Nova news: of PROMs and curveballs

I recently experienced a PROM, and no, I'm not talking about that American high school rite-of-passage, but Premature Rupture Of the Membranes... or, in layman's terms, my water broke!

Now, when you're really close to your due date, this breaking of water thing is good, signaling the start of labor and delivery.

But when you're more than two months away from said due date? Not so good.

Perhaps lil' Nova was impatient to get out and play with all the goodies he/she had collected from the baby shower we'd just had ... or ... since a few other expectant mothers also experienced the same thing on the same day, perhaps all the weird weather and variable barometric pressure impacted these membranes somewhat ... or it could just be due to the phase of the moon, who knows... there's no real way to tell why it happened, only that it did.

These past few days have been quite an experience. It is a huge relief to be past the critical first 48 hours though, and it looks like we will be settling into a waiting game / holding pattern. Nova is still a-pickling inside me, and the goal is to keep him/her there for as long as possible up till 34wks: if I've not gone into labor naturally by then, they'll induce me.

No I won't tell you how far along I am. ... suffice to say I'm marveling at this curveball life just threw at us: from having more than two months to prepare for Nova's arrival, we now might meet the tyke in just a few weeks' time.

And between now and then, I will be in hospital, under the watchful eye(s) of relevant medical professionals.
In the meantime, poor Kosh has to split himself between work, home/cat and me PLUS get the apartment ready for Nova.
In many ways, I have it easy ... for the moment, anyway!

So do send 'stay put' thoughts to Nova, k?

My next update here might not be until Nova appears.

Ciao!

Teddy Bear, how long you been out there?

Yesterday I decided that in-the-oven Nova needed to be properly exposed to all things Meat Loaf, so I loaded Bat II and later Bat I to sing along to while I iced my hands (that's another post). Then I went looking for any Meat Loaf tour dates, just for the heck of it (Why is he spending the first half of August, Sept & October in Blackpool UK??): that took me from the official Meat Loaf fan site to the *real* Meat Loaf Facebook page, which featured two songs from his latest album HANG COOL TEDDY BEAR which came out last May.

Wait, whattt? Meat's got a new album out? Where was I?

Oh. I was doing my Malaysia/Singapore trip, nursing a sprained ankle, etc etc.
Not a real excuse, but I'll take it.

I have since "liked" the real Meat Loaf on FB, so I should be on top of things, yay!

And I'm now debating getting my hands on the album. Well, the CD, anyway. I'm old-ish school, can't imagine just buying the MP3s... there's something about a complete album: not just the individual songs, but how they are arranged and the larger story they tell...

Anyways, so Los Angeloser is the song that got me all anguished over having missed out on Mr Loaf's latest album. Today I looked for/found the official music video for it. Umm... I don't quite get it... lots of eye candy if you're a guy, I guess. Still a great and funny song tho.

(the type of car he drives? A *shit* car. just fyi)

And now I'm leveraging YouTube for songs from Teddy Bear to give me an idea of whether I really do want to Hang Cool with it or not. And just because, here's a list of links for you, dear reader, in case you too are interested (most of the "vids" are just the album artwork with the track playing).

1. Peace On Earth
2. Living On The Outside
3. Los Angeloser
4. If I Can't Have You
5. Love Is Not Real/Next Time You Stab Me in the Back
6. Like A Rose (feat. Jack Black) (starts off sounding like You Gotta Fight for your Right to Party)
7. Did You Ever Love Somebody
8. Song Of Madness
9. Running Away From Me
10. Let's Be In Love
11. If It Rains
12. Elvis In Vegas

(NOTE: The import / special edition / explicit albums have an additional track: California Isn't Big Enough ... imo it's so NOT worth shelling out the extra dough for the one song... esp when it kinda riles up my prudishness :p "I can barely fit my dick in my pants"? Really?)

So, about the overall story of the album... Meh... Right now I'll say it starts off just okay, picks up once you hit Los Angeloser, but a few songs later it flounders a LOT before starting to pick back up in the last two songs. The jury is still out about whether i *really* want to own this album, or actually go the cherry picking route.

What about you?

Being Nosy?

Hi everyone!

According to sitemeter, I have a steady 130-ish visitors per week to this site, even when I've not posted anything in forever. So whoever you are, I thank you, all 130-ish of you!

And here's an update for ya!

I actually have lots to blog about... but as you may know, I have a blur wobbly line drawn in the sand about how much personal stuff to share publicly on this blog, just because, well, sometimes I can be paranoid schizophrenic psycho yeah (no not really) (that's just what they're saying about me). As such, I've been leaning more heavily on a seemingly-transient medium like Twitter, and seemingly-private(ish) medium like Facebook. What? It makes total sense. Maybe. LoL!

But hey, I'm now breaking the main/biggest news here, whee!

I have a parasite in my belly!
.. and it has my nose!!
(just to point out the obvious: the noses, from top to bottom, are me, Nova, Kosh)

Going with a temporary gender-neutral (to me, anyway) alliterative name, we're referring to it as Nova Naranek online, to match this internet moniker. We should be meeting the munchkin in mid/end June. Yes, we're in the home 'stretch' now.

Feel free to squeee in the comments :)

An explanation for #Jan25, and a NSFW Tasmanian aside

Explaining the Egyptian revolution to Americans through a medium they all understand -- a Hollywood movie that involves Egypt! Found this via Twitter and really want to spread it around. Unfortunately Blogger doesn't seem happy with the huge image (about 600 x 6500, 2MB), and all my attempts to reduce its size renders it blur and unreadable. So please follow this thumbnail instead to the image's location on TwitPic.


Interestingly, the creator of this piece is @furrygirl, who has gained a lot of followers since this emerged. Her reaction and caution: Warning: I'm a pornographer & atheist, & don't usually tweet politics. I am *NOT* work safe.

... and that segues right into something I've been wanting to share, and had no idea this #Jan25 post would give me that transition opportunity. The connection here is NSFW. Majorly NSFW. NSFW means NOT SAFE FOR WORK, in case you didn't know.

Words can't really describe this video. Just watch. And boys, snap those jaws back into place please!

(lyrics)

This. This is the woman Neil Gaiman married.

Wow!

Foody Friday: quiche galore

The more I make quiche, the more I love just how versatile it is. It's a breakfast equivalent of nasi goreng (fried rice) in the sense that you can throw in whatever's available at the moment, you know, finish off leftovers and such. I also recently tried a targeted quiche, i.e. trying to actually replicate a certain taste/combination.

Here's a list of my recent quiche permutations:

• Leftover slow-cooked Catalina Cranberry Chicken (a recipe from mochamomma) with spinach and other veggies. This was particularly hearty and tasty: having flavorful chicken really helps pull it all together!
• Spinach, artichoke & diced tomatoes with habañeros. This was my first try ever at artichokes. I used the canned variety. I knew it would complement the spinach. I made mega-cheesy because this was for the potluck end-of-semester "party" for my massage course. It was a hit.
• Spinach, artichoke & orange peppers. I felt bad because Kosh had missed out on the goodness of the previous quiche, so I made this one for him :) I'd only used half of the canned artichoke (kinda on purpose), and while I was out of diced tomatoes, the peppers worked just as well. I eased up on using an entire bag of shredded cheese tho, LoL!
• Spinach, orange peppers, onions & hot giardiniera relish. I was still in a quiche mood (hey let's face it, it's real easy to make, it's really hard to ruin, and I love love love eggy breakfast-type dishes!), so this was a more 'normal' quiche, i.e. throwing together what I happened to have on hand. Yes, my quiches tend to be vegetarian.
• Philly Cheesesteak Quiche. My massage classmate speculated about making one of these, so I surprised her with one for her birthday. I'll expand on it below.
• Crustless veggie quiche. After a few weeks off (I *did* get tired of quiche after a while, LoL!), and after deciding I needed to cut some unnecessary refined carbs (i.e. the crust) out of my diet, I tried my hand at a crustless quiche. I also used a whole lot more egg whites than I did whole eggs. It turned out fine, but looked a bit ...small... and the crust really did lend a nice touch to the overall taste and composition, so in this case something was missing... I'll have to experiment a little bit more with this, and also figure out the difference between this and a fritata :)

Okay... so now... let's delve a bit into the Philly Cheesesteak Quiche, shall we?

I found this recipe, and totally tweaked it :)

I started by attempting to carmelize half a white onion, sliced. Ended up just kinda burning the heck out of the onion instead :p Made that the first layer, followed by thinly sliced green peppers, and the drained contents of a small can of mushrooms. For the beef, I used two portions of what I found at Walmart. I kinda burned the things too, and had difficulty getting them to separate out into individual strips. Oops!


In the photo above you see the layers of onion, peppers, 'shrooms, beef *and* some philly cream cheese that I decided would add something unique to the dish.



When researching this dish, I found out that Philly Cheesesteak sammiches are made with provolone cheese. Well, either that or Cheese Whiz (is that the stuff that comes in a "spray can" like whipped cream?) (ugh!), it seems. So I found some sliced sharp/strong provolone, cut 'em into strips, and that made another layer.



Then I remembered I'd intended to add some shredded cheddar cheese BEFORE the sliced cheese. Oh well. So that went on top. Then in went the egg and half-and-half combo, and the dish was popped into the oven (350F) for 45 mins.

It came out looking just like any other quiche...
... and this is how it was delivered to the birthday girl.

I was really anxious about not only giving away a total experiment (which included kinda burned onions *and* beef!), but giving it away as someone's birthday present to boot! Thankfully she said it was good, and that everyone who had a slice gave rave reviews (she only got to eat perhaps a sixth of the dish, because of those other mouths, poor thing!).

I still have two portions of the frozen philly-style steaks: whether I do another round of PCS quiche, or try to fix an actual Philly cheesesteak sammich for Kosh & myself, we'll have to see... in the meantime, if you try your hand at your own Philly Cheesesteak Quiche, do drop by and tell me about it, k?

Have a great weekend!

Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon

This review of Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon is part of the 2011 Stephen King and Read Me Baby One More Time Challenges.



This is a tale targeted towards kids. It reads like a fairy tale. The narrator is all too present, too prominent, dropping too many hints of "oh if only so-and-so knew of the room full of such-and-suches, would it have made a difference? I'll let you decide," that might be amusing at first, but irritating after a while.

That said, I rather enjoyed this book.

Stephen King obviously had his Dark Tower characters on his mind when writing this: the land is named Delain (very similar to Roland Deschain's last name, don't you think?); the ruler is Good King Roland (no link or relation to our Roland Deschain except for the name, though); but best of all, it features Randall Flagg as the bad guy. We learn a LOT about Flagg through this tale, and for that alone I think my digression from the Dark Tower series to this book was no mistake.

In fact, reading this BEFORE The Gunslinger might be a good strategy for people who want to approach the Dark Tower indirectly: you might then have a better feel for the person with whom Roland finally palavers at the end of The Gunslinger.

But back to The Eyes of the Dragon. The plot is simple: Randall Flagg has served as advisor/magician to Good King Roland and one or two rulers before him (and that's just this iteration!), but his objective is always to induce chaos, plans that will be thwarted if Roland's first-born, Peter, takes the throne. Thomas, the second-born, is so much more flawed, malleable, corruptible. What unfolds then is what you would expect: the king is poisoned, Peter is found guilty and imprisoned for life in the tallest tower, Thomas is crowned King, and Flagg gets free reign in steadily steering the land into anarchy. Can Peter escape? Save his land? Rid Delain of Flagg? The narrator implies he can, but strings the tale out quite a bit until you find out how.

Mentioned without really being expanded on is the concept of the White, the 'good' force that works subtly counter to the Black of which Flagg is but one representative. This is something that is expounded more in The Stand, in case you were interested in what Mr King was trying to say. Do check it out too, if you haven't already.

One thing I found interesting was how Thomas was described: not that great with his studies, neither very creative nor intuitive, someone who kinda plodded along the best he knew how ... these were about the same things said of Roland Deschain. Of course, one was raised in the shadow of his never-do-wrong brother while the other had integrity, loyalty and pride beat into him from an early age, it's no wonder they turned out very different... but think about it: was Mr King experimenting with a "What if" scenario where our Roland Deschain had from early on been in the thrall of Flagg? Those who have read this recently: any opinions?

For the record, this is at least the second, if not third, time I've read this book. I'm guessing once during my college years (the 90's), at the end of my work career (mid-00's), and now.

I'll be taking a short break from rereading Stephen King because my massage therapy classes have just started up again, so I should get to reviewing stuff before class, and already get moving on assignment we've already been given. Ugh. Hopefully I'll plow through The Drawing of the Three during the MLK Jr long weekend.

Until then: happy reading!

Stephen King's The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower I)

This review of Stephen King's The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower I) is part of the 2011 Stephen King and Read Me Baby One More Time Challenges.



The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. It is in this first sentence that we already meet Roland Deschain, formerly of Gilead, in pursuit of his old enemy Marten (or Walter, or Randall Flagg, or ...). As the chase continues, we are treated to some of Roland's backstory, whether the relatively recent encounter with the townspeople of Tull, or events of his childhood that set his feet upon the path he now walks.

And if you'd not come to the conclusion already, once the events surrounding Jake the boy from New York found at the Way Station unfold to their (end), you wouldn't be wrong to dislike Roland a litte, or at least to see him not as a cookie cutter hero, but a real man; a hard man; a man forged of bullets, murder, pride, vengeance; a man of unparalleled focus and intensity. A man on a mission.

By the time the gunslinger and the man in black finish their palaver, I think it's safe to say readers will be intrigued by what has been put forth: what is this Dark Tower? Who is the man in black's master, who could grant virtual immortality to the furthest of his minions, and only by visiting through dreams? What this thing about worlds having moved on? What did Jake mean when he stated Go then. There are other worlds than these.?

Then pick up book II - The Drawing of The Three, and prepare to yourself be drawn even further into Roland's world.

ADDITIONAL NOTES for those who have already read the book:
I read the "revised and expanded throughout" version, but with the "original" version on hand to compare and contrast some passages. I'm sure somewhere online someone has done just that, and provided exhaustive analysis of what was changed and why between the 1982 and 2003 editions. Here I'll just note two main things that I made a point to look up.

The first was in Tull, when the pianist Sheb comes bursting in on Roland and Alice in a blind jealous rage. In the revised version, Roland recognises him as someone who was involved in what went on in Meijis. I remember in Book IV that the early (if not earliest) encounters between Roland's ka-tet and the bad guys of Neijis occur at a pub where were have someone plinking away at the keyboards... I guess that was also Sheb? I'll find out/confirm it once I get to Wizard and Glass :)

The second actually covers many things, but they all occur during the palaver between Roland and the man in black during that enchanted night. The main thing that was changed was that Marten *was* Walter who in turn *was* the man in black (in the original, Walter was the man in black, but Marten was someone else, someone Roland later tracked and killed). That the man in black's master was Maerlyn, who lived backwards in time, was nixed: instead he is Legion, and that's about it. No mention about the Beast that lives in / guards the Tower.

These amendments definitely help tidy things up a bit: the confusion about Marten/Walter was always at the back of my hubby's head, so when I was done with the reread, we sat down and discussed the changes, he with his notes he'd made of Books I - IV, and me with the two versions to flip between and quote from. Major quality time, I tell ya! No, I'm being neither sarcastic nor facetious. I've mentioned before that Stephen King, specifically the Dark Tower series, was one of the subjects we bonded over way back when we were dating. So yesterday's discussion was a great throwback to our younger days :)

Next, I picked up The Eyes of the Dragon: that review will be up in a few days... stay tuned!