Kitchen Fun!

When it comes to food, I am often lazy. I like cooking but the effort often drains me, so I don’t usually cook. That said, when I do cook, it’s often on a binge, and I normally cook pasta, and other high carb dishes. Today’s was no exception. I made Onigiri (Japanese rice balls), with the filling being buttered mushrooms. However that didn’t quite work so I ended up making some with fillings, most without. The leftover fillings I mixed with the rice that fell out as I was making the rice balls. All in all, not bad. I learnt that you should always cook the filling before the rice, as the latter doesn’t take too long to cook.

Ingredients:

1 and half cup of rice
4 button mushrooms, diced
Knob of butter
Salt water
Clean hands

Thinly slice and dice the mushrooms into tiny little pieces. Heat up skillet, melt butter and then fry the mushrooms till brown. The oil might jump, so take precautions not to get burned. When brown, take off fire and set aside.

Wash rice once and then pour in enough water to cover it up to about the first line on your forefinger from the rice’s surface. Put on stove and cook, keeping an eye on it. This can take anywhere from 3 minutes to eight, depending on how strong your fire is. As soon as the water has evaporated mostly, take it off the stove and set it to cool somewhere. The rice should still be a bit sticky but cooked. (This is the absorption method).

As rice is cooling (about 5-8 minutes) prepare a small bowl of water with salt in it. If you’re afraid of the heat like me, wash your hands with warm water, or water as hot as you can make it without scalding. When your hands are warm, you can begin! *Remember to set a plate for you to put the rice balls.

If you can take it, first mix the rice in the pot to loosen it. Then scoop some rice up directly from the pot and mould the rice into a ball. When it’s moulded as you like, put the ball in the plate and continue.

To add the filling, this is what I did: I took a small amount of rice, put it in my hand, put the filling on it, then another layer of rice on top. Then I moulded it again.

Once you’re done, if you’re impatient like me, throw the rice into the freezer for a maximum of 10 minutes to set. Otherwise, you can either eat it straight or leave it in the fridge to set or take to work next time.

Yosh! Eating time!

You’re Under Arrest! Dreams!

Sleeping in the afternoon can do weird things to you.

So, as is my custom on the weekends, I napped. And generally if I dream and remember it, it means that something’s messing in my life and I’ve got some issues/pressure in my life.

That, and also means that I’ve overdosed on a certain fandom, so the issues I have come out in said fandom. Though sometimes I wonder at the hilarity of it, since this time’s dream came out in a mix of TWO fandoms with no resolved issues.

As usual, it started in a dystopian world, and basically revolved in the concept that we were here to do things again. Here’s the funny thing; the person in charge knew that the families where the people would be born into. He also knew when, but he didn’t act until most of them were around the same age they were when they did whatever it is they did all those years ago, even though the thing that they had to was NOT done to this emperor (yes I know it’s confusing, and I’m writing this as I just woke up, couldn’t you tell? 😛

Right after this is where it gets weird. Natsumi and Miyuki Tsujimoto from You’re Under Arrest (a really old fandom) of mine showed up. The first thing we did was to hide ourselves; keeping quiet and using the hidden boards leading to rooms in the old-type apartment really helped. The people who was searching for us couldn’t find us.

I’m saying us because as weird as it sounds, this is one of the few times that I had a complete participation in this movie/dream, from start to finish. I was there when it began, and I woke up in a weird mood. Also, I was in this dream with no awareness of who I was.

The search in the house began as night fell and ended a few hours before dawn. I think the length of time it was taking to look for us was also a factor; they were looking for people who wouldn’t be able to stay hidden for more than a few hours, but we hid from dusk till dawn, though some of us managed to move around so we could prepare for leaving the place.

I know some of the characters that came to our aid, but I cannot for the life of me remember who they are. They are from fandom though. From people whom I believed I would be able to trust even if I had met them in real life.

Towards the end of the night, someone said that they would begin preparing the way out of this house. I asked, “So, who’s going in who’s car?”

The man grinned at me and said, “Oh, we’re taking bikes this time around.” Then he went ahead to prepare.

After not hearing from him and fearing the worst, I went to look for him, along with someone else (dark skinned guy, I don’t know why I remembered him either). We found ourselves heading up, and we had to choose 3 doors I think, each on the same floor but the staircase to reach them was different. There were people heading to one door, the same door I was in front of, so I turned and used the other door, while the dark guy waited for me at teh bottom of the stairs (he didn’t know either).

There was a door that led outside, but from it we could see some Mat Rempits waiting for a friend. Before we could begin looking for that man, the mat rempit (a large Harley Davidson guy type, actually) came into the office building looking for trouble. I don’t know how, but we managed to deal with the guy without violence or noise. The noise bit was important.

When we found the bikes, they were already being sent downstairs, and this was how it got tricky, I was on the platform of the room opposite where the guy who was helping us (Reminds me now of someone from the manga Dear Boys) had lowered the bikes. Now, as he did, I was aware that someone was coming up the stairs and that someone was NOT friendly. So I made some motions to tell him to hide and he was staying in the darkness of the room, giving me a thumb’s up (the angle meant that someone would have to be on the same level as I am to see him as he was not near the door at all).

Somehow we got through that, and we then began running (seems to be a theme of a lot of my dreams). The way we slipped out was a little funny; the people who manned the front of the station created this “mobile police station in a housing apartment front” and were advertising in bright lights and yellow background. I also feel a need to mention that they did this as the ops on us was moving away.

THEN we left, with the mobile station moving with us (they were running with us). THe cover was that they were doing a roadshow or moving from place to place to offer security. One truck, many bikes. The two little girls had their own bikes.

Then we left. This time though, we had a destination.

Either Kaito or Cadoi City (the latter is a brand from the DS game the world ends with you). We had to get there to meet up with someone who would send us all back or something like that. From what I knew of the city, it was one of those bright, neon-light, never sleeps kind of city.

So we got off, and thankfully, the kids managed to keep up with us. The people whom I travelled with were:

Natsumi Tsujimoto (wanting to keep speeding all the way)
Miyuki Kobayakawa (in a pair with Ken Nakajima)
Ken Nakajima
Aoi Futaba and unnamed partner
Juanita Norin (my goddaughter in the stories I wrote)
Someone who looks suspiciously like Iris from Sakura Taisen, but something in my mind registered her as both Iris and not-Iris.

As we travelled, we somehow got this one, flashy guy to follow us. I can’t remember how, but I knew he was a cop who was usign his wealth to tune up the car and that we had to play nice to him so he wouldn’t call the rest of his buddies. As we reached an inn and stopped for food and refuelling, he asked us why we weren’t stopping and then said that Kaito/Cadoi was at least 2 days on a bike. We didn’t question him, but checked in. There was an unspoken agreement that we would leave in the dead of the night (I never actually saw day in this dream) to continue our journey, but when one of us went to check on the bikes, we discovered that the old innskeeper had this special alarm installed that would sound the moment we tried to take our bikes away.

Most of the cast had konked out by now, so we left them sleeping.

This gets fuzzier as I can’t really remember; around 7 something, we went to have breakfast and in the midst of waking everyone up, he told us that he knew who we were and what we were doing. Then he said it would be best if he followed us, implying that if he didn’t, we’d have the police on our hands fast. BAsically blackmailing la.

Juanita told me this and hung on to me when I woke her up, and so did the man himself when I went to wake the people in his room (guys mainly).

Then I woke up.

Now nursing headache. x_x

Memeime!

Stolen this from LJ, I’ll cut it in a bit.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

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Missing Thunderbird emails after reinstallation

Somehow, when reinstalling Firefox 3 after a weird error this morning, the colleague in charge of Tech Support for our dept managed to make my Thunderbird email folder disappear.

Here’s the symptoms:

My inbox no longer recognised my current profile, prompting it to request for a new account. The inbox is empty and it looked like a default config. HOWEVER, my old profile was still around, and looking at the mail inbox size of 1 gig, I knew that my emails were there.

Note that this works only if you have one profile name:
a. Make sure Thunderbird is closed.

1. Click on Start > Run > %APPDATA% or open My Computer > C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR USERNAME HERE > Application Data > Thunderbird

2. Open Profiles. The folder you want to keep an eye out is named [gibberish].default . Take note of the name (mine was ic5ghksomethingsomething.default)

3. Go back to the main Thunderbird in your Application Data Folder and double click on the profiles.ini file (note: it’s best to copy the file to desktop before you do anything to the file in your Application data folder)

4. When profiles.ini opens, change:
Path=Profiles/
to
Path=Profiles/ic5ghksomethingsomething.default

5. Pray

6. Restart Thunderbird

7. Profit??

I hope this works for you! It was a mix and match of various sources on the Net.

Dreamers of Despair

She stood at the edge of the cliff, watching the scene before her. Far away, towards the horizons, her siblings were in a tiny ship, sailing towards her. They were coming home after several months at sea. She could see them coming towards her, see the white sails on their ship approaching her. With a sigh, she raised her hands, and the wind rose at her command. The winds moved towards the sea from the large plains behind her, bringing the hot air of the land to meet the cool of the sea.

The immediate result was a typhoon that appeared out of nowhere that slammed into the ship, upending it. She could hear their screams as the ship capsized, along with the screams of a hundred wives and children as their men’s ships descended into the darkness. Their screams would follow her till the end of her days, which mercifully, would not last long.

Before she ended it though, she needed to be sure. With a sigh, she closed her eyes and sent her soul out of her body, towards the harbour where the women were wailing. There, she sought a face, a young boy with clear brown eyes and a high forehead, with an elegant nose and royal bearing. She found him where she knew he would be; at the balcony of a house overlooking the harbour, waiting for his father anxiously. He was biting his lip, seeing his father’s ship go down yet refusing to cry out like the others had.

“Good boy,” she whispered, knowing that her voice would be lost in the wind.

Yet, he turned to look at her, his eyes wide and penetrating. The soul looked back at the young man gravely, but it became apparent to her very quickly that he wasn’t looking THROUGH her, but AT her. His voice resonated through her mind, a young boy’s voice but already heavy with the passing of years.

“Do not think Death will put you out of my hands, Mignon, nor my father’s Hand to stay my anger. This has not ended,” his voice was as cold as she remembered, sending shivers down her back.

Turning, she sought to head out to the sea, to complete her work, but instead found herself being pulled back to her body at high speed. As she landed dizzily, she realised that small hands were pushing her towards the cliff, forcing a stiff human body forward past the edge. She could not regain control of her body fast enough; the only thing that registered was that she had stepped off the cliff. Looking upwards as she flailed, she saw the one who had pushed her down; brilliant green eyes looked at her emotionlessly as deep red hair whipped across the face of the child that had pushed her.

“Annwn…” was the only thought she had as she hit the sea.,