just spent a good 2 hrs preparing dinner and trying out a new baked salmon recipe =P also ended up having so much (rich) food to myself that my landlady couldn't help remarking, "you're having quite a gourmet dinner there.... is it your birthday or something?" haha. that's prob cos i dun usually cook very fancy stuff and can easily whip up something (i myself find) edible in 30 min or so... =P i've been pretty adventurous with my meals the past few days... really want to make chawan mushi one day... unfortunately fancy home-cooked dinners take up time and money... =(

Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, authors of a new biography on Mao, will be at Berkeley tmr evening! (ok dun think it's that NEW; it's new in the sense that it only hit the stores in the US prob a couple of weeks ago) Here are the details, if anyone's interested. think the name 'Jung Chang' should be pretty familiar to many ppl, cos she's the author of Wild Swans (a novel that was pretty popular about 7 yrs ago and which seemed like a must-read novel for many RGS girls then... it was on my reading list some time ago too but cos it was like four five hundred pages long i never got down to reading it... =P) anyway this new biography is apparently very controversial, for painting (according to critics) an overwhelmingly negative picture of Mao... the general take was that it's well-researched, yet it's such a shame that the authors (once again, according to 3 reviews i came across) seemed only bent on using all these documents to convince their readers that Mao was 100% megalomaniac, discounting whatever notable achievements he did also make... doubt i'll hav time to read it myself, but anyhow, it should be interesting to sit in the session tmr. =)