Tuesday, June 15, 2010

dreams

I was really sad to wake up from my nap to realize that Eric's parents hadn't brought over 5 kittens for us to keep just until they'd grown into cats, and that Kristy and Shannon weren't in my kitchen doing the dishes and cooking me dinner. :[

Monday, June 14, 2010

footy pajamas!

I have footy pajamas. Eric bought them for me because he is nice and I was pining over them immensely. It's so fantastic to hop into bed on cold nights, protected all the way down to my toesies... they keep me so warm that sometimes I have to take off the blanket and just have on the sheet, whereas before I would sometimes wake up shivering if the blanket had fallen off. And they're cute with the awesome three wolf moon design :D



that hat has kitty ears, and Eric bought it for me as well because apparently you can upgrade your pajamas to a costume, which means getting a hat with ears and a tail. The tail would be a bit strange to wear I think, but I love the hat.

And Eric bought himself some matching ones :]

Saturday, May 1, 2010

randomz

yo homies.

Not too much is happening! This week is my last week of my real job, then I go back to delivering pizza for 10 hours a week. Delivering pizzas is pretty fun. I will definitely write a post chronicling some of my strange/cool experiences. Someday...

today is Sunday, which (for the past 9 weeks) has been the only day I get off each week. Eric is at work, no one else is home, and I lay in bed for hours and usually cook something up fancy.

Unfortunately today is an on day (500 calories for me) which sort of takes the joy out of cooking. Sushi is pretty wonderful though... last on day, I made one with tuna, avocado, spring onions, and lettuce. It was delicious, filling, and only ~300 calories for the entire roll.
I've been progressing only slowly with this alternate day diet-- I got sick halfway through April and decided it was probably best for my body if I gave it the amount of calories it needs, which was good because I got better quickly, though at the expense of my strict adherence. Worth it. And even so, I've returned to the stage and am doing pretty good overall. I do have one weakness -- and an expensive one at that. It is Sal's Pizza and it is the most delicious pizza I have ever had. Ever. I've only tried the pepperoni... I want to try sausage and meatball, but the pepperoni is just so good that I think it will take a while for me to be adventurous. Especially since it's $28 per pizza... which really isn't bad when you consider that two pieces stuffs you for dinner, and one piece is more than adequate for lunch. We've only had it two times, but we want it every day.

Yesterday I was craving pizza rolls, which they don't sell here but also are really salty and bad for you anyway. So I went to the store and bought some egg roll wraps and some clearance tomatoes... it was around 1 kg of tomatoes for 99 cents, because they were about to go off. I love a good bargain. I made a yummy marinara sauce, and we already had some salami and mozzarella... so I made some pizza rolls in the oven, but they were very bland and kind of sucked. I think it was partly because the mozzarella we have is particularly tasteless and uninteresting, but I'm not sure how else to spice it up. DISAPPOINTMENT.
I also tried making garlic knots from a recipe I stumbled onto but I failed to note there is a difference between instant yeast and active yeast, so that didn't work out.

Despite all my failings and cookings and current sedentary lifestyle, here are my new stats:

Alternate Day Diet Week 4ish:
Sunday, 2/5/10.
Weight: 98.1 kgs

not too shabby for four weeks of partial dieting, and literally no effort to exercise. I'm excited for the next few weeks, when I'll be exercising regularly and hopefully maintaining my diet.. guess we'll see how it goes. :D

Anyway, now I'm off to create a salad royale.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

I've been doing stuff!

Hey folks,

does this font look huge to anyone else? I will see about making some adjustments.

This seems better, but maybe it will be too tiny when I actually make the post.

This is a short entry to say "dang I haven't written in ages." I will tell you some things that I've been busy with:

1. working. I do this a lot, but it had been quite slow and empty since the beginning of April, but now things have started to pick up and I have quite a few things to take care of, and thus I have less time for frivolous activities such as blogging.

2. partying. Last weekend we had our flatwarming! finally... we've all lived there since January, but hey, we're a bit lazy with planning. It was a really good time and it was fabulous seeing my school friends all at the same time again. The next night I made some awesome beer-battered fries (with some unopened beer people had left) and aioli, of which I took pictures and originally intended to blog about. I might still, since I've got an entry partially written. WOULD HATE TO WASTE IT.

3. being boring. When I get home, I eat dinner, watch TV or play Wii with Eric, and then go to bed. That is all. Being so terribly boring is exhausting.

4. being sick. I have felt like I'm coming down with a cold for the past few days. I've been staving it off with eating good food, taking my vitamins, and sucking down lots of glutamine. I guess it's working enough to keep me at the "I'm only a little bit sick" stage instead of allowing it to progress to a fullblown bodybattle against sickliness. Hopefully it ends soon though!

5. sucking at dieting. I'd been doing quite good, and feeling great, about my alternate day diet-- but it was sort of thrown off by the party, at which I drank too much, so that was too many calories for one day, and the next day I had to eat to help my body recover, and then since I've been feeling sick I have been eating regularly because Eric says I have to or else I'll get sicker. I am pretty disappointed that I have not been sticking to my diet, but once my sick feelings go away I intend to start all over again.


And that is it I guess!

FOR NOW.

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

I can make Mexican food

Hello!

Happy birthday Mom, I hope it was super fab.

yesterday was a really good day at work. I did stuff, did a good job doing that stuff, and had fun doing it.
this is a picture of my editor, Paul:



and this is a picture of me pretending to be an editor:



after work I came home and me and Eric started putting together our fabulous Mexican feast.

I had soaked some pinto and kidney beans overnight, which were then ready to be crushed and shaped into refried beans. I used a potato masher to smoosh the beans halfway in the pot they'd soaked in while I heated up the skillet.

I used onions from the roast we'd made earlier in the week, and some pre-minced garlic mush, and sauteed them in butter for a minute or so before adding the beans in slowly and further destroying their natural form with help from a wooden spoon. I also added heaps of salt. I thought it was too much salt maybe, but it was not. Once they were all done and cooked, I added some water to give them a nicer texture.



nom nom nom.

I also made some flour tortillas. They turned out absolutely fantastic... and definitely easy enough that I would make again.

Flour Tortilla Recipe

I used the recipe for "Chewy Flour Tortillas" and followed it almost exactly, although I only sat the dough for 10 minutes and then 15 minutes, because I was really really hungry. It did make 8 tortillas, but two of them are a bit runty. So I'd go for maybe 6 tortillas instead of the 8 that the recipe recommends.



Cooking them was easy... once the skillet heated up, it was probably less than 30 seconds per side before they were quite nicely browned.



Eric cut the tomatoes and made the margaritas... I don't think I took any pictures of the frozen margaritas though. We had been using pre-mixed margarita stuff but recently we bought lime cordial and triple sec and it's muuuuch better than the pre-mixed stuff.



you can also see my cute little macbook in the background! I love you, macbook.

The plan was to make burritos, so along with what I've already mentioned we also had rice (I cooked it in chicken stock and some burrito seasoning, and then added corn later... it was pretty bland though so I'd spice it up next time or skip it altogether), lettuce, sour cream, chicken (from the leftover roast... I warmed it up in a dry skillet and added heaps of burrito seasoning, was very yum), and... I think that's it.

This is a picture of the feast laid before us:



you can even see our margaritas in our fabulous margarita glasses. Wholesale restaurant supply stores are awesome.

There are HEAPS of leftovers, too, which helps make the effort of home-cookin' worthwhile. It will do Eric's lunch today, me and Eric's lunch tomorrow, and probably our dinner tomorrow as well. I can't have any today because it's my on day.
Strangely, although I've been talking a lot about food I hadn't even thought about eating any or being hungry. I'm already doing a good job I guess.

Anyway the mexican was delicious and it was really fun to cook with my boyf.
You guys should definitely have a go at making homemade tortillas and refried beans... but use beans from the bulk bin instead of canned beans, they are much better for you and if you use the water from boiling them to smooth out the texture in the end, you get even more nutrients... which I didn't get to do because I just drained out all the water, but oh well. Next time! And there shall definitely be a next time.

The only downside is that we used about 50 craptons of dishes. This isn't surprising, since every time I remember having Mexican, we've always had tons of dishes... but I should have taken a picture of these because seriously, I don't even know how we used that many dishes. It's amazing.

Overall rating:

Monday, April 5, 2010

I've got an imdb page!

yaaaaayyyyy! I'm really a person who does movie stuff now I guess. The TV movie I'm working on doesn't have an imdb page yet, but maybe it will someday I hope!

my imdb page!

I haven't added a photo or anything to it yet, but I certainly plan to. I was thinking maybe taking a photo of myself on a faux red carpet type thing, get pretty fancy and awesome as if I'm truly a part of the scene. :D

Right now I'm at work! So it's possible that I shouldn't be blogging, but also: Paul says there isn't anything for me to do right now. I will probably play around in Avid once I've done writing this blog, because Paul gave me some advice on music video editing and I want to play around with it. We have some cool songs on the server that we've used as temp music until the composer sends us some real stuff, so I might as well enjoy myself. I'd much rather be editing than be at home now anyway -- Eric is at school and the only thing for me at home is dishes and laundry. NO THANKS MISTER.

Today is my on day, so I had an orange for breakfast and for food at work I brought along: one yellow capsicum, one tomato, and two hard boiled eggs. All of those things together equal ~295 calories, which is hardly anything for as much food as I intend to eat. EXCITING. For dinner I will probably have broth and something that is around 150 calories, but I do not yet know what that is.

Tonight I am going to soak some pinto and red kidney beans so that tomorrow they will be ready to make into refried beans... I am also going to make homemade flour tortillas and then some sort of chicken and corn filling so we can have awesome burritos. So basically: you can expect a cooking post tomorrow, which should have lots of pictures and maybe be interesting, or at least make you hungry.

Okay, that is all for now! I am going to edit some music video stuff I guess.

Sunday, April 4, 2010

guess what


I'm making a blog and I suspect it will be awesome. I want to do an awesome blog-a-day like you, Shannon, but that isn't going to happen so hopefully this will be at least a blog-a-week thing.

in addition to random blatherings about my unimportant life events and my opinions on things, I want to use this space to track my progress as I have just begun a new lifestyle change-- I'm (rigidly) following the alternate day diet, for two months at least. If I feel good and lose weight, then I'll stick to it rigidly until I'm at my goal weight (68 kgs) and then I'll stick to it more casually for the rest of my life. If it sucks and does nothing and I feel crap, then... I'll do something else I guess.

Anyway if you aren't familiar with the alternate day diet, it's basically this: one day you eat what you want and however much of it you want (the up or off day) and the next day you restrict your calorie intake (the down or on day). link to a better description

I've just barely started, so I'm interested in seeing when I start seeing results. I haven't been exercising as much as I used to, but I intend to get back into it once my work contract has run out and I'm back to being a barely-occupied bum.

Alternate Day Diet Week 1:
Start: Sunday, April 4/4/10.
Weight: 100.9 kgs

Other than that, I've begun to fancy myself some sort of a chef. I roast chickens regularly, I made an awesome pie crust that I used for an awesome chicken pot pie, some sweet mexican dishes, chai tea cupcakes, fantastic plum crumbles, and banana cake. Everything except the banana cake has been awesome. I have some pictures of a few of my creations, and when I do cook stuff I am going to post pictures here, as well as some guidelines. I don't use recipes for stuff that isn't cooked in the oven, mainly because I can't be bothered and I like to think that I know what I'm doing. I'm gutted that plums are out of season though... man they are a fantastic fruit.

So yes. This is my massively boring introductory post. But pretty much all of you are family, so I hope that maybe you'll come back anyway.

<3





PS I put all of those photos in because I care.