I was recently in Singapore on a business trip and my host took the team out to a local market (Lau Pa Sat Festival Market) for dinner. Interesting place with a wide selection of Asian cuisines.
We ordered a wide range of dishes, Sambal Stingray (excellent!), Chicken, Beef and Pork Satay, Sambal kangkong (water spinach), prawn rolls, chicken with dried chilis, plain chicken wings (why I have no idea), and something that resembled a large snail (maybe a whelk?, no idea but they tasted good).
After the meal, my host insisted I try the Ice Kachang which is a Singapore shaved ice dessert. I was thinking, "Shaved ice, how bad could it be?". They asked me what I wanted on it and I said "surprise me". This is what I got.
The yellow stuff is durian (a type of fruit) which if you're a fan of Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods on the Travel Channel is something he loathes and can't eat. The smell of this fruit is pretty potent with nice ripe aromas of "open sewer" and "rotting vegetables". The flavor I think is reminiscent of garlic and onion. Not bad if you can get past the smell but just not something I associate with dessert.
The dish also contained a lot of the ingredients described in the wikipedia article: red beans, agar jelly, attap chee (palm seed), sweet corn and coconut milk.
The best tasting part of the dish was the palm seed which had the consistency of a large semi-solid phlegm ball but at least it tasted good.
I washed it down with an entire pitcher of Tiger beer but I couldn't get the taste of durian out of my mouth. It stayed with me all night and I was still tasting it when I woke up in the morning.
Today my daughter needed to send a letter (yes, the paper type, real old school) to a friend. We handed her the paper and envelope and the look she gave us was no different than if you or I were handed a morse code key set. We'd know what it was but in all likelihood not be able to use it. The same was true with Katie and the paper and envelope.
She knew somehow she physically had to pick up a writing utensil (aka non-digital dye device) and apply ink to paper and the symbols she transcribed would need to form a cohesive, legible sentence but it appeared in her mind that performing this task was on par with resolving differential equations in calculus. After walking her through the concept of full English sentences, it was now on to addressing the envelope. Wow! You would have thought you were explaining brain surgery to a caveman, "No, Gor! zip code! zip code!"
I feel like Rip Van Winkle. What the hell happened?
Now where'd I park my dinosaur?
This story is a few months old but I’m just getting around to writing it.
Back in October, our household experienced a ladybug hatch.
From research, a female ladybug will lay about 10-15 eggs and apparently an insect orgy was going on in the house because there was easily 100 plus of these creatures all congregating in our foyer.
Although they weren’t really bothering us (apart from devouring the pet parakeet, Google it, parakeets are their primary prey, horrible sound hearing a parakeet screech “Help Me!” and knowing you’re too late to save it), we still wanted them out of the house so Ellen gave me the task of getting rid of them.
The first problem was that, as previously mentioned, they were in the foyer which is one of the high entrance types with a window about 14 feet off the ground. The ladybugs were moving back and forth between the window and the ceiling (about 20 feet up).
After seeing the height problem, it occurred to me that I have an extendable wand (calm down, ladies) that can be attached with a duster (now really calm down ladies, I’m not dusting for you!). By using the duster, I was able to trap the ladybugs in the hairs and then throw them outside. After capturing and releasing about twenty of the bugs, it occurred to me, “What the hell am I doing?!” In my past military life, I used to help train F-15E Strike Eagle aircrews whose job was to drop enormous bombs on the enemy eliminating all trace of their existence from the Earth and I never had a pang of guilt yet here I was delicately removing ladybugs one by one.
To say I’ve gone soft would be an understatement.
I had to excuse myself to the bathroom, drop trou and make sure I still had a pair.
After returning to the foyer with a new found determination, I was intercepted by my 13-year old vegetarian daughter who probably saw a different look in my eye and asked me, “You’re not going to kill any of them are you?”
How do you respond?
It took me several hours over three days to finally clear out the house and not kill any of the stupid SOBs.
Now the kicker, after clearing out the house, I happened to be at work and one of my co-workers stopped by my office. He looks at my desk and says, “Oh, look, a ladybug”. He delicately picks it up and says “Fly, be free” and throws it into the air. Except this one never took flight for some reason and his throw made a perfect arc from across the office directly into a hot cup of green tea that I just poured. The bug was floating upside down just like a dead goldfish. I pulled him out but it was too late for this one. Now that’s irony.
My 4 year old son, Luke, loves to torment his 2 year old brother, Logan. I'm not talking about typical school-type teasings like "You have cooties" or "Your Daddy smells like beer and strippers". Because we all know that cooties don't exist and, well, let's just leave it at that. No, I'm talking about real torture. Luke could give lessons to Jigsaw. Tonight, they were both in the toy room (or what should be the dining room) and Luke was teasing Logan again. Despite being younger, Logan isn't much smaller than Luke. After another round of torment, Logan apparently sized up his odds and liking his chances, hauled back and popped Luke. I was two rooms away and heard it. Kind of sounded like a hunk of ham hitting a coconut. Maybe a poor analogy but try it next time you have both handy. It’s got to be a whole coconut so you can hear the liquid (i.e. Luke’s brain) sloshing around. Within seconds of the Tyson-esque strike, I heard a child crying and realized the registry was off for it to be Logan. Luke came into the family room bawling and proceeded to inform me that his younger brother had indeed, struck him.
What do you as a parent do?
I am sure most “Parenting” websites and periodicals and Child Psychologists would advise sitting the offender (Logan) down for a timeout. And this did pop into my head. However, I also know Luke and after grilling him as to what was he doing that caused Logan to hit him, he explained in his own unique, one-sided logic the situation and why he was the innocent bystander. But clearly he was tormenting Logan. And after thinking the situation through, I told Luke, “You teased him, he hit you. You tease him again, he’ll probably hit you again.”
Bad parenting? Maybe. But in my way of thinking, people (not just kids) need to learn there are consequences to their actions and real-world examples usually hit home the point. And one more thing to mention, I didn’t put Logan in timeout. Partially because he was already crying since he felt bad about hitting his brother and making him cry but also because the Flyers were on and that would have required me getting up from my comfortable chair, setting down my beer and walking to the other side of the house.
Bad parent, I don’t think so.
Lazy parent, absolutely.
