BIKSS and I are in our 50s. We met in 1988 but it took us 24 years before hooking up in 2012. We moved into a DD/lg dynamic a year later. In April 2015 some shit hit the fan. We took some time off but eventually found a new us.
I used to live alone except for a few shifting years when my folks moved in then out, then after dad passed on, mum moved in again. Now that she too has passed, it's just me, one carer whom I've decided to keep on, and my tenant.
He lives with his family. This is us.
It's pretty pricey but it came highly recommended.
We tried it last week.
The salad was interesting - brussels sprouts, dried blueberries, manchego, mustard vinaigrette (taken off their menu), but to be honest I think we enjoyed the novelty of it more than its actual taste. (It came as a disc-shaped wonder.) I did enjoy the manchego cheese.
We decided on their original five cheese blend, tomato, fresh basil pizza. The combination of cheeses was a bit strange. It was quite plain for a many-plenty-cheese pizza. The base was way too hard for my liking. This was NOwhere near the deliciousness that 4Ps offers. Man I miss Vietnam.
Oh well. We also had a chicken something. I'm not sure what it was called exactly, and the online menu doesn't have it listed.
Breaded chicken in a tomato gravy covered in cheese. I would hazard it's some kind of chicken parmigiana lol. The cheese was good. The sauce was good. The chicken was hard and the edges too crusty. I also don't like having hard bits in what is meant to be a boneless fillet. I had to spit out a rather sizeable bit of tendon! Ugh.
So now that's 2 places he recommended and 2 out of 2 that I don't like. I don't think I'm ever going to try ANY of the places that fella recommends anymore. Clearly we have very different tastes. I would like to note that the places he's told me about tend to be "popular" choices - they're well known and have a certain following in terms of hype and "hip" factor. They're also pretty pricey. I suspect it's more for the name-fame than the actual quality of the food!
The sex at the end of the evening tho, that was HEAPS better than dinner :D
Sex. Sex is one of the other things. It's not been great. Mostly I think because of the missing libido. But also because when I DO get around to feeling, you know, randy, the lady bits end up not enjoying it anymore.
BIKSS went to fiddle with the girly parts down below and when he brushed against my clit I pushed away from his hand. It didn't feel good. AT ALL. This might be a problem. It wasn't painful, but it wasn't pleasurable. It was like the kind of negative response you might get from having someone brush up against a 3 day old sunburn. The response mind you, not the actual sensation on the skin, just to be clear.
Anyway. Things aren't fabulous on the inside either. It's a bit hurt-y and painful and I'm looking into getting some Premarin cream for it. The boss has told me about this on a couple of occasions. I think it's time to invest in a tube.
The hot flushes have disappeared tho. That's a plus. My period can be timed now that I'm on the pill. Which is also a plus. I'll see what I can do about not being on a bleed while I'm escaped with BIKSS on the first weekend of June.
This week my orchid decided to bloom, and I see 2 more stalks of buds forming. Must be all the sun. I know they're known to be indoor plants, but mine seem to only come alive when the sun is crazy scorching.
On the topic of new life, we've also upgraded our transport service. There's free wifi on some buses, USB ports in others. And today I sat on a bus that had an extra door. The regular ones have an entrance at the front and an exit in the middle. This one has another exit right at the end of the bus. I suppose it will help with convincing passengers to move to the back of the bluddy bus already. I hate it when they all crowd around the middle cos no one wants to be the ass who got stuck on the bus and couldn't make his way down in time.
USB port beside my seat
Last Thursday I took the day off cos the mother had a tele-appointment with her audiologist and I had to be home to assist.
After that we went to lunch, DIM SUM FOR THE WIN! I love it. And then sent the car in for a windscreen change cos something hit the glass and there was a crack about 1/3 way down the middle. While waiting for the replacement to be done we caught the new Dr Strange movie.
After that it was Chinese hotpot for dinner at Chinatown - Roz look away. We ordered a seafood platter - and it came on a bed of ice! There were skewered prawns on there too but by the time I took a pic the prawns were swimming in a herbal chicken soup.
The next day we went out to the marina for dinner. Hadn't been to the Thai place in a bit, so I made a reservation and off we went.
Top - steamed salmon with Thai spicy sauce (very spicy, but very good)
Left - cucumber juice
Right - stir fried veggies
We also had tomyum seafood soup but it wasn't much to look at.
After that we went in search of some salted nuts. I managed about 5 different bags from the nuts-by-weight counter at a grocery store, AND they had yoghurt covered raisins! I love those things. For someone who doesn't have a sweet tooth, it's really strange (even to me) that I like the stuff so much. But I do. It's been almost 48 hours and this is all I have left. The bottle was full when I got it. Now I'm down to 18 raisins.
Mouse and lappy for comparison
Well then. At least I know now where I can get more. :D
Left - tuna salad on rye cracker - tuna from a resuce, crumbled cream cheese from a rescue, cucumber (bought) and spinach leaves from my kitchen garden!
Right - made my own baba ganoush. Didn't have tahini so I just chucked some clotted cream with a dash of sesame oil into the mixture.
And after 2 days of practising (maybe 4 hours total?) I finally got the Bagatelle to sound like something half decent. I'm not a fan of the 5-sharp key signature AND accidental double sharps, but this one was worth it.
Enjoy!
Also - I'm here again so soon because I'm excited to share something OTHER than mum updates. 👻
We wanted to go to a food court near my piano kids' house, but it was stupid crowded, even at 630pm before the usual dinner crowd descended. So we ended up wandering around the basement, where a lot of restaurants are situated in our local malls, and decided to pop into a Japanese ramen place for a quick dinner.
We'd never eaten at this chain before, it being a ramen place after all (some of you will remember we're low-carbers) but I figured they'd have sides.
Well, they didn't have ENOUGH sides to count as dinner so we decided to try a noodle dish that we'd never tried before and split it. We ended up having something like 4 spoons of noodles each, which really isn't that bad I suppose.
It was the first time either of us tried Tsukemen - or dipping noodles - and there was also a thing called chijimi on the menu. Apparently that's the Japanese name for buchimgae (Korean pancake things).
Top - pork chop tsukemen (virgin encounter)
Middle left - pan fried gyoza (or what Americans call pot stickers I think)
Middle right - chijimi (virgin encounter - it reminded me of my childhood cos it tasted like the whitebait fritters my mum used to make!)
Centre - agedashi (fried) tofu
Bottom left - chicken karaage
Bottom right - fried squid rings. No, not calamari rings per se cos it's not whole rings of sliced squid. It's more like a chopped-squid-mash that's formed into rings and then battered and fried. So it really depends on how you define calamari rings.
While looking up whitebait fritters I learned they're a pretty common dish in New Zealand. I wonder if Roz is a fan? Basically it's an omelette of eggs, flour, whitebait and seasoning.
Makes me wanna run out and get some tomorrow so I can fry me up some fritters!
Anyway. It was suprisingly delicious, and we both came away stuffed!
The bill was a bit pricey at $56+. But I had $42 in my e-wallet from cashback transactions so I used that to offset the bill. I got 6% cashback for using the card that's linked to my cashback account. Then there was a bonus $5 cashback for first time use of the app's newly launched in-app payment gateway. So in the end I paid something like $5.60 for our dinner. I was kinda thrilled about that!
Meanwhile, I've decided that in an effort at doing something productive since I'm going to continue to be stuck at home a fair bit (caring for mum) these days - I suppose I've finally gotten bored with whatever I've been amusing myself with the last 2 years during Covid restrictions - I've gone back to practising the piano and learning new stuff. This comes hot on the heels of a bunch of reading I did. Apparently even though people who studied music in their youth seem to have a healthy store of cognitive reserve in their old age, adults who never played an instrument or studied music before benefit from later-in-life music engagement too. I figure it can't hurt (and it might give me a leg up) to keep on learning new pieces, just to be sure, you know?
I'm working on the first Bagatelle from this video, and I've now got an achey wrist cos I haven't actually practised for a looong time (teaching isn't the same as practising....) and I might have been a tad over zealous today.
Oh and speaking of pain - the main reason I came here today was to say -
I scraped my knee. And the worst thing about having a scrape or a cut, even ones that don't draw blood but have definitely taken off top layers of skin - it bluddy hurts when you're trying to take a shower!
We had Turkish food last night. It was probably the best one so far. Nay, I take it back. It's the only Turkish restaurant we've tried where we came away satisfied with our meal.
It was really REALLY good. Rich aromas, not too salty, fragrant rice, and the kunafe (bottom 2 pics) was perfect - subtly flavoured with ground pistachios and a warm comforting cream to top the whole thing off - neither sickeningly sweet nor laden with cheese to mask the flavour of the kataifi (spun pastry).
There was also a cold baba ganoush (ours was a chopped version instead of smooth -top pic) and some deep fried cheese-in-pastry rolls (middle left) for starters.
We had a lamb targine (middle right) for our main and it was totally worth the carbs!
I have also finished my Understanding Traumatic Brain Injury MOOC and a mini Concussion Short Course. While doing some extra reading on food sources of Vit B12 I got a hankering for some lung. To be specific, beef lung or Paru,as the Indonesians call it. We know of ONE Indonesian restaurant that still has it on their menu, it being a super tedious dish to prep.
BUT I am now the proud recipient of a pack of frozen, marinated and sliced paru (which I found online - it seems there is only ONE seller of said dish) defrosting in the fridge to be cooked for dinner tonight!
Here are some examples of what this fried dish looks like - altho if you look up Google images you'll find tons more variations.
I can't wait! This isn't an easy dish to cook. The cleaning and pre-boiling with spices to get rid of the funky tastes and smells just take too long, plus don't forget peeling, chopping and grinding the aromatics and other spices for the marinade! But since there's a prepped ready-to-cook version, I'm totally game to try it!
For now I don't have much to do by way of online courses, I think I'll take a break for a bit till I can sort out this mother mess. We discussed getting her back on alprazolam to keep her calm. I think that's just the best option for now. My boss is thinking we might get a second opinion at another hospital, but he's doing that more to confirm that there is NO other option that hasn't been thought of rather than to try and find a different solution.
Currently mum is on an alternate day confusion/agitation incidence schedule. She's fine one day, bad the next. Rinse and repeat. He suggested giving her a pill every night with dinner so that she doesn't even have a chance to get riled up and then have to be calmed down. It's a really low dose and at her age, probably the best option for everyone as there seems to be no other medicine class that works on her (or works without unwanted side effects like somnambulism, incontinence, diarrhoea etc).
This up down situation happened just after we made a plan to spend the night across the border at the beginning of next month. I was afraid that this tiny escape, too, would be impossible to pull off, never mind an actual holiday. But in some strange turn of luck my brother has agreed to mum-sit while I'm away for the night. I told him if she's fine and behaves, he doesn't need to stay the night cos our caregiver will be ok to handle her. However if she's in a mood then it's best a family member be around to console and cajole her, as she sometimes displays hostile/ aggressive behaviour towards our caregiver.
Le Sigh.
Anyway, that's the update for now, things are moving... plans are being made, and I'm trying to reclaim some of my life, some days more successfully than others.
Oh, and I snuck BIKSS in last night for a session of after-3-whole-months sex! Has it been that long? he asked. Yes. It has. It has indeed.
