Monday, December 24, 2012
Breakfast at home: two small slices of banana bread. Collected external hard drives and prepped them for selling or giving away. Patrick and I drove to Stonestown Mall. I had lunch at Jalapeno's (veggie taco salad in a bowl) while Patrick did some last-minute shopping. We went to Trader Joe's to get a few groceries. Home. The landlord stopped by to examine a leak in Patrick's room that we discovered yesterday morning. Backfilled some journal entries. Nap. Ordered chinese food delivery from Taipei Restauarant and Dim Sum via GrubHub. It was my first time using GrubHub, and I ordered from my iMac. The ordering process was serviceable, but not a very memorable experience. Seamless has still not responded to my question about why the review I wrote for South Sea Seafood Restaurant on April 7 was trimmed to 2,049 characters without warning. We wanted food from Xiao Loong but neither of us wanted to order by voice, and they did not have online ordering. Dinner: egg rolls, foil-wrapped chicken, wor won ton soup, sauteed cabbage with garlic cloves, mu shu pork, steamed rice. We have eaten in person at Taipei many times in the past, but I don't think we've ever had the egg rolls before. We received 2 free egg rolls with our order, and they are seasoned with Chinese five-spice, which to me makes these somewhat distinctive. Also notably unusual is that the wor wonton soup included some kind of tasty root vegetable we were unable to identify. As wor wonton soup does not normally include this, it's another note of distinction to the menu. In my foil-wrapped chicken I tasted a small piece of gristle, and I thought there was slightly too much rice wine. We were happy with everything else in our order except for the fortune cookies which were individually sealed but nonetheless tasted stale. Patrick's fortune: Your heart is pure. Your face has duck sauce on it. My fortune: Everything is coming your way. Perhaps you're in the wrong lane. The fortune cookie fortunes are fun and funny, but this is somewhat marred by the advertisement from eat24.com on the back, a bit of irony since we ordered via GrubHub. Watched Total Recall (2012) on Netflix DVD with Patrick. This film's best feature is its collection of futuristic, computer-generated sets, but even that, like much of the rest of the film, borrows too much from film history rather than inventing something largely new. This film has many, many obvious influences, sometimes matching scenes or plot elements exactly from films such as RoboCop, Blade Runner, The Matrix, Star Wars Episode I, The Fifth Element, Minority Report, the Jason Bourne series, The Da Vinci Code, James Bond films. The most original concept in it is the fall, and you're left to guess how and why it came to be. The film might not be very original in execution, but it is pleasing to the eye, exciting, and with more than a few unexpected turns. Patrick and I both thought it deserved higher ratings than we had found on imdb and Rotten Tomatoes. Organized bookmarks at my.xmarks.com until late. Late snack: leftover wor wonton soup. Erased another external hard drive in preparation for giving away or selling.