The weekend

We had a lunch catch-up with Bertam her mum Val and Jenny at Winner Winner Chicken in Pukekohe. I had such high hopes and probably bit into the piping hot fried chicken way too soon and burned my mouth. But when it cooled down, it wasn’t any better unfortunately. I took some photos but none of them turned out to be worth posting (the iPhone 14 Pro Max’s wide-angle shots are just too distorted) because everything looked BROWN. For sides we ordered Mac and cheese, tater tots, fried mushrooms and the loaded fries which was the best one of the bunch.

They had good gravy which made me think that should we come this way again, the chicken to order would have to be their grilled one which is their signature chicken anyway.

The fried chicken pieces were just too small with a heavy batter and the chances of over-cooking them high which I think happened in our case.

We skipped dessert- they have famously good cabinet pies- because we brought Farro Fresh sticky-date pudding which we ate at Berta’s house, served with vanilla ice-cream and do-it-yourself-instant-coffees as we all talked about the upcoming elections, the public transport system and dealing with burial plots.

Berta gave me some pretty purple broccoli to take home (she said it tastes slightly more bitter than its green counterpart).

Sunday was a trip to Mitre 10 for some pots (we have a calathea plant with new shoots that we wanted to repot) and another opportunity to ooh and aah at all the plants we couldn’t afford. On my Wishlist are:

1. Variagated monstera

2. A 1.5m olive tree

3. Swiss-cheese plant

4. Philodendron Birkin

5. Fiddle leaf fig

We had been mulling to buy a cherry blossom but we couldn’t decide which one. There were a couple on sale, but at over a meter and a half long, how were we going to transport it home in our little, compact cars??

We also looked at some mobile pools. Apparently, El Niño is going to bring in a scorching summer so we need to prepare for it- plus we don’t know what to do with the empty ex veggie patch; a pool might just cover up that bald patch!

We thought of an actual pool (starts at $50k for those trendy, shallow lap ones) but someone told us that should we think of putting our property on the market, a pool doesn’t actually push the price up nor make your listing more attractive. You’re better off using that $50k for interior renovations.

End of the week

Late to the House of Cards party

Can’t believe we’ve missed watching this when it started. But what’s more astounding is how we cheer on the villains and wish the good guys ill.

40 versus 37.5

I’ve been asking myself (and anyone who still bothers to listen because they’ve heard this before so many times) if I should do 40 hours instead of 37.5. But when you get off at 2pm on Fridays when everyone else is literally dying in their desks at work, and get home to a new bed and a bag of popcorn…well..

Food focused

Sam and Mary are dieting so for the last couple of months, I’ve been buying, cooking and eating food solo. As it turns out, other people’s dieting has a good effect; I tend to eat less, waste less, not necessarily buy less or cheaply, and only have indulgent meals (like fried chicken) on the weekends.

To go to the gym or not

Have not set foot in a gym for the last 7 years. But I have some abs, my waistline is still 29-30 and I have good arms. But is that enough? Should I be grunting along forever in the garage?

The Weekend

The winter sun in this part of the world looked like 4pm even if it was only 12 noon.

We drove through places that were now familiar to me; the place with the quirky shops, the place with the great pies (there was a long queue), and the place with the salmon fish. After that, a big blue lake appeared on the right and it seemed never-ending as we drove alongside it.

At one point, we drove past what looked like tourist vans parked on the lake shore. A mass of white, naked bodies- teens, adults I couldn’t tell- were actually swimming in the cold water. Good on them.

I never sleep on these trips, but this time I did with the soft 4pm sun caressing my face.

When I woke up we were nearly there and you could see the mountain or the mountains, standing guard like a gate to something. Before them, a vast plain of bush and grass, rocks, and a single road that led to the village.

And it wasn’t really a village in the true sense, but accommodations for tourists and scattered housing for conservationists, scientists, and maybe the military.

We stayed at the best one- the oldest one, and it looked like it was in the middle of shedding its age and donning new retrofits for the future. Half of the hotel wasn’t even done- we could see mattresses lined up along the corridor from the large windows in a connecting wing- and we stayed half a kilometer away at refurbished cabins.

We settled in (there was a buffet for dinner) and in my room, I could see the mountain looming high and shadowed.

It was’t at all inert- it was alive.

Today

Strange vegetables

Did you know that the celeriac is the root of the celery? You cook it like you would potatoes but the best thing about it, is that it has fewer carbs than potatoes. Tastes like celery, but nuttier Wikipedia describes it. Hmmm. I don’t like celery that much; I used to hate pansit that had celery bits in it. Kohlrabi on the other hand is actually related to the cabbage. The following way of cooking it appeals to me: For a simple side dish, sauté the sliced kohlrabi in a bit of butter in a skillet. Once it begins to show some caramelization, season it with salt, nutmeg, and a little sugar​ for increased sweetness. Continue cooking until slightly al dente, with a bit of crispness, and serve it immediately.

The end of single-use plastic (for real)

Don’t get me wrong; I think I can live without plastic. But if it’s there like in the supermarkets, I will use it and won’t feel guilty about it. But this is it- the government is banning it for good.

Spend like a penshioner

So a much older friend advises me, and with Uber rides now starting at $14 for a 6-kilometer minimum, I decided to do public transport. By the time I got back, I had saved myself $56. I felt very virtuous after that.

The Gold-Card hour

All the passengers on my bus had gold transport cards and it always gives me flashes of my future- that’s me eventually. And strangely, I’m at peace with it because it’s inevitable. A couple of things could be different; I would be immaculately dressed because that’s non-negotiable for me; I could finally be driving instead of taking the bus (Dear Elon, pls sort out your self-driving cars ASAP).

J'aime la France: la vie insulaire

J'aime la France: la véritable âme de la ville

J'aime la France

Today’s expenses:
1270 F for macarons
680 F for cappucino
chips and water ? F
250 F (2) cannelle

First we went to the beach. In the distance, we could see an ever shifting curtain of rain. It could come or it won’t, but we did bring our umbrellas. There was a long narrow wharf and midway, Sam got anxious. It wasn’t rickety but it was gappy. The water below was really clear and blue.

I couldn’t tell when the buildings were made. The Hilton looked like the buildings in Muriel’s Wedding and a quick Google search showed that the movie was made in the 90s, so there you go. But the streets all over the city were in a state of repair and we had to walk our way through a maze of orange cones. Doing pedestrian crossings felt like Russian roulette and finally, we found a supermarket.

We were stumped. We wanted cheese, butter, ice-cream and sorbet. but it was at least 45 minutes walking back to the hotel, so…..

Everyone literally had a baguette under their arm. The bread section held different sorts and we wanted to just stand there and smell it. We figured, we needed a car and then we’d go crazy shopping. So we’ll be back.

Darkness fell fast just like as it was back home. The restaurants were half-empty and we were all Frenched out asking questions so we just went back to the hotel.

We opened the courtesy bottle of brut champagne (an Armand de Brignac) and had it with bags of Lay’s potato chips. That was dinner done.

The morning commute

When I started at my current job, we lived out west which was more or less under 40 kilometers away- but it might have well been 400 for someone who took public transport. I would wake up at 4am, make breakfast (for everyone) when I still ate breakfast, took the train to the city, and from there, took another one south.

The trains then were slow, and not the faster, quieter electric ones we have today. But none of these things- the waiting times, the (small) crowds- mattered to me. They didn’t because I had no other choice. I made the choice to NOT drive.

Those long commutes were actually relaxing; I read books, listened to this then little known singer named Adele.

I’ve been using Uber heavily for the last couple of years because I have this notion, that, ‘it’s saving me time’. But for what exactly I’m not sure. Can I ‘spend’ it? Can I ‘save enough of that time’ and use it for something fantastically miraculous?

So far, I really have nothing to show for (again, choices?) so I thought, the weather has turned cold and dark. The buses are nearly empty. The walk would be good. So here we are…(and listening to Adele still).

Walk to the bus stop

The 6:25am bus

The 6:55am train

The Weekend (in photos)

Where is autumn?

It seems that as far as the weather is concerned, you will never quite know what you’re gonna get

Can you have your cake and eat it too?

I go for the full cream, full sugar one…

Stack it

Well, couldn’t find a brioche bun bigger than this, but three patties it is!

The Prom King

My nephew had his prom/soiree over the weekend and it was light-years away from what we had at the old and dusty Sison Auditorium. I would actually like to travel back in time though to attend one

What did you get for your birthday?? (probably diabetes)

I’ve never had a sweet tooth and still ended up with a whole bunch of sweet treats, some of which I’m offloading to the people at work, and some which I’m having all to myself (the Silvanas).

Silvanas

My sister got me these through one of her (Filipino) friends.

Lemon Meringue tart

Salted Caramel and Chocolate cake

Small victories

1. A perfect hollandaise sauce from a first attempt

2. Finishing a book amidst all the distraction

3. Taking a nice nap after a go-see of all your current streaming subscriptions and finding nothing worth your while to watch

4. A clean kitchen for five straight days

5. 30 squats

6. A couple of Hail Mary’s before you fall asleep

7. Getting onto Twitter and ‘walking away’ when coming across a MAGA supporter, a Republican, an anti-vaxxer, an LGBTQ+ agitator, a dumb politician, a misogynist, an anonymous, self-righteous white, male boomer, a whinging farmer, a conservative…

8. ‘Walking away’ from purchasing another pair of shoes, jeans and hoodie

9. Being distracted by other people’s shit

10. Waking up the next day to a world still somewhat intact

A list

1. I worked for two consecutive weekends, and it wasn’t like night shifts or repetitious things like on a conveyor belt or something, or that for meals, I had nothing but a pie and a glass of water. It was conducting seminars, smiling a lot, taking nice photos, dinners at this nice restaurant and generally just socialising. A bit of it was physical- but it was no different from, say, cleaning your house. But I was EXHAUSTED. DEAD TIRED. I wonder how I’d survive if I actually needed to work two jobs.

2. But you learn to pace yourself- two important things; 1) find time to exercise even if it’s no more than 15 min; 2) SLEEP WELL.

3. Twitter is vicious. Stepping into it without anonymity is both empowering and frustrating.

4. But who cares right? My gut feel is that the world is ending, and all these things that have trapped everyone into a never-ending combat of words is pointless.

5. I keep telling myself, step out of it- do you. Care for yourself alone and the people you love.

6. I asked a couple of questions over at ChatGPT…

7. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

8. Found a new fried chicken place called Peach’s Hot Chicken

Wednesday's List

1. My siblings posted photos of the kids’ Valentine's Day dates on our family chat account- time flies. But I still feel the same though I doubt if I still look the same.

2. Have yet to find an available booking for a root canal; might use the money instead for some facial treatments.

3. People sometimes act strange. The good thing about it is that I don’t really consider them good/close friends, so I’m never really obliged to ask why. It’s good sometimes to go about your day just doing you.

4. It’s certainly hard to make (real) friends after a certain age, but I don’t mind. After all, I only made some well into my mid to late 20s and I can definitively say that friendship can be over-rated.

5. Back into semi-serious body-training again. Ugh.

It came and we waited...

I had to Google it- ‘how different is a typhoon from a cyclone’?.

Turns out they’re the same, with the name difference based on location.

But they don’t feel the same- and I should know, having been the veteran of a hundred or so typhoons since I was a baby. The year I was born (and I’m not telling you the year), a succession of strong typhoons inundated most parts of the island of Luzon. The deluge was such that BongBong M’s daddy intoned while surveying the damage from a helicopter, ‘“For the first time, the waters of Manila Bay linked up with those of Lingayen Gulf...”

Years later, older and not necessarily wiser, I had spent the night drinking in a friend’s house as a typhoon raged, not realizing that the worst was yet to come after I had passed out in their living room. When I woke up, nearly all the trees and power lines in Naguilayan were down. Our narra tree, planted the year Binky was born (I think) had fallen and I managed to crawl through it and get inside our house and pretend that I was home during the night.

When I came to New Zealand, it was a pleasant surprise to realise that there was virtually nothing in nature that could kill you. If you were harmed, it was basically because you made the decision to swim through the rip-tides, walk through the bush without telling anyone, or climb up a mountain unequipped with the right gear.

Nothing in this country was actually hostile until the weather started to change. And change it did, and now we have tornados (killed a Filipino worker a few years back) and cyclones that could be coming more frequently.

The topography of Auckland is strange because just over 40kms away from where we live- and that’s not a great distance- there were massive flooding and landslips, while we actually had none. But we didn’t take any chances even if what we did wasn’t much- I filled the bathtub with water in case the water supply was cut off, filled empty soda bottles with drinking water, kept my more expensive shoes away from windows, cooked an extra pot of rice…

And we waited as the slow-ass cyclone (moving at a glacial pace of 11kms per hour) made its way down. I set the alarm at 4am which would have been the time where it was nearest to Auckland. I slept through it and was woken up by the cat at 5am who wanted so badly to pee (we closed the laundry door to prevent the rain from going through the cat flap).

Everything was quiet. The house was intact. And I was in the middle of a dream where I was cooking Peking Duck, so I went back to sleep.

How much of your daily life is really yours?

It’s beginning to dawn on me, that Saturday is the only day that I get full possession of my life.

I wake up anytime I want and have ditched setting alarms. If I wake up at noon, then so be it (I never do). I do a quick check of the phone charging overnight on my bedside table. If it’s nothing urgent, I just leave it there. I avoid reacting to the news. If a comet had crashed into the earth in the middle of the night, there’s nothing we could have done. We’ll get painlessly pulverised in our sleep hopefully, and be mercifully eternally bound in whatever dreams we’re in.

Coffee. Then another coffee. A great bowel movement. Shower. I put on my face- serum, moisturiser, sunscreen if we needed to go out somewhere. Unlike weekdays where I don’t eat any breakfast, we either eat out or have some old favourites like Spam and rice, pancakes, a well-buttered toast.

Then it’s chores. The week’s laundry in batches; coloreds, whites and delicates. There is some sort of weird comfort in the washing cycle- wash, soak, rinse, spin. I love doing laundry because it echoes life. I’m perpetually organising my clothes, my shoes. I think of the week ahead and mentally put together outfits. I feel that I have too much. I also feel that I never seem to have enough.

I think about dinner because more than likely, there is something that I’d like to eat, something I’d like to cook that I’ve been planning for the whole week.

For this Saturday, it’s a simple roast chicken but done the way this restaurant in Paris does it. They only use a small portion of the breast and serve it with a hefty shaving of black truffles and bearnaise sauce.

I won’t be putting shaved truffles on it, but I was thinking of making bearnaise sauce (you can check out a YouTube video of how Le Clarence makes its roast chicken here).

But by midday, I’d changed my mind about the bearnaise sauce; we had gone to the Asian store, but I had completely forgotten to get white wine vinegar and shallots. Maybe some other time then.

The only thing unusual with the way the restaurant roasts its chicken is that it’s placed inside a dutch casserole and then placed in the oven; it’s then taken out at regular intervals where it’s basted with its own juices. Towards the end when it has browned, you put in butter, garlic cloves and fresh rosemary, basting it again over and over until it’s done.

This forces me to always check the clock.

The done part was about 45 minutes more than the usual way I roast chicken. I make a salad out of leftover romaine lettuce. I’ve taken out buns from the freezer and defrosted them. I make a normal gravy with chicken cubes and buttered roux. We start to eat at 6:15 pm, later than usual, but in the middle of summer, it feels more like noon.

The chicken is much more noticeable moist than usual though. It’s delicious actually though I detect a hint of bitterness from the rosemary; perhaps I put too much.

What next? I feel like doing something and automatically, I try to look for the time. It’s always, do I have enough time??

I stop myself and make a drink (gin and tonic, which I don’t normally do) instead.

New Year's Resolutions list (1)

1. Schedule that goddamned root canal

2. Clean and re-season the iron skillet

3. Look at getting a new food processor

4. Look at either signing up at a gym or updating your fitness equipment

5. Sort your clothes for real (give them away to the Salvation Army)

6. More cardio

7. Go see a dermatologist

8. Increase your vegetable intake

9. Aim to read more (start on the books you already have)

10. Less of the bad fat

11. Start writing again please, even if it’s in small batches

What do you have planned for 2023?

Hope springs eternal as they say, so even if I enter 2023 with not enough money (it’s never enough isn’t it?) or personal accomplishment (where’s that novel huh?) or abs (my thighs have grown muscular though), I have an (over) abundance of hope- and the will to try, and try again.

As I’ve always said, if you’ve stopped trying or fallen behind a certain threshold of trying, you might as well check out (not literally).

T'was NOT the night before Christmas