It’s winter and uni is in season. For a month I had live uni from the local Japanese seafood store once a week, eating on average 2 uni’s (10 lobes). Then someone pointed out to me that uni has a high cholesterol contents (12% daily consumption for each spoonful). After numerous readings from the internet the verdict is still out for me. Is this cholesterol all bad? What are the other nutritional values from uni that can counterbalance the high choleserol level? For now we stop having uni, trying to be moderate about it. I have to admit though, that last month was a blast, the live uni was always so fresh and yummy.

On a whim, I stopped by the local seafood store yesterday on my way home from work. Just wanted to see what they had that day.

Were they spot prawns in the live tank there? Sure they were! I immediately grabbed a pound and ran to the car. I could hear them kicking now and then in the bag while I was driving home on the freeway. Once home, I fired up the charcoal grill, threw the shrimps into a rub of coarse salt, chilli powder, crushed garlic and cilantro, and waited for my wife to get home.

These shrimps could be eaten raw like sushi, but we just took off the heads and saved them for deep frying later, then threw the tails directly onto the hot coal. A quick turn and it’s ready in a minute. The meat is sweet just as claimed.

The heads we deep fried quickly, and they came out crunchy just like salty crackers. Legs, antennae, we tummied them all.

Oh yummy!

The Memorial Day Weekend was fun. We stayed with our sister’s in Vancouver WA and enjoyed great company and great home-cooked food. We also drove out to Hillsboro to have a Venture Shield protective film put on the front of our Prius. Great job done by ClearBra of Oregon, located right next to the Hillsboro airport. It’s here that we also discovered 2 new gems, Insomnia Coffee house and Vivi’s Vietnamese restaurant. Insomnia uses great Sleepy Monk beans. Vivi’s is a charming little mom and pop restaurant serving pleasant food prepared with love and lots of attention to details, comparable to home cooked food. The owner moved here from Canada and opened this restaurant 2 years ago. See our reviews for bothplaces on Yelp.

After a prolonged bout with the flu since Thanksgiving, I finally recovered enough to brave the wet and cold weather to finish the pond roof, with help from my Dad. Not enough time to put the lights on for Christmas this year, unfortunately.
There is an opening in the middle which is where the pond island is. We figure if it snow real bad we can always cover it with a concrete-mixing tub that we have.
Not too shabby eh?

We designed this cover for the pond, made from 8ft Palruf corrugated PVC sheets, 4×4 posts, 2×4 rafters and 2×2 joists.

It passed the first test over the week of artic freeze. Now I need to improve it by using longer joists and 12-ft sheets over the right side of the pond.

This weekend is the end of a week of artic deep freeze, as low as 14F on the morning of 12/9. Our pond and the fish came out unscathed, with the help of 2 pond de-icers, and a couple buckets of boiling waters poured along the stream on the 3 coldest days. The stream had the most built-up of ice in its history of existence. Ice sheets formed over the shallower part of the pond, but our latest generation of gold fish huddled under one of the de-icers and they looked OK.

What a week!

ice formed along the exposed part of the stream

Watched the HBO’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25th Anniversary Concert last night. Most enjoyable show, if I could ignore the drawn out 1.5 hours of Bruce Springsteen at the end, which was too long for me, and I’m not one of his fan (there’s more that I can say about him but I don’t care enough to do that here).

Two words: Jeff Beck. He appreaed on both days of the original 2-day live show in Madison Square Garden. Otherworldly riffs on Superstition with Stevie Wonder, and yet another version of his signature closing number “A Day in the Life” which was a shoutout to the Beatles. Tal Wilkenfeld presence was refreshing though I noticed she might have put on a teeny bit of weight since the last time I watched her on the “Ronnie Scott’s” DVD. And she put on much more make up for this concert appearance.

Biggest surprise: Mick Jagger strutted on stage un-introduced for his Gimme Shelter version by U2. Granted that U2 couldn’t do justice to this song, it was nevertheless fun to watch, if you count Fergie on stage in that performance too.

Me think will get the DVD when it comes out so I could edited out the Bruce Springsteen part.

I’ve been subscribing to the WSJ for the last 2 years. Lately, about 3 months ago, I started noticing that there have been more grammatical errors and typos in their articles, or just bad sentence structures. Some are dumb mistypes that any decent word processors would automatically flag and even auto-correct if you allow it to. Are their writers getting messy? Are their staffs being laid off, paid less, having to do more work, are new hires of a lesser quality? What’s happening to their basic proof reading? This is from the Friday Aug 21, 2009 Weekend Journal article Jay Leno Gets Ready For Prime Time, quoted: [NBC] recently put the network under the leadership of a company veteran, Jeff Gaspin, and programming executive Ben Silverman, after overseeing several expensive flops in his two years at the network, departed.
Tell me if you don’t have to double back and reread this sentence twice or more in order to understand what it means.
I know I need to back it up with more proof, but I don’t keep my previous newspaper copies so I can’t list them out here.

And they are asking for $400+ to renew my subscription?

This is the first year that our back yard wisteria produced seed pods, and boy are they huge. This year was also an excellent flowering year for this wisteria too.

Just read an article today that Monster Cable, the over-priced a/v cable maker, has been a bully since 1980 in suing left and right on anything that uses the word ‘Monster’. Remember the movie Monsters Inc? Sued. Monster Garage TV show? Sued. The Boston Red Sox’s The Green Monster? Sued. Job site Monster.com? Sued. Less well-known entities didn’t escape this AAA a*-hole bully either: MonsterVintage LLC online cloting store? Sued. Monster Mini Golf indoor greens? Sued.

The last time I bought Monster Cable products was in 1999 when I didn’t know better. Now there is even more reasons that I would tell everyone I know to stay away from this bad-ass bully for eternity.