My mom is the most adorable lady in the world — except when she starts yelling at me for some mundane thing. Then she becomes Medusa or I don’t know, some scary person, as are most angry mothers, I’m sure.
Anyway, so my mom. She’s 4’11″. Just typing that makes me so excited, you guys, because that means I’m actually taller than someone! :-O She was born and raised in Hong Kong by a chef-turned-policeman father, a shoe-manufacturer-supervisor mother, and a shoe-manufacturer-employee mother. So you can see how she can be kinda no-nonsense sometimes, as no-nonsense as a 4’11″ person can possibly be, I guess. She’s nearing 60, though don’t tell her I told you that because she honestly doesn’t look it (Asian genes, holla!) and she gets kinda self conscious (like every other woman on the face of the planet). She learned English in secondary school; there are lots of stories about the oral exams and the studying for oral exams she endured: “This is a man. This is a pan. This is a man and a pan.” She took an ESL class while I was in pre-school after we moved to California when I was two. So to an extent she can understand (because sometimes, when I get carried away, I talk rapidly…in English at home) and converse with people, but only if it’s absolutely necessary because she’s shy like that — except when she’s angry or…trying to get a hold of me, as last Tuesday night has proven (so embarrassing :-[). She gets all "Homie don't play!" on you, only.. she would never really say anything like that.
Anyway, my mom. Totally still a fob (fresh off the boat, for you people who haven't caught on the bandwagon yet.. Please check out My Mom is a Fob and My Dad is a Fob for more references; I totally relate to most of the things posted there.) despite the fact we've been here in the States for 20 years. But that makes her...totally adorable. She only sings the "Rah ah ou la la's" in Bad Romance and the "Boom boom pow's" when they come on the radio. And sometimes, like last night when I was falling asleep on the couch, she says things like:
[Preview for Prince of Persia (awful, awful, awful, awful looking movie; I don't even want to be paid to watch it, unless it was like $1 million or something.) comes on the telly]
Mom (in Cantonese): This movie looks great. Let’s go see it!
me (mumbling): It looks awful. You can go. I’m not.
Mom (in Chinglish): It has Jerry what’s-his-face. He’s involved. That guy. Jerry.
me: Who?
Mom (in Chinglish): It also has that gay guy. You know, from Backstreet Mountain.
At this point, I’m not half asleep anymore, but laughing… kinda maniacally. :-| And… she was referring to Jerry Bruckheimer, which doesn’t surprise me.
With the success of my 10-minute tiramisu recipe, I thought I’d share with you my 10-minute strawberry pie!
Ingredients:
1 9” pie shell
1 quart fresh strawberries (about 15 medium-sized)
½ cup white sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch (or 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour)
¾ cup water
A few notes before I get to it:
This pie is technically supposed to be ‘no bake’ but because I had a frozen pie shell left over from baking an apple crumble pie, I thought I’d use that. If you also want to use a frozen pie shell instead of a graham cracker pie crust from the baking aisle, you have one additional step.
You may have noticed I made a few substitutions. I originally made this pie with white sugar, but my family rarely uses white sugar opting for honey or cane sugar to sweeten. The dark brown sugar is what I had left over from my apple crumble pie, so I used that instead. We also don’t make many things using cornstarch, and I didn’t see the point of going to the store just for it so I used double the amount in all-purpose flour. For any other recipe where you don’t have cornstarch on hand, you can always substitute with double the amount of all-purpose flour. (1 tablespoon cornstarch = 2 tablespoon all-purpose flour)
Directions:
I return for a brief moment from my unannounced (and for this I am sorry… leaving you on the edge of your seats, wondering if this blog has perished and gone to Blog Heaven… :-( ) hiatus to bring you a Public Service Announcement.
Family and Friends:
I am ever so grateful for you, especially when you lent me an ear so I could spout all kinds of crazy things about applying to law school. Oh, you know, when I got those rather minor panic attacks where some of my hair fell out over a silly little standardized test. Or when I blabbered on about wondering ‘who I really am’ and how to best express it in three-pages, double spaced, twelve-sized Times New Roman. Or even those couple of weeks, right before sending in the initial applications, when I got cold feet and decided to apply for a Masters in Liberal Studies. Luckily, I finally made up my mind. I had lost too many hours of sleep. I had worked too hard. I couldn’t and still can’t give up on something that I believe I love… even after a year and a half working in a civil litigation firm..
You guys were/ are awesome.
But, seriously? You have also got to stop hounding me about whether or not I’ve gotten an acceptance letter yet. The perfectionist that I am, I wrote and tossed away hundreds of personal statement drafts before settling one that I could swallow, and that, delayed my application process. I didn’t really finish all of applications until the “OMGYOUARESOLATEITISNOWFEBRUARY” mark.
<sidebar> For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about: because I took the September LSAT, I should have already had my applications in before Thanksgiving.
And I’m still now in the process of just applying to a couple of other schools, for the hell of it. So, my dears, no. I have not received any notifications from any law schools. It is still yet early for me. And I promise, you will eventually know the who, what, when, and where. Til then… the answer is ‘no’ and ‘next topic please..”
For some reason, I’m always in a hurry, or at least, I like getting lots of tasks done as quickly as possible. Needless to say, I have that mantra when it comes to preparing meals. There are days when I’ll humor myself by making pie crust from scratch, and there is never a day when you will catch me using canned pasta sauce. Anyway, the point is I like things fast, and it’s even better when I have the ability to multitask. That’s why this version of tiramisu is one of my favorites. It takes less than 10 minutes to prepare and at least about an hour to set/ refrigerate, leaving you time to run errands, study, go to class… you get the drift.
Ingredients:
8 oz. mascarpone cheese (1 container)
8 oz. Cool Whip (1 tub)
2 large tablespoons Nutella
24 lady fingers (1 package)
100ml Baileys (1 Baileys Mini)**
1 ½ cup espresso or strong black coffee
1 or 2 Ghirardelli milk chocolate chips (optional for shaved topping)
Directions: Read more…
For those who are unfamiliar with the LSAT, it is essentially made up of 5 sections: 2 logical reasoning sections, 1 reading comprehension section, 1 logic games section, and 1 unscored experimental section. So by doing a little simple math, logical reasoning makes up 50% of your score; if you do poorly, then you’ll be SOL (no law peeps, not statute of limitations…)! According to PowerScore’s Logical Reasoning Bible, the most difficult type of problem within the section is the assumption question. Granted, your particular exam won’t have an entire section dedicated to assumption questions, but it’s still an integral question type to grasp because other question types build upon assumptions, i.e. weakening and strengthening questions, but I digress…
The basic task of an assumption question is to bridge the gap between the evidence and the conclusion, and you’re probably thinking, “Well, gee, how can it be that hard? We already do that almost every minute of the day!” It’s true, thus making it difficult; the difference between the LSAT and real life is that in real life we don’t have to figure out the purpose of the author’s argument or understand his mindset; we’re usually our own authors. Additionally, in real life we usually don’t have to deal with concrete evidence; facts can change.
Let’s take a look at this ridiculous scenario as an example: Read more…
