Hibernation

It is no coincidence that my last blog post coincided almost exactly with the kickoff of Teach For America admissions season. It's been a very busy three months that I'll take an easy, breezy pictorial approach to recounting, leaving out all the bits about work...

1) The glorious weather in Northport, NY, where we spent Thanksgiving with Eli's family









2) American political discourse gets more relevant by the day









3) I was making a beeline for the cash register at Barnes and Noble when I was struck by the "old soul" countenance of this little reindeer. Naturally, I had to rescue him (his name is Gaspard)












4) Eli and I have started doing jigsaw puzzles and playing speed over hot cider. It is chilly outside, not that we have the right to complain...

My Latvian Doppelganger

Something I've been obsessed with for the past two days is watching videos of classical music performances. I've been looking up all my favorite piano pieces, and sometimes have found videos of the exact same recordings I have on CD (check out Zimerman and his bushy eyebrows playing the Chopin Fantasie in F-minor!). The coolest thing, though, was seeing my Latvian doppelganger, Vestard Shimkus, sit down to play the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1 (he's the pianist, not the conductor).



If want to watch some superhuman fingerwork, look at this:

Smorgasbord

Random updates...

* Eli and I went to a family reunion in New York last weekend; as usual, we arrived in time for the hottest day of the year. But at least we missed the tornado in Brooklyn (seriously, WHAT is going on?)
* I'm very excited about a host of sequels coming out to movies that I love: Harold and Kumar Go to Amsterdam, a sequel to Elizabeth called The Golden Age (random aside: I was a serious Henry VIII buff in 4th grade and read like, five of his biographies and can still name all his wives in order), and last but not least, Rush Hour 3.
* Currently searching for a wedding photographer and a non-denominational officiant. To my chagrin, there appears to be a clear trade-off between price and cheese factor, though I am still hoping to find a cool art student type who hasn't yet been poisoned by years and years in the wedding industry.
* There's a show on PBS I've been semi-obsessed with: New Scandinavian Cooking. I don't know that I'd try any of the recipes -- I think I need to taste herring properly cooked before giving it a whirl on my own -- but Claus Meyer, the host, makes me giggle, with his Nordic good looks and no-nonsense instructions. Think IKEA meets Posh Nosh.
* I haven't been cooking Danish food, but I have been cooking. I made a blueberry and nectarine buckle, orange nutmeg muffins, lots of experimental sauceless pastas with white wine and aglio olio, and composed salads (beets, lemon juice, Boursin; tonight we're having a CA-style Nicoise with seared ahi tuna instead of canned).
* Now that I work full-time in my living room, I feel slightly on edge there and find solace working in the kitchen and reading in my bedroom. I can't be in the living room for very long or I end up answering emails, fiddling around with spreadsheets and craving caffeine.

Sprawled Again

After a mysteriously long hiatus, I'm back! Was I in an iron lung or on a reality show? Or maybe it was a reality show about being in an iron lung?

Big news. As of this afternoon, we have signed on for another 10 months of sprawling in the South Bay, adding new life and purpose to this blog. This is a sort of last gasp before the confluence of a number of changes in summer '08: wedding, new apartment, new job (for me), and another six-hour exam (for me). Looks like we won't be making it to Beijing for the Olympics.

The decision to renew the lease happened to come on the same day I discovered that I have gained 15 pounds since leaving San Francisco. Despite being surrounded by nature here, it apparently takes more effort to go out and take advantage of it. The Fremont Older Open Space is something we just discovered recently. This is someone's random photo from Flickr, but it works for me. It's sort of a perfect cross between Rancho San Antonio, which is covered in nice shaded paths, and the Dish at Stanford, which gives you immediate gratification with a steep hill at the beginning and awesome views within five minutes. Interesting fact: this is not the older cousin of some lesser known Fremont Younger Open Space, but used to be owned by a San Francisco reporter named Fremont Older.

Still life with pepper and paranoia

I went to the farmers' market at Vallco Fashion Park (probably my favorite textbook example of a shortsighted branding decision) during my lunch break today for the first time. It only runs from 9am to 1pm on Fridays, so I never really would have been able to go if I wasn't working from home.

I got some tiny red bell peppers (one is pictured left, reclining on the stovetop), Japanese eggplants, a whole pint of blueberries, a portobello mushroom, a bag of fresh spinach, two white nectarines, and a pound of spectacular, sashimi-grade scallops... all for under $25. I had the portobello and some spinach for lunch, both pan-fried with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. For about an hour or so, I was super excited about this.

While I love farmers' markets and am always amazed to see the variety of stuff that is miraculously coaxed out of the ground in the Bay Area... by the middle of my blog post, the whole episode suddenly made me feel a little uncomfortable and oh-so-twenty-five-years-old and fast becoming some kind of monstrous housewife-y type ("in the morning I do my Pilates, and then I go to the farmers' market, pose and photograph an organic bell pepper, saute some vegetables, update my blog, go shopping with my girlfriends and head to yoga!").

So um, if you'll excuse me, I think I'm going to stop daydreaming about my vegetables and go back to being a results-oriented strategy professional. :-)

Simpsonified

This Simpsons avatar creator is so cool! Thanks for the tip, Caro.



















Wow, that's two posts with Simpsons references in a row...

It tastes like burning

Fuchsia Dunlop is a British food scholar on China who has written two extraordinary (to borrow a word more often used in the Queen's English than in California) volumes on Sichuan and Hunan cooking. I love curling up in bed with a cookbook, and it makes me so happy when the book is written by someone who has an endearing personality and lots of stories behind their recipes.

I've cooked up a few things from her books in the past couple of weeks: beef with cumin, numbing & hot chicken, red-braised bean curd puffs, Yueyang velveted fish, steamed eggplants with chile sauce, and pork slivers with sweet bean paste... it's definitely been an adventure. The smoke detector has gone off twice and the Sichuan peppercorns I lovingly ground up in my mortar for the numbing & hot chicken I cooked tonight BURNED MY HANDS FOR TWO FULL HOURS.

I guess I did read Fuchsia's warning about wearing rubber gloves, and I guess I'm lucky I didn't rub my eyes or anything like that, but seriously, it was like someone had pepper-sprayed me in the hands. It started out as if my hands were clammy, with less circulation than usual, but things quickly escalated. For a couple of hours, my hands felt intensely tingly and fiery to the point of being simultaneously icy cold.

I needed relief and I needed it fast -- so who did I turn to? The Internet, of course. There, I saw recommendations for things ranging from dishwashing liquid (no effect), to oil (no effect), to bleach (no thanks!), until finally I saw something about how rubbing alcohol dissolves the capsaicin on the outside of your skin but as for the stuff that managed to make contact with your nerves (??!?), you have no choice but to nut up and walk it off. Luckily, Eli realized that hand sanitizer is pretty much the same stuff as rubbing alcohol so the problem was contained, if not completely rectified for another couple of hours. And I think it goes without saying that the deeply visceral nerd-feeling I get from cooking with rubber gloves will be a small price to pay the next time around.

Adventures in Telecommuting - Week 1

Last Monday was my first day at TFA, and it's been a pretty busy week: all kinds of trainings, visiting the SF office for an afternoon, getting my computer and internet phone set up, making my own lunch. A couple things that have struck me about working from home as a permanent arrangement:

* I haven't yet gone all Emily Dickinson on everyone (although it's only been a week)... I think my 9 months of living alone in Tucson have prepared me well for not talking for long stretches of time.

* There are TONS of stay-at-home moms and round-the-clock landscaping activity at our complex. The landscapers and most of the moms are very friendly; the UPS guy, however, does not say hi back.

* I need to figure out how to translate my in-person personality into my phone personality. I nod a lot when I'm talking to people; it's my way of showing them I'm listening and following along. Can't nod over the phone. Makes me nervous.

* I've been eating waaaaay too much kaju barfi. :-(

A conversation with Eli

It's been a long, long time since the blogosphere has heard from Eli. While he's always been a rather private man who shuns the glare of the public eye, rumors have been circulating as to his whereabouts, ranging from the mundane (doesn't like to blog) to the fanciful (running off with Falkor in search of the Southern Oracle). But we caught up with the reclusive financial associate in his suburban home, where he granted us an exclusive interview. Sheena reports.

S: So tell me... what exactly have you been up to?

E: Studying for the CFA exam.

S: How's that working out for you?

E: It's working out okay so far. I've budgeted my time well and just need to make it through the final week and a half.

S: Any big plans for after you're done?

E: Exercising and watching television.

And there you have it. Tune in next time when we catch up with yet another errant blogger -- IS there a new Thurgood Jenkins in town? Don't touch that dial...

Reply hazy, try again

It has been a secret goal of mine for oh, the past twenty minutes, to win the New Yorker caption contest at some point in my life. I don't think it's going to happen unless I take up golf and stop changing the channel on NPR's weekend offerings, but here's hoping.

Posh Nosh on YouTube

Posh Nosh is a fake cooking show from the BBC, hosted by the Honorable Simon and Minty Marchmont. It's hilarious and I was really excited to find it on YouTube.

Episode 1


Bon appetit!

Cell phone bed

From Geekologie:







The concept is totally ridiculous, but I love the image of a cell phone walking around in pink slippers.

Stream of consciousness

- Back on another fitness kick, although my prediction is that Ben & Jerry's Cinnamon Buns ice cream will be the death of me

- The thing I am most allergic to, according to my allergy test: dust mites. And in the process of detoxifying my bedroom and closet, I found a horrifying, unspeakable centipede

- Tonight is my penultimate evening meeting with my offshore development team, and therefore the penultimate time I will have to miss the first half of Heroes, second best show ever

- I've only read two books in the past three months, unless you count cookbooks (I've probably read about four of those), and I feel like a bit of a slacker, especially since Eli continues to study for CFA Level II with serene, monk-like devotion

- I stopped running the air conditioning in my car, opting to open up all the windows instead and deal with the heat... got really awesome gas mileage

- Found an Ambiance outlet in Noe Valley... oh dear.

On quitting

Ronni's most recent post got me thinking... I'm not very disciplined in keeping up with most of my online pursuits.

Witness Yelp, where I wrote 13 reviews, added a few random friends to my list, and... pretty much fizzled out. Or what about last.fm, which made me feel like I was being thrown under the hipster bus every time I hit Play? I had a decent run with goodreads and enjoyed seeing what books my friends had recently read and enjoyed, but I really don't read enough anymore to make frequent updates...

Netvibes is about the only thing I use religiously to organize my feeds and stay on top of my gossip, foodie news (Tastespotting was a great recent find), and friends' blogs when there are updates. :)

And speaking of quitters...

* Snoop Dogg looks uncommonly sober at the Warriors game tonight. Seriously, I don't think I've seen his irises since 1995. Good for him!

* I'm leaving my current job on May 18 and joining Teach for America on May 21. I've never quit a job before--usually it's just time to pack up and go back to school--and I've found it to be awkward, delicate, and sad on a lot of counts. But I'm really excited to start my new job and explore some new possibilities.

Step 1: Cut a hole in a box

Eli and I drove to Woodside last week to scope out a potential wedding venue. Some things we were not expecting:

1. Most places only give tours during the business hours of M-F 9am to 5pm. Hey, those are our business hours too.
2. The places with the best views know they have the best views and only do full-day events on weekends... which means if you want to have a small outdoor ceremony somewhere, you have to rent the sucker for 8 full hours.

Passing by a massive ranch in Woodside where some guy was hitting golf balls into a field, we started mulling over that classic question made infamous by Office Space: if money weren't an issue, what would we do all day with our time? We both decided that we would choose to read and study languages and play the piano... and then travel and read some more.

But if we ever do strike it rich, it looks like we're in luck on the language front: the folks who created the excellent ChinesePod service have launched SpanishSense... hope they keep it up! Too bad I won't have much of a commute starting next month. ;-)

Childhood obesity on a stick

Sorry, I'm still on my "sad for America" kick... this was just too crazy not to share.

Banking on a little hope

With everything that's been going on in the news, I've been feeling a bit ambivalent about humanity lately. I suppose it doesn't help matters that I recently finished The Road, a novel which takes place in a post-nuclear-disaster world where cannibalistic gangs roam the earth.

So... I've been a little bummed the past few days.

That's why it was especially nice to hear about Kiva.org today from Christine -- it's a service that helps you make loans to small business owners in developing countries. Most loans are repaid in full, and you can make loans as small as $25, so it's kind of a nifty, low-key feel-good thing to do. Christine and I lent money to a 25-year-old medical store owner in Nigeria... feel free to join in. :)

Post-engagement life

I know we promised lots of photos, but after the marathon effort involved in putting together the Kodakgallery album on our Spain trip, we're going to take a little break from all that. Enjoy the album if you haven't already seen it (and I reckon most of you have). I don't know if you can see my new ring in any of the pictures... in any case, it was on the wrong hand the entire time I was on vacation (seriously, did I miss that day in school or something??) and it wasn't until we got home and looked it up on Wikipedia that I put it on the correct hand. I never claimed I was good at being a girl. :)

Since coming back, Eli and I have started exploring some of our area's amazing open spaces. We saw lots of cool scenery on our trip, but we realized that there are so many beautiful places right under our noses, places that we want to hike and explore in those sunny slivers of evening we have between work and dinner. As much as I complained about Daylight Savings this year, it's definitely got its perks... sunsets at 7:40pm being one of them.

Spanish fly

We're back from Spain. More details and photos to come, but it was an amazing experience which has forever changed us.

Especially Eli.

They think they've got us figured out...

Do you ever look at the sponsored links that show up in Gmail and scratch your head? Check out the list of links I got to the right of an email thread on brunch plans:




















Apparently brunch consumption is somehow linked to luxury apartments and French food and getting hitched. Or what about this set of links, displayed next to a thread about the Kanye West video "Throw Some D's" (not making this a hyperlink was a conscious choice)... Throw pillows? Balloon popping video??

It was a Tuesday evening in the suburbs...

...and Sheena Bear has a new friend.

Trader Jose, Trader Ming, Trader Giotto

I discovered a new favorite item from Trader Joe's today: the French Apple Tart. Eli and I had tomato & basil bruschetta on whole grain bread for dinner, so we felt totally justified in indulging in a little dessert.

Some other Sheena/Eli-approved items:
- Coconut Curry Chicken Stix
- Chicken & Cheese Tamales (at $1.99 for two, this, my friends, is how you eat economically)
- Rice Pudding (I'm trying not to eat this anymore, but yeah, it's good)
- Coconut Shrimp (ditto)
- Honey Sesame Sticks
- Chocolate Covered Espresso Beans
- Veggie Chips
- Prig Khing Green Beans
- Frozen Black Cherries

What are your Trader Joe's favorites? I'm always down to try some new stuff.

Reading log: February

February has not been a productive reading month. It's the shortest month of the year, and on top of that, I've grown increasingly distracted (in a good way) with planning for our Spain trip.

The Place You Love is Gone by Melissa Holbrook Pierson
Grade: B- Pierson's elegy to her lost hometowns is poignant in parts, and obnoxiously preachy in others ("we have sold our birthright to the devil in exchange for a wide selection of bath mats"... barf). Sadly, one of her main points--that everyone develops their own specific language of signs and symbols that define their personal brand of nostalgia--definitely applies here. I was so not moved.


The Fated Sky: Astrology in History by Benson Bobrick
Grade: A- I don't usually love history books, but hot damn, this was a good one. I have to ding it half a grade because I don't think any collection of "wow, neat-o!" moments throughout history, no matter how well-written it is, can shake me up and change the way I think forever. As far as the validity of astrology itself, I'm still a skeptic, though it sounds like some of the really old-school pure mathematics-based stuff just might hold some water: Bobrick does a blind reading of Hitler's birth chart using principles from Ptolemy's Tetrabiblos and comes up with some specific conclusions that seem a bit too dead-on to be mere coincidences.

Next up: a book on social engineering and human experiments (yikes)... probably the only book I'll be reading in all of March because I'll be too busy stuffing my face with gateau Basque. ;-)

The Oscars: an experiment in liveblogging

1) Glad that An Inconvenient Truth won
2) Jennifer Hudson's right boob is out of control
3) Is it just me, or did the clip for Little Miss Sunshine basically show the arc of the entire movie in under 60 seconds?

Euromix 2007!!

Sheena and I are making a mix in preparation for our trip to Spain, France, and (briefly) London next month: Euromix 2007. Not sure if anything can beat the amazing vocals from "Space Rider", by far the best song on the 2000 Ministry of Sound compilation "UK Garage":

Space Rider,
Where you think you're goin'?
Is it somewhere I can follow?
Some way crazier place
where I can be free?

Other songs that represent the zeitgeist of Europe to me and other misled Americans: Ozone's Dragoste din tei and Gunther's Tutti Frutti Summer Love. I might not have Gunther's mullet, but I think I've seen those glasses at H&M, and I must buy them. Also, I plan on obtaining the shirt seen above by urinating selectively on one of my white undershirts. Or maybe this is just what white undershirts look like when you don't wear deodorant.

Keyvan, got any more gems like "By my side"?

Happy (Lunar) New Year!

Today's the first day of the lunar new year (or Chinese New Year for folks who think all y'all look alike)... an estimated 14 billion "Happy New Year" text messages are expected to go out over the next seven days in China.

As for Eli and me, we've been eating a lot. My mom cooked up a crazy feast for the new year's eve dinner, always a splurge by tradition: shark fin soup, abalone and sea cucumber over gai lan, a ridiculously good braised pork dish, steamed whole fish, orange pork chops, boiled chicken, and a little Hennessy. My parents stayed up until 1:30 watching the 5-hour New Year's extravaganza on CCTV, but I can only take so much Beijing opera.

Can't buy me love - retraction

Okay, you can buy my love if you bring me this puppy:



Eeeee!

Can't buy me love

From indexed.blogspot.com:

Wisdom of crowds indeed

I'm doing a project for work that has involved playing around with Yahoo!Answers. If you haven't tried it out, it's a pretty nifty concept. Questions are posted and answered by visitors to the site. People are incented to give good answers by a number of mechanisms that introduce a civilizing dose of karma: each user keeps a balance of points. Points are taken away whenever you ask a question, but you are awarded points whenever you provide an answer. There's quality control, too--when your answer is chosen as the best answer by the "asker," you get a nice handful of bonus points.

So I decided to do my part and answer questions where I have some expertise. I got a Biology degree at Fair Harvard so I thought, hey, I'll start by browsing the Biology section. I'll weigh in on a few questions, see what's going on, get a sense of the user experience... that is, until "johnny" decides to rain on my parade by reminding me not only of the humiliating state of this country's educational system, but also of its self-assured swagger and emphasis on truthiness:



I thought, this must be some kind of joke... there must be some people out there with more sense than "johnny," or at least more sense than Jessica Simpson, right?

Right?

Impress the ladies... with fish sauce

I found a killer recipe for pad thai on Chez Pim and made it for dinner tonight. The tamarind pulp experience was unappealing on a lot of levels, and the simmering fish sauce concoction smelled like--well, like the nether regions of 99 Ranch, but in the end it was well worth it. With the exception of the tamarind step (not difficult, just gross), it was surprisingly easy to put together.

Reading Log: January

January was the month of anti-heroes...

Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
Grade: A
Visceral, full-bodied writing + an unstoppable plot + sassy characters you probably wouldn't want to run into in real life + well-executed magical realism... it's no wonder the LA Times Book Review drew comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Quentin Tarantino. Really, really amazing.

Atonement by Ian McEwan
Grade: A
I loved this book about as much as Rushdie's, but for opposite reasons (Shalimar the Clown : a juicy Zinfandel :: Atonement : a grassy, crisp Sauvignon Blanc ::*). McEwan's book is all about a controlled unveiling of a carefully architected plot, but it somehow manages to be very passionate throughout, even in its restraint.

Villages by John Updike
Grade: B+
After reading a novel set in a disputed area of Kashmir and another novel that centered around Victorian England and World War I, what better way to lighten up the month than to bear witness to the tribulations of a adulterous computer programmer in Connecticut? I really did enjoy reading this book, as hollow as it sometimes felt compared to the previous two novels, but it lost big points with me for two reasons: (1) pardon the ageism, but it was disturbing to read extremely graphic sex scenes written by a 75-year-old man, and (2) female characters were consistently simple-minded fools who serve as supports to Updike's simple-minded generalizations about women.

*Sorry for the lame wine analogy. I couldn't resist. Paired with the nerdy analogy structure, I should really be ashamed--but it's funny, right? Please continue being friends with me.

Soul Train 2.0

Loving this video.

MSTRKRFT - Street Justice

Cupcakes for Eli

The KitchenAid is awesome--it's quick and efficient and makes a cute whirring noise as it cheerfully does my bidding. I chose to make buttermilk cupcakes as my first baking project. I promised they would be fluffy and sweet, and they were...

What failed me this time was not the KitchenAid. Nope, it was my inability to read labels. I mistakenly bought whole grain pastry flour instead of normal processed white cake flour. To be fair, Whole Foods chose not to carry any cake flour because they hate freedom, so what I got instead of tender, fluffy cupcakes was tender, fluffy cupcakes with some residual grain particles to chew on at the end. Oh, and colon health, because I really care about that at the age of 24.


There are ten whole cupcakes left. Eli's got his work cut out for him this week (I don't think these are suitable for bringing to work; it would just make me sad). But there will be many more baking projects to follow--Eli recently started studying for CFA Level II, and I'm always happy to whip up some extra brain food.

Meet Sheena Bear

As part of a work activity, Keyvan created a frighteningly accurate stuffed animal likeness of me.

My lofty goals

My excuse for not blogging, not going to yoga, not reading, not studying Chinese: I was very sick, then overwhelmed with work, then had a fun ski weekend, only to come back to even more work. Case in point: today I was in the office from 8:30 to 6, and will be on a phone meeting from 7:30 to 9.

When the pendulum does swing back the other way, though, I will be free to watch twenty recorded episodes of Fruity Pie, a Taiwanese childrens' show with a musically inclined cross-dressing main character.

Look what I got in the mail today!

I've wanted one of these since I was a little girl. From now on, fluffy cakes. And pictures of them.

Reading Log: December

Happy New Year, everyone! Having some time off for the holidays has been great--I got a chance to celebrate Christmas with my family, run around Point Reyes with Eli and his parents, catch up on Six Feet Under (4th season now), bake macaroons, and sleep in most days. New Year's Eve was spent enjoying the triple threat of brunch, shopping, and Keyvan, followed by some Chinese takeout, Korbel (Ronni, we thought of you), and a shockingly graphic History Channel documentary. Though I can't say I'm quite ready to go back to work, I've had a pretty good run.

I also got a chance to read! I really didn't think I was going to make my four-book goal this month--I blame caffeine withdrawal and the glacial plotline of Never Let Me Go--but a chunk of sweet, unstructured time came in and saved the day.

Bad Girls of Japan, edited by Laura Miller and Jan Bardsley
Grade: A- A fascinating collection of essays on how traditional female gender roles have been turned on their heads in Japan, from the cannibalistic mountain witches of Japanese folklore to the brand craze that had modern-day shoppers hooked on luxury goods. I did find some of the analysis to be a stretch (schoolgirls making ugly faces in photo booths equals subversion?), but academia must be indulged here and there.

Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
Grade: B- Creepy and atmospheric, yes. "Wrenchingly desolate", no. This book got great reviews from critics, but I should have known it was going to be less than awesome when Amazon recommended it to me. :)

The Basque History of the World, by Mark Kurlansky
Grade: A-. I have always wanted to travel to Spain, and to San Sebastian in particular, but I never knew very much about Basque or Spanish history beyond a few proper nouns seared into my memory from my high school Spanish textbooks. I was totally drawn in by Kurlansky's obvious love of his subject (Basques are cool, seriously--did you know they were expert whalers and were the first to bring chocolate to Europe?) and his cheerful attention to detail.

The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama
Grade: A- Obama lays out his stances on "the issues" with elegant, emotive prose. I found myself unsatisfied at times with some positions that appeared precariously balanced--in seeing both sides, the cynic in me alleges that he's simply trying to stay marketable to as many people as possible. But one of Obama's core themes that resonated with me is that the real world's complex problems demand nuanced treatment and substantive, empathetic debate, in place of the stark and oversimplified polarizations that are so common in today's politics.