The season of the interview, and Celebratory Chicken Pot Pie

These pictures are of a delicious pot pie I made. Also of my pets (Wynona leaped into my drawer, Belly sleeps with her head on a pillow!) because they are (seriously) the cutest pets I know.

I *finally* have a job. I didn't want to write about my interview misadventures before I'd secured gainful employment, for fear of jinxes or bad karma for being snarky and haughty or something. But now that I've signed a W-4 and an I-9, I can breathe a bit more easily unless I get fired for screwing up in some unforeseeable horrible way.

The job-- it isn't a career or anything. I'm working part-time at a Jewish New York style deli/restaurant in Berkeley-- it kind of reminds me of Bagel Mania in Santa Fe, only tastier. (No offense, Bagel Mania, but you guys don't serve free pickles.) Anyway, not exactly a career-oriented job, not that it couldn't be. As put in the employee handbook, working at the restaurant is "good, honest work" and I believe that and think it will be challenging. But I'm not a career waitress. Honestly, I'm not even a very good waitress. Lucky for me, I'm being cross-trained as a busser/food-runner/server/host/counter person. Today was my first day and I did about two hours of hosting. Which was incredibly exhausting. I don't know how I'm going to handle my back to back closing and opening shifts this weekend. (7:30 in the morning?!) All said though, I am immensely relieved to have a job, even if it's not collaborating with Adrian Tomine/ curating the MoMA/ making heaps of cash by selling my wares. (And by "wares" I mean crafts...)

The interview process was easily the worst part. Interviews suck (and I have one more on Monday!). Seriously, to get the job at the restaurant, I first had to take a Meyers-Brigg type personality test. I had to come back for a round of second interviews for a job in reception at a yoga studio. I waited an hour and a half for an interview at a popular brewery with dozens of slacks-and-white-button-downs with offensive perfume and shiny shoes. I interviewed at a bunch of restaurants-- one guy was super mean, and we kind of got into a fight over e-mail. A few never called me back, and the ones that did, well, I didn't want to work there. (I was desperate, but not to the point of having to hang out with "Josh" at the office park soup joint and do dishes for three hours every day.) I briefly and against my better judgment, tried out yet another (it would've been my fifth) unpaid internship at a cool gallery in downtown Oakland. It would have been a great job, if the whole money part was included. But basically, this lady wanted a minion, and I quickly realized I couldn't mop floors (except the ones at my house) for free anymore. You want to pay me to mop? Sure. This internship is actually going to lead to "something"? Mmmm, maybe. You want me to sweep, mop, not pay me, and then go home? Nope.

There was one job I really wanted, with Lonely Planet. I am still convinced I would have been perfect for it, but so are the other hundreds (thousands?) of travel-happy twenty somethings who sent in their resumes.

By far my most memorable and terrifying interview was with this dude. He looks mild-mannered enough, I know, but that's because of the light and the angle of his face. In reality, he has a razor-sharp jaw and an icy stare that he will try to kill you with when he says "this job is all about criticism of your work and not taking it personally and turning out the best stuff possible, even when you are beaten down, over and over again". The company he owns and works for describes itself as a "think tank", but, um, no. They're in advertising. Mr. Owner and his buddy (and good cop to his bad cop) described it to me like this: "Altoids came to us and wanted us to re-tool their image. We went with eccentricity, really studied it in depth for months, and wrote up a fifty page report. Then we pitched it to Altoids, and they loved it." So, all of those weird vintagy-Altoids ads where one group of people finds another doing group doing something inappropriate and awkward? Yeah, that'd be the "think tank". The job itself sounded pretty awesome "are you an anthropologist?" they asked. "We need an anthropologist for this job!" Lots of reading and research about bizarre arcane practices and people, admittedly, a lot of "thinking" and as Mr. Owner assured me "wayyy more money than you've ever made before sweetheart". But even with these perks, it still sounded sort of bad. For one, they've represented everyone from Coke to Proctor and Gamble. They also work with smaller brands, but I don't really think I'd be doing anything positive, ultimately, by selling diet coke to people. Then there was the whole part where Mr. Owner told me (literally) he was a misogynist and he hoped I could handle "strong personalities". He didn't hire me, but I think I'm OK with that. I'd rather eat free pickles and drink chocolate egg creams.

The pictures above are from a chicken pot pie I made following one of K's hockey games. It was pretty easy, is surprisingly low-fat (the creamy filling sauce stuff is pretty much just flour and 2% milk) and we gobbled up all the leftovers-- it reheated nicely, and kept in the fridge for about a week. Recipe below:

Ingredients:

* One large (or two small) boneless skinless chicken breasts.
* Coarse salt and ground pepper
* 3 tablespoons olive oil
* 4 carrots, or a bunch of baby carrots, sliced.
* 1 medium onion, finely chopped (about a cup)
* 1/4 teaspoon dried thyme leaves (parsley, sage, and rosemary, too! If you want.)
* 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
* 2 1/2 cups low-fat milk
* 1 package (10 ounces) frozen peas, thawed
* 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
* Box of phyllo dough (in sheets), thawed

Directions:

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Cook the chicken breast(s) any way you like. (I pan-fried them, about four minutes aside, but poaching or roasting would also work well.

Using two tablespoons of the olive oil, saute the carrots, onion and thyme (I used rosemary, too) over medium heat until the carrots are tender, but still crispy (8-10 min.) Season with salt and pepper. Add flour (still over medium heat) while stirring. Slowly add the milk, stirring all the while, until the mixture is smooth. Cook until the mixture comes to a simmer and has thickened.

Remove from heat, add the peas, lemon juice (I used a little bit extra, it's nice) and cooked chicken. Season with more salt and pepper, or other spices, if desired.

Now comes the tricky part-- you're going to use the phyllo to create a crust. Some recipes suggest only using the phyllo dough on top, but I like having an entire crust. Rolling out the phyllo (it'll be in long strips) is best, because then you can cut them to fit your pie pan. I used several layers overlapping on the bottom (kind of like a lattice-topped pie, only covering the whole surface) lined the sides with them, poured in the filling (I had extra, which I froze) and heaped a bunch on top. It's hard to go wrong, it just depends on how pretty you want your pot pie to look. Brush the top (and the insides, if you want) with the remaining tablespoon of olive oil.

Bake the pot pie for 20-30 minutes (check often, so it doesn't burn) until golden and bubbling. Let pot pie cool for fifteen minutes before serving.

Fall Food: By the Seat of My Pants Calabacitas

The onset of fall and the cooling weather (yes, even in California) makes me want to eat a lot and get fat for the coming winter. I think it's biological. Food just doesn't taste as good in late spring/early summer when all I really want to eat is gazpacho, cucumber sandwiches, and popsicles. Well, OK, not really, I always enjoy food, but fall makes me want to stuff myself with lots of warm, spicy, mulled things.

It's been a good week for cooking. Last Sunday, I made cowboy cookies for my grammy, from a Martha Stewart recipe. While my cookies looked nothing like hers, (maybe because I got steel-cut oats instead of regular oats by mistake) they are tasty and chewy and have enough butter in them that they've aged well. Thinking of it, these "cowboy" cookies remind me of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist of Brokeback Mountain fame. They most definitely would have packed these on their secret love-treks into the wilds of Wyoming. They're stick-to-your-ribs cookies (with aforementioned oats, chocolate, pecans and coconut) perfect for long days on the trail, and um, frolicking in the outback. Ennis and Jack would have enjoyed. But don't tell my grammy that.

Tonight we had tacos, one of our favorite dinners, and I'd been meaning to use some gorgeous fall vegetables for a while. Calabacitas is a perfect fall side dish because it's flavorful, filling, spicy, and incidentally, vegan. Bring a batch to the next potluck with your hippie friends!

This is the recipe I made up, after vaguely remembering the calabacitas of my youth. I was never so much into them, they were usually a side attraction to my enchiladas or rellenos. But these hold their own.

Ingredients:
2 medium to small zucchinis
2 ears of yellow corn (white corn or even canned will work just as well)
1/2 of an onion, yellow or white
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup of green chile (I had to use Hatch's canned variety, which you can find in most grocery stores. If you're in the land of enchantment, though, use the jarred saucy variety, or, better yet, fresh roasted green chile-- the ultimate)
A few shakes of powdered red chipotle
Olive oil (a good drizzle to begin, then added here and there, as needed)

Instructions:
Chop all vegetables to desired size. (And chop the corn off of the cobs)
Saute the onions and garlic over medium high heat until the onions begin to soften.
Add green chile, zucchini, and corn. Saute on medium heat. Add salt and chipotle to taste. Cook until calabacitas reach desired doneness.

Easy-peasy, you can pretty much do whatever you want. I took the calabacitas off the stove while the corn was still a little crunchy, which was quite nice, and it retained its sweetness. Some calabacitas recipes suggest adding cream to thicken and creamify-- this is totally optional. Calabacitas can also be dressed up or thickened out with cheese, tomatoes, meat, etc. Versatile and delicious!

Hullo, Halloween

For my Halloween costume this year, I adapted butterfly wings from a Martha Stewart project. The wings are up on the wall now, and K says they're Mets wings because of the blue and orange color scheme. Not terribly sturdy,(made of floral wire and tissue paper) but served their purpose. K, was of course, Abe Lincoln. Some of the kids at the school where he teaches were a little confused about who he was dressed as.

Little Billy: Are you a president?
K: Yes, I am.
Little Billy: Are you Barack Obama?
K: Uh, nope.
Little Billy: Are you John McCain?
K: Definitely not.

I thought it was pretty obvious (Who else wore a beard like that without the 'stache?) but I guess it probably is more obvious if you're not seven years old. Still, though. I knew who Lincoln was when I was in second grade. I think.

K's pumpkin was the oldie but goodie "pumpkin barfer" and mine was some sort of animal. I was thinking dog, but I think it ended up looking more like a red panda with its tongue hanging out.

The pumpkin pie was made entirely from scratch (I peeled and gutted the pumpkin myself) and I was (am) very proud of my pastry chef efforts. However, should you ever decide to make a similar pie from scratch, make sure you blend the boiled pumpkin pieces in a blender. Egg beaters and mashing it around with a fork just aren't going to cut it-- I found this out the hard way when my pie was pleasantly flavored and spiced, but weirdly stringy in texture. There's nothing worse-- I like my pumpkin pie smooth and silky. I did think it was pretty, though.

Last night K and I got In N Out burgers animal style for our Halloween feast, ate in the parking lot, and then went to Rocky Horror at this place which in theory looks super cool. Pizza, beer and couches to go with your movie? Yes, please. It sort of sucked though: we had to wait outside in the rain for 40ish minutes before the movie. There weren't that many people there, they just weren't letting us in the lobby. While we waited shivering in our wet wool, dorky-fanboy-movie-theater-bouncer types yelled the rules to us over and over: "There will be NO, I repeat, NO cameras of any kind in the theater. Yes kids, that includes a camera phone. No food, no drinks, no smoking, no drugs of any kind, no alcohol, no weapons, no matches, no lighters, and yes you WILL be frisked at the door!" After three different goons (at least) had told us the explicit rules for gaining entrance to the holy movie theater, they made good on their promises. The girl who frisked me definitely squeezed my boobs, and after that made me get rid of my pomegranate. "They're way too messy," she explained. Um, hello. You guys serve pizza and beer in your theater, and fruit is sloppy?

Rocky Horror is supposed to start at midnight, but we didn't get the preshow (costume contest, various Rocky Horror virgin rituals) until 1 AM. The movie didn't start for twenty minutes after that. I've only seen Rocky Horror twice before-- once downtown in an NYC theater crowded with drag queens, and once at Vassar, as performed by the NSO (No Such Organization, formerly known as Non-Human Student Organization). The NSO was home to the X-Files devotees and Star Trek geeks, the Anime nerds and Buffy worshipers. These kids held a convention at the school every year that was ground zero for dungeons and dragons, LARPing (live action role playing)and purportedly, group sex. I shouldn't dis the NSO, because I too greatly appreciate some of the things they hold most dear: Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and yes, I'll say it, The X Files. But they were dorks. The kids who felt awkward in high school who then met a ton of like-minded friends at college and reveled unrestrained in their dorkiness. Bottom line: The NSO's Rocky Horror was wayyyy better than whatever Oakland hipster's finest had to offer. Actually, even at the Parkway, these kids were more nerd than hipster. Which is preferable, but still. I know Halloween and Rocky Horror are only once a year, but please, even that's not cause to frisk me before I can enter your movie theater. Also, Rocky Horror starts at midnight, not 1:22 AM.

The Wide Wild West

(Exciting pictures after the text)


My first car meant a lot to me. Not because I bought it myself, or knew how to work on it, sliding underneath like a grease monkey or anything like that. I was fifteen when I started driving by myself in my own car, because New Mexico is insane and apparently thinks that letting kids who aren't even sixteen drive by themselves will somehow make our drunk-driver-ridden speed-demon-racing roads better. Not that I was complaining at the end of my sophomore year. Hell no, I was psyched. Living in Santa Fe, none of my friends were even close to my neighborhood. Driving was the beginning of hanging out in parking lots, playing hide and seek in cemeteries, and of course, reveling in the two weeks per year the plaza had actual grass. For me, like so many American kids, driving=freedom.

So it was kind of a big deal when my car was totaled near the end of August. I wasn't in the car, and no one was hurt-- the most important thing, obv. But the damages exceeded the value of the car, and so it was time to say goodbye to my dashboard (what had become a somewhat shabby assortment of doodads and plastic toys glue gunned all over the surface, see picture, but which I had recently replaced with astro turf and an awesome jungle scene) my teenage bumper stickers (Weezer, Keep Your Rosaries off my Ovaries, 98.1 Radio Free Santa Fe) every inch of my beloved 2001 Passat Wagon. I drove cross-country three times in that baby, taught three friends to drive stick shift in it, and slept in the back several times. Both of the driving pictures above are of my pal the Passat. Damn, what a car.

My extensive preamble can lead to only one thing: a new car. (Let's face it, living in California with a 72 lb. dog, a car is still essential.) K and I had been planning a trip to Santa Fe, and we left a couple days after the car was kaput. Once in Santa Fe, we (me, K, and my mom helping) used this dealer guy, Fred, to secure a new car. This time I had to pay for it myself-- sign of the times. (That I've grown up, not that the economy is in the toilet and my dad refused, though that is true, too.) Long story short, Fred wrangled me a Subaru Impreza WRX which is, not so coincidentally, the kind of car he has. It's more performance than I need in a car, but a hatchback, has decent gas mileage, and room for Belly. I really like it. K needed to go home and take care of the babies (fetch them from their babysitters) so my sister D and I struck out West for California.

We took mostly two lane highways because that's so much more romantic and fun and Blue Highways than the interstate is. That, and we've both been across 40 gazillions of times and it's ugly and dull, with the exceptions of the red cliffs near Grants and Gallup, and the Flagstaff area. So instead we struck off though Northern, New Mexican mountains and forests, and as it got dark, skirted Monument Valley in Arizona. Just north of Santa Fe, the landscape opens up and is wide enough, and full enough of mountains and mesas that dip into valleys and canyons, that the sky starts to look almost purple if you stare straight up for a long time. If the windows are down when you’re driving, the wind smells like snow melt or cotton wood fluff or charred pinon, depending on the time of year. We also drove across what an old friend of mine termed "Navajo Country" and so made lots of references to that, as we drove by tepees (no, really) silhouetted against Shiprock.

There is no landscape in the whole world I like better than that of the American West.

When we got to Page, AZ (right on the Utah border and next to Lake Powell) every single motel room in town was full because we were right next to Lake Powell and it was summer, and also because there was some sort of weird French convention going on, probably a discussion of how great the Euro is. We got vanilla milkshakes and bean burritos and cried a little (OK, a lot) at the prospect of having to sleep in the car after a long day, but in the end that is what we did. In the parking lot of a Holiday Inn Express, where we freeloaded off of their lobby bathroom facilities and password-protected Wifi. Even when greasy and weepy, the MD girls know how to charm a hotel clerk in a pinch.

The next day took us through Utah, where we stopped near an unusually clear blue lake (see the picture) surrounded by fishing and ATVing rednecks. A mother duck swam nearby with her ducklings, and we restrained ourselves from kidnapping one. We stopped in Ely, Nevada, which is right over the border in time to wander around the town before it got dark. This is all I have to say: fucking sketchy. The "casinos" there were like mini museums-- stuffed animals of all tooth and claw, miniature everything, model trains, and lots of old, obese white people who seemed pretty thrilled that you're still allowed to smoke indoors at casinos.

This was the second time I'd driven across Nevada, and it was better than the first because we listened to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on CD. We'd both read the book the previous summer, but it's so intricate and long that we'd forgotten lots of plot details. Driving across the desert at 95 mph listening to the book was almost better than reading it for the first time. Mostly because driving in Nevada is a trip. We saw very few other people on our long lonely road. I think highway 50 is appropriately termed "the loneliest highway in America". You can drive really fast, because there's nobody else, and we didn't see any cops. The highway shoots straight across huge valleys, which look like they're going to go on for hours until you abruptly come up against a spiny mountain pass. Up and over, and into another colossal valley, past derelict gas stations, suspicious government explosions (really) and lots and lots of Joshua trees. The cemetery pictures are from just outside of Ely. So are the tree pictures. We considered leaving some of our own shoes, but we liked them all too much.

Indochine in Pictures

Not really, I just like that word. A few shots from Thailand and Malaysia. In the one where I am wearing a jaunty Peter Pan leaf hat, I am riding an elephant!

Mary Haldeman Dayton April 12, 1927- August 30, 2008

It might be a bit uncouth, or in poor taste to post on my personal only kind of themed definitely sort of irrelevant blog about my gramma's death. But I don't care. She died not unexpectedly at the end of August and I miss her. Here is what I read at her memorial, and above is a picture of her that was in her newspaper obituary. I think it's kind of a weird picture, but it is one she really liked of herself.

The summer before I went to college, I met my gramma in Aspen for the chamber music festival. We spent five crazy, stressful, but mostly wonderful days together. That year in my writing classes at school, I wrote a short story about our vacation. I’m going to read an excerpt from the story—a bit from the middle, and then the end. It’s not quite linear and a bit disjointed, but please bear with me. I’m picking up at a part during which I’ve just biked into town from our condo.

In front of Dior, I locked up the bike next to expensive and gorgeous mountain bikes from Italy. I wanted ice cream and to play in the street fountain like I had when I was six. My dad had splashed in the fountain with me that day; he’s always been the sort of father who doesn’t mind getting messy or looking foolish while playing with children, his own or otherwise. My grandmother is the same way, and I knew if I asked her, even
when I was nine, or eleven, too old to get in the fountain, she’d have come anyway.
I stopped at Clark’s on the way back to pick up more wine, bananas, English muffins, coffee filters, a sling in a size large, and some magazines. Pedaling back up the hill was difficult with my grocery bags balanced on the bike’s handlebars.
Neighbors were fixing hamburgers on the grill when I got back, and I heard kids splashing in the pool, but in our apartment it was quiet, except for the drip of the humidifier, which sounded a long way off in the next room.
“Gramma?” I called, not very loudly. She was asleep, where I had left her. I stood over her and noticed that her eyes were opened slightly, and that I could see little slits of glassy blue. She breathed slowly through her nose and was snoring slightly. Her hair, dyed strawberry blonde and so much thicker than mine, was freshly cut, styled and perfect. Her nose is my dad’s, with a bump on the middle. My sister will have the nose too, in four or five years. The three of them look alike, but I look like my mother.
I studied my grandmother’s still face and thought she was beautiful. Her mascara was slightly smeared, and the ends of her hair curled around her chin; she looked so lovely, lying on her back and snoring.
She had sprayed her perfume, and I put my face into the bedclothes that smelled like her. My gramma wears a lot of perfume; whenever she comes to stay, the whole house smells like her for at least a week after she leaves. From the nightstand, I dabbed it on the insides of my wrists and brought them to my face periodically for the rest of the evening.
I was pulling my pajama pants on when my grandma knocked on my door.
“Del, what do you say we make a trip to the Little Nell? For martinis and oysters?”
She was dressed in a dark blue dress closer to royal in color than navy, Ferragamo shoes, a very nice Hermes scarf, and went bare-legged. It was summer in Colorado, she said, and nylons wouldn’t be necessary. We both put on lipstick (hers coral and mine hot pink) and decided to walk there. Downtown was still fairly busy; it was a Saturday night in a tourist town, at the end of the season, and most of the hotel rooms were full.
“Do you think jeans are OK for the Little Nell?” I asked my grandmother.
“Oh, sure.” Flick of the wrist. “It’s a bar. A very nice bar, but a bar. We used to stay at the Little Nell, in the old days.”
We sat at a table by the window.
“Oh, waiter?” my grandmother trilled, fluttering her fingers. Her hands gleamed with rings and bracelets.
“Two vodka martinis, please. And a dozen oysters.”
We sipped our martinis together. I tried not to wince, while she let hers roll around in her mouth and down her tongue slowly. Our oysters came and we both slurped them from their shells, covered in lemon juice and dotted with horseradish.
“The first time I had a raw oyster was in San Francisco,” I said, “when we were there for Bruce and Lynn’s wedding. We were having dinner at some place down by Fisherman’s Wharf and you made me try one.”
I don’t think she knew how glad I was, how secretly special I felt that I was drinking martinis with her, that I would be able to tell this story at family gatherings fifteen years later. It was a strange sort of premature nostalgia, brought on because for five days in August she was all mine.
We sat quietly. I ran my finger, dipped in water, around the rim of my glass, making a high, resonant note sound, until I realized it wasn’t appropriate, even if we were among the last people in the bar. It was a classic hotel bar, with large red leather chairs and mahogany paneling and ashtrays for old men’s cigars. It was almost empty except
us; it wasn’t the sort of place one went to dance or get drunk on a Saturday night. My grandmother stood up delicately in her black heels.
I took her hand as we walked out of the Little Nell. When I was younger, my gramma never made me hold her hand, but I liked to anyway. People watch her when she walks, and I really don’t think she’s ever noticed. She’s not the sort of woman who bothers with other people’s glances. She grew up thinking she was ugly because of her red hair, which makes her less vain than she might be otherwise.
“Mon Dieu! Those oysters were exquisite, weren’t they, dear?” My grandmother says ‘Mon Dieu’ instead of ‘Oh my God’ because she thinks it makes her sound continental. And it does.
The concierge tipped his head at her and said “Good evening, madam,” as we left the hotel. She smiled, and inclined her head.

Melaka, the Straits of Melacca

In the Cameron Highlands, we were taken on a comprehensive tour of a tea plantation, a butterfly farm (which also had examples of all sorts of exotic insects, reptiles and amphibians) and a strawberry farm. The tea plantation tour reminded me a bit of the tours we used to take on IHP. And man oh man, would my IHP compatriots have had a field day. Apparently, all of the tea-pickers are migrant Indonesian workers who pluck for the equivalent of pennies a day, six days a week. It looked like a pretty shitty set-up, but I didn't know what to say to our guide other than "huh" and a lot of asides to everybody else about how that sounded pretty exploitative. The plantation was overrun with field-tripping Chinese middle-schoolers, and I was glad to depart for the Strawberry place which was small and did not appear to run on close-to-slave-labor and I had a really delicious strawberry milkshake.

After the Cameron Highlands, we journeyed South on a "super luxury VIP bus" (which basically just meant huge squashy seats) to the capital city of Kuala Lumpur, or KL. KL is kind of just another huge Asian city, but much easier to get around than Bangkok. (Which is pretty much the extent of my intimate knowledge of big Asian cities, unless we're counting India as "Asian") KL has a skytrain and a Chinatown and a weird park called the Lake Gardens that is basically their version of Central Park, and lots and lots of shopping malls. I enjoy shopping, but malls kind of make me want to kill myself. I got excited about going to Top Shop and finding some cute pants that fit really well, but that was about the extent of it. Also we went to a fancy watch store with the sole purpose in mind of asking them how I should clean my stainless-steel watch which gets really grimy and leaves gross marks on my arm. Fantastic tip: use an old toothbrush and toothpaste. My watch was super-shiny and gleaming afterwards, and I annoyed the crap out of Lacey pausing to admire the shininess and glinting the faces' reflection across the room like Tinker Bell.

Lacey and I spent the first half of our full day in KL in a soulless, air-conditioned shopping mall housed beneath Malaysia's Twin Towers, the second-highest buildings in the world. They actually had a pretty neat aquarium, with manta rays we could touch and huge sharks in an overhead tunnel and adorably-translated "fun facts" about aquatic life. After lunch, we wandered half-heartedly around the deserted Lake Gardens, probably so desolate because it was freaking hot and really humid. They had a weird sort of mini-zoo, with regular sized deer and also mouse deer, which may be indigenous to Malaysia. We were the only people at the zoo, and fed the regular-sized deer green leaves which we hoped weren't poisonous.

That evening, we partook of group-karaoke in a swank place with a cold/hot/dessert buffet, deals on booze, and private rooms. I only do karaoke when tipsy or with people I will never see again, so Lace and I made sure to cover both of those bases. We did a duet to "Summer Nights" (I was mostly John Travolta) and I did Crocodile Rock, among a few other songs. Fun and kitschy, but we still peaced out early.

We're in Melaka for the night, a historically important fishing port that like Penang, passed colonial hands between the Portuguese, Dutch, and British. We took a guided tour this afternoon in a tricked-out bicycle rickshaw, and had some seriously amazing fusiony/continental/tapas food at a yummy little place on the river. We're not here for very long, which is sort of too bad because it seems like a pleasant little town, in a lazy-dazy way. On the other hand, I'm jonesing to get home to my boy, dog and cat. I'm planning on slinging a couple Singapore slings, and heading on my merry way back across the big blue ocean. I love traveling, and I think I need to go abroad at least once a year to convince myself that I know what I'm doing. Also I just love it. But once a year is probably enough.