Naked Baby

Tomorrow school starts again.  Another year of 1 day weekends, homework and projects, late night meetings and presentations.  I can’t wait to see all of my classmates again but I dread the deadlines and having to keep up with so many smart people.

I asked an ex Harvard Business School (HBS) guy how it felt since he left HBS.  He said he never stopped missing those years so I am trying to enjoy it as much as I can. Of course it’s hard to study or get ready for school when a naked baby randomly crawls into the room so once the semester starts I’ll have to lock myself in the office again.

Getting old, it’s interesting how you manage to convince yourself that you still haven’t aged. I keep forgetting that I am also aging, I kept telling everyone I was 32 until someone else reminded me my b-day was 6 months ago and I am officially 33. A nice symmetrical age.

Talking to one friend he was concerned that he was getting old since he realized for the first time ever girls half his age are legal in the US, I pointed out that they have been legal in Holland for years and that seemed to cheer him up a bit.

Another friend laughed at that, saying in 91 he bought his first house.  That was the year I started high school in the US and seems particularly ancient by now. There was no internet, email was just a wacky thing people with no life used.  BBS, Gopher, finger, telnet, usenet, irs, all those things didn’t really take off till 94-95 and of course most people don’t even know what I am talking about now.

It’s all relative till you die, for Kian 91 is something only heard about from the parents hippie time, for me and my friend it’s the start of adolescent.  For the girl turning 18 it’s just when her parents got frisky.  For other “old” people like me take a look at the top music of 1991, it totally beats what the kids are listening to these days.

So it might not be fair to post twice within minutes of each post, I could have easily put both posts together but I am after all trying to keep my mark of blogging once a day this week so even though I am cheating a bit by posting twice one day I keep the count going.

So keeping on the food theme I cooked chilean sea bass and stir fried udon, snow peas and broccoli. The sea bass I simply dusted with cumin, salt and pepper.  It then cooked for a few minutes on a hot cast iron pan before going to a 500 degree oven for 7 minutes.  The noodles were cooked with 1/3 cup of oyster sauce, 2 t spoon hoisen sauce, 1 t spoon grated ginger, 3 cloves finely chopped garlic, 1 t spoon sesame  oil, 2 t spoon chile past and salt & pepper. Since the udon noodles were pre-cooked I just warmed them up in the same water I had cooked the broccli in.  All the ingredients then went into the wok for a quick 3 min stir. Amazing flavors, the fish went great with the noodles.  I didn’t miss the sauce that came from this recipe .  But you can give it a shot if you want a more complex flavor.

Amazingly it took 2 days before I missed a posting, work as suspected is busy even when it doesn’t seem busy. The rhythm of life (sounds like the Jungle Book) takes on even more time.  But I digress, as promised here is the rib recipe.

The ribs came out absolutely delicious, it’s only fair to say that I found the recipe over here, you can see pictures there.  To be fair I gave everyone half a rck not 1-2 pieces as she did.  I plan on doing half a rack again for Kian’s b-day but I don’t think our oven will be big enough I might have to work in batches.

You sit and watch it flow past you, events, places, people,… after a while it all starts to blend together.  One waterfall looks the same as the other, one white sand beach as soft and inviting as the other.  And then once in a while something hits you that reminds you what you are enjoying, it anchors you back in the now and you have to give thanks to whatever higher power made you lucky enough to witness a fractured piece of heaven.

surfer

Down an unmarked road, our first night in Big Sur, I took the less traveled path simply to make a u-turn.  One turn turned into another and before I knew it we were at the beach at sunset with one determined surfing women.  In the freezing water with the light failing she went back into the waves determined to catch one last wave before calling it quits, then turning back yet again… the chilly salt tinged wind, the twilight turning the surf into a small moment of perfection.

It’s these perfect moments that make everything else worth it.  These small moments of perfection need to be captured, remembered and enjoyed.  As the years go by you get more and more busy the moment start to fade into beige you have to remember to stop and fight the beige once in a while.

I wanted to take a picture of my office with the papers spread around the desk, the papers are cases and models for the International Marketing class I finished two weeks ago.  But then I got lazy.  It was an awesome class, my favorite part was answering the following two questions correctly.
1. A car company launches a new campaign where they emphasize how their cars are small but roomy, powerful yet fuel efficient, stylish yet sensible,… which country manager absolutely refused to run the campaign in their country and why ?
2. A multinational company sets new standards for the use of their logo and proper usage of theme colors, France refuses to abide by the rules and modifies the logo and colors, why ?

The answers are the bottom of the post. As you can imagine the past two years have been a blur. Kian, school, marriage, and general life adventures have taken a ton of time and I’ve lost touch with some good friends in addition to letting the blog die. It’s interesting to see facebook taking so much of my time these days with twitter dropping off. FB is completely addicting but there is nothing important on it, people you know are always saying semi-interesting things and it requires very little time yet you go back to it again and again. It’s a less funny version of www.textsfromlastnight.com.

I am going to try a small experiment where I post once a day for a week, not sure if I can even keep it up for two days never mind a week but it’s good to setup lofty goals. Maybe as an addition I could plan on seeing two movies this year. A side effect of being busy all the the time is the lack of reading. Don’t get me wrong I read a lot for school work and projects but I don’t have any time to read books just for enjoyment. This past two weeks gave me a bit of extra time (2 whole weeks) between summer school and the start of a new semester. So I bought a few books.

First was A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami who takes after Henry Miller in his style of writing.  How could you not like a book about tracking down a sheep ?  The book also made me want to pick up smoking with the main character putting away pack after pack in every chapter.

Then came Whatever You Do, Don’t Run a book that might as well be a series of blog posts, interesting but having no plot.  It’s a fun book to read before you go to bed.

hmm I am out of touch with blogging, I had a good entry in mind but it kept sliding and I didn’t want the weekend to end without me posting something.  Hopefully I’ll get better as the week goes on.

1.  Germany, because Germans are too sensible to ever put up with claims of performance and gas mileage efficiency, they also realize how physics works, you can’t have a roomy inside when the car itself is tiny.

2.  France gets to do whatever they want since they blow away all the other countries in terms of sales.  When you are the top sales guy you can get away with almost anything, short of telling the CEO you’d like to nail his wife at the Christmas party.

Tomorrow BBQ rib recipe and adventures in diaper changing.