masak-masak

... or "intermission", continued!

I have no idea why I've been documenting my recent kitchen adventures with such enthusiasm... So far there are now 21 pix in the Facebook album I've devoted to this topic ... today yesterday (it *is* 2am!) I was particularly proud of the impromptu lunch which involved juggling three pots/pans on the stove to produce egg noodles alfredo with a side of salmon sauteed with onion & veggies. follow this link for the album, recent photos at the end.

... final installment on the "throwaway" "series" soon!!

sunny sunday snippets

Okay so I need to stop featuring GraphJam stuff in every post... but...

more graph humor and song chart memes
why do I like this? I'll let you speculate, LoL, cos I'm not sure I know either :-)

On another topic:
Anyone on facebook who is friends with me can see that I've had an increase in friendships over the past week or so - all it took was for one pal, who happens to blog *and* be a "brother" of mine, i.e. a fellow member of a co-ed professional chemistry fraternity, that one pal finally joined facebook and befriended me, then I noticed quite a few familiar names appearing as her friends, so I befriended them and it's been kinda cool to reconnect with some folk from my 1990-1995 era of life :-) Still so many missing tho :( Patience...

Kinda funny tho, how I'm almost at 100 friends over there. Who would have thought... after all, I only joined facebook at the insistence of one friend who said it was the only way to keep in touch with her... that was about a year ago... then I concentrated on reconnecting with schoolmates,,,, then added fellow bloggers,,, then got sucked in to the word games... and the rest is history, LoL!

anyways, it's not like I'm going for quantity targets or anything, but if you're on facebook and would like to hook up as friends there, look me up using my "Lynne Naranek" moniker :-)

Have a good week, y'all :-)

... it warms my heart ...

Warmth #1 : it looks like the Barisan Nasional has been denied a 2/3 majority in the newly elected Malaysian parliament. Votes are still being tallied, but it seems instead of just Kelantan (and Terengganu at one point, right?), Penang and Kedah are no longer in BN's hands. I am of course a bit concerned that it's PAS, the not-just-race-but-also-religion-based party, that's emerged victorious in Kedah... we'll see how things go over there...

Warmth #2: So over at Facebook I decided to look up some authors I like, and found that Patrick Rothfuss has a fan page and an actual group there. I fanned the former and joined the latter. And the next day, *gasp!*, I got a friend request from Mr Rothfuss! I was all geeked out that entire day :-) After all, it shows that he goes though his Facebook activity, and is acknowledging my fandom by "friend"-ing me. *grin* And just for that, I'll plug his work just a little bit more: if you haven't read The Name of the Wind yet, do pick it up, it really is a great book,,, I can't wait for Book 2 (and of course, after that, Book 3) to finally come out!!!

... another facebook- and author- related post next, stay tuned ...

oidioid

... can anyone tell me what that word means??

My Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2004) has nothing like that in it, and my Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (3rd Ed, 1996) has only "OIDIUM, pl OIDIA (a type of fungus)"... turns out it's related: resembling fungi of the genus Oidium. Yes, I couldn't find an official definition, had to find it indirectly... maybe if I invest in the Scrabble Official Tournament Dictionary it might appear there?

... yeah so I was playing scramble a few minutes ago, and just *had* to express my disgust at that particular word appearing in the list of possible words for that one particular board.

... On a related note, last week Kosh and I bought the actual physical Boggle board game, and my oh my how nice it was to play for real / "live"! If nothing else, it's going to force me to actually learn the meanings to words that up til now I just knew to type in (for example: ait, ani, avo, gie, hae, quin, tae, wot), because Kosh wouldn't accept words I didn't know the definition of. Which is fair, considering I've been playing Scramble semi-professionally (read: *all* the friggin' day!) for *how* many months now?? From my first attempts where I could barely score 25 points, I can sometimes hit 140points,,, and have occasionally been the highest-scoring person in the live games room.

Hmmm, I think I need a life. :)

And, in case you were wondering:
AIT : a small island
ANI : a tropical American bird
AVO : a monetary unit of Monaco
GIE : to give
HAE : to have
TAE : to
QUIN : a quintuplet
WOT : to know

More Facebook-related news in the next post, where I'll geek out a bit at being acknowledged by an author... stay tuned!

musical accompaniment...?

it was a weird dream about having to get somewhere, but I was delayed because someonw wanted to make sure I had a certain piece of paper or something, so I was going through this pile of old letters over and over and over trying to determine whether or not I had it, and my train? was gong to be leaving soon I was slowly getting more and more agitated, and so I said something like "you know what, (mouthing the f-word) this, I've gotta go", and a fellow schoolmate SHUSHES me in response to the already self-censored swearing, and i just lose it. I start raising my voice at her, asking her "did you even stop to think about the fact that by the time someone reaches our age, we've already made some decisions about how we want to communicate, and what we want to say, so please DO NOT insult yourself and me by trying to shush me like a baby" and on and on I went, ,,, and while that was going on, a sound intruded in the background, which somehow complemented my diatribe quite well, but it got me wondering why I was having some musical accompaniment to my dream, and I slowly woke up in time to identify it : the cat was puking up a hairball.

Yum.

So, update on the health-front: definitely getting better - can you believe it's been over a week since I first got floored by this cold?? Kosh got hit much worse than me, but he's more recovered than I am at this point in time. I'm still downing those 12-hr sudafeds, although the volume of snot blown out of my nose has steadily reduced. Maybe in a few more days I really *will* be more human again...

One last note: I'm no longer addicted to facebook, but, I love it because I can play scrabble with pals all over the world! And recently some of my Swiss cousins joined, so I've added them to my friends list. Which triggered a hunt for some Malaysian cousins, also added to my list. Okay so one doesn't "really" keep in touch via FB, but what with my inability to send text messages, my lack of emails, and my irregular blog posts, I do sincerely think that buying a round of drinks via Booze Mail, or throwing sheep is as good a way of keeping in pseudo-touch as any!

Anyone wanna scrabble?