I have these wonderful jeans that not so long ago were very comfortable to wear. A month ago, I noticed that I have to wiggle a bit more to get them over my ass, and that stopping to breathe helps to close the button. The scale confirmed my fears, 3 kilos more - oops, how did that happen? - and most of it seems to have gathered in one area.
Women have the right to have a little padding on their hips, right? Especially if they had a baby and are past their 35th birthday. And what do you shake in front of men if you have no ass? The only problem is to get new jeans. A big-assed woman, one head taller than the rest of the women in Hong Kong, doesn’t have too many choices. I went shopping last week, and could only find pants that were either too tight around the hips or too wide around the waist. It was frustrating, no fun at all… the ass has to go… and who is designing these ridiculous jeans anyway?
Where was I? Aah yes, I wanted to boast about my new work-out regime that I actually enjoy doing. No measurable impact on the ass yet, but I am having fun. Every morning after I bring little man to the school bus, I walk up the mountain behind my house at a brisk pace. The first time I arrived at the top I could hardly breathe, but by now it’s quite easy to do. Last Friday, I arrived at the top and even thought that it had been a bit too easy, so I decided to walk further along a trail I had never tried before.
I am so glad that I did. It wasn’t an easy walk. The trail was narrow and slippery from a tropical downpour a few hours before, but at times it felt like walking through an enchanted forest. There were lots of sparkly dragonflies hovering above rain pools. Yellow butterflies with brown dots that looked a bit like enchanted leopards, and black ones that were so big that I first mistook them for birds. I crossed creeks and marveled at the vegetation around me. Lush, green, and still dripping from the rain in the morning. Trees standing so closely together that there was hardly any light on the ground, ferns with elegant long leaves, and beautiful blossoms in yellow, pink, and red. The trail went along a mountain range directly at the ocean, and at times the views were breath-taking, and bit vertigo inducing. Would they be able to find me, if I slip and roll down the 200 meter slope to the shore?
I made it home intact, and as I was standing under the shower to get off the mud and sweat, I was thankful that Hong Kong, more known for its skyscrapers, still has these wild places. I feel very fortunate to live right at the edge between concrete and jungle.
PS: I have just looked at my popo in the mirror, and I could swear it’s a tiny bit smaller.
We were up at seven this morning. I am still trying to teach little man the concept of sleeping in on weekends … lol.
But we made up the early start by spending a few lazy hours afterwards in our PJs. Little man told me in detail last week’s school adventures, we simulated space shuttle lift-offs, and tried to transform his new transformer toy without breaking it. It took a while, was only slightly simpler than solving Rubik’s cube, but finally we managed to change the police car into a robot.
Before little man could say “and now please transform it back into a police car”, I suggested making pancakes. This was happily accepted.
Pancakes are our preferred lazy morning food, and little man has gotten quite good in helping me to prepare them. We make the European variety, thinner than American pancakes with more eggs. In German, they are also called “Eierkuchen” (egg cakes).
It’s funny how everyone has a slightly different recipe for these very simple dishes. Naturally, little man and I think ours is the best in the whole wide world :D.
Mix 200 grams of non-raising flour, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar, and three eggs in a bowl until the mixture is reasonably smooth. Then whisk in milk little by little until you have thin, smooth pancake batter. The amount of milk needed varies, but I would say it’s about half a liter. Let the batter stand for 10-20 minutes, to make it more elastic and avoid excessive flour taste, then whisk one more time.
Little man has become an expert at whisking. He started whisking before he could talk… lol. Attracted by the cool kitchen toy, he demanded a share of the action very early in life. I am glad to say that the spillage is now down to a minimum. This morning, he also cracked an egg… trying to fish the egg shell out of the batter slowed us down a bit.
Then the frying begins, and getting the temperature just right, makes a good pancake in my opinion. I have a gas stove, which lets me adjust the temperature instantly. I start by heating up the skillet at maximum heat for several minutes, only then I add a teaspoon of oil. When the oil is hot and evenly distributed in the pan, I turn down the heat to a minimum and add batter, just enough to cover the bottom of the pan after a little bit of swiveling. Heating up the pan thoroughly avoids the infamous first spoiled pancake.
After all the liquid has evaporated, I turn the pancake. I am a chicken and use a spatula, but one of these days I have to learn the cool throw-it-in-the-air trick to impress little man. The kitchen ceiling needs a new coat of paint anyway.
Little man tops his pancakes with extra sugar or orange jam, but I think they also taste good on their own. The recipe above yields about eight 7-inch pancakes, which we didn’t eat all at once… really.
At the risk of sounding like a total geek, I am counting open source software today. It’s software without restrictive copyrights whose source code is readily available, and therefore can be improved, adapted, or changed. Best of all, it can be used for free.
Most open source software is developed and improved in a collaborative effort. And once the core software is written, lots of people contribute so called add-ons or plug-ins that make the application highly customizable. For me as a user, these add-ons are the biggest advantage of open source compared to commercial software.
I am not a geek, far from it, and you don’t really need to be, to use open source applications. Some of them have rather spotty instructions, but most are very user friendly, come with documentation, and have user forums, where non-geeks like me can ask embarrassing questions without being laughed at.
At the moment I am using the following open source applications, and I would recommend every single one of them:
I use Thunderbird for writing emails and Firefox to surf the internet. There are hundreds of useful add-ons for both applications, that make using them a real joy. Just to give you an example, I installed a Firefox add-on called ColorZilla, which let’s me determine the RGB and Hex code of colors in web pages. If I come across colors that I like while surfing the web, I can determine their code and replicate them for my own blog or website. Well, I don’t really need that, you say, but there are hundreds of other add-ons, and the nice thing is that every user can install the ones that are useful to him. I also think that Firefox loads web pages much faster than Internet Explorer.
My blog uses Wordpress and is hosted on a Linux server. I was so used to working with blogger, that I hesitated to use my own domain, because it wouldn’t allow me to use the new version of blogger. However, since I switched to Wordpress, I haven’t regretted that I did. Most of Wordpress’ advantages can only be seen behind the scenes, at the administrative level. For example, comment reading and reply is a much more convenient than in blogger. And again, there are many useful plugins that can be installed to customize the application.
For Cosima Inc’s web page, I use Joomla which is a bit like a blog application only more versatile in how pages are structured and which features can be chosen for a page.
I also installed FileZilla, which let’s me quickly and conveniently upload files to my webserver. Most of the music for my Musical Monday posts were uploaded to my server with FileZilla.
Today, I also installed Vanilla (don’t ask me why half of open source software names end with -illa), a forum software, on Cosima Inc’s server. I am going to use it as a private messageboard that only invited users can see, and I am hoping that it will make communication between me and the company of my partner much easier.
Seven applications, all open source and for free, on my non-geek notebook alone. I like all of them, and am thinking of adding more. There is this open source office suite that I have yet to check out…
Michael Manring, Murray Orrick, Nina Hagen: “Die Welt die monden ist” from Schönherz & Fleer’s Rilke Projekt
… and thought I share it with you.
It’s from a CD called Rilke Projekt on which German actors and singers recite/sing poems by Rainer Maria Rilke accompanied by music written especially for the CD. The first CD was such a success in Germany that two more CDs followed.
Rilke is one of my favorite poets, but very hard to translate. Listening to the recording makes the poem much clearer than reading the English version below, doesn’t it?
Forget, forget, and let us live now
only this, how the stars pierce through
cleared nocturnal sky; how the moon’s whole disk
surmounts the gardens. We’ve sensed so long already
how the darkness breeds many mirrors: how a gleam
takes shape, a white shadow in the radiance
of night. But now let us cross over
and invest this world where
everything is lunar–
Translation from Uncollected Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke,
selected and translated by Edward Snow
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986)
I am slowly learning how to shoot pictures with a macro lens, I bought recently for Cosima Inc. The lens is for a Nikon D100 camera, that we had for a long time, but which I have not used much. It takes much better pictures than my small point-and-shoot camera, but is so heavy, that I seldom take it with me.
The goal is to become proficient enough to shoot product pictures for Cosima Inc that look professional, but I am discovering that it’s also a lot of fun to just take the camera outside and capture the little things that often go unnoticed. Like snails and daisies in little boys’ fingers, and beautiful feathers, barely an inch long. Also, tiny ants and petals, all found in my parents’ wonderful garden.
It’s shortly after nine in the morning. Little man is in kindergarten. I am drinking a cup of coffee and staring alternately on my screen and into space. It’s the silence before the storm.
Today and tomorrow will be very busy days. Tomorrow night, little man and I will fly to Berlin, and there is so much to do before we get on the airplane. A mountain of emails, calls, and admin for Cosima Inc, a big birthday party for little man this afternoon (it’s not his real birthday today, we are celebrating a little bit earlier), and lots of preparing and packing for our stay in Berlin.
I am only taking little sips from my coffee cup, to draw it out a little while longer.
There are several words for the state of being alone, loneliness is one but it has a negative connotation, and therefore is almost the opposite of what I want to describe. In all of us is the need for companionship, of spending time with and being loved by friends, parents, children, and lovers, but solitude, and being comfortable with it, is equally important, because we all are separate human beings with our own feelings, beliefs, and thoughts. And spending time alone, and nurturing our own separate soul is not wasted time.
I came across an article by a young woman from India. In Being OK with Me she describes how hard but important it was for her to spend a period of her life alone and become comfortable in her own world. It is a wonderful essay on solitude and why it is not something we should fight.
The problem is that even if you have identified the need of spending time alone, in normal life it’s hard to get. It’s probably the reason why I like the night so much. Then it is not so hard to find the odd free hour to write a post, read a book, hang after a thought, or just bathe in an emotion.
Download Jamie Cullum’s All At Sea by right-clicking and selecting Save Link As.
Today is my first blogoversary… yippee! Come on in and celebrate with me! Raise a glass of bubbly – alcoholic or not – to Cosima Underwater’s first year!
I almost missed it. I was thinking about introducing a few more labels and clicked on the first post one, and there it stood May 4th 2006, the day that I started Cosima Underwater, pretty much on a whim, not actually sure what I should do with it, nor where it would take me.
The second post on the same day was a picture, an HNT picture, and it introduced me to a wonderful community of people. That I met you all, while we were being half-nekkid, made it all the more enjoyable :).
So, on my first blogoversary I would like to thank Os for starting it all. Os, you are my Da Count for today. Without you, I would still be traveling alone in cyberspace… completely clothed. And how boring would that be?
I have these wonderful jeans that not so long ago were very comfortable to wear. A month ago, I noticed that I have to wiggle a bit more to get them over my ass, and that stopping to breathe helps to close the button. The scale confirmed my fears, 3 kilos more - oops, how did that happen? - and most of it seems to have gathered in one area.
