The Mighty Quynh

Once in a blue moon or two I’ll search for a new recipe on the web. I hate the jerks who give a recipe 5 stars and say something like, “This recipe was great! I just made a few tweaks by using half the salt, three cloves of garlic instead of one, and substituted chicken broth for the white wine. I also left out the parsley. It turned out spectacular!” Uh, pretty sure if you had to alter half the items in the recipe, it’s not a 5-star recipe.

Yelp. Useless. I have more luck picking restaurants at random. Also (here we go again), I don’t trust any review of a Vietnamese restaurant unless it’s from someone who has grown up eating it. Sorry, it’s a bias I had to learn. It’s just so horrible in NYC. I don’t understand how Viet food got to be trendy here. Oh, right, for the same reason I don’t bother with Yelp anymore…

On a review of an Asian convenience food item which I won’t bother to link: “I enjoy eating Asian-inspired cuisine so much that I have my very own pair of chopsticks…” Wow. Hardcore, dude. Come back when you have rice cooker.

Hammy suffered a stroke a few weeks back. Last Friday I said farewell to her for the last time before Rich took her to the vet. She’s running in the great hamster ball in the sky now. Here are a few pics of her I had been saving up for a rainy day.

Hammy?

Hammy!

Sophie and Hammy

It’s stupid.

I’ve walked along the High Line park twice now, and I’ve realized I really don’t like how it smells. It has this weird oppressive sauteed butter-ish smell to me. I guess some people smell it very differently because I heard one guy say it smelled “like a bowl of Vietnamese pho, with all those herbs.” Having grown up eating pho with a ton of herbs, I couldn’t disagree more, but hey, this is New York, where real Vietnamese food does not exist. I can’t blame the guy for not knowing any better. :p

But seriously, looks like the smell is from the Prairie Dropseed that’s in abundance all over the High Line and blooms in late summer. “It’s been described as smelling like coriander, a combination of honey and cilantro leaves, or popcorn.” I guess that explains my buttery scent and that other guy’s pho (cilantro) scent. Strange how people find such different scents in the same plant.

I like the smell of cilantro as well as popcorn, but I don’t get either of those in this plant (at least when it’s combined with all the other plants on the High Line) and I find it decidedly unpleasant.

I’ll remember to avoid the High Line around this time next year. Yet another reason why I’m cheering on Autumn.

As in marksmanship, not liquor.

I think guns are scary (only been to a range twice) and I’ve never been a fan of History channel (more like WWII military channel) but I’m pretty hooked on Top Shot. I know drama makes for good television, but I really like that the competitors are relatively drama-free and that the competition is the main focus of the show. The challenges are pretty fun to watch. Plus the show actually teaches you about a large variety of weapons.

I’m a little disappointed the two ladies were the first to go this season, but it doesn’t surprise me. Not because women can’t shoot, but because women don’t get to be Navy SEALs or sharpshooters or whatever (AFAIK). There aren’t many of us who get the kinds of jobs that require constant physical training and practice with a myriad of different weapons every week, so of course the talent pool is going to be much smaller and not as evenly matched. We just don’t have those opportunities.

Anyway, Top Shot airs new episodes Tuesdays 10/9c.

My dad is doing the 3.5 mile walk tomorrow in NYC. Donate at his page HERE! The money goes to help support programs that combat hunger and improve livelihoods.

I should have posted this sooner.

Rich and I decided to go to EGG one of the nights we were in London. It didn’t look far on the map so we took a bus to the King’s Cross St Pancras station and figured we could walk the rest of the way. Once we were on our way, some guy sitting in a van on the other side of the street hollered, “Yougoin’totheEggclub?”

Rich didn’t understand what the heck he said and I hesitated to answer because who the hell is this dude yelling at us out of a dark van and why does he care where we’re going? By the time I decided to shout back “Yes!” he had already rolled up his window, so we just shrugged and carried on.

We walked just under a mile to the stupid place, which took probably 15-20 minutes but felt like forever because we were alone on a deserted road and I was wearing heels. We’re used to Manhattan where pretty much anywhere you go you’re surrounded by buildings and there are people out and about at all hours and stores are open. We really weren’t expecting it to be so desolate in a major city. It was just bizarre to us and since we didn’t know how much farther we had to go it was a little nerve-wracking.

Anyway, when we got there we picked up some flyers or something and then I saw that there is a free shuttle from King’s Cross to EGG. Which must have been what that guy was yelling at us about. COME ON!

At least we got to see a fox.

I’m not going to talk about the DJs because who cares, but here’s some general impressions of the festival itself as compared to previous years:

- Incredibly crowded. Shit’s getting mainstream.
- The dust problem was 100% better. Made did good there.
- Entrance security was a complete joke. Inside the Zoo was stricter though. We saw a couple folks get busted, have their wristbands cut, and get thrown out. Security guy to smoker: “My job is to catch you. Your job is to not get caught.” Another guy upended a girl’s beer because she didn’t have a 21+ wristband on.
- I didn’t care for the tent layout. Being all in a row and too close together made you hear too many things at once if you weren’t right up to the tent. However, I realize the larger tent sizes probably made the old Grove Discotheque (2009)/Sunday School (2010) location too small to use and limited the arrangement of the tents.
- The Garden of EZ was nice, but I liked seeing graffiti artists transform the buses before my eyes last year and the Sonic Forest from 2009 was cool because it was interactive. I was hoping for more stuff like that this year, but it seems like the art really took a backseat.

I also only took about 5 photos this year, as opposed to like 200+ last year. I figured there were tens of thousands of other people per day taking cooler, better pictures and videos, and there would probably be a lot more media coverage, so why bother. I also could’ve easily gotten pics with some DJs, but I hate getting my picture taken and I’m not a fangirl. I don’t do the pics with DJs thing. (Rich has several bad pics of me staring into space as Marcus Schulz stands next to me talking to someone. Heh.)

Rich and I were a lot lazier about trying to see this and that DJ because we’ve already seen all the ones we care about enough times. We sat outside the tents and chilled out with drinks most of the time. We’re old and jaded.