Author / Sixer

by Sixer

The Efficient Extension

Hello.

Hi?

Yes, today I want to talk a bit about a person very close to my heart: me. That’s right, a few days ago I fell further into my tweens: “the irresponsible twenties between childhood and the coming of age at thirty-three.”

It’s really very sobering to be quite past the age where most of your fictional friends turn, magically, into adults. Especially when you, quite clearly, age like a hobbit. This year I was reminded of how lucky my parents are that I was born when I was. Not just because I’m so lovable in general, but because I need all the help I can get when it comes to being considerate and my birthday is really conducive to that. I share September not only with Frodo and Bilbo (September 22nd) but with Theo and the Geekette as well. These are two people I’ve known since before I got the knack of coming up with really cool aliases. They know all the embarrassing alter-egos of my past and yet, somehow, love me anyway. And, because our birthdays are all in the same month, I’m never more than a month late giving them a gift.

After a month, I kind of figure “what’s the point,” so, yeah, my birthday has saved my friendship probably twenty times over.

Plus, it’s on national talk like a pirate day, score.

I’m a little too full of grasshopper pie right now, seeing as how that’s been my dinner for the past three days, but sometime this year I really would love to do a picture tutorial of a cake. Not just any cake, but the Geekette’s birthday cake. It’s called The Bloody Chicken Cake, but don’t worry, it’s safe for most vegetarians.

It was born out of a side comment and a joke of a promise, that somehow just wouldn’t die. A few months ago the Geekette came over and cooked me some chickpeas. We always seem to have a can of these in my house but, before last month, I think the last time I had eaten them was when I was seven (I don’t count hummus when saying this, just as I wouldn’t count salsa if I said I hated tomatoes). Anyway, she cooked them up in olive oil with curry, cumin, paprika, and a little bit of the bush basil my dad has growing by the front step. It was really good, even after she pointed out that chick peas really do look like chickens. It was so good that we decided her birthday cake should be made out of chick peas, and of course once that was voiced I had to volunteer, and thus the Bloody Chicken Cake was born. The “blood” in the title comes from my first imagining of the cake, which used blood oranges. That idea didn’t last long, but the name was too good to waste.

Wanna slice?

by Sixer

Skittles

Sometimes I think that, when the skittles company was still in its tender years of advertising, a wise marketer took it aside and said:

“Look, your catch phrase is a problem. Not only does it make no sense, a rainbow being nothing more than light refracted through a prism – tasteless and intangible – but it also makes the mind jump to unicorns. You don’t want your product associated with unicorns. Trust me.”

And so the Skittle Company begged the wise marketer  to tell it what to do.
“Change your slogan” he advised. But the Skittle Company didn’t want to. They pleaded, groveled, and cajoled him to think of a way they could use their treasured catch phrase without having to bring in unicorns, until finally the wise old marketer said “There is a way, but it’s dangerous. Not every product can pull it off.”

“We’ll do it,” Said the skittle company. “For the sake of our rainbow of flavours, we’ll do it”

And thus was born the skittle commercials: The men held by giant hands, the kid with the skittle tree, the blender angered at being replaced – all attempting to be so surreally fantastical that they make the slogan (“taste the rainbow”) seem not only quite normal but safe and familiar.

At least, that’s how I imagine it to be. But then again, I don’t like skittles.

by Sixer

Cycles

아녱센요! (a-nyeong-se-yo, or my attempt at a hello).

It’s nice to see everybody has survived their summers. I’m so looking forward to fall. Having only one class, I should be able to post more often, right? I guess I should warn you, I just published a post a few minutes ago, but I dated it August 15th. I actually wrote it on the seventh, but my pictures wouldn’t upload, so twenty days later here it is! And yes, the power to alter my blogs chronology is some kind of scary cool. Should I say I wrote this when I was six?

Most of the things I alluded to in the previously mentioned post are actually still current. I did sign up for a class, I’m still following my study plan (loosely, but enough to make me wonder if I’m merely an alien replacement), and I haven’t yet made my bento freezer staples. However, Snow White and her dwarves are scheduled to leave today for a week so I’m looking forward to a productive weekend at least. Maybe even an actual post?

I’ll tell you all about my class when I have something more interesting to say than “I’m taking such-and-such at such-and-such a time.” In order to distract you, can I tell you the latest news in sewing blog land? Ms. Casey, from Casey’s Elegant Musings, is going to hold a circle skirt sew-along. I’ve watched her swing dance sew-along, and Ms. Gertie’s one for Lady Grey (that was hard to watch, I love colette patterns), and I’m thinking this time maybe I won’t just watch.

Desire.
Dream.
 Do.
The three steps of obsession.

This, combined with my halloween costume, my language study, my class, my blog, and the fact that I do actually work now, should fill up my hours quite nicely. I’m hoping to get a lot of crafty stuff done now because, come November, I’m trying for Nanowirmo again. Last year I hit the humiliatingly low number of 5,000 words, which must not happen again. In recognition of all these plans, I’m ending this post with a sappy limerick poem. Enjoy!

My dreams sometimes seem like so much rubbish.
Like shiny candy wrappers,
Tossed away with glee.
In the sweetness of this swiftly fading present,
I give up a cloudy future
For hard and sure reality.
by Sixer

In which we review some bento

I’m so glad it’s August. The weather has finally started calming down, and I’ve begun to get those back-to-school-tingles that I love so much. Pretty soon the whole world will put on the most bewitching perfume, and we’ll all start gathering “bouquets of sharpened pencils.”

Here are the bento I’ve put together in the past two weeks. No need to squint at them, by the way, just click ’em to enlarge.
Steak, rice, Nuts, cheese, and various veggies
Rice, egg soboro, cukes, cheese,  and zucchini cake
Rice, tamagoyaki, sausage, marinated cukes, and various fruits

You can see that I’ve used some unorthodox containers to accommodate my varying leftovers. I’m really happily embarrassed with my rice heart. Like a charaben bride . . . .  Anyway, to make it I placed the veggies around a cookie cutter before stuffing the thing with rice. And, yes, the rice held the whole day with the cookie cutter removed. I’m always interested in how other people’s bentos hold up after being lugged to work, or even how they survive having the lid put on them – some people like to have everything popping out of the box when they take their pictures, which is striking but can hardly reflect what they see when they sit down to lunch. I know that when I use this particular bowl I have to be really careful about how I carry it, because, being a vessel of chinese take-out origins, the lid doesn’t fit that securely. My other bento boxes I’m a lot more careless with, to the point where I have had to mop spilled vinegar off my blue case more than once.

Besides planning out my next round of bento freezer staples, and making an out-of-this-world study plan for my outer sloth’s amusement, I’ve been toying with whether I should take an class at the community college. They have a folk dance class that would be a lot of fun, a digital photography class which I know I need, and various cooking classes. The cooking classes are easiest to say no to, they cost as much as seven weeks of dance class but only last one day. I can pretty much muddle my way through anything in the kitchen – though the canning and dumpling classes are really tempting – and I do need to be saving something for when I move out. More if I want to go somewhere on vacation next year. That leaves dance – bonus points for being healthy – and photography, which would benefit you all. Which would pick if you had to choose?
by Sixer

Take Two

My dad took me to go see Captain America today. Me and a kid or two. It was a little weird, being in 3D, but mainly it’s your basic action movie minus explosions. Not that there weren’t explosion, there was just more punching than I’ve grown used to. Is it just me or have most movies gone over to either swords or guns?

Anyway, the dialogue can be summed up by the cutting line “You’re not going to quit?” delivered with gusto from the bad guy, and the equally fitting “nope” from our dashing hero. My favorite scene was when the grenade was thrown (waaaaaaay at the beginning of the movie), but the death of the baddie was pretty epic. And the ending was mind blowing (and tragic) to someone like me who, apparently, lives under a rock.

Further proof: I just found out today that They’re doing Spiderman. Again.

Talk about popular.

In other news:

This is the remainder of the dinner I made sunday: coconut rice and curry. I had the curry again the next day with noodles and it tasted even better. I actually zapped it, and I think that made the coconut cream I put in there stand out.  Back to the bento, the green stuff in the corn is some leftover cilantro, and the white liquid in the pink cup is the coconut cream. It’s some kind of sweet, and oh so good when you mix it with the rice and curry. Yes, I put it in the curry and ate it with the curry. Despite  that, we still have a little bit of it left in the fridge and I’m trying not to eat it raw. Maybe if I mix it with yogurt I can call it a “natural dessert” and thereby pass it off as healthy. Cause, you know, despite giving us the bubonic plague, yellow fever, and tuberculosis, nature is looking out for us.

I finally gave in and stood on a chair for this shot.

This is a zucchini/squash cake. It was really good, the last one leftover after Thursday’s dinner – a dinner where neither my dad nor my two older brothers were present, just to give you some perspective. My aunt made these with the veggies from my grandfather’s garden. The zucchini she used was immense. I didn’t recognize it at first, thought it was some strange kind of squash to be honest. Thicker than my upper arms, almost as wide as my head – that’s how big it was. And probably two feet long. The rice is just normal rice, with a little bit of red pepper paste, curtesy of Korea, and leftover steak. I put some dashi (or is it bonito?) flakes in it, and some rice vinegar and mirin. Despite all that it didn’t really taste asian to me. I’m finding that Korean and Thai food don’t. Especially Korean.
The rice was actually almost bland, it probably needed more dashi, however the paste provided a nice kick that went well with the surprisingly flavorful veggie burger. The salad was mainly to keep the red pepper off my cherries, but I like the color it added to the “box.” I actually left my stacking boxes at work the day before I took this picture, which ended up as a blessing since it forced me to use a chinese take out container (dumplings, I’m assuming). I love the circular shape and how it impacts food arrangement, and it’s fun to have that much space. Those white boxes are skinny.  My next bento buy will be a circular box, probably one of these, but it won’t happen for a while. I’m still not making bentos consistently enough to classify it as a hobby, definitely not enough to call it a lifestyle. I don’t think it will be long before I reach that stage, though. Unlike so many other things I’m trying to get into, bentos are instant gratification. I’m happy when I’m making them, when I’m planning them, when I’m hungry at work and thinking about lunch, and, most importantly of all, eating them is like eating satisfaction. It feeds both my desire to be able to make beauty and my need to make something useful. It’s creative and crafty, pretty and practical, indulgent and industrious. But mostly, it taste good, and really, that’s all I care about at lunch time.

I don’t mind the warm colors so much when the box is black.