SS and I are going to a potluck party tonight, and in honour of the occasion, I have just made these pumpkin chocolate cookie muffins (I don't have baking paper or a proper baking sheet), from a recipe from La Fuji Mama's lovely blog.
They worked out okay, although I didn't have cinnamon, which would have made them a lot better. Hmmm...the problem of not enjoying my own cooking continues, but this month I am (almost) committing myself to cooking something (from scratch) every day in order to raise my confidence. It can be part of the whole NaNoWriMo / Blo-Re-Mo challenge - a kind of Blo-Co-Mo. We'll see how long this lasts!!
Some photos (I also have to learn how to take good photos - ahh - so much to do!!). I used cheap 'n' nasty Meiji chocolate (but it was "bitter" so not to fat tasting) because I couldn't find any chocolate chips at our local store.
I cooked up the pumpkin while I prepared the rest of the ingredients.
You can see the ugly patchwork I made.
The second batch - I put chocolate chips on the top of each one.
* My last batch I made as cookies and they tasted MUCH BETTER than the muffins (of which I made about 30!) - ah well!!
I haven't enjoyed TV much recently - I am sick of seeing semi-crap movies on Sky and Japanese TV is okay for about 20 minutes but not much more. I think I find most TV boring (even at home in NZ) unless I have something to do at the same time, e.g. mark students' work or sew or something.
So, when I asked my sister, Martha (sometimes known as Wanda) what she watches and how, she gave me three great programmes to try and suggested I download them or watch them on YouTube.
I always follow my sister's excellent advice and it just so happened that the day I decided to start watching Project Runway, season 5, I also bought a very cheesy patchwork kit (Halloween theme) to help while away the hours. 48 hours later and I had watched all 14 episodes and completed sewing that would normally take a few weeks.
My eyes were sore and my fingers much more nimble...and I felt truly satisfied, both entertainment and craft-wise.
I have wanted to go to Ghibli Museum since my friend Susan told me about it last year. It is a museum run by Studio Ghibli, which has produced Hayao Miyazaki's masterpieces, including "Tonari no Totoro", "Howl's Moving Castle", "Sen to Chihiro no monogatarai", "Mononokehime" and more recently "Ponyo".
To be honest, I have only seen "Tonari no Totoro" but I really enjoyed it and will eventually see the others I am sure.
The museum is located in Mitaka on the Chuo line. Tickets can be bought at Lawson stores and apparently sell out very fast. We hope to buy some today, but might not be able get ones for this week (my ideal plan). We may even have to wait until January. We'll see.
Well, it is 3:30am in the morning and I am officially starting NaNoWriMo! NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, where you challenge yourself to write a (shortish) novel of 50, 000 words over the space of 30 days. This year, I am going to cheat a little.
I also cheated last year. My friend Kelly, a cool chick from the U.S. who is an amazing singer at karaoke (and introduced me to lots of angry girl rock) and beautiful and talented in many ways (the art of conversation, art, using American English), invited me to join and I jumped on the bandwagon without much thought. Another friend, Susan, a cool chick from New Zealand who is an amazing, hilarious conversationalist and gets on with EVERYONE, also joined and November 1st we all set off on our novels. Kelly wrote a fantasy-thriller set in Tokyo and Susan chose to write about a person who traveled through time and ended up in a different country each time jump. They followed the NaNoWriMo rules to the tee and ended up with fully fictional, complete novels by the end. My concept was a little different. I decided to do a sliding doors type expose on my own life. I would look at every memory / event I ever experienced and see how it could have been different. Yes, you're right, that doesn't sound like a plot, it sounds like going through therapy - and basically that is what I did. I ended up with 50,000 words of the most honest drivel I could possibly come up with and have not been able to look at since I finished it on November 30, 2007 and submitted it to the NaNoWriMo to achieve my false "winning status" as a novel writer.
This year, I thought, would be different. I even came up with some plot ideas that on the surface did not look like they could possibly be related to "brainwork, cerebration, cogitation, contemplation, deliberation, excogitation, meditation, rumination, speculation" of oneself (thanks, www.thesaurus.com - you will be duly linked to this blog in appreciation).
The sum of my plot ideas:
1. Someone finds out (not sure how - possibly told by a fortune teller) when they are going to die - how does this affect their life and actions and dealings with other people?
2. (Somehow manage to work in the latest obsession with craft that seems to be sweeping the world - this idea came to me at 3am in the morning, so not the best)
3. Friends go to a fortune teller - one gets told they will die when they are 40, the other when they are 90
4. Could be people on the JET programme in Japan...they go to a Japanese "uranai" (fortune teller)...
5. Write the novel via a series of blogs....
6. Each blog has a different theme on something I am interested in....
7. Make sure I write 50,000 words on my various blogs to combine, and submit to NaNoWriMo, thus achieving false novel status for the second time via an obviously self-absorbed route.
VOILA! Here I am.
I have decided to re-name the month to either "Revelation Month" or "Reflection Month", either of which can be reduced to "Re-Mo" (I like it because it has "emo" in it - a popular buzz-word of recent years relating to...heck...I thought it related to being overly emotional, but all I can find is this info on Wikipedia:
Emo (pronounced /ˈiːmoʊ/) is a genre of music that originated from hardcore punk[1] and later adopted pop-punk influences when it became mainstream in the US.
It has since come to describe several variations of music with common roots and associated fashion and stereotypes.
In the mid-1990s, the term emo began to refer to the indie scene that followed the influences of Fugazi, which itself was an offshoot of the first wave of emo. Bands including Sunny Day Real Estate and Texas Is the Reason had a more indie rock style of emo, more melodic and less chaotic. The so-called "indie emo" scene survived until the late 1990s, when many of the bands either disbanded or shifted to mainstream styles. As the remaining indie emo bands entered the mainstream, newer bands began to emulate the mainstream style.
(Me again): So, I guess I got it wrong and...NO WAIT! Google might be better than Wikipedia in this case and I found this video from searching for "what is emo"..which describes it thus: "Emo is short for emotive or emotional and describes an emerging social trend".
So, ANYWAY (and yes, I did cheat at NaNoWriMo last year by copying and pasting liberally from: Wikipedia, my own emails, my journal, just to get the word count up each day).
The reason I am a bit obsessed about the reflectiveness of my "novel" (aka a series of blogs about whatever I am interested in that hopefully have some kind of "self-improvement" flavour to them) is that in the NaNoWriMo bible "No plot? No problem!" written by its founder Chris Baty, it specifically says that this is NOT AN OPPORTUNITY for self-reflection or self-improvement. Fair enough too, because who wants to read about that?
Ah ha, but I am not writing my "blog novel" for anyone else but me : )
Possible Blog topics:
1. Using a blog 2. Teaching 3. Re-discovering cooking 4. Crafts 5. Blogs I like
To make it all sound a bit fancier, I will add Blog to Re-Mo...thus becoming "Blo-Re-Mo"...and here ends the first chapter at just over 1000 words.
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