These couple of months after that of May, I started to realize how much these months revolved around the “death of something”, whether it was something like a relationship, someone well known that I never knew in person or even my cat, T_____, who passed recently today (he had to be put to sleep during the afternoon at the vet’s and cremated, poor thing). When I think about the word “death” or “dying”, I think of if as the most cruelest of words within the English dictionary, even the words themselves feel like stabs everytime I hear someone say it. When it comes to things like this, the reality of it doesn’t hit me until darkness falls or a few weeks later, at most. As they say, time unlocks itself and life goes on.

A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th president of US 1953-1961 (1890 - 1969)

Today I marched with an army of greenhorns by my side into the battlefield of the workplace, serving customers, taking down replacements, stocking up and the like and instructing the influx of all these people, who really should be trained a lot more than what I’ve seen. Now after what I’ve done, I’ve realized how all the higher-ups must feel when it comes to dealing with us, not being able to solve their own dilemmas before or after, because we and the customers come before them. I felt like I was suddenly promoted to General or something, since I had to co-ordinate the new people, namely G______ and S____’s younger brother for most of my time there, despite me saying that I’m absolutely rubbish with explaining how to do things in general. Even explaining simple things could be quite a chore, like loading a nineteeth century cannon instead of going for a tank. But, I learnt something really important here; leaders can be made instead of born.

Cooking is like love. It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.

Harriet Van Horne

Ever since I cooked the Clafouti and went to Borders for a cookbook a few days after the ordeal of cooking literally from scratch, I’ve literally fallen in love with cooking, instead of going the easy way and buying things off the shelf. It’s wonder what a person’s drive, time, ingredients, the right tools in the kitchen and one’s hands can do. Doing things by scratch makes one feel very accomplished, plus, it beats eating instant foods from the convienience store. The smells that rise up from the oven, the feeling of exaustion akin to pulling several loads of bricks and the anticipation of tasting the goodies that arrive soon after. It’s simply wonderful. After all, even salad dressings prepared by yourself is a lively addition compared to those from a bottle. Now I can eat salad without worrying about olives or small cubes of cheese! My repetoire so far: Berry lemon clafouti, custard, egg custard tarts, gnocchi with blue cheese sauce, vinaigrette dressing, not to mention how to seperate the egg yolk from the white Next up, Chinese mango pudding or watermelon jewels. It’s moments like these that regress me into a curious, eager child who’s quite interested in ways to creatively create mess with a valid excuse, hoping with pry away the glory of setting off the smoke alarm from a certain twin sister who has done it several times whilst frying up the humble breakfast rashers.

I heard a lot to do with Tibet lately thanks to the Olympics looming ahead of us and with it’s neighbour getting all the attention like a slimy newborn baby who just popped out into the world screaming for immediate attention. It was originally because of two things; because of the fact that Tibet wasn’t a part of China and because of China and it’s track record of being as humane as Robert Mugabe minus the statues and the overglorification and their merchandise being shoddy, which surprised me since the Olympic Village and all the related buildings have sprouted off the ground all ready for the Big Day. Unfortunately, talking about it does get people into trouble, like Björk who got into trouble when she sung the words of “Tibet, tibet.” during her live redition of Declare Independence in Shanghai with many Chinese members of Youtube declaring her a bully, even if she talks truth. Goes to say that truth is stranger than fiction when it comes to things like these, because some people can’t handle it.

The new month has started for me in a storm of cookery (mainly gnocchi, custard, custard tarts and making vinaigrette dressing), work and playing the piano and learning it like a duck to water, which is cold, considering the prolonging, typically bi-polar winter weather in Oz with added flooding in the City of Perth. The current forecast to my life is generally hopeful to the point of feeling unstoppable and deathproof (no, not that movie by Tarantino, unfortunately). L______ has been quite an addition in terms of piano-playing, correcting how I’ve been playing out the beats whilst tickling the ivories and figuring out that warm-ups will make my left-hand playing less… shall we say, retarded. Like everyone else, I’d had my fair share of movies, mainly The Dark Knight which everyone is still going ga-ga about like the reinvention of the wheel (despite Ledger’s Joker looking like a Don’t-Fuck-With-Me hobo in serious purple and dark green Armani drag, with all the seriousness of a relative with cancer) and the one with Jackie Chan, which was a letdown. Meanwhile, at the work front, S____ is discovered to be quite controlling, paranoid and as obsessive-compulsive as I’d first thought, with the customers being filled with more arse-holery than ever (I even “pranked” a group of them in a van by overfilling the desserts with extra topping, enough to make a mess of the vehicle at high-speed). Not to mention the current influx in noobcakes across the area. Anyway, that’s all for me, Sade out.