rotenburo

I guess I should post, huh? It's...been a long time. Well, the semester ended maybe a week and a half ago, and I ended up getting the results I had expected to get. To be honest, it didn't feel like I did much learning this semester--or at least, efficient learning. I ended up taking Spanish online, which...well, I don't think online classes are for me. I lack the self-discipline and motivation to pace myself--and largely prefer having face-to-face interaction--especially for a language course. As for A&PII, it was more of an exercise of memorization than it was learning...or the way the class was taught didn't make me as interested in the topic than it was the previous semester.

I don't really have much to say in regard to my classes otherwise. I need to figure out what I want to take for the summer this week, and then register. I can't really the week after, since I'll be in LA visiting my grandma and the rest of my relatives staying there. Hopefully, she'll be doing tons better by the time we see her. My dad will be coming with us too, which is nice since we won't have to worry about how he's doing while out of town.

In my latest culinary adventures, I made decent fried rice my second run-through Friday. The rice's texture wasn't mushy and it didn't stick all over the wok, so I was pretty satisfied with the results. Next time, I will have to remember to add the rice into the eggs earlier though, since I ended up with huge chunks of eggs distributed in the rice instead of small pieces. At least this time I could see the pieces. My sister and I also attempted making egg tarts/dan tats for Mother's Day. We decided not to make the shells from scratch though, and opted to use phyllo dough. It was kind of disastrous the first time around, since we had never used it before, and we left the tarts in the oven a tad longer than desired, so the texture wasn't what we wanted exactly. The second time around though, it went great. I should probably be more careful in catching all the bubbles on top of the egg mixture next time, although I thought I had gotten all of them...but then again, tarts are smaller than an entire dish of steamed egg, so I guess bubbles are more noticeable if you don't catch all of them. I also am starting to think that I don't like olive oil in my baked products. I don't know what it is about it, but there's a smell that lingers after the product is done baking. At least, it seemed that way with the last two baking projects I did. This time around, we used...peanut oil, I think? Wish we had a more neutral oil around, but it was that, or olive, olive/canola, or dark sesame, hahaha. I still have a lot of half&half and a whole roll of phyllo dough leftover that I have no idea what to do with.

Today, I went out with my friends to go see Star Trek: Into Darkness and Iron Man 3. Afterwards, we had dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. My food wasn't too notable, but we were seated immediately, which was a first at this franchise, haha. Next time, I'll just stick to getting salad there or something. I'll give a rundown of my thoughts over the movies, along with other things I've been into (ETA - in another post, ahahaha) in bullet points (let's hope I don't tl;dr too much still), haha.

- Star Trek: Into Darkness: I didn't know how much I missed the cast of characters until I had watched this movie. They're so fun. I saw some things coming from far away, while my expectations for other things were thankfully unmet, hahaha.

- Iron Man 3: The only Iron Man I have seen before this was The Avengers from last summer and then the cartoon from back in the 90s, haha. This movie was pretty good too--though I didn't like it as much as Star Trek. I had forgotten that this was the franchise the Mandarin appears in. I was a bit miffed that the Mandarin wasn't...Chinese. Could they serious not find someone who would ethnically fit the role? =| Ignoring all the other whitewashing issues surrounding this--it's also just really weird to have a person called The Mandarin not be Chinese, and then throwing in terrorist activity clips that seem to be from the Middle East....just what? I just don't understand how any of that is suppose to correlate. It's like me saying I'm the pope while wearing rabbi gear or something (no offense intended--I just needed some sort of example and that was the first one that came).