*miserychick is actually happy

It’s been almost a month-long eating marathon ever since we got to California about 4 weeks ago. As I am not yet a habitual food blogger, a lot of the yummy food goes undocumented, straight from the plate to my stomach. Here’s just a couple notable ones:

This sugary sin of a breakfast is called the Big Skinny Pancake, a specialty from Mon Ami Gabbi, a french restaurant at the Paris in Las Vegas. It’s a stack of 4 giant fluffy crepes topped with cherries that’s been doused in Chambord and chocolate sauce.

Nothing too special here about these tacos except that tacos in California kick ass.

For the 1-year anniversary of our wedding, I found a Thai restaurant in LA’s Thai Town that specializes in Northern Thai cuisine. The Yelp reviewers had great things to say and the pictures of the place looks as authentically tacky as a Thai restaurant could be, so we got a crew of 9 people and took over the place, eating a feast of Thai food enough to feed a small classroom. Pictures were taken just before we all devoured everything.

Nam-prik-oong is a tomato and pork based spicy paste, you eat it with fresh veggie. It looks innocent enough but caught most people by surprised.

Here’s the Yelp link for Spicy BBQ in Hollywood (at the corner of Santa Monica Blvd and Normandie).

Amongst other things I got for Christmas, this is one probably made me smile the most:

Vietti Barolo Castiglione 2005

For Christmas dinner, and in celebration of my mother-in-law’s newly purchased iron-cast dutch oven, I cooked my very-first beef stew ever: Beouf Bourguignon from Julia Child’s recipe. Like a whole bunch of suckers across America, I too was influenced by that Julie/Julia movie. It took 4+ hours and a lot of cooking tools, but was worth every single minute and effort:

Soon it’ll be time for a detox.

1.

2. I went to a Sunday morning yoga class, and afterwards we all get out the door into the warm sun. It’s a gorgeous, beautiful day – just five days before Christmas – and it’s hard to believe that some people on the other side of the country are buried in snow.

random guy: “don’t you just love that we don’t live in the east coast?”

I wanted to say yes, but I would be lying. Then I took a stroll in the sun down the street all the way to the ocean in my yoga outfit.

After seeing our creepy-looking mug shots on that last DesignWeek article, our buddy Darren, professional portrait photographer, graciously offered to take some photos of us. Now we have some grown up photos, so… bring it, magazines!

UPDATE: I’ve added enhanced, edited version by Darren to the flickr pool! They look even better.

w/ David Bouchard, he shares the studio with us.

There’s more in the Flickr photo set.

This photo shoot was taken in our studio, here’s what it looks like when you’re taking *real* pictures:

Mark “sm-eye-sing” for Darren, thanks Tyra.

Because some things are better said longer than 140 characters.  I’ll just quote the guy in whole:

Starting a company is like landing on the shore of a deserted island

You have a certain amount of provisions, which you have to make last until you find a way to make the island sustain life—or convince someone to send you more.

You don’t know how big the island is at first or what predators lie in wait.

There’s always a chance someone else will raid your island if it looks fruitful, so you need to shore up your defenses.

Eventually, if you’re successful, you’ll be king of your own prosperous world. If not, you’ll die—or, at least, have to go home.

Either way, it’s a fun adventure (until you get eaten by a tiger).

link

When we started, it seemed that everything that could have gone wrong with moving into a new place, went.  Our new landlord was gutting the bathroom and putting in a brand new one (yay!) but they ran into some plumbing problems and by the time we started moving our stuff in, there was no bathroom.  The previous tenant, our friend J, still had half of his stuff in the apartment.  Construction dust was all over the place.  It didn’t look at all habitable.  Then it rained the entire time we were loading and unloading the car.

Since the bathroom was not finished, we had to spend the night at the old place and moved the mattress the next day, which started off horribly.  After Mark drove the truck to our place, we realized it had a flat tire and was actively leaking air.  And this was the first time we’ve ever had a flat tire with a zip car.  The zip car rep called a mechanic, who arrived about an hour and a half later and took another half hour to try taking out the flat tire but couldn’t.  The truck had to be towed.  By that point, it was actually becoming quite hilarious.

Anyway, we ended up getting another truck and the rest of the move was surprisingly fine.  The apartment eventually came together in the afternoon.  Our landlord and her sister got down on the floor and scrub every inches in the kitchen.  The bathroom was usable.  Everything we owned is moved in and today we skipped work to unpack and rearrange stuff.

Even though the two places are somewhat similar in size, we manage to have more stuff than could fit in the kitchen and more clothes than we thought we owned.  Every time I move, I get rid of clothes when I pack.  Then I get rid of more when I unpack.  And then somehow, the next time I look through my clothes, there are always more to get rid of.

The new place is cute.  We have the top two floors of an old house.  It creaks with every step you take and I’m sure our house mate downstairs can track us around the house by listening to sound of our footsteps.  The stove is this a vintage Lady Kenmore from who-knows-when still in great condition but all the markings on the knobs are rubbed off and you have no idea how hot you’re turning it to.  There was an old wall sconce which we were excited about, but then the landlord took it out and the wall is plastered over.  There’s a deck with a view of the CN Tower.  There’s a lot of Italian neighbors and cats.

My favorite, though, is the presidential street corner:  Clinton & Gore.

(photo from Mike Stroud on Flickr)

On one hand, it kind of makes sense that the publishing industry is going through a digital shake-up. Putting articles online, as opposed to printing costs way less, saves the earth (paper, ink, waste, and all that), and is arguably accessible to higher number of readers than their printed and bound version. Sure doesn’t take a genius to recognize that magazine printing is probably gonna go away w/in our lifetime, and in fact, some of them already went.

On the other hand, though, printed stuff: real ink on real paper, holds a value much more than just being sentimental. There’s still a prestige attached to getting printed (regardless of what it is). It’s a mark of validation.

UPDATE:  apparently I was wrong about the magazine industry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmGSfVo2NUw (still, that video is compiled by magazine industry lobbyist…)

About a month ago, we did an interview over email w/ an editor of Design Week UK, admittedly not really knowing what kind of reach the publication has. They have a website and lots of writing about design on it. Lots of interview with people and a lot of content. They seem important, but I somehow thought that they were an online publication. I told Mark that it would probably be an online article without even asking the interviewer. “It’s not gonna be printed?” he asked. “Does anybody print anymore?” was my reply.

Yesterday, out of the blue, a friend emailed us from the UK. She’d flipped the pages of Design Week to see our names on it, with picture and the interview, and graciously scanned the page for us. We had no idea when/if it was going to come out, and if it wasn’t for Francesca, we might still be in the dark about it. And, according to her, it is one of the most well-read design publication in the UK. (!!!) 0_0

Surprised, it was printed! And it is online. I couldn’t have been more wrong, and I’ll admit that it looks much better in print.

(thanks Francesca!)

While I don’t really dig the super-white teeth and ultra brown skin treatment they gave me, it’s still pretty cool.

Very humbled and really grateful to the feature writer of Design Week, Anna Robertson, and Andy Cameron who suggested us for them. Our super friend Juan is also featured in the same section.

“There are different species of laziness: Eastern and Western. The Eastern style is like the one practised in India. It consists of hanging out all day in the sun, doing nothing, avoiding any kind of work or useful activity, drinking cups of tea, listening to Hindi film music blaring on the radio, and gossiping with friends. Western laziness is quite different. It consists of cramming our lives with compulsive activity, so there is no time at all to confront the real issues. This form of laziness lies in our failure to choose worthwhile applications for our energy.”

- Sogyal Rinpoche (via SwissMiss)

As in, blogging like back-in-the-days blogging, when photo sharing took a lot of time and there were no other micro blogging and status update tools like twitter and facebook to augment your every minute activity reporting. Because back then, I actually sat down, and take the time off to think about what I was going to write. It was time consuming and it was somewhat of a craft. Nowadays the craft is about cramming little thoughts into 140 character bit and make them funny.

I’m sitting in a Starbucks in the middle of boystown district of Toronto, surrounded by gay men who make small talk about the shitty weather to each other. I’m killing time. And this is the first time in a long time I can remember killing time – because I usually run out of it. Ironically though, I don’t feel any more productive these days.

We’re moving to a new apartment next week. It’s kind of exciting to have a new place and re-set the things we own into new spot so that we might appreciate them again. Our new apartment is in the middle of Toronto’s Little Italy neighborhood. Our landlord is Italian and her whole family live on the same street. Our neighbor downstairs has a cute grey cat named Sam.

We’ll have to take public transportation to get to and from work now – not something I look forward to but maybe the routine will get me to appreciate Toronto more since I’ll be out of my little 4-block comfort zone that I was constricted to for the past 18 months.

Oops, now I’m out of time. That was quick.