March 15th, 2018

Birthday Eats

I’m sure this doesn’t surprise anyone, but my ideal way of celebrating my birthday is with food… lots and lots of food. And I got my wish!

Even though my birthday was on Tuesday (13th), my husband and I started celebrating earlier because one of the restaurants I wanted to go to is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. On Sunday, we headed to Kemuri Tatsu-ya, an izakaya-style restaurant where most of the menu are small dishes to be shared.

It’s funny because when I was younger, my birthday always fell on Spring Break, and friends would often be out of town, making it hard to celebrate. Now I’m not in school anymore, but my birthday falls on SXSW, a super popular festival that takes place throughout town. It’s fun for out-of-towners, but inconvenient for locals as we struggled through traffic and closed highway exits to make our way to the restaurant. My birthday is never at a convenient time!

We’ve been to Kemuri before, so we pretty much knew what we wanted to order already. We started with small starters like street corn and kushiyaki (skewered, grilled food), and we also got the BBQ boat which comes with 3 meats. It changes each time, and this time it came with brisket, unagi (eel), and duck – all of which were amazingly tender and delicious. Then we ended with BBQ tsukemen, which is a dipping ramen with a smoked brisket broth. We left feeling full and happy!

Grilled street corn

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13 · Posted in Life
March 2nd, 2018

Recap: February 2018

February felt like a much less sluggish month, probably because I had way less allergy problems. Though, I don’t think I was any more productive because I spent hours and hours watching the Olympics. In the past, I didn’t pay much attention to them, but this year, I decided to give it a try and… I got addicted to following along!

As for Valentine’s Day, my husband and I like to treat it as a day where we cook something we haven’t done in a while and/or we splurge on nicer ingredients. For example, we’ve made steaks before and will look for nicer, aged steaks. One year, we made homemade okonomiyaki (Japanese pancake), which we had never done before. This year, we decided on Japanese curry! Though we’ve done it many times before, we haven’t made it at home recently, and we also bought some highly marbled short rib for it. I didn’t take a good photo of it, but here’s a phone photo:

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11 · Posted in Art, Cosplay, Hobbies, Life, Monthly Recaps
February 12th, 2018

The other little ways

With Valentine’s Day coming up, I’m reminded of earlier in my relationship with my husband. When we first started dating, we treated it as a special day and gave each other little gifts and planned where to have dinner. After a few years, that kind of died off, and I found myself annoyed at him. I knew he wasn’t the romantic type, but I told him that I wish he’d at least put in a little effort once in a while.

For a couple years after that, he would buy me flowers, but then that’d trail off again. However, I had come to realize that he shows he cares in other ways, and that I shouldn’t try to lump him into what I see other people doing. Sure, he doesn’t buy me flowers, he doesn’t compliment the way I look, he doesn’t do anything romantic, but those aren’t the things he cares about. As many of you know, we’re both really into gaming, and I’ve noticed that’s where he puts in the effort instead.

(Side note: my husband works from home twice a week. This fact will make a couple of these stories make more sense.)

[chatting online during work]
Me: Ugh, I forgot to update my graphics drivers last night to fix that Destiny 2 issue. Remind me to do it when I get home.
Husband: Want me to update them for you right now?
Me: Oh… yeah, sure. Thanks.

[just getting home from work]
Husband: Sam wants to play Left 4 Dead 2 tonight.
Me: Whoa, we haven’t played that in forever. I’m going to have to re-install it.
Husband: I already installed it for you.
Me: Oh! Thanks!

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14 · Posted in Life, Random
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