My wife regularly shops at Asian markets. I'm usually not suprised when I get home from work and find some strange assortment of Japanese candies, Chinese beef jerky, and Korean pickles.
On Friday I was greeted with this sight:
Years ago, when I was working in Hong Kong & Singapore, I picked up drinking Japanese style iced coffee. Japanese iced coffee is nothing like the weak ass shit you get at Starbucks when they dump hot coffee over ice. WTF is that?
Brew coffee, mix in sugar and cream to taste, then chill. No watery coffee in a plastic cup. Typically the iced coffee is found in a small can (see above)
Starbucks has copied the style and they call it Starbucks Doubleshot. It's available everywhere. It's good, but the Japanese brands are better.
It is amazingly refreshing in the heat. Cool and sweet with good flavor, you really can't ask for more get you going in the afternoon. For a while I was drinking 3-4 cans a day and riding the caffine wave until my eventual wipeout. I don't drink it regularly anymore, mainly because I crave it so much.
Besides three cans of iced coffee, she also picked up a bottle of Pocari Sweat. In spite of it's name, it's a great tasting version of Gatorade that I started drinking about the time I started with iced coffee.
My wife knows my love for these drinks and hooked me up. Who can ask for more?
In other news, I dug up potatos in the backyard today.
Several months ago I found a bag of potatos that were sprouting in the house. rather than toss them I took the girls outside and we planted them. Fast forward to today and it was time to dig them up. Here I am with Zoe plucking the spuds from the ground with my bare hands. Zoe provided the management as I dug.
After washing the dirt away, here's is nature's bounty. I am a rocking farmer.
Wife wierdness:
My half-Chinese wife was born in New York and raised in Cincinnati. She's as American as they come, but she was raised by her crazy Chinese mother. The effects are slight, but noticable. She eats something called 'lo sung' on her toast. It looks like bacon bits. She also eats something called 'stinky tofu' which should really be called 'smells like vomit tofu' with her mother & grandmother. Most of the time I let it slide uncommented.
The other day I came upon this scene:
Yes, Mira is laughing. Both girls love this. In China they don't use q-tips to clean their ears. They use this special bamboo stick that is curved at one end and has a puff on the other. Michele uses the hook end to scratch the inside of the girls ears. Then the puff end to draw out the wax, dirt clods, and small stones that get in there.
The girls CRAVE this. They ask for 'ear scratching' all the time. It's fargin weird I tell you. Not as weird as shoving a lit paper cone in your ear, but weird none the less. When I question such things, my wife has a pat answer, "A billion Chinese can't be wrong."
The fight:
Martin wrote up a brief description of our viewing of the Tyson fight. Less than a minute. I'm sure glad it wasn't Pay Per View. I have say that Tyson was amazingly candid in the post-fight interview saying that he wasn't ready for Lennox Lewis.
Geekage:
I've been getting more and more interested in the use of XML feeds. After reading Lukwam's and Argv0's posts about using feeds, I had to give it a try.
I got Newz Crawler working, but NewsMonster eludes me. Newz Crawler works pretty damn good. Tight integration with XP to boot.
What I really want to build is my own page to aggregate RSS feeds, but I have much learning to do.
I think this entry is long enough, don't you?