Ella is here
31/01/2006
How was your New Year
I managed to get away pretty easily on Sunday – fewer relatives mean fewer bothersome questions. The ones that pressed, received an answer that they don’t have to give me any more ang pows, but if they offer it, like now, I’m not shy to take it.
The others who asked straight up questions received straight up answers.
I met cousins I haven’t seen in ages, and some look the same, some doubled in height, some doubled in size. Some are exactly the same, and some I say the same thing to every year – Happy New Year, and Bye, see you again. Nothing in between.
Most were preoccupied with my due-anytime sister-in-law, who felt brave enough to go down to the Regent Hotel and get the jelly carp for dessert. On her own.
And I had a busy day stuffing prawns with garlic (which i detest doing, but love eating) at my brother’s because we had our Chinese New Year dinner at his place. KF was trying to keep awake, since he slept at five the night before and I woke him up at nine-thirty.
But back to the prawns. My brother has this neat prawn recipe. He gets big unshelled tiger prawns, slits them down the back and up the head – at this point, I usually remove the vein – and then he stuffs the prawn in the slit with a mixture of chopped garlic, a little salt, olive oil or margerine and kaffir line peel. We stack them stuffing side up and stick them in the oven to grill for about 10 minutes on high, and another 10 or 15 on medium.
Sometimes he gets live prawns, which freak the hell out of me because when he thinks he’s chilled them to death, one or two will jump out at me when I try to pick them up to get them cleaned and slit.
Anyway.
I spent yesterday just chilling. We went out for lunch, but Crystal Jade was closed and I had to make do with weird Thai/Vietnamese.
We wandered around town a bit, went home and started a dvd marathon. I love Hong Kong triad movies. They’re so complicated and cool. Especially the Johnnie To ones. SPL was a little violent. But anything with Donnie Yen in it is good. And the Donnie Yen/Sumo Hung bits – brilliant.
We also watched Election. This time it’s Simon Yam who does the work, and Tony Leung Ka Fai who does the shouting. No fancy fight sequences. Just plain old triad style whacking. Quite cool. I liked that.
And simply because I said I like the other Tony Leung better, we caught The Longest Night, which was surprisingly good. Set in Macau this time, it features a psychotic Lau Ching Wan and the same fatman that appears in those Johnnie To Gangster films.
Then we watched Sideways. This one – I was a tad disappointed with, mostly because I had hyped it up in my mind for a while. Not my thing.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was funny, but I think I’ll be content with the book. I really wanted to catch it for Martin Freeman, who’s Tim in the original The Office, and who incidentally, shares my birthday. He’s gotta be a genius with those credentials, really.
I slept at around 4am.
And got up with a start at 12.30pm when my brother called. He wanted me to go and get him a replacement pot for his coffee purculator. Apparently it’s broken. So I’ll go do that in a bit. He also said, Ella is here.
I rambled something and hung up and I was in bed before I realised he meant that my sister in law had delivered the baby.
So there’s one more baby in the household to contend with, Eleanor. Let me go and grab his coffee pot and try to catch a peek at her in the hospital. Later.
