September 7, 2020 at 8:18 pm (Flowers, Food and Drink, fpj-photo-challenge, Holidays, Links, postaday, Recommended, Weather)
Tags: California, Garden, websites
Inspired by viveka, whose adventures on my guilty pleasures self has been following for years! Though forced to spend 2020 sheltering at home, viveka’s posts make self incredibly thirsty!
Here’s the reason behind the week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge:
- People all over the world honor their workers in a variety of ways. In the U.S., we honor those who labor by setting aside the first Monday of September as Labor Day. But world-wide, people pour themselves into their work — paid or unpaid — with commitment, ingenuity, and a sincere desire to make a difference. For them, work has become more than just work. It has become a labor of love.
Here are a few of self’s own Labors of Love.
Self grew tomatoes, and planted more flowers.
The California fires are still blazing.
Take care of yourselves, fire fighters! Hope you have big pitchers of ice-cold beer waiting at the end of your shifts!
Stay safe.
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August 23, 2020 at 3:56 pm (Food and Drink, Links, postaday, Sundays, Weather)
Tags: California, Garden, lens-artists photo challenge, patti moed, summer
Patti Moed: Take “a fresh look at ordinary, everyday objects — things that you see and use in your everyday life . . . “
For this challenge, self decided to go outside and see what she could see. Fires are raging in her county, but three things stand between them and her neighborhood: the I-280 freeway, foothills (at this time, dry as dry) and of course FIREFIGHTERS. The fires are at this moment 10% contained; it took firefighters almost a whole week to get there.
Since it is summer, her backyard is in fruit. She has three fig trees, one plum tree, one lemon tree, and two cherry trees. Busy, busy time. Because of this photo challenge, she decided to take pictures of homely garden furniture which she’s had for probably decades:
Here are a few peeks at the Everyday Objects of others:
Stupidity Hole
My Camera & I
Photographias
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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August 12, 2020 at 11:38 pm (Flowers, Food and Drink, Links, Lists, Movies, Philippine History, Publishers, Recommended, television)
Tags: blogs, history, inspirations, restaurants, The Philippines, war literature, websites
Self’s List of Bookmarks has grown during the pandemic! And keeps growing.
The past week, these:
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August 10, 2020 at 12:47 am (Artists and Writers, destinations, Explorers, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Philippine History, Recommended, Sundays, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: Doreen Fernandez, Dumaguete, Filipino food, memories, restaurants, The Philippines
- The drive from Dumaguete through Bais and Mabinay to Kabankalan, Negros Occidental is an excellent road, past hills and valleys, even a zig-zag portion, through fields and towns, and hardly a billboard.
Self has driven this route. Ten years ago.
Doreen G. Fernandez (self’s second mother) had made an appointment to visit Vicente Lobaton, kinilaw artist. Kinilaw is the Filipino version of sushi. And it’s rather a specialty in the Visayan Islands, in the central Philippines. The number one requirement is that the seafood be freshly caught. And in a country with over 7000 islands, there’s no excuse not to have seafood that is freshly caught. Kinilaw is served with a “dressing” called sawsawan. Want to know more? It’s all in Doreen’s book, Kinilaw (1991) She goes on to describe the meal, which involved kinilaw crab, fish, and shrimp. (SO hungry right now)
Doreen was from the self-same island that Dear Departed Dad was from. It has a very non-PC name: Negros. That’s right, the island is named Negros because its people were dark. It has been named that since the 16th century. It is divided into two provinces: Negros Occidental (where self’s Dear Departed Dad, and Doreen, were from) and Negros Oriental. Negros Oriental has this really cool city called Dumaguete, which became the title for one of self’s short stories (It’s in MsAligned 3, published earlier this year)
Vicente, who goes by Enting, has two restaurants on Negros. One is Enting’s Manukan in Sagay; the other is Enting’s Lechonan on 17th St. near Lacson in downtown Bacolod, the capitol of Negros Occidental.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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August 3, 2020 at 8:37 pm (Books, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Personal Bookshelf, Philippine History, Recommended)
Tags: desserts, elections, Filipino food, indulgences, memories, Mondays, nonfiction, nostalgia, politics, The Philippines
p. 13: “the past comes rushing back . . . ”
- On election day, in full view of more than 700 foreign and local journalists, and millions of concerned citizens, Marcos’s men ripped up ballots, bought others and muzzled voters. As many as three million names were stricken off the voters’ list.
p. 16 features a description of self’s favorite Filipino dessert, halo-halo (Literal Translation: mix-mix):
- This delicacy, served in a tall sundae glass, contains diced bananas, sweet mango, chickpeas, kidney beans, strands of macapuno (the succulent meat of a variety of coconut) — all of these in syrup — plus pinipig (kernels of crisp and delectable rice), mongo beans, corn, langka (jackfruit), sweet potato, jello, ube (purple yam preserves), and leche flan.
HUNGRY.
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July 31, 2020 at 5:54 pm (Food and Drink, Lists, Surprises, Traveling, Wall Street Journal)
Tags: fast food, Fridays, restaurants
Chipotle Triples Its Online Sales (and self has never eaten in Chipotle!)
Las Vegas Sands Revenue Drops by 97%
Whirlpool Benefits from Stay-Home Repairs
Dow Jumps 165, Lifted by Pfizer Shares
Dairy Prices Near Levels Before Slump
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July 25, 2020 at 2:32 am (Food and Drink, Lists, Salon.com, short story collections, television)
Tags: adaptations, COVID Reading, Fridays, Justified, memories, noir, reading lists, short story, summer, Timothy Olyphant
Reading Elmore Leonard’s Chickasaw Charlie Hoke.
There is a “big redhead” named Vernice, looking “like a strawberry sundae in her La-Z-Boy.”
There is “bourbon over crushed ice.”
There are mentions of “a pit boss at Bally’s,” a waitress at the Isle of Capri coffee shop.
There is an “RV in a trailer park on the outskirts of Tunica, Mississippi.”
Very fun reading Elmore Leonard. It brings back all the FEELZ about Justified, the F/X series that ran for six seasons and had Timothy Olyphant! Timothy Olyphant! Who Salon’s TV reviewer described as “one tall, cool drink of water”!
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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July 22, 2020 at 2:16 am (Books, Food and Drink, Places, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: COVID Reading, London, museum, novel, reading lists, summer
The Snakes (never mind the page, it’s somewhere near the end, that’s all self can give you).
Dan is clearly not a happy man. He even casts shade on what’s become of the old Battersea Power Station.
Battersea Power Station is, in self’s humble opinion, A GREAT RECYCLE OF INDUSTRIAL ARCHITECTURE. It’s now the Tate Modern. OK, maybe it’s a little grim. But that’s just the outside. The art inside is fabulous!
Of course it would go. Everything went. Like Battersea Power Station before it, a place like that was marked for destruction . . . He leaned against a wall and watched the people going by, and the girl cooking the curry in the wok . . . She’d been joined by a friend who had propped up a sign saying ‘vegan.’ She smiled at Dan. He didn’t like white girls with braids . . . He put his hands in his pockets and walked away, out into the noise of Rye Lane, towards the station . . . He was nearly crying when he got to the station, and he didn’t even know why.
Lighten up, Dan!
Self can’t WAIT to see how this novel ends. According to 80% of the people who left reviews on goodreads, it’s going to be terrible.
Self’s next read is an Elmore Leonard short story collection, and those stories will be as far from contemporary London as one can possibly imagine.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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July 10, 2020 at 1:37 am (Food and Drink, Links, Movies, Philippine History, Recommended)
Tags: adaptations, memories, nostalgia, Palo Alto, reviews, summer, war movie, websites
Self just saw the review on a site she checks pretty regularly: http://www.rogerebert.com
She normally doesn’t like watching ‘military’ movies. She feels like the high point was Platoon and The Hurt Locker and she hasn’t seen any good ones, not any straightforward (not Quentin Tarantino tongue-in-cheek) good ones, in a long time.
But darn, The Outpost sounds like a good movie! Brian Tallerico (who she hasn’t quoted before, she doesn’t think) begins his review with:
- Director Rod Lurie’s first film in almost a decade is also one of his best, and the first movie since our national nightmare began in 2020 that I really regretted not being able to see in a theater.
That’s you and self, Brian!
If only they would open the Stanford Theater on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto so that she could watch classic black-and-whites like Roman Holiday and enjoy with the $1 small bucket of popcorn.
Anyhoo, this is one of those VOD ones. The only other film she’s rented during the pandemic has been Ronald Emmerich’s 10,000 B.C. and that’s because she wanted to see how Captain Jim Holden of The Expanse looked when he was 21 and clad only in animal skins.
Read Brian Tallerico’s review here.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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July 9, 2020 at 8:20 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Filipino Writers, Food and Drink, Personal Bookshelf, Places, Women Writers)
Tags: essays, Filipino food, indulgences, nostalgia, The Philippines
From Hometown Foods: Essays on Filipino Food:
Quiet, bucolic Silay used to have a lot of gambling for high stakes going on behind the walls of those gracious houses. Some, I was told (I never saw them) had sophisticated warning, hiding and escape systems built into them in case of an unlikely raid — unlikely because of pakikisama, because important officials were among the gamblers, because it was an important part of the community lifestyle. Tales were told and zarzuelas were written about jewelry, land titles and car registrations flung on the gambling table; of haciendas lost in a night of gaming; of marriages sacrificed at the mahjong, panguingue or monte tables, or at the cockpit.
For these gamblers, I was told, were developed for kalan-unon (kakanin) for which Silay is famous, and the accompanying institution, the manug-libud (accent on ug and ud). The kalan-unon are portable — they can be eaten without getting up from the gambling table, and they used to be made by the best cooks in Silay — maiden aunts, young wives, mothers, girls, many from the best families. The food was taken around by the manug-libud (“libud” means to take from place to place, usually to sell) to homes with or without gambling, to restaurants and schools, in large round baskets covered with cloth and carried on their heads.
Are there any chefs from Silay in the Bay Area? Are there any Filipino restaurants in Redwood City? How about Half Moon Bay? Just wondering.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
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