenon pickle. And much, much more. I am not a crowd person, but I am very impressed with the diversity of food and merchandise displayed along the strip. And the number of people there. You can hardly walk. You also have to bring a big bag to hold all the stuff you buy along the street before you can go back to your car to unload. Man!
Then we went to Rose Tea Cafe for some authentic Chinese food. Mmm mm mm mm mmm as Rachel Ray would say. S brought two bottles of wine. It’s the first time they charge a fee to open the bottle for her. And we ordered food. Boy, did we order food. We had two tables pushed together and still the dishes barely fit. I should have brought my camera to take a picture of all the great food we had. L couldn’t believe how much we ordered but he did his share of eating for sure. Of course we boxed all the leftovers and then we ordered more to go. he he. It was a food explorsion yesterday. Now we have several days of food in the fridge.
And that was the only meal either of us had yesterday. We didn’t feel hungry for the rest of the day. Even for L. He stayed away from food the whole day. That was amazing.
All in all, it was a very good day and very pleasant surprise to visit the strip and to go through town and see all the universities there. S and D did all the driving.
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| From socks |
It was knitted from top down and I find myself liking this way of constructing the socks than the toe up. But it’s not quite set in my head of how it’s done yet. I still need the instructions in front of me when I make the top down socks. I made another pair and would save it as a gift.
Also uploaded the pictures for Jen’s shower.
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| From Jen’s Shower |
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| From Jen’s Shower |
Yeah, it’s only a glimpse at the great decorations C put up at her fabulous home.
Also spent hours today transferring VHS tapes to DVDs. It’s a long overdue project and hopefully one more sitting will finish this batch.
Work tomorrow. It’ll be fun. The server was setup last week and I can focus back on the conversion project again.
After C’s shower for her soon-to-be daughter-in-law yesterday, it’s a quiet Sunday today. We went to the community garden with Merrill who brought some tomato cages for us. The tomato plants and the pepper plants are the only ones that survived the flood from the rain. Our lot is at the lowest part of the whole area and the extra rain just totally rotted out the other vegetables that Leo planted. We met Dick whose lot is more to the middle and his garden is so beautiful full of grown plants and free of weeds. He said he goes to the garden 3 times a week. No wonder! Later, Leo cooked the beef stew and I made the Foccacia bread from Michael Chiarello’s recipe. The stew was great but the bread was a bit disappointing. I didn’t leave it enough time for the last rising before I put it in the oven so it’s not as risen as it could be. Will try again next time.
C did a wonderful job for the shower. She transformed her living room into a blue heaven. Three round tables decorated with blue ribbons on the chair and blue napkins. Jan made center pieces with white hydrangea in a box with blue ribbon and there is even a blue martini (name My Blue Heaven) to boot. We did line dancing before lunch and J did a impromptu singing of the song for her wedding dance. Lunch was also a very tasty lettuce salad and chicken and apple and fruits. And after the gift opening, the guests left. The five of us cleaned up and everything was in order in a short time. She really put in a lot of time and effort for the planning and a lot of work getting everything decorated and food prepared. Wow, what a wonderful job.
I’ve got the dancing bug lately. Couple of times a week, I have the urge to go dancing. It would be nice if there is a group of us that can go dancing together. It would be fun to have some real dancing friends so you know you will have a good time when you go. Watched a lot of reality TV tonight. Senseless and a waste of time which makes me long to go dancing even more. Guess I’m restless today.