Today I Cooked A Meal

In fact, this is the first complete meal I have cooked ever since my wife is away. It's been 3 solid weeks, and every week it was endless party, thanks to my dearest friends around here. Even today, Six Crawl invited me for dinner as well; thinking that's a bit too much leeching for that young couple, I gratefully said no :)

Cooking is quite fun, and my cooking skill is pretty much ok, as long as I'm willing to spend the time. I can't make very delicious dishes, but I happen to enjoy the taste I can make. Lucky me. Wife sometimes wonders how come I rarely cook, but still can get the taste roughly right, even for those dishes that I've never tried. For most dishes, that actually is not too hard; just decompose the taste and try to paint it back with whatever ingredients you have access to. Well, enough for the boasting, time to get some sleep.

Snow is on the way!!!

Finally, this weekend, a blizzard of possibly 12.2 inches of snow. What better can life give me? And a possibility of thunder snow, which I have never seen in my life. This is truely the weekend of gift, Yahoo!

Risk Management?

Before leaving office, I took a small Sam Adams. The good stuff unlocked my stiff mind almost immediately, put my thoughts gliding freely in a borderless darkness. Suddenly I felt all excited and eager to do stupid stuff, like what I saw in the Top Gear clip last night.

Jeremy, the host, raced up and down a mountain in an Audi RS4 with 414 BHP, against Leo who climbed on the cliff bare handed, well, almost. Jeremy lost miserably.

Uphill was shockingly fast for Leo; it took him 1 hr 57 min, fast enough to beat the RS4; going downhill, both parties tried to make best use of gravity. Jeremy didn't have to push hard on the gas, while Leo jumped off the cliff like a bird. That would be the most beautiful 3 seconds of the clip, until a chute came out of his back. "1200 feet in 20 seconds. Beat that Clarkson!"

For a moment, I wished I were Leo.

For many years, I admired such a life, doing irrationally stupid things, constantly puttying yourself on the edge, and risking the precious life; but, is "stupid" the right adjective? Speed and courage are what men craves, no matter how pointless the action itself looks in others' eyes. The motto should be "I come, I see, I conquered"; no asking for what, at what price; those questions are stupid.

However, the calculative reality slowly wears off men's edges, risks are calculated and managed, projects are tagged with feasibility researches, dreams are dead. If things were so calculative, I wonder how the Colossal, or Alexandar's Library, or the numerous wonders, could ever be made into reality. Unfortunately, we are living in an era where risks are managed; fortunately, we, as human being, still have one nation that is never afraid of dreaming.

• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5252945100827089880, check out from minute 11:00.

On Sleep

Sleep is a bloody greedy insatiable monster. The more time you give to it, the more it craves for. Irritated and refusing to give it any more? You'll be the one that's crushed. Sometimes it might feel good to be a small-brained and sleepless shark.

Lovely Hearts

Valentine's day is around the corner, and Google has also joined the chorus.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=valentines&btnG=Google+Search

Enjoy!

Sad Story ---- from Diary

Here is one story from my diary. This incident gave me quite a shock at that time, and I thought I would remember it for quite a long time. It turned out it didn't last that long. Good that I put that into ink, so now I could be shocked again, for good.

The story was about a mid-aged guy, and the time was quite late after dark. There was no record of what I was doing that late outside that day; given around that period I usually didn't do much meaningful stuff after work, it was quite possible that I just finished a nice dinner with friends in a restaurant, or came out of a kara okay bar, or something of the same sort. As I wasn't spoiled enough to take a taxi home yet, I had the chance to experience this at the bus stop.

It actually wasn't a hectic story; everything happened pretty much quitely. This guy, a little bit dilapidated, mid-aged, was selling newspaper. It was a cold night, so there weren't many people around; for those around, they all hustled towards a warmer place, like home. Suddenly that guy started sobbing, for one obvious reason ---- there was still a pretty big pile of newspapers in front of him. That didn't last long, before he wiped off the tears and started yelling for sales again.

Although I babbled quite a lot about what I thought and what I felt and what I guessed in my diary, I'm not going to put it here. After so many years, those are all irrelevant. All I know is I still feel a heart wrenching guilt for not having helped him while I definitely could. Althought most likely that guy overcame the hardship he experienced that night (or I would rather believe so), and probably has already forgotten what happened what happened, it still cannot acquit me.

While less than 10% of the world's population is enjoying a pretty excessive life, more than 50% are experiencing the other extreme. I don't know how to help because I feel like a coward. My wife and I once talked about experiencing some places where people are extremely deprived of the basic necessities of life, and then we flinched at the thought that we would end up giving up all what we have to help; there simply is no way to be rational under such circumstances. Maybe that's why we all bear sins, whoever has the luxury to go to a church or read the bible all bear sins for not being able to help enough.

After I wrote up the above piece simply based on my impression, I checked for some facts, and it is astonishing; over 2.8 billion people are living on under $2 a day; it's pretty sure most of them are living on even much less than that, if the distribution is really like a triangle.

Pangza's Anniversary

Three years ago on this day, Pangza was married; and so did Sister Three (a.k.a. Six Crawl). Sounds much of a coincidence, unless it was not. (For the record, it was 2/4/2003)

Today the couple wanted to have a romantic dinner, without Max around. Was a dinner enough? No fruits? They did spend more than 3 hrs on fruits and kept us waiting for that long before the big day. With such an obsessiveness for fruits, it's amazing to see them returning in 2 hrs, straight from dinner and no leeway whatsoever.

The night after dinner was pretty much eventless. The big gang gathered in front of a 17" monitor and watched a movie, after which a subtle atmosphere of amour inevitably grew in the room ...

Music Night

While I'm alone, I start to try something new. Wife is pretty skittish about sounds when sleeping, whereas I am not. Therefore, I start to put music on throughout the night, although weekends only.

That is a gorgeous experience.

There is a long play list for this, and all tracks are classic music. My favorite musical instrument being classical guitar, music in that is dominant, followed by violin and cello. Pop or country music cannot get into this list, as they don't feel as fluent most of the time, and I don't want to be suddenly waken up by the drummer's impromptu. After several nights' fine tuning (not much), this list is just the right recipe to sooth me into a hypnotized state, and to gently pull me back to reality in the morning with the perfect touch of harmony. The only sadness is that I never have the chance to get the taste of tracks in the middle hours, unless I get up for the bathroom trip which I rarely rarely do.

I remember the years when I had the radio on for the whole long nights from time to time. I'm not sure what the music did or does to my sleep; but in those timeless tunes, my thoughts could just wander into any borderless ecstacy. Finding this neverland again is like getting into touch with a long lost friend, so familiar yet much more to explore.