ten minutes to myself

the one about the dishes

Today, we loaded ourselves into our trusty Kia minivan and drove to the Minh Long porcelain factory/showroom/outlet in District 9. It was only about one hour away, but with Madeline in the car with us complaining about having to take a drive longer than her school commute of ten minutes, it kind of felt like four or five hours. Our mission at Minh Long was to cross another item off of our Stuff to Buy Before We Move List - new "everyday" dishes. It probably seems excessive to have porcelain for regular use, but here in Saigon, a porcelain soup bowl is about $1.50 while one from Corelle is $10. The math seems self-explanatory, right?

The actual purchasing of our new dishes doesn't make a very exciting story, but there were a couple of crazy things that happened. Chris took the kids to the cafe on-site for ice cream while I lurked around the showrooms free of tiny grabby hands. I joined them in time to see the kids each presented with large colourful sundaes. We amused ourselves for awhile with trying to guess the flavours - Sadie's had a purple scoop that I think was purple yam, and one that was definitely durian. Chris quit sneaking spoonfuls as soon as he realized that that the white scoop was durian and not vanilla or coconut, but we both were rather amused to see that Sadie thought that her "exotic" ice cream was just grand, regardless, and she kept working at it until it was entirely gone. Madeline barely touched her dish.

The other crazy thing was when we were in the parking lot, filling up the back of the minivan with the boxes of tableware. When we took Sadie over to the teapot-fountain to take a quick photo, the excited paparazzi swarmed our little girl, and I really couldn't get a good shot of her because of the crowd.  

Sadie wasn't really amused.

reveal

So, remember how I wrote about ordering hand-sewn quilts for my kids back in October? They were finished in time to be tucked under the tree for Christmas. This one is Madeline's (please excuse the quality of the actual photo - the lighting was lousy):

I love it. She loves it, which is probably more important. The dark turquoise of the applique looks fantastic with the white background, and I can't find any faults in the workmanship. 

I'm less pleased with Sadie's:

The pink fabric was supposed to be pink tie-dye, but sometimes those things are tricky to communicate, so I can mostly forgive that. The thing that really bothers me about Sadie's quilt is the proportions. It's really long, and the center applique is small and leaves lot of "blank" (or yellow) space. I don't really like the large section of plain fabric between the top of the center applique and the top of the quilt, and I don't like how the applique isn't centered in the middle of the bed (see: problem with the length). I think that this was actually my fault though - aren't twin beds normally longer in Asia than they are in Canada?  I'm kind of tempted to relegate this quilt to guest-bedroom duty and start over for Sadie. 

field trips: not always the best idea

Today, Madeline's class went on a field trip to the zoo here in Ho Chi Minh City to study animal habitats. Both Chris and I were wondering about what the outing was intended to achieve; we've been to the Saigon Zoo before and it's more of a lesson in "habitat don't" than "habitat do". This is the developing world, after all ... 

Still, when Madeline's teacher stopped me in the corrider to talk, I was internally freaking out that she'd unleased her belligerent streak again. Instead, he apologetically recounted all of the things that apparently deeply upset her on the excursion, like:

• the elephant was chained up
• the otters had no access to water
• she heard some classmates excitedly talk about how one of the snakes was being given a cute little bunny to eat*

I'm still unclear what the point of going to the Saigon Zoo was, but I do know that I'm pleased that the treatment of animals in captivity is something that matters to my kid. 

 

*I wasn't sure what Madeline thought that snakes ate. I asked her, and she figured that it was animals that were "less cute" than bunnies.

best of 2012*: things that made me happy

* Not an exhaustive list.

What I spent a lot of time doing in 2012, aside from healing broken parts of bones in my left leg, was reading. I read a lot. I actually read a lot of YA, and I'm not ashamed to say that I've enjoyed reading YA more than I have adult fiction. I live with adult problems, after all, so why do I need to read about them? 

The first book that I read in 2012 was Dash & Lily's Book of Dares (so charming and wonderful and NYC at Christmas!). This led me to Will Grayson, Will Grayson, which got the whole John Green snowball rolling. I read everything with his name on it (including some obscure/neglected Kindle singles), and it turns out that I love Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars as much as everyone else seems to (maybe a little bit more?). And then I went back to the other author of Will Grayson, Will Grayson and read Boy Meets Boy (deconstructed fairytale-ish) and Every Day (AU) by David Levithan. Both were fantastic and took awhile to leave my imagination. 

I can't write about my favourite books of 2012 without mentioning Code Name Verity (finally, a grown-up book!), which probably was the most gripping novel that I read. I loved that the protagonists were awesome and intelligent women who were devoted friends instead of written to compete with each other, I loved that one of the characters was a pilot, I loved that it was set during WWII, I loved the epistolary element, and I loved the complicated and clever way that the author unfolded the mystery. 

And honorable mention to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I haven't seen the film, but the book was perfectly complicated and engaging. I liked the mulitiple narrators. 

Non-fiction-wise, I adored Mickey Rapkin's Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory  (which is nothing like the movie) and Bill Bryson's Shakespeare. I honestly think that one might be my favourite thing that Bill Bryson has written; the author basically starts off by explaining how history has left little factual information about William Shakespeare, but he still manages to write a few hundred pages :)

 My tv discovery of the year is a show that I wish I'd actually discovered a couple of years ago: Community. I do not understand why this show isn't the highest-rated show on tv instead of being on the verge of cancellation. The way that this show plays with genre is amazing and the fact that a character like Abed Nadir exists just makes me happy. Six seasons and a movie, please.

I also watched a lot of back-seasons of Project Runway with Madeline, and now I want to go to Mood and have Tim Gunn pop into my life at opportune moments to offer advice. But doesn't everyone?

Pop Culture Happy Hour is still my favourite podcast, and this year, I think that Trey Graham became my favourite co-host because he's the guy who talks about things in the theatre world.  I also listened to Manic Mommies (relevant, I guess, because this started out as a parenting blog) and some good stuff put out by my beloved Canadian Broadcasting Company: Under the Influence (about advertising and media, and it's always really interesting) and The Vinyl Cafe.  

Two movies that I am totally smitten with that I think that rest of the world should be: Moonrise Kingdom (a gorgeous quirky Wes Anderson film) and the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (because Maggie Smith is flawless). 

I really enjoyed our summer holiday in the United States. I got to see a real space shuttle, after all! I also learned that selling fireworks must be lucrative, if all of the advertising on the interstate that we saw is any indication. 

All of the organic/free-range/way-better-than-in-Vietnam food that we ate on our Christmas vacation in the UK is making me happy. And wistful, now that we're home in Saigon and the four grocery places I've visiting in the last three days haven't had any broccoli. 

Pilates is one of the things that I started this year that I'm really happy with. That reformer is one versatile contraption. 

I took some awesome photographs this year. I didn't post them here, so you'll just have to trust me. 

We paid off the mortgage on the house in Calgary in October, nine years and two months after assuming it. We actually only lived in it for two years and a little bit. 

Lastly, I have to mention that my Air Cast is a pretty brilliant discovery of 2012. I would have loved to have had it when I broke a bone in my ankle back in February and it was totally worth the effort and expense of going to Bangkok to get it this past December when I fractured a metataral on the same foot. It's miles ahead of the casts I had put on at Family Medical here in Saigon in terms of mobility and muscle retension. Not to mention that I can clean the grime of Saigon off of it! 

 

 

 

 

nineteen more days ...

A couple of updates in regard to the doll bunkbeds my kids will find under the tree at Christmas:

1. I've finished the mattresses. I was all set to travel an hour across the city, hopefully find the quilt inserts to use as mattress padding at Lena Faustina, and then travel an hour back across the city, but instead I just bought three thin quilts at Metro for 60,000 VND each and cut those up. Easy peasy. I love Metro as least as much as I loathe it. 

2. The bunkbeds have two coats of paint on them! Chris picked up a couple of one-litre cans of Dulux-brand latex for me over the weekend, and it's been working out well. I was pretty adament about using latex even though I'm applying it on wood because of the easy clean-up. No primer - Chris managed to find some (pleasant surprise), but it was RED! Just no. The paint is covering a lot better than I feared it would without the primer undercoat. I'm pretty confident that three coats will be fine in the end, so that's just another two hours of painting that I'll probably schedule for Monday morning. 

3. Paint brushes in Vietnam leave a lot to be desired. Apparently, synthetic fibre ones don't exist. I was told that the one on the left is rabbit fur (grr - PETA isn't going to like shopping for painting equipment in Vietnam) and I'm not sure what the one on the right is made from but my guess is straw. These paint brushes makes me feel nostalgic about the time I painted window casings on our house in Calgary, which is something I never thought I'd feel. 

 

Quotable Madeline: Art Criticism Edition

Madeline points to a thumbnail-sized image of Dali's Persistence of Memory in one of her reference books and says, "Mom, this is my favourite kind of art - droopy pictures of everyday things!"

five rows too far

So, even though I live in the Land of Hot, I've been pretty good about not letting my knitting skills fall by the wayside by knitting something each year. I've made baby hats aplenty that I've sent off to friends, a cute shrug for Sadie, mittens for my bigger kid, but 2012 was the year that I was going to knit something for myself! 

I was only five rows away from being finished the Ruffle My Feathers scarf when tragedy struck. I'd just finished counting the stitches between the repeats, and then I went to gently shift all of the stitches on my circular needles over to the left, and this happened:

 

But that is actually not supposed to happen! The cable is NOT supposed to come out of the needle tips! I swear I wasn't being violent with my knitting needles; I treat them with a lot of care because I can't really replace any of my Knitpicks gear here in Vietnam! 

Anyway, the result was 30+ live stitches , and though I tried to pick them all up, I saw that I was in a losing battle and conceded. I'm not experienced enough to be able to fix up the lacework. I'm so bummed out, though, because I was only five rows away from being completely finished with this scarf!

It would have been pretty, huh?

 

the life counterfeit: now with doughnuts

It's probably not surprising to anyone that there are a lot of fake things in Asia. The fake Apple stores in China got a lot of headline attention in the summer of 2011, so that's a good example (and there was also a fake Ikea, which I would have been more interested in). I've never seen a fake Apple store in either Bangkok or here in Saigon, but that's not to say that my life has been devoid of fake items. We've watched our share of fake DVDs during our nearly five-and-a-half years in Asia, bought Sadie fake Adidas when she needed new sneakers, and I'm currently very enamoured with the fake Cartier tank watch that my husband brought me back from his trip to Beijing. 

So, perhaps it's not very unexpected this week found me schilling these fakes things for the Canadian booth at the international food fair at Madeline's school. 

They're Timbits, but not real ones because they're homemade instead of being purchased at a Tim Horton's.  I've never made doughnuts before, and tested out two different recipes for these. The first was a cake doughnut recipe that I think I found over at Dinner with Julie, but I had trouble getting the size of the doughnut holes under control and the final product was a little too crumbly to be eaten in a school gymnasium. I ended up going with a yeast doughnut, and found this tutorial at Crepes of Wrath really helpful. The actual recipe is Alton Brown's.

The fun part of this exercise was that my Canadian neighbour's mother's neighbour actually owns a bunch of Tim Horton's franchises back in Canada, and donated a bunch of Timbit boxes and other swag to decorate our booth (there's no denying that it's still "bake-sale" chic, though). 

 

hey!

Where did my last two posts disappear to?

sometimes the story is better ...

So, it was my husband's birthday yesterday, and I've been in a Saigon's-a-cool-place-to-be mindset, so I thought that the gifts that I'd found locally here were thoughtful and kind of awesome. Exhibit A: A print of the part of HCMC that his office is in from a funky gallery (Tara & Kys) he likes:

Exhibit B (not pictured) would be a lacquer tea box (similar to this), because Chris likes tea and has a variety of different varieties sitting out on our kitchen countertop. 

I am a little sad to report that neither of those lovely gifts excited him nearly as much as this did:

This is exactly what it looks like: a slice of a tree trunk with the bark removed. It's also a cutting board that is roughly sixteen inches across and three inches high, and it weighs so much that dropping it on one's foot might actually break bones. 

Chris bought it from the guy who drives around on his motorbike selling wooden cutting boards on the street. I guess that he was admiring a pair of the cutting boards, each from a different kind of tree, before finally selecting the one above (Exhibit C?) for the actual purchase. Apparently, he chose wisely, as he was later informed that he picked the one that he "can chop up a snake on and not get poisoned from the wood."  Which leaves me wondering why cutting boards are even made from toxic trees? Or was the snake the important thing to focus on in Chris's warning? Could we have chopped up a chicken on the other cutting board and been totally fine? 

This is just something that I didn't have to think about when I lived in Calgary. I'd just go to Ikea and buy a cutting board in the prettiest colour. Easy peasy, and no one gets sick and no snakes are harmed.