I had some leftover sausages from Monday night when I made those pork hotdogs so I decided to use them for this quick and easy dish. I got this idea a while ago from watching an episode of “The Big Bang Theory” where Sheldon said that he loves “spaghetti with little cut up sausages”.

I started cooking the spaghetti and then I fried up the sausages in a pan that I’ve already seasoned with some garlic oil.

When they were more or less cooked, I took them out of the pan and sliced them up.

And then I cooked them some more till they are nice and crispy on the edges.

Next I pour in the arrabbiata sauce and let it simmer for about 10 minutes. Arrabbiata is basically a tomato sauce with chilli. If you like it even hotter, you can add in some cut chillies and use a spicier sausage.

And this was my dinner tonight with some for lunch tomorrow. Again, cooking, eating and cleaning up took about an hour.

My parents are away for a 4-week trip to Shanghai and Tibet which means I will be hunting and foraging for myself during that time. My brother should hopefully do some cooking as well because I don’t have that many things in my repertoire. Knowing that I need to add a bit of variety to my old standbys of pasta, fried rice, steaks and rice congee, I brainstormed and came up with: pork sausage hotdog in a Vietnamese roll with Chinese spinach stir-fried in garlic.

This idea was inspired by the pulled pork sandwich that is served with garlicky broccoli rabe as seen on an episode of Man Vs. Food:

Pulled Pork Is Roast Pork 2.0 At DiNic’s | Unbreaded.

If your parents ever tell you TV is bad for you, tell them they are wrong.

I will let the pictures tell the cooking story. These are the basic ingredients.

The Chinese spinach is stir-fried in garlic with pepper and fish-sauce to taste.

The sausages are then pan fried in the pan that is now seasoned with the oil and garlic from the stir-fry.

This is the finished product. The Vietnamese rolls are now nice and toasty after a few minutes in the sandwich maker.

It doesn’t look pretty but it was delicious.

All up, cooking, eating and cleaning up plus marinating tomorrow night’s steaks took me an hour. Not bad eh? And I covered the major food groups.

Tham and I had another one of our many discussions about man-woman dynamics recently. This time it was about how some girls instinctively put up their defensive shields when approached by single men. It is therefore pleasantly refreshing when we find out a girl is carefree and relaxed when she’s being chatted up. Even if we don’t like the girl that way we enjoy talking to girls who don’t question our motives and think that we are up to something. It’s so much easier and is one of the reasons that I hang out with married women. Hahah!

However, there is a downside to the girl being super friendly. If a guy is inexperienced or does not know any better he can easily mistake her friendliness and openness for her liking him romantically. That’s not a fault of the girl though – every guy should know this mantra by heart:

It’s all a lie until she touches your happy bits.

Another downside for the girl who’s popular with the guys is that she will inevitably attract bitchy comments from other girls. As sure as the sun will rise from the east, women can be catty to each other in their own clique and will be outright mean to those whom they have deemed not worthy or perceived to have wrong them in some way. And a girl who’s sucking all the male attention in the room away from them fits the bill perfectly. Women really are their own worst enemy.

Wholesome Lindsay Lohan is the best kind of Lindsay Lohan.

The old school Asian man …

May not compliment his wife on her cooking
But he will eat anything she cooks without complaints.

May walk ahead of her
But he will always turn around and wait
Before walking off again.

May not praise her looks all the time
But he never criticises her either.

May not always show that he cares
But he will wake up at 5 in the morning
To pick her up from the airport.

This old school Asian man is my father and today is his birthday. Happy birthday dad!

BJ and I in Kings Park, circa 2000. And yes, she’s heard that joke about her name many times.

When I saw last her in Sydney, Jan 2007

This afternoon I had bumped into BJ, one of my best friends from way back. She’s been living in Sydney and country New South Wales. I hadn’t seen her in 4 years and since then she’s had a baby. We’ve kept in touch with the occasional SMS and calls but as our lives got busier (hers more than mine of course) those had lessen. If only she was a more avid Facebook user. Heh.

I was walking out of the office towards the post office nearby and there she was on the same side of the street pushing her baby in a pram. It felt kinda surreal and I actually squinted and focused for a while to make sure that she was who I was seeing.

We walked and talked and it felt like we have never lost touch at all. Of course it helps that my life hasn’t really changed much since the last time that I’ve seen her (forever lonely – sob. Heh), and she’s still as I remembered her. The conversation was effortless. I’m kinda blessed that I have a lot of friends like that.

It got me thinking about the timing of this chance meeting. If I didn’t had to go to the post office today, if I had ate my lunch a little slower before leaving the office, then I probably wouldn’t have met her today. Although, she would have called me sooner or later and I would have met her eventually soon enough. But I don’t fret over such trivialities. The important thing is that I met her today and that made my day great instantly .

And yeah I got thinking about “Sliding Doors” again.

I had a conversation yesterday that reminded me of what I had wrote previously about sharing a lover. I’m pragmatic about it and my opinion of it remains unchanged and that is: if everyone concerned knows about the situation and is honest to each other about it, and that everyone’s needs whether financial, emotional or physical are met, then it can work.

But things can get complicated if kids are involved. Do you tell the kids and when do you tell them? If you tell the kids would they get bullied or teased in school about it? Kids do not have the emotional capacity and maturity to be able to understand it. And neither would most of their parents. Modern society is still not capable of accepting such a liberal arrangement yet.

Note that I said “modern society”. Whilst on one of their several trips to China, my parents encountered a tribe called the Mosuo in Yunnan Province. It is a matriarchal society and their approach to sex and child-rearing is decidedly liberal in the modern sense and there is no word for “father” or “husband”.

The traditional Axia system is marriage-free. Mosuo men call their beloved women Axia (“intimate companion”) and women call their lovers Azhu. They are not bound by marriage and will live in their mothers’ homes all their lives. Every adult Mosuo girl has a special Azhu house of her own where her lover can visit during the night but must leave early the next morning. If the girl wishes to stop the love affair she simply closes the door and then the man will not return. The lovers have no economic or legal ties: Their relationship is based only on mutual love and affection, where the will of the female is highly respected. If children are born into the family, they belong exclusively to the mother’s side and inherit her surname. They are raised with their mother and uncles and are not introduced to their father until their adult ceremony.

Mosuo: A Mysterious Matriarchal Group in China.

For more reading:
Mosuo – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Is China’s Mosuo tribe the world’s last matriarchy? | Life and style | The Observer.

And here’s a good Youtube clip (embedding is disabled) – Mosuo Women – China.

If you are a fan of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report living in Australia, you can either watch it by subscribing to Foxtel or you can watch the clips online after it has aired on Foxtel. This was a fair situation I thought. But this appears to have changed. Now, you can only catch the shows on Foxtel – the online clips are no longer available to Australian fans and from what I read on the show’s forums, to all fans outside of the United States.

This is not the first time that it has happened either. It does not make sense that they would do this once, reverted back to the status quo and then revoke access again. What has changed? They are not saying. Currently the thread on the forum about this issue runs 15 pages long.

“Video unavailable from your location”? – The Daily Show Forum.

However a fan had posted a good workaround on page 3. And this is it:

1. Use Firefox and install an add-on called “Modify Headers“.
2. Using the add-on, add a header of “X-Forwarded-For” with a value of “12.13.14.15″ or any IP that you know is an IP address in the US.
3. Set the add-on to be “Always on” in the Options.
   On the Firebox button (big orange one) click on Options – Add-On Bar, then click on the Modify Headers icon in the Add-On Bar (bottom-left corner) and select “Start”. (thanks to helpful comment from Annoyed below)

And say goodbye to this …