Current Desktop, Jane Mount

New year, new desktop! This time, featuring one of the shelves from the Ideal Bookshelf series by Jane Mount. The painting I chose is her children’s literature bookshelf, which has titles like Winnie The Pooh, Pat the Bunny, Goodnight, Moon, and The Little Prince.

What Jane has to say about it:

For a while, I’ve been documenting people’s bookshelves as a form of portraiture; you can actually learn a lot about folks by their books’ covers. Now, I’m working on a series of “ideal” bookshelves: sets of favorites—mine or someone else’s—amalgamated in a picture, even if they don’t usually live on shelves anywhere near each other.

Lunchtime Sweethearts Pouch

When I need to take a break from writing (or, at the moment, grad school applications), I clean my room. After an exhausting three days of cleaning, I am now officially tired of cleaning my room. It took me two days to clean the bookshelf, and another day to clean the dresser and drawers under my bed. For the most part this means going through tons of paper (I saved everything: movie ticket stubs, airplane boarding passes, homework from 6th grade, my earliest attempts at writing stories, stickers, sketches + drawings, scribbles from class, notes to myself, post-its, magazines, newspaper articles, etc.) and recycling it. This afternoon I took everything out and vacuumed the drawers.

Since I’ve been putting off tackling the closet, and I wasn’t in the mood to cook/bake, I decided to do something crafty.

It’s not done yet, but I’m calling this the Lunchtime Sweethearts Pouch. Put all your ziplocked cookies, pasta salad in tupperware, bento boxes, etc. in it.

Gingerbears

The Christmas celebration finally arrived at our household. We opened gifts before dinner and made gingerbread bears after. I got books for Christmas, of course: Bird By Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott from my sister, Cindi; Harlen Coben’s newest Myron Bolitar book, Long Lost, from my brother Paul; Dad gave me Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Sadly, I did not reclaim the title of Best Gift-Giver this Christmas; that’s a tie between Cindi and Paul. Which means I have lost out two years running now :( But! I definitely won Best Single Gift, which was a 36-page Snapfish photo album for the parents. To say it was a massive hit is an understatement. That’s right, siblings! Still got it.

Anyway, Cindi brought back a gingerbread making kit. Yes, it comes from Crayola (of all companies! I had no idea Crayola made such things, but yay!), and it had two sets of directions (for adults and kids) on the back. I’ve never made any sort of gingerbread before, but I love it – the spice of cinnamon, the soft chewy goodness. Generally speaking, I love all Christmas food, especially peppermint/mint.

After we squeezed vanilla frosting out of a bag, we painted the gingerbears with the Crayola provided edible watercolors.

The eyes are all wonky because I stuck the sugar eyes onto the frosting not knowing or noticing that they came in different sizes. We made six gingerbears, and I did not pair up the eyes right for a single gingerbear.

Now, the box says we can make 8-12 bears. But they only provided us with 10 eyeballs. What is up with that, Crayola? Did you think the kids couldn’t do the math? Even I can do the math! Anyway, so instead of having a sightless bear, we decided to make cyclops bears. Then I realized the cyclops eyes in fact resemble bear noses and mouth. Okay, in a very vague way, but still.

We’re saving the gingerbears for when we watch Up! I am an open-minded person, and will, at the very least, admit to exceptions and such – but there are three issues on which there is no compromise. If you’ve know me, you know what they are. One of them is Pixar vs Everything Else, or more specifically, Pixar vs Dreamworks.

Red Bean Pastries

Around the time I was tired of working on applications, and my sister was sick of studying for her Princeton finals, we both started craving for these red bean pastries that Mom used to make when we lived in California. I remember juggling the hot golden pastry ball from fingertips to fingertips, blowing on them, holding them outside the front door and waving it around in the air, and still burning my tongue because I could never wait to eat them.

The recipe, transcribed into my Moleskine for recipes. (Being a recipe book, my handwriting is much neater than what it usually is.)

Adapted from this recipe, which made flat pastries, but the ones Mom always made were round golden balls, so that’s what we went with. Instead of sandwiching the red bean paste (which we made, instead of buying a pre-made pack as recommended by the recipe), we just folded up the edges into a ball.

Summer Palace, Hong Kong

I went to Hong Kong a couple weeks ago for some visa work. I was only there for a couple days with my aunt, and I got to enjoy some pretty fantastic food. (Tried Dan Ryan’s Grill – Peter Luger’s still wins.) Unfortunately, I didn’t bring a camera, so I had to take pictures with my cell phone.

My aunt asked what I wanted to eat while I was in Hong Kong, since we’d be there for 4 meals (two dinners, two lunches). I only had two requests: steak, and dim sum. For our final lunch, just four hours before our flight back to Shanghai, we ate at the Summer Palace restaurant in the Island Shangri-La Hotel.

Now, in those really morbid games of “How would you rather die – fire/freezing/drowning” and “You’re on an island, what book what you bring?” and so on, my answer to “What would be your last meal?” was always dim sum. B/c you get so much food for it. With steak, it’s just steak and maybe some vegetables and potatoes however you like it. And that’s it. But dim sum is AWESOME. A little bit of everything! And because I love mixing foods/tastes, dim sum really appeals to me, since I get to sample a large selection of foods.

Plus, it always tastes so much better because you only get to try one piece of this/that dish, so each dish really stands out. It’s like when I hear a song I wasn’t really feeling on the radio – suddenly, I like that song a lot more b/c I only got a fleeting taste of it. it definitely catches my attention more than if I had the CD and could play it a million times on demand.

…And then my phone died because I not only didn’t bring a real camera, I also didn’t bring my cell phone charger.

After lunch, my aunt had to finish up a business meeting. So I hung out in the bookstore in the IFC Mall for two hours and finished reading Long Lost by Harlan Coben. If they ever do make a movie of the Myron Bolitar series – Jude Law for Win. Not for THE win, but Win as in Windsor.

Yang’s Fry-Dumpling

I love Yang’s Fry-Dumpling in Shanghai. Yang’s is more street vendor than restaurant; you pay first and then grab your food (though there is limited space for people to eat inside). Topped with a sprinkling of sesame seeds, the fried pork and soup dumplings are fried golden-brown so there’s a crunchy bite to it. And I love that crunchy bite ’cause when it comes to food, texture plays a fairly big part in how much I enjoy the food. Splash a little vinegar on it and it’s AMAZING.

How I eat it (or, This Is How One Should Eat It): I bite through the skin and sip out most of the soup first. Otherwise, the hot soup is either totally wasted and/or just sprayed all over your shirt. Slurping sounds are included as part of the experience.

Current Desktop, Kat Macleod collage

My current desktop, featuring the fashionable collage ladies created by Kat Macleod. Made by quick cutting and pasting b/c I just wanted something colorful, without the depressing “feast or famine” message wallpaper that came before this. I’m still switching back and forth between them though.

Just got an email from Amazon alerting me that Week 10 of their Wish List Sweepstakes has started. I’ve been entering it since week 4. I also entered the Wist List Draw at ModCloth about two weeks ago, to no avail as I discovered an hour ago. This morning I entered the Writer’s Wish List Sweepstakes ’cause I suddenly wanted the Kindle. Suffice to say, I’m not expecting anything :(

I have never in my life won at “lucky” draws. All of fourth grade, we played like 10 rounds of Bingo every Friday afternoon. I never won. I’d get SO CLOSE! Just one square away! And someone would beat me to it. Anyway, as you can see, I’m still trying! Definitely still very hopeful and wishing hard, just like The Secret* tells me to.

*Flipped through it at Costco once. The cover, with the red seal and ancient script theme going on, that intrigued me.

Conversations I’ve Had Lately With My Dog

Being a jobless, full-time writer can get kind of lonely. Especially since the friends I’ve made here are all working or still in college and they’re going to school. So Simba, our 3-year-old retriever, gets called upstairs into forbidden territory to keep me company. Then he chills in my room and gets to hear all my best and worst ideas. Basically, he gets to watch my brain devolve into a state of absolute uselessness.

re: a new dress
“Doesn’t this look good?”

re: 250 words of a YA novel opening
“So is that okay? Gripping?”

You Can Sign This Book

I love getting (okay, and giving) books as gifts, and I always make people sign the inside cover or first page as a sort of card, to kind of commemorate the occasion of me getting a new book. There’s always a reason why someone chose to get that particular book, so the inscribed messages have the double function of telling me who gave it, and why. And the why is what I really love about it. Sometimes it’s an inside joke, other times it’s just the sharing of something that was meaningful to the book-giver – the gift of a new bonding experience.

Top 5 Favorite Dedications/Autographs, in no particular order: