Having a rice cooker has sort of changed my life. I bought it off of a friend who was moving. Initially I had my doubts, especially buying one using "fuzzy logic" because as I'm sure was the case in most Asian households growing up, you had some ancient thing with a 2 pole switch that somehow made rice, puddings, steamed vegetables, and whatever else. You could trick those things. Fuzzy logic (whether or not this term is correctly applied) rice cookers are a whole different animal. You have to tell it what you're making (some of them even have cake modes...which my friend and I tried and hey, it looked enough like cake! Imagine if we made it mixing with a whisk and not a fork and also when sober!) and then it'll magically cook it juuuuust right. And I've been living without a rice cooker for years, being the bad Asian that I am. (Along with not playing the piano or violin.) I just make rice in a pot. What is so hard???
But hey, you help a friend out by buying his junk and you get junk you might use in return. Yay! Also I joked that with the fuzzy logic brain 'n all, it might be intelligent enough to become my new best friend.
And it has.
I haven't done anything crazy in it yet but make white rice and brown rice. Okay, I attempted to make steel cut oats twice, which sort of yielded goopy nightmares, but the oats that remained in the pot were delicious. (I should add that I've never made steel cut oats before and so they sort of astound me and I'm sure it'll just take some experimentation with the water ratio. Also the oats all remained in the pot...the goopy mess was the...oat water that had congealed?) The cake was at someone else's place so I can't count that. But combined with my normal stores of pickled vegetables I never get around to eating (kimchee, cucumbers in soy sauce, etc) I am in snacking heaven. It feels healthier too than some of my past snacking habits. (Until you factor in just how much rice I can inhale with the right sesame and seaweed seasoning and then I remember why I don't lose weight.)
And so, as with I later admitted with getting a real bed, I concede that a rice cooker is a good investment. Tending periodically to a pot of rice doesn't take much work, but setting a timer for rice to be done when you're back from errands is pretty clutch. And since my jaw has been hurting the past few weeks it's been nice to have large amounts of rice porridge (mixed with sweet potatoes! mm) as a staple starch around. You win, Asian-and-now-common-American-apartment-dweller wisdom.
Project 365: day 1, a photo by muroo on Flickr.Spring is here sort of! By a work parking garage.
Hmm, there was supposed to be a message about retrying this project now that my phone is smarter. But it didn't work. I'll find a way!
Hello world again!
I wonder who still has this blog on their feeds! So I am back, reflecting on my life, with no guarantees that I will post again. :-) I guess I converted to tumblr, but since apparently it's a bandwidth whore (hence not playing nice with use at work) maybe I'll spew my thoughts here again.
I have a lot of saved drafts, and a lot of more organized things to say...but perhaps expanding on that indication, this is a post about how I am woefully unfocused.
As I type right now, I am amid another flurry of work left to the last minute. The super last minute. I've been aware of this workload for a while, and I've had the past 3 weeks to work on it, but I just haven't. I can't really put my finger on why other than just being a pathological procrastinator. But I do know I need to improve on this. And I've been better this quarter at work than usual...but not quite the best. Why haven't I been able to improve myself at work as much as I'd like? I think it's because I'm also trying to be better at every thing all at once.
I fall into this trap so much that it's not even a trap, but a dysfunctional way of life. I suppose growing up being placed in specialized programs and then going to a competitive high school and an even more so college has led me to increasingly believe that I should be good at everything. I bitterly scoffed at people who delved into their studies and didn't do extracurriculars and got the same or better grades than I with less stress (for shame!) thinking I was the capable one. Some of my friends do still envy my logistical ambitions -- if I want to fit something into my schedule, it will fit. I may sacrifice a little bit of everything else, but I can and will go to work, see an apartment, get my teeth cleaned, help out at the tae kwon do school, go to my soccer game, and then meet you for your birthday party.
I've been skipping things as of late (the past year) with mixed results. I've mostly been stinging on the exercise and the social engagements, which might not be the best way to go. Either way, this has led to no improvement in my life regarding stress level, work production consistency, and clearly not my health and fitness since I've been exercising less. And now I feel guilty for not leading the jam-packed life I used to with zero results.
What I've forgotten is one of the fundamentals of learning which I now see applies to life skills. Master one skill, build a foundation, and move on.
Instead of trying to (currently):
