Living Room Changes

I picked up a wall mounting system for my LCD television. I'd always meant to, ever since we got the LCD, but I've always balked at the $300-$400 price tag on the nice swingarm mounting systems from Future Shop or Best Buy. However recently I picked up a Costco membership, and I saw the swingarms on sale there for less than $150. I snapped one up the instant I saw it.

There were a ton of parts that I didn't need in the kit, meant for every TV mount under the sun - I lucked out and ended up only needing the basic parts, none of the extensions were required. It was pretty straightforward, the parts were easy to assemble, and I have a ultrasonic stud finder to locate the wooden sections of the wall I had to drill into. There were plastic tubes that could stick to the wall to hold the cables running to the TV, which was very convenient. The only challenge was measuring out how high on the wall to mount the bracket, to make it the same height as before.

This wall bracket freed up an incredible amount of space in our living room. During the time Kathy was away in China, I had replaced the old TV stand with a full sized table for convenience. I used it to hold both the TV and a computer setup. Having the table space meant I used it as a table, so it was always a bit of a mess. And the space under the table was often used as storage, which was also not very pleasing to the eye. The TV was also offset to the right of centre compared to the couch. The worst part of this temporary arrangement was that it became temporarily permanent, and stayed that way for over a year and a half since the time I put it in.

You can see it in the picture below.

Functionality: Good - Asthetics and Space: Bad

So after I had the wall mount in place, a whole bunch of things had to go. First the big table. Then all the bits of stuff that had been stored under the desk. Even the small computer monitor went, since I rarely use both the computer and the TV at the same time.

Now my oil-PC computer is in a spot where it can be showed off a little, rather than hidden away behind all the monitors. It's great for some light websurfing or Youtube. I rearranged the shelves on the cabinet unit for the electronics and moved it to the right side where it was much less in the way - I'm still a little surprised at how I managed to fit all of the wiring and a UPS behind the cabinet. I can now finally reach the couple of light switches on the wall without having to reach around behind the cabinet. The staircase is much less blocked away now too.

This is looking a heck of a lot better.

Another angle - you can see the bracket behind the TV.

So this should probably be the way things are for a while. I've thought about trying to put the electronics cabinet into the wall to free up even more space, but it would be a much larger project to consider at a later date.

The only problem with this setup is - where the heck am I going to sit when I want to play some games on the computer?

Allen.

Crayfish Moulting / Molting

Kathy discovered that our crayfish had shed it's shell the other day - we didn't see the actual moult but we took some pictures of the discarded shell. It freaked us out at first, seeing the ripped open carapace. I mean, we've heard of it before but this is the first time seeing it. I wonder how it gets its claws to pull out of the skinny little arm sections?

Did the fish eat him?

It looks like he's come out of his shell!

The crayfish is supposed to eat it's old shell - this one seems to be doing it over a period of a week or more, not all at once. Right now, it's eaten everything except the old claw shells and about half of the carapace.

After a week, only the old claws and a bit of carapace are left.

Allen.

Front yard fixup

More of a a shabby bit of dirt than an actual yard, we've neglected the front yard of our house for years. I mean, we mow it when it gets too long, and but we don't water it, and haven't really watered it since we started having watering restrictions a few years ago - the lawn mostly withered from lack of water and we stopped caring about it at that point. Looking out at it last week, it just looked really sorry, so Kathy and I decided to do something about it. We scraped away the mostly dead grass with a rake, and removed what was left of the back third to make a flower bed.

I went by one of those places that sell patio stones and various other concrete bits, and picked up about $70 worth of driveway curbing to use as the edge around the flower bed. It took 2 trips to pick it all up with our little car, but it wasn't too far away so it was all right I suppose.


After we laid down the concrete, we filled the flower bed with soil. We have a giant cube of soil in the back yard that we used while reseeding the back lawn, so I carted the soil over to the front with a hand truck and a garbage can. Since the distance was around the whole townhouse block, about 10 homes, it worked better than a wheelbarrow with a single wheel.


We also put a good amount of soil down on the remaining grass as well and reseeded the area. Kathy says she wants to plant some shrubs, and I think it should look pretty decent once it's all done.



Edit May 13 - a week later the grass is starting to grow back through the soil, and we planted some perennial plants:



Allen.

Hamburgers

I whipped these up pretty quickly while I was watching TV from the kitchen. We had some ground beef and I felt like having hamburgers, so I minced up a couple of onions and mixed it with the beef, plus some cornstarch and soy sauce that was around. I added some ginger powder - it takes the gross smell from the beef away without having bits of ginger in the meat (I dont like biting into pieces of ginger in food). I heard there is a trick to mixing ground meat - you have to stir it in ONE direction, it helps make it stickier faster instead of crumbling. I don't really know but it's what I hear.

The buns were the first googled recipe I clicked on that didn't require milk (cause I didn't have any milk at the time), and I didn't make exact measurements of the ingredients. I didn't expect them to look so nice. I wonder which recipe it was? I suppose I can find it again if I needed it.

The recipe needed one egg and one egg yolk for the egg wash, so I took out two eggs. I separated one yolk into a bowl, and added the extra egg white to the recipe.

I think I've figured out how to make a proper egg wash now. (dont laugh) After I had the whole yolk by itself in a bowl, I popped it and pulled out the skin that covered it. The remaining yolk was just the nice and smooth liquid portion inside, and once mixed with about a tablespoonful of water, looked proper at last, and worked beautifully when brushed onto the risen dough. How come recipes never tell you this stuff? Maybe I am just reading the wrong recipes.

Likewise with the sesame seeds - the recipes I've seen all say to roll your bun in the seeds, but they are not that easy to handle and lift. I experimented by sprinkling sesame on some, and spreading it on with a rub of my hand with others - I think I got better results from rubbing than sprinkling.

Anyway after I grilled the hamburgers and sliced the buns, the end result was really nice. It's too bad we didnt have any lettuce around, it would have been picture-perfect if I added some lettuce and a couple slices of tomato. Kathy and I gobbled these burgers up right quick, stopping only to take a quick snapshot first on her suggestion. We ate these with ketchup, mustard, and pickles. There is a plate of broccoli that you see the corner of, slightly off to the side. Yes, really, it's there, honest.

Maybe I should have cleaned up the crumbs first, but I was too anxious to start eating

Here are the others staying warm in the oven

Dinner Banquet Speech Ettiquette

Last week I was at one of those fancy dinner parties for a friend's association event. It was held at a nice Chinese restaurant, with a 10 course meal. I was rather looking forward to the dinner and the events they had scheduled.

However, before the dinner and events actually started, the various VIPs of course had to give their speeches and greetings. None of them kept it simple - everyone had something to say about everything apparently.

Dinner was supposed to start at 6pm but by 8:30pm, there was no food other than a couple of tangerines and soda pop that were on the tables already. So everyone was drinking the pop on an empty stomach, getting hyper on sugar and caffeine, and generally not hearing what the speeches were about. I didn't understand much of what was said, but I was told that the speeches were about the Chinese New Year, and that each section was being repeated in both English and Cantonese for everyone's benefit. The bass level on the microphone was way too high, but no one really cared cause we were all so hungry.

Eventually the restaurant got tired of the speeches and just started serving the first appetizer course to all the tables, to the cheers of all present. They followed up very quickly with 4 more courses, so quickly that we hardly had time to finish each new platter (despite the fact that we were polishing them off at a swift, famished pace.) I guess the food was starting to pile up in the kitchens and they had to be served before they got cold.

Anyways, if you are holding a dinner banquet, dont let the old codgers talk until a little food has been served, people will be much more receptive to listening to them speak BETWEEN courses rather than when starving at the beginning of dinner.

Allen.

P.s. One dinner guest at our table ate before he came to the dinner, because HE EXPECTED THIS TO HAPPEN. Apparently this is a common occurence. Sigh.

Chen Style Tai Chi (太極拳) term 2

This Sunday, our 2nd term starts for Chen Tai Chi. Hopefully we will learn some of the names of the moves we are doing - I like the class taught by Sifu May, but I wish we knew what the steps were called so we could refer to them properly.

Ji Hong Tai Chi had an open house last week. Kathy and I were part of the demonstration routine for the Chen 1 class, to show what you could accomplish in just 1 term. There were also demonstrations for the Yang style beginner class, and advanced demonstrations for Chen and Yang - they looked very nice and we were very encouraged about what we can accomplish in the future.

At first we were wondering if people were going to show up on such a cold day, but they did, in surprisingly large numbers. There were so many people that the benches and chairs were not enough to seat them all. It's nice for the school but I wonder how they are going to manage all the potential signups.

One nice thing about Ji Hong is that the people taking the classes are all relatively young for tai chi people, average age is about 35 I think. Compared to some places where the average age is perhaps 70, Ji Hong feels like a pretty energetic Tai Chi place. (My opinion of course)

Allen.

Bread FAIL

I made a batch of standard french roll dough and brought it over to my mother's place to bake, figuring I'd show her how I can bake bread. Wow, it went badly. First, the dough sitting in the car for the 2nd rise did so over 4 hours in cold temperatures, and I didn't let it warm up to room temperature. I just cut it like usual and formed the baugette shapes. The oven at my mom's seems to be hotter, so I over baked it too. The end result were some weird twisted burnt shapes that exploded along the side. I was pretty annoyed about it. The end result is - don't change variables and expect the end result not to change too.

Allen.

what the heck happened?

eeeewwwwww =(

Kill me now... oh, you did, thank you

Even my yeast starter experiments looked better than that - here is the latest one for comparison: