Happy New Year!

5 months between posts is probably not the best for keeping an audience.. oh well!

Ina and I have enjoyed the past 4 months, grown closer to eachother and learned a lot about eachother as well.

A strange thing happened this past Monday that I thought I'd blog about. Ina had gone out for BSF for the evening, like she does every Monday and I was all set for her to go so that I could play some PS3, which I hadn't touched since some time last year.

I was all excited as she left so I could get in some gaming time. Only instead of playing games, I sat and watched TV. Then I moped around a bit and realized I had no desire to play games at all. None. As I watched television, I found myself glancing at the clock everyone 5 minutes, wondering when my wife would come home.

2 favorites thus far

The 2 most favorite gifts that we received for our wedding are probably two of the most unpractical gifts people could give us.

The first one was the Ice Cream Maker. When we opened the box, Ina gave me this look, like a "not again". Apparently she'd received one before. But we tried it out and the next thing we knew, we were making our own ice cream or frozen yogurt once every couple of weeks. We've made great use of it, making things like Blueberry Frozen Yogurt, Bailey's Chocolate Ice Cream, and Green Tea Ice Cream.

The second one came recently, the Wii Fit. Wii Fit comes with a balance board and works kind of like a step aerobics block mixed in with a yoga mat. There are tons of exercises and we probably haven't even scratched the surface in terms of unlocking all the various exercises, but so far we are getting pretty consistent exercise from it.

We've found that both gifts give us a lot of joy and fun in our lives.

Of course, the "real" gift we've used the most is the Henckels' knife set. I love that thing..

Open house

One thing I remember from childhood was that my parents loved to look at Open Houses. We'd drive around aimlessly looking for signs and when we spotted one, we'd almost always go in. Personally I was never a huge fan of open houses. I knew my parents had absolutely no intention of buying the homes, let alone even move. But there we were, going from house to house just for the fun of it. As I got older I appreciated it more, but I still felt like it was a waste of time.

Ina and I have been looking at open houses the last few weeks as we make what we feel are necessary arrangements to start a family. I have to admit that looking at other peoples' homes is a lot of fun! We do the exact same thing, pick an area we wouldn't mind living in, and look for signs. It's so much fun..

For me the biggest criteria has been having a 2 car garage, a large kitchen with tons of counter space, and of course I'm always looking for a house with a good living room or basement that is perfectly perfectly for a home theatre. For Ina it's more about location, location, location. We both want to have at least 3 bedrooms and I prefer having 3 or more bathrooms.

Both of us also look at how much renovations the house would require, since we both feel these should be factored into the cost of the home.

I've been having a ball looking at homes.

Mario Kart Wii

Over the past two weeks, Ina and I have spent on average 30-45 minutes every day playing Mario Kart Wii. We usually play in Versus mode so that there are 12 racers - me, Ina and 10 computer controller characters. We've also tried playing online, which I'll get to later.

I think what bugs me the most about the Wii but also what makes it so attractive to non-gamers, is that Wii games put everyone on even ground. Even after years of experience playing Mario Kart 64 (N64) and Mario Kart: Double Dash (Game Cube), Ina can beat me in Mario Kart Wii. It frustrates me to no end, and I often find myself angry, mostly at myself for not being able to beat her -- although I often take it out on her.

I'm the gamer, therefore I'm *supposed* to win. It's an expectation -- a matter of principle. So when I try to win and I don't, I get pissed off pretty easily. I find it actually a little comical how worked up I can get over a silly game like this. I have to keep reminding myself that this game is designed for non-gamers. And yet often I'll look at the map and notice how far ahead Ina is that there is no way to catch up, and I will get extremely pissed off and jealous instead of just feeling lucky that my wife is playing video games with me.

And I guess at the end of the day, that's really what I should be grateful for.

Where's the sriracha?

First of all I just want to say I'm no chef. I enjoy cooking a lot, but if you asked me what I could make I couldn't tell you. Living alone for the last 5 years, I've made an assortment of things, some were good, many were bad. There are only a handful of dishes that I can honestly remember what I put in them and that is more likely due to several failed attempts that were ingrained into my memory. What I did have though, was a collection of ingredients and tools with which I used to cook with.

One thing I've definitely taken for granted is living above a Loblaws. It allowed me to get anything I was missing at any given time. All I had to do was put on some pants and run down to the store to get it. Now getting dressed is the least of my worries.

Due to Ina traveling a lot for work and not doing a lot of cooking, she is missing a lot of things that I've taken for granted over the years. I never thought to add these items to our gift registry because I just assumed she already had it. She lives like a bachelor who rarely ate at home and went out a lot. The state of her kitchen is similar to my days prior to when I stopped playing World of Warcraft.

For example, we don't have a butcher's knife. I'm talking about the bread-n-butter big chef knife, the one that when you walk into any chinese family's kitchen and yell "DAO!", that's the knife they hand you. Most cooking shows you will see (especially chinese ones), the chef uses one knife for everything -- for cutting vegetables, slicing meat, fileting a fish, mincing garlic, even using it to lift ingredients from the cutting board (we'll get to that later) into your mixing bowl or wok/pot. We don't have one.

Another item I was surprised we didn't have was a decent sized cutting board. A few nights ago Ina and I were cooking together and I had to chop up some broccoli so I asked her for the cutting board. She handed me a plastic board the size of a regular sheet of paper. It had a wide groove "moat" all around the edge which made the actually chopping area about the size of an index card. I appreciate that the groove helps catch juices and blood, but at this size, that should be the least of your worries. Okay, I'm exaggerating but you get the point. Back at my old place we had two cutting boards and the smaller one is about 3 times the size of this one.

By the title of my post, I'm sure you know what's next.. SRIRACHA! My brother and I discovered sriracha about 2 years ago.. and by discover I mean we cooked with it, put it on everything including hot dogs and burgers, all meats really, pastas, etc.

Other missing staple ingredients: general herbs (bay leaves, basil, thyme, rosemary), butter (not even alternatives!), ketchup, corn starch, fresh garlic.

"I'll provide the sun"

Ina and I couldn't have imagined things going better than they did during our wedding day on May 17, 2008. Pastor Victor told us during marriage counseling that if we got 80% of it right, we should call ourselves lucky. I felt like we were close to 99%.

I don't know how many people were helping us pray for sun for our special day, but God was listening. The day started out gray and looked like it was going to thunderstorm at some point. The weather network was forecasting rain as well. After the ceremony, we piled into the limousine and headed towards our photo location near the Bluffs. It looked like it was going to start pouring any minute now so we had the photographers on speed-dial so we could change to an indoor location quickly.

When no rain came, we continued to the park. As we pulled up, the sun started to peak out from the clouds, and the next thing we knew, the skies opened up and it was blue skies and sunny. It was an amazing sight, even the photographers were astonished.

Perhaps the only hitch for the entire day was that our limousine's battery died and half of us had to hitch a ride to the restaurant in the photographer's minivan.

The entire day was nerve-racking for me because of my stage fright, the morning I was nervous wreck because I was worried that I'd screw up the vows. But it actually worked out great. I did them so well that people thought I had memorized them -- in fact Victor was actually holding up the script for us to read. Then for the rest of the day had me worried about the thank-you speech.

But the evening went nearly perfect. We had a wonderful (and exhausting) time. The games we played were fun and memorable, and we hope that everyone else had as much fun as we did. I got my 'fake smile' down to an art. My jaw was killing me by the end of the night from all the pictures, but it was all worth it.