was looking through some old photos and this from the Bali Salsa Festival 2010 made me giggle out loud – it was a nightclub called….
Vi Ai Pi – which is VIP phonetically! AWESOMENESS! It was so good that I had to quickly snap this shot whilst on the back of JC’s motorbike, risking life and limb to bring you today’s episode of Engrish.
So Zee and I decided sometime earlier this year that perhaps it was time to do a performance again (our last one was in 2007!). It’s a little bit hard though – Zee lives in Singapore and me in sunny Melbourne, which makes rehearsing commute a tiny bit difficult.
So he decided to fly up here for a week. And then I tore my ankle ligament the week before he arrived! Yayy!
So with a total of just 16 hours choreography and rehearsal time, Zee and I met up in Bangalore for the 5th International India Salsa Congress a couple of weekends ago and performed it! We were pretty nervous – what with my ankle not being entirely stable and not having had much time to train, and we’re pretty happy with the result!
We’ll also be performing this routine at the Sydney Salsa Congress in 2011! We are sure by then it’ll be fantastic, with stable ankle, GREAT spine (positive thinking), high heels and a bit more practice! Click the link below to watch the video and tell us what you think!
I love jars. I love honey. I love honey jars.
I go through a lot of honey, being a honey in my tea, drizzled on my oatmeal, marinating my chicken, on my toast kinda girl. And I buy all my honey from Aldi, where it comes in these 250ml jars for just $2.99 a jar. Confession: I have been known to get upset with people when they try to throw out a used up jar of honey.
Why? BECAUSE I LOVE THE JARS (I thought we had covered this people). Re-using jars is my little way of contributing to the environment cause, because I’m so aware of being such a huge consumer. And, I decide, I will be my own little environmentalist in ways that are easy for me to achieve. I figured I would share all my JAR GOODNESS methods, because maybe they can help you save the earth a little too and stop you buying plastic containers, or leeching nasty plastic toxins into your food. So really, I’m saving your life, too. I am your hero.
You may also rub my belly for luck if you come visit and bring food. I am feeling so generous today.
I use jars for keeping all kinds of food, in the freezer or fridge, or for toting a packed lunch/brekkie and even keeping condiments in the pantry. I’m trying to go eventually plastic-free in my kitchen so jars are coming in very handy for this! Let me list the ways:
I use jars to sort – hair ties, hair pins, international coinage that inevitably gets carted home every trip, spare buttons for clothes, erasers and staple refills, anything small and that usually gets relegated to that top junk drawer everyone must surely have in their homes. And if you don’t have a random junk drawer (or 6) I don’t want to know about it because you’ll make me cry from feeling utterly unworthy of your domestic god(dess) nature.
Love tea light candles? Don’t want to be carted off to jail for being a nasty firebug with arsonist tendencies? Would rather snuggle up to your loved ones in FULL knowledge that you are holding safety first?
I LOVE using tea lights in jars, especially when I think there is some probability of sleep overtaking the “get out of bed and blow them out” urge. Also, in our new house, I’m really excited about having dusk-time tea light parties out on the deck that will be so full of ambience and prettiness. With hundreds of jars. Uh huh. Imagine the amount of honey I’ll have to ingest!
I hope the above suggestions have been useful, and that you are now excitedly taking stock of your pantry to see what jars you can save – coffee jars, pesto jars, pasta sauce jars, honey jars, and all that jazz! Life improvements are exciting!
DISCLAIMER: I am sometimes blogging under the influence of da good woosa tablets those great doctors prescribed for pain management. Excuse the sometimes lapse into the WOOSA!
No folks, not the colour, but the vegetable. When I was growing up, I knew this wonderful food as Brinjal, and hated it. I don’t actually remember why I hated it but I was a fussy kid who generally didn’t like anything. I didn’t like non-seedless fruit, proclaiming bones and spitting a mouthful out promptly if an errant seed in a grape or watermelon was found. I didn’t like crunchy french fries (apparently they too, had “bones”). I didn’t like corn but loved peas (the opposite now). Fussy kid or delusional kid? I don’t know – at least I was cute. I think.
Lately though, eggplant has been my ultimate food for meals. I love chopping it up and putting it in everything, and allowing its sublime texture and wonderful flavour come through. I like adding little cubes of it to my bolognese sauces and whizzing it to make a yummy dip. I like sauteing huge chunks of it with tomatoes and wilting some spinach into the mix for a dish that can be devoured warm or cold. Mostly? I like grilling it.
A few months ago, S bought me the coolest grill pan ever. I’d been wanting one of these for years but could never justify the cost. Oh yeah, you know what I’m talking about:
Be still, my beating heart.
Promptly started in Sharon’s Test Kitchen, a number of searing exercises. There was the meats – chicken, all manner of cuts of steak, venison, pork cutlets, scallops, lamb chops. There was the sauces to accompany those – with jus lovingly scraped off to accompany mushrooms, wine splashes and more. And then there was vegetables – and eggplant has won hands down.
It’s easy. So easy I weep with joy when S and I decide to have steak for dinner. You chop it up into 1 inch slices. You sprinkle it with salt. You prep your meat and SEAR it, making delicious sizzling noises the whole time, and only sometimes with your mouth. You ignore the strange looks your partner gives you as you cackle maniacally at the smell of burning meat at the pyre. You allow the meat to rest, and whilst it’s doing that, you chuck the eggplant on the grill.
Whilst these babies are cooking, plate your salad and pour your wines.
And then:
Just waiting for a slab of meat to top it off!
I would show you a picture with the steaks lovingly lain on top of the stack, juices merrily running around creating a flavour explosion. I would describe how the eggplant just heightens the texture of the steak perfectly whilst making the salad so much more exciting. I would attest to how the silky smooth eggplant drenched in steak sauce is just the perfect mouthful.
But I ate it.
Do you have an ultimate food of the moment that you can’t get enough of? I would love to hear all about it – as long as you come over and grill me some eggplant whilst you regale the tales…
(And yes, this blog post was written/planned/photographed over a month ago so no I’m not trying to wield heavy kitchen contraptions in my condition. In fact at this stage the kettle is too heavy for me to easily make a cuppa.)
Well. I’ve been pretty morose – it’s not really in my nature to lie still for days at a time. Nor is it particularly fun or easy hanging out on a mattress on my living room floor, unable to do much more than be in a pleasant stupor from the WOOSA painkillers, or snarl at Steve and Mum in a delightfully wingeful tone, or attempt to read everything in sight.
So I started poking around the house for motivation for recovery. And here’s the first.
Gorgeous Zara Heels
Aren’t they just beauties? I picked them up in Singapore, knowing full well I couldn’t wear heels for a few more weeks with my ankle. Now with my back, who knows? Still, I’m not the glamourous shoe queen for nothing, and if there is NO other reason (and there certainly are), I’ll be striving to get better because a lovely pair of shoes like this surely can’t go to waste.
4 inch stiletto loveliness
I’ve already started dreaming up the summer outfits that will do these babies justice. Floral dresses, little black cocktail numbers, skinny jeans, denim shorts… Which gives me just a few months to get this spine back into “wearing heels” mode. And these aren’t the only pair. In the last 2 months I’ve acquired (ahem) a large number of gorgeous footwear, and wardrobe to match. Will be blogging all about it soon, rather frivolously, as it’s rather tragic I won’t get to wear it all for a while.
And now lastly, before we take one last look at these lovelies, I must just say:
A big thank you to all of you. The aching fear in my heart and supreme upset I felt has been so assisted by all your loving words – your messages, your emails, your support, your random visits to my apartment to foist upon me giggles, nourishment and help, your facebook posts, your smses, everything. From people near and far, friends and professional contacts, all of you, your stories, your flowers, your words, they have all meant ever so much. Thank you.
And now back to the shoes.
Yes ok, that was a pun, and a very poor one at that. I guess cryptic tweets and facebook status updates are really not the way to do this anymore. After a glorious 2 week trip, this is the last thing I want to blog about but it’s important for my own catharsis and to get everyone understanding why it is I’ve been a hermit upon my return to sunny Melbourne. Yes, that was another joke, the coldness of this damn city is killing me. What I would do for the tropics right now.
I’m highly emotionally volatile this week, and it’s because 2010, you have just about slain me with infliction of injuries. At the start of the year it was a pinched nerve in my neck that took weeks to treat to wellness. Just 2 months ago, I tore my ankle ligament, putting grave fears that I wouldn’t be able to dance for a long time in my heart (and my dance partner’s!). Luckily with solid treatment and the mother of all braces, I was able to perform, perhaps not to perfection, but to satisfaction, on my overseas trips. In ugly flat shoes. Uh huh. But still, everything till now has seemed a mere trip up in the journey of my dancing. And now? Probably the most dreaded injury of all. You see, you can operate on knees, heal ligaments and broken bones eventually, even strengthen dislocated limbs. I’ve done all of those at various stages and always bounced back. This is the first time I literally feel like I can’t, and may not.
So when I got back from the airport on Wednesday, I had a bit of a cough. I’m not talking a hacking, thumping on the back requiring cough, I’m talking a very ladylike KOFFKOFF. And all of a sudden my back seized up. I’d been feeling its soreness for a few days in India already, but this was nothing like soreness, it was acute pain. I called out for Steve and said “Honey, this doesn’t feel so good.”
I spent the next 24 hours in a state of flux and pain – but knowing that sometimes backs do get thrown out, they just need rest, I just needed to give it time. However I’d never been in this much pain before – not through fractured bones, knee operations or ligament issues in my ankle. Movement was highly restricted, as almost anything caused searing pain right in my lower spine. I couldn’t sit, move forward or well, do anything.
On Friday I got an appointment with yet another of the wonderful doctors at the Olympic Park Medical Centre – these guys are not only awesome, they are also starting to get to know me, ALL of them, through all my various injuries! Bonus! The only thing bad is that these guys treat all manner of athletes and truly know their injuries.
As soon as my doctor pronounced the words “slipped disc“, the tears started streaming down my cheeks. I’ve never been so glad to have Steve sitting in a doctor’s office with me as then. He explained to me all the implications, the treatments possible, the risk factors, all the while handing me tissues and watching me silently weep. All that was going through my head was “this is it“. I was soooo mortified but couldn’t help it – I’d just had it with waiting rooms, doctors, and pronouncements of me not dancing anymore. He was delightful about it and pretended like there wasn’t a loony bin sitting in front of him collapsing into a whirlwind of emotions, but gosh it was awful.
Imagine feeling like you’re finally, after many years, becoming the dancer you have wanted to be, and have made the difficult and seemingly insane decision to quit your job, focus on your 2 passions in life, and LIVE your dream instead of trying to do it half heartedly whilst having a full time job. And life, instead of saying “YES, Go Forth! Pursue with Passion!”, instead rubs its hands together in glee and keeps sticking its foot out in the aisle to trip you over. And over. Oh, and over.
I know no one with a fully slipped disc (not spine PROBLEMS, but a disc that has prolapsed entirely) who has been able to resume to 100% of their ability. And certainly not quickly. And definitely not in dance, a sport that requires full use of your body. Plus, I don’t really have a year or two to recuperate – I’m almost 30. It’s time for me to do this NOW. As you might imagine, this has been a huge blow. My brother had a slipped disc. It made his life a misery.
To explain the crazy emotions I’ve been through in the last 2 days, exacerbated of course by the WOOSA inducing painkillers they’ve put me on, and the need to stay bed-bound for 3 days (because lying still is SO in my nature!), would give you an insight into the insanity that I’m not sure I want publicly displayed. But as ever, I am willing to be adventurous in my descriptions, so here goes.
I’m weepy. Leaking like a badly installed roof in a storm. Angry. Moping. Feeling like it’s hopelessly unfair. I’m discouraged. At times of real sinking, I think that there are sadly enough, people in the Melbourne salsa scene that may be happy this has happened to me. I’m also relieved sometimes, that it hasn’t hit the nerves in my legs, graced with blessings that mean I could potentially heal. Maybe. I’m frustrated. Sad. In a rage. I see colours and lights and happiness when the drugs are peaking and smile drunkenly and blabber lots and entertain anyone who’s online and up for a seemingly drunken chat. I’m sore from lying down. Standing up hurts. My body feels like it has snapped in half. Eyes hurt from crying. I’m alone. Living in a different country to my family and home has never felt so difficult.
I know logically that the only way is up. And my team has rallied together incredibly to ensure my two events this weekend go off without a hitch in my absence, as well as to make sure the school keeps running smoothly. My friends have been amazingly loving, supportive and all of it. My business partners have been so understanding. Steve, love of my life, has been a strength and pillar of support, and my family has been superb at long distance love. I realistically have a very good support system to get through this.
And I know it’s not entirely dire – I COULD bounce. If this first few days goes well and I lie and don’t move, it may heal. I am lucky. I have so much around me to be thankful for. I’m going to focus on allowing my loved ones into my life to help look after me instead of reclusing like a hermit (my first instinct when I’m injured). I’m going to blog. Lots. I’m going to do all the computer/accounting/admin type things for the studio I can whilst lying down. I’m going to plan my recovery. All the while, I’m going to allow the emotions and rage because it’s healthy (sorry in advance, my friends!). And try to ignore the pain, the pain, the pain that is all consuming.
If I am a recluse, if I don’t want to talk, forgive me. I have some very tough decision making to do in the next couple of days about my upcoming travel and events, about allowing my mum to come to Melbourne to tend to me, about how I’m not going to make Steve crazy as I’m a difficult patient. At this stage I’ve been told not to leave the house, to just lie flat, to not MOVE. And moving is painful – it literally feels like my body has been cut in half at the spine. Basic things like going to the bathroom, making a cup of tea, sitting up to eat, they hurt. And ashamed as I am to admit this, I’m not in a space (given it’s only been 24 hours since diagnosis) to hear about anyone else’s experiences, good or bad. I’m struggling, even if I’m having a moment of lucidity as I type this. I’m crying a lot. I’m sorry. It’s immature. But I need time with it all.
So I guess this is the end of the story. I haven’t not been able to type it all out in a coherent way, just an honest way. I promise to update again soon – I am aware of all the people friends, family out there who love me dearly and to whom I owe it to to keep updated. I am such a lucky girl who just feels momentarily kicked in the guts by life.
When japanese and italian cuisine merge to create delicious, exotic pasta, and a couple of moments of mirth.
engrish!
