Love ACTUALLY is all around

Every Christmas Hannah and I have this cheesy tradition - we watch the movie "Love Actually" starring Hugh Grant. We are not really a big fan of him, but that movie always stir up some emotions in us. It started years ago when I moved to NY alone. I caught this movie on the TV during 2004 Christmas. It was snowing outside, warm in the apartment. I miss my family. Years later, I shared the movie with Hannah, and now it somehow becomes our "tradition" to watch this movie every year.

"Love Actually" has one of the best opening monologues -

"Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaking suspision love actually is all around."

And this morning in the newspaper, once again, we proved that love is actually all around. Scott Jones was comforting his girlfriend, Alexandra Thomas after she was injured when they were overrun by a phalanx of riot police during the ice hockey final riot in Vancouver. This image of the couple kissing quickly spread around the globe!

If you look for it, Love actually is all around. :)

Thought over morning coffee

A thought came up while Hannah and I were having a conservation this morning over coffee....

Why University of Auckland has to right to all our research when we have to pay them to do research? Don't they have to pay us instead?

What a woman!

In order to be more efficient and save money, we usually cook an item to last us for at least a week, and bring it to school for lunch, have it for dinner and anything in between. For the last few weeks, we had American chilli, Penang curry and this week, Hannah cooked Beef stew with drop dumplings.

I have to admit I had my concern whether I would like the dumpling or not when I saw Hannah making it last night. In my mind, as a Chinese, I always envision the best dumpling as having thin skin wrapped around well marinated pork. So you can imagine my surprise when Hannah just prepared a huge bowl of dough and dropped a tablespoon full of dough into the beef stew and called it - dropped dumpling! I was skeptical but again, I was proven wrong! and I am glad!... It was not the most beautiful thing I see in a soup bowl, but it was deceptively delicious!...Beef stew with dropped dumpling - I would recommend you try it :)

And have I told you how amazing this woman is? Hannah is the only "ang-mo" I know who can differentiate the quality of a brand of rice just by looking at the texture and by smelling it! And she can put a few Asians to shame with her excellent skills in using the chopsticks!... well, she couldn't really make great Chinese stir-fry like me :P, but she can make a mean beef stew with dropped dumplings!