first beach day this year

the other night i rented "the endless summer" from iTunes, and it made me want to go to the beach. not to learn how to surf, you crazy?  just to go to the beach.  so this weekend i did just that.

woke up mid-morning.  had breakfast at "the flying pan" where for the last three weekends i've ordered the same thing (spanish-style egg white omelette with smoked salmon, wheat toast, fruit bowl, orange juice, long black coffee) and left tip, tho not customary here in hong kong, just so they'd remember me and my order, but they always manage to give me a wrong omelette anyway (once with egg yolks, once plain - without the things that make it "spanish", and once without smoked salmon).  i'll give it one last time next weekend and if they still don't get it right, i'll just make my own omelette breakfast.

i asked rene, benj, and josen to come with me to the beach but they said they'd rather go to a soho bar to drink the afternoon away, so i went by myself. dumped everything in my tote (photo, above): my big-ass towel, pretty floral shorts, sunscreen, sunnies, and most important - a nice book to read (isaac asimov's "the complete robot" compilation).  took the mtr in flipflops, got lost in shaukeiwan, especially after asking locals who pointed me at the wrong direction, then finally got to the minibus (craziest drivers in hong kong) that took me to shek-o beach.  my first time going to this beach - really nice weather, and rather crowded so i just went and stayed in one end.

i had a ticket for "x-men: first class" in the evening so i didn't stay in the beach very late.  movie was great. it wasn't until the movie was over and i was brushing off popcorn from my shirt that i realized i locked myself out from my apartment yet again. (i was in such a hurry from getting home from the beach to going to the moviehouse, while being on the phone with rene and benj who were still drinking in soho and asking me to join them, that i forgot my keys again). so i had to go to emi to borrow her copy again.

when i finally got in i got an email notification from iTunes saying there's a new doctor who episode that i can download. yay! only it turns out it's just a teaser.  new episodes won't be availabe until fall.  sigh.

anyhoo. i love my color today.  next time i'll try a different beach.


 XXX

revit rendering study

one of the main advantages of revit over autocad is instant visualization.  basically you can work with the visuals at the same time you're doing the planning.  this one was a preliminary "look" study of a boutique hotel, rendered natively in revit.  i read somewhere that there's a (3rd party?) rendering function that uses cloud-accessed files, but i don't think that's a particularly good idea for now, because basically it means you'd be limited by your internet connection.  it's bad enough that so many things can go wrong with windows while doing a complex rendering, and the occasional power failure, with cloud computing you'll also have to worry about internet connection.  soon maybe, but not tomorrow, and definitely not today.

XXX

yellow clams

these clams were different from the other batch in that these are prettier - the shell and the meat are yellowish, and the brown lines on the shell make for a pretty pattern.  they're more lively too.  when i bought them they were spitting water at unsuspecting passers by at the market.

things were kind of decided for me:  i had half a day-old baguette that won't be any good at all tomorrow, so i thought i'd make some soup to dunk it in.  i was thinking maybe cold tomato soup, but when i passed by the market i saw these pretty clams so i thought, well, clams in soup, maybe asian spicy style. but the stall where i buy herbs was out of cilantro, so i bought broad-leafed parsley and dill instead, and onion.  when i got home i found out that i ran out of chicken stock, so i just dumped half a bottle of white wine in it.  i really should learn how to cook properly.

XXX

get your own ewan mcgregor now! cheap!

who knew he's for sale? and for cheap, supposedly.  but then what's cheap for them is probably still not affordable for me.  and anyway i don't think i'd want to own ewan. i mean he looks good and charming and all, but i wouldn't know what to feed him, really.  tho from the persona he projects onscreen he looks like a very good-natured low-maintenance guy, so maybe it isn't so bad. nah. i can't even keep cacti alive for a long time, much less an ewan.

the screen shot above was from an ad in sfgate.com.  clearly the advertiser just scans keywords in the article (the article was about a new ewan mcgregor movie) and tempts reader to buy it from its website for cheap.  stupid bot. 

XXX

mini mango (pahutan), and silly things

when i was a kid i loved toys that looked nothing like the real thing.  they can be the ugliest one-color plastic toy car with nothing but air inside - two pieces of thin molded plastic halves with untidy joint right in the middle, or a teeny weeny solid plastic gun no bigger than a coin, so small and unrecognizable in shape, never mind in details, that one couldn't really make out what it was until one saw on the candy wrapper it came in that indeed it was meant to be a toy gun.    it made me feel special that adults had to create something especially for my kind, the child whose only source of spending money was the occasional spare change from my mother's pocket.  i thought, how nice of these people to try to amuse me with these silly things. of course even at such a young age it occured to me that they were what they were not because of purposeful design but because they had to be the cheapest possible product  that can be wrapped with a piece of candy, but why spoil romantic notions with practical ideas?

it's somewhat the same way with the tiny mangoes (pictured above, Mangifera altissima, or simply "pahutan" where i grew up) that i found in the market today.  i loved these when i was a kid.  i'd bite a small bit from the pointed end and start peeling the skin off like a tape going round all the way, then pop the whole thing in my mouth (about the size of a sushi).  the pit is very thin and i used to bend them in my mouth because small as they were, they were still a considerable chunk in a child's mouth.  my mom used to bring some home and make a big fuss of how special these are.  i, of course, believed her.  it made me feel special that there was a mini version even of this common fruit, something specifically for me.  until of course i was older and she kept buying these, at which point i realized that  she was buying these for herself.  and of course at that age i was already well aware that not everything was about me and that adults enjoy their own special things, too.


XXX