The Night Before Full-Moon Night

On the night before the official super big full-moon night in 20 years, I failed to meet my vampire friends and wolfman, they seems unwilling to go out to meet people again since there are too many movies and TV plays about them. But I do have some nice adventures, for the first time, I have tried Kayak (for an hour which leads to my sour arms), campfire S'mores (the marshmallow got so burned), and got my first traffic ticket (I told the police officer that I am gonna to frame it)

My first kayak (rented actually) was red, like my first car (second-handed owned seriously), and it is for only one person like most kayaks do. My friends Adam and Alison, (they have the same capital A for their name but they are not any kind of relatives, I know I am being nagging today, HA), they got a kayak for two, bigger and slower (haha). Alison and I were both the first time for kayak, and it is really fun after we got to know how to steer and control the speed.

I have to admit that I was really freak out when my red K got into the water, because I simply didn't know how to deal with it. It was spinning in the middle of water, and seems like I will be stuck in that circle for a life time till vampire come to rescue me. And then I learned that the funnier part is when I got stuck in the tree branches over the water, or on the duckweek. I really didn't mean to disturb them, but my K was such a wilful one that she never go straight in the middle of water. Though I didn't get to the final destination of our route, I feel like I have done twice the route than others, as my K was too into curvy route, doing all the Zigzags.

It was a nice experience on the Santa Fe River, with people from Meet-up group. http://www.meetup.com/ Adam told me that usually the price for renting a kayak should be around 30, but we group got special half-price. And the weather was perfect too, clear and cool, with a super big full-moon hanging over the trees beyond the river. That scene is gorgeous, and it is wonderful that I feel the bright moonlight cover me, on a nice river in a red kayak.

Then we had a campfire, and for the first time again I tried campfire S'mores. I have tried toasted marshmallow before, but never in such way. And we were using twig to make it, so natural and wild. Exactly as the picture showed, but the picture is not from me, it is from http://whatscookingamerica.net/Cookie/Smores/Smores.htm

One thing you need to watch out for S'mores, is that your finger really get tasty and sticky after that. Plus they are really sweet and fat, so watch out for your weight.

The third big first I got today is about the traffic ticket. In fact, I was showing off to my friends that I have never got a ticket before for driving here for over one year. And the lesson I got is, NEVER SHOW OFF!

But I have a reason to comfort myself everytime I find myself driving over speed limit or passing a yellow-red light, that is my girl spell, an impression I have got from American movies and TV plays. See, pop culture media do influence our young audience!!
So another lesson I got is, GIRL SPELL DOES WORK OUT!! OK, never show off again, but fortunately enough for me, the police officer I met tonight was a really nice, kind, thoughtful, considerate, lovable, admirable, worth blessing one. We need to be careful while driving, under the speed limit, obey all the rules. Keep safe, live better.

Such a interesting night! I almost thought that I may ruined the night when I heard about the over 200 bucks ticket, but then took the whole story in a relaxing and funny way with the final result. Thanks again, dear police officer!

California is going through a tornado now, what an unbelievable natural situation the planet. I hate the rumor about 2012!! Praying for people who can't enjoy the natural nature, praying for Tan, hope he will be totally completely fully safe and fine there.

CDA -- a methodology may be applied to my thesis

Gloomy Ms. XY is going to meet her thesis advisor tomorrow, after Daylight Savings Sunday. Losing one hour for my summer.

I am trying to figure out what exact topic I want to explore in my thesis (yes, I just started to think about this in a serious way, I have been wasting my time for TWO MONTHS!), and currently I am favoring for doing interview or research, but hopefully that's not too far away from documentary theme, which is what my dear advisor good at.

Also interested in Critical approach, I googled this article from Google Scholar the other night, and was reading it for the past two hours. This is really good, explained me about the history and key persons in the development of CDA, Critical Discourse Analysis.

http://www.linguistik-online.com/14_03/threadgold.html

Since I took the course Sociology of Gender last Spring, luckily I know someone mentioned in this paper, Judith Butler. and I read another article about her comments on Kafka's scripts, which recalled my pleasant memory of reading her paper then. I am in for her opinions, and for the article about CDA, I guess I still can spend a lot of time tangling with her proposal about performance versus performativity.

Went to shopping with my roommate yesterday, because Forever 21 is newly open after relocation and decoration, much fancier and gorgeous now! Also, GAP is on sale, http://s.gap2550.com/coupon.html?utm_source=BuzzMedia&utm_medium=NonMobile&utm_campaign=Gap2550

this is really awesome, you can apply this coupon even after the additional 30% off tops they are having now. I spent $28 to get things with original price of $67. I am definitely aware that all the on sale stuff is like cheating, they still get profit anyway, but isn't is wonderful that I can show people a receipt indicating that I saved about $39 while swiping my mommy's credit card?

Post the status in my FB after shopping, because I think this is quite funny and universal for girls:

Bless for all those rest in peace

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2011/03/massive_earthquake_hits_japan.html





Got the news about the earthquake in Japan last night, really shocked by such a giant disaster.


Was watching news just now, saw those images and videos of the flood and destroy, can't help but all tears down.

Before any disaster, our human lifes seems so fragile, we can't do anything when something out of our control is dangering our lifes. You are not able to run away from the coming flood, so strong and merciless, that fact is very sad but so true.

I can't imagine what if that happens on my beloveds, whenever this thought pop out, my tears flow out together. Sometimes human beings are just helpless and small in front of the nature.

Some people said that 2012 is for real, and indeed, those images from the news looks much stunning than any motions from movies, plus they indeed happened. I am feeling lost about the concept that the next year is the end, that is cruel but who knows. Anyway, thanks for letting me being here for now, love and live. Bless all.

XY Tofu Stew and Rango

Seriously? Nightmare again! It took me about 20 minutes to upload this image just now, because of the same problem I have encountered last time, portrait or landscape. I have no way but rotate while resave and resave it. I am tried of this experiment.
(OK, calm down. .....)


So, this is the dish for dinner I made today, I would name it XY Tofu Stew . It may looks not that good, but goes really well with rice. I make it totally by my own recipe, Here it is, and since this is the first time I write about my own recipe, I cant tell the exact amount of what for what, tbsp or cup or however, it is Chinese dish, you just feel how you want to make it and put things together at your will.

Ingredients: 1, a box of firm tofu (should be firm, not silken nor soft, maybe they would work too, but the cook time then should be reduced accordingly);
2, Shiitake Mushroom (Dried, 7);
3, Grounded pork or chicken; (my understanding is that chicken is easier to be done than pork, and I don't like eat beef with tofu there)
4, Three eggs (that's the amount I usually go with a box of tofu, or four, depends on the size of egg)
5, salt, sugar, soy sauce, light soy sauce, black peeper, oyster flavor sauce, lemon flavor salt;


Steps: 1) put the dried shiitake mushroom in a bowl of warm water, let them enjoy themselves swelling there for half an hour; remember to keep the water they have been swimmed in.
2) whip the eggs till they three (or four) become really united; cut tofu into cubic, be creative about cutting; introduce juicy egg to the happy tofu cubic, mix them together, be careful don't hurt tofu;
3) don't leave the meat alone, get them defrosted and ready for hot pan; heat the pan, add oil, when oil get impatient, put the meat in; add salt and soy sauce, mix them with meat till the bloody color of meat turn into dull done-meat color;
4) get the meat out, get the pan clean again, add oil, when it is impatient again, put juicy egg with tofu in; try to make sure that each little cubic is wrapped with egg when they play with each other in the pan, that's not easy, cause the egg gets solid then;
5) add salt, sugar, keep on rolling them till all the egg are solid; add sliced mushroom; when they get familiar with each other, introduce them soy sauce, oyster flavor sauce, and even some light soy sauce, depending on your personal taste;
6) bring meat back into the pan, mix them; try to make them taste good, you can adjust your amount of seasonings;
7) remember the water that the mushroom have fun with? get some of them to the pan, at least cover the kids in the pan there; keep the heat on high till the water boiled, and turn them a bit lower;
8) add black pepper, lemon flavor salt (personal opinion), or any other sauce or flavor something you like;
9) within 10 minutes, your stew tufo will be done! Yeah! I really like them with steamed rice!


After I get full with my dinner, my roommate asked me if I want to go out for a movie, Rango is on. I heard that my dear Johnny Deep in the main voice, then why not. So we headed for the movie on 9:30 p.m.
Since it is Spring Break, the town is pretty empty, and there is not much choice about the schedule of movie. We were the first for that showtime, and there were only 10 people in for that. It is a good movie though, the motion and pictures are very awesome. I am amazed by how animation can be such a blast.


The plot is very typical, Hamlet style, I am not saying that there is a prince with a ghost father, but the track is always the same: the protagonist lives a happy life at the beginning, gets dumped by some incident, gets a new place as a totally stranger, gains his cognition with stories and maybe lies, faces the theme challenges, failed the first time to solve it, gets lost, gets epiphany to some extend, gets back to the group and solve the problem, Yeah! plus also makes out at last with the most active female character.


The story is set as western style, and they all sound kind of Mexican accent, like in cowboy era. I really appreciate the scene of chase in the canyon, and the some theme setting of Western desert. and the awkward owl band, haha, banjo sounds perfect there.

Another problem discussed here is the environment and human behavior's consequence on wild animals. In this movie, the theme conflict is about getting water for people, and everyone in the town of dirt treasure water as their lives, the thing they deposit in bank is, water, and the one who get them water is the big hero. Keep on mind that we have to save the environment, don't waste our mother planet's blood.
And human construction is a big damage to wild animals, like highway. It cut the routine route of local animals, and you never know that some of them are so willing to risk their lives under the wheels for reaching to the other side of the road. Also the mass spreading out of area for human being devastate the original home of animals. this topic is huge, and one people's concern is surely far beyond enough.


another motto I grabbed from Rango is, You never live out of your story. everyone has its own life frame, just be yourself and know where your border is. no kidding.

Macaroni and Toy Story

(My lunch today, the macaroni are the character from Toy Story, isn't it cute?)

So, this is especially irritating for me in the past one hour: I was trying to upload a picture of the macaroni I made today to my blogger for this post, and the layout of the photo just did not go with it. It is supposed to be landscape horizontal, but the photo posted in the blog was portrait vertical, no matter how did I rotated the original one. Since I do need this photo to be lying there instead of sitting up, the process was not good. Luckily that I eventually solved it, without reaching out for anyone. At one point, I was furious and wanted to call Tan and shout at him, LOL, that's what I do when I am in a mess and he can't help me out, because I know he is not familiar with blogger nor photos.

Here is what I have done to save my temper about blogger: firstly, I tried all the directions to rotate the image, and re-upload it, didn't work; then, I realised that all the images uploaded in Blogger will be automatically saved in Picasa, (sorry, but no one tells me about this, this is ridiculous!). Ok, I accept the fact that they are all from Google, whatever, Go Google, Yeah! (still hypocritically consider this is nothing more than stupid). So secondly, I was wonder whether I can edit my photo there via Picasa, and I signed up for a Picasa account.

All my uploaded images were there, including those I upload for test or by mistake, and there were 7 the same vertical pictures of my poor macaroni, who was so in need to be horizontal. I tried to rotated them under Picasa, but the button for rotate and edit were grey, which means unavailable. So I deleted half of the pictures there, and closed the page.

Thirdly, I run for google search engine, and I googled "blogger photo vertical horizontal", there popped up quite a lot results, about the shit about this consequence. And I found one reliable help forum discussing that photos from Canon have this problem, and one way is keep on rotating your image, re-save it and re-upload it, at some magic point, the image will be correct. Another way is to change the name of the photo, from JPG to GIF. Here is the link of the beautiful forum: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=68832f2bf271e38a&hl=en

I tried to change the name of my file, and I found no way to do it. As you may conclude from my talk, that I am a completely computer idiot. And Yes, You are completely 100% right! At last, I reopened my photo by Windows Photo Viewer, as I usually use Microsoft Office Picture Manager. I re-saved the picture there, changed its title, and BANG, re-uploaded it, and BANG, I got it!

So relieved......

I was going to talk about my happy girl mood after making macaroni, which are character from Toy Story, there are piggy, bear, Buzz, and Woody! and I often add broccoli and wieners to it. I am a cheese person. But after all this, I don't know, I sense a little bit of achievement yet I am more than willing to shut this page now.

Things You Didn't Know About ...

Quoting Forrest Gump: life is a box of chocolate, you never know what you are going to get.

Same here with a movie fan, I have to admit this is a fairly fun yet risky role, because you never know what you are going to watch next. A good one, then lucky for you, and ummm inspirational yummy! But what if you have unfortunately encountered a cheesy lame one? Then go and enjoy wasting your time, suffering before the screen with no clue how duller the movie can be, and waiting to be disappointed like a dumped puppy and have to reach out for some other ways to make up for you little hurting heart.

My way of punishing myself for wasting almost a whole evening on a mistakenly chosen movie, My So Called Love (Taiwan, 2008), is wasting another 15 mins on my Chinese social network Renren.com, and found an amazingly fabulous clip from TED, about orgasm, the title is Ten Things You Didn't Know About Orgasm. The speaker is Mary Roach, here is the link of her, feel free to click it if you think you know her or want to know more about here http://www.maryroach.net/

See, because I like her from her 16 min speech on TED, and I want to share it, that's why I am posting the link. And for the movie I feel regret to spend my time on, I am not posting anything for it, and please be cautious for any movie with this English title.

I watched another Taiwanese movie last Tuesday, Blue Gate Crossing, which is very in my tune, and I felt like so going back to my high school and hanging out with my class pals again. That is what a good film does: it helps you sit back and relax, brings you to the certain story that it means for, lets you experience together with character (or fancy yourself as the one) within it, and makes you THINK! for whether memories that you almost forget, or dreams you always desire for, or status you should retrospect on, or at least some feelings you can never tell exactly but you just know they are good.

Tan's been calling for over an hour, sleepy now, haven't finished yet, to be continued ......

New Blogger's Resolution

(umm, what should i post for today?………… yeah, this one looks great! record my life:) BTW, I am not a Cbrand camera user, just in for the ambience created by this one)

OK, I totally understand that resolution NEVER works on me, but I still wanna to try this one more time for my new blog. A new site for Ms. XY, a new way to record my life.

Actually the word Resolution just popped out of my almost-mid-night brain, when I was trying to figure out a cool title for my first English blog's debut. And to be honest, I think this name is awesome.

Yes, I finally realised that I do need to start writing a blog, especially a little bit professional English one, instead of fooling around with scattered social networks, or superficial one-sentence-status post, you name it. I was pretty thrilled about my idea this morning at my work, and have wasted most of my time this night till now, for setting up and other fooling around stuff, and DALA , finally start to write.

Being 24 years old plus three months, I can't help but have been feeling sorry for myself those days. I have been dumped too much of my precious youth in the name of Enjoying My Life, and actually have done nothing big deal. That is really really pathetic, which I seriously hate. Facts: I haven't began a real full-time job yet, I Even haven't graduated from school yet, haven't been living in a big city in US, haven't been to Paris, haven't learned my second foreign language, French, Spanish, Japanese whatever (though I have to say my picking up Japanese will deeply disgusts myself), etc.

Hence, I am trying to supervise myself by tracing my track via blogging. I think this is a good way:)

Therefore, you can not find gossip nor emotional outlet article from this site, but just some quoted or original thoughts, thesis progress report, cooking experience (I am thinking about talking about my experience of making non-Chinese food, as well as write recipe of Chinese food), language learning practice (I have restarted my Spanish couple days ago, and I plan to finish all the videos that available from SpanishDict), travel stories, and book/film review. Maybe some more topics, but what I can come up with now already sounds active and optimistic. Good for me!

That is what this blog should be like in my plan, oh, and plus some cute images every now and then. I just love some pics of cute kids and animals, or posters, and about my life.

I love my life, though it seems rather inefficient recently, I still just love it! The only wish is that I hope myself can cheer up and make every side of it better and better!