KEEP IT IN THE PHAMLY

If you know me and you probably don’t because if you did you wouldn’t waste your precious time on this Earth reading my stupid blog. You'd also know that I am always doing something even when I’m doing nothing. Be it word games, puzzles, typing on my macbook, writing in an actual notebook, drawing, jotting, plotting, planning… The one and only time I can sit still is when I do my nails.

The power of vanity never ceases to amaze me. Women endure so much pain and discomfort to make themselves feel pampered and babin’. There’s plucking, waxing, shaving, regrowth, lasers, in-growns and soooo many painful tangles at the hairdressers; none of this makes me bat a well-lined, mascaraed and shadowed eyelid yet painting my nails has me squirming like a kid busting for the toilet while Dad’s taking an epic poo.

My gosh! It hurts me sooo much to sit still and do nothing. Actually, I’m doing something – I’m typing out this blog post while my nails dry but I did give ‘em a 15 minute grace period (epic length in Jade-time) and touch-typing keeps the fingers apart so one could argue it’s better for me to be typing than failing to sit still.
Maybelline New York’s ‘Mini-Colorama’ range is my fave new varnish at the moment. Not only does it come in mini-size at a mini-price so you use it all before it gets gluggy and icky, the range has a plethora of bright or chic or prissy or tough colours so there’s something for every mood! It also glides on really nicely so even primary school failures like me can colour inside the lines.

If I make you spring rolls, it means that I really like you because it’s a laborious task to make Mum Pham’s deliciously good looking and tasting spring rolls. There’s the finely chopping of everything in the mix, the delicate layered hand-rolling of every single spring roll, the frying and then washing herbs, lettuce, boiling noodle, pickling carrots, chopping cucumber and making dipping sauce.
Clearly, I don’t like you very much because I couldn’t be bothered making spring rolls just so I can take photos for my blog readers. Instead these are some photos of my spring rolls scavenged from my friends’ Facebook photos.

Ingredients:

• Cooking oil for frying
• 2 x packs of Tyj Spring Roll pastry
• 1 x large onion or 2 x small onions
• 2-3 carrots
• 1 x sweet potato
• 1 x Yuccca root – I use the frozen ones because half the Yucca is usually enough starchiness, but you can use fresh too. It’s messier though.
• 1 x packet 85g dried Viet black mushroom
• 1 x can of water chestnut
• 1 x pack pre-fried tofu (or ground pork if you’re a meat eater)
• 1 x pack glass noodle
• 2 x eggs

Making the spring roll filling: The smaller you chop filling ingredients, the better! Throw it all into a giant mixing bowl or giant pot as you:

• Finely dice the onion
• Shred the carrots, sweet potato and Yucca (you have no idea how much I LURVE my food processor for this step – it used to take me three hours to make the filling, now it takes me 1)
• Soak the dried black mushroom in water for 10mins until soft then finely chop
• Soak the glass noodles (same water is fine) just to soften it a tiny bit, which makes cutting into 2cm pieces with scissors easier. Or you can cut it while it’s hard and dry and see how much you can get in the bowl ‘cause most of it will go flying
• Chop the water chestnut into 2cm x 0.5cm long bits – it’s labourious but this delicious chestnut gives the spring roll a real crunch that makes it worth it
• Slice the pre-fried tofu into the same size bits as the water chestnut
• Crack in some black pepper
• Crack in two egg yolks on top of that - keep the egg white to seal spring roll pastry later
• Dig in with your hands and mix it all together!

Now roll the spring roll or ‘spinner roll’ as my niece likes to call it. I like to trick my friends into coming over early to be part of the Phamly fun, sitting around rolling together. Really, it’s just manual labour. This video is the closest I could find to my method of rolling - don't  forget to use the egg white to seal!
The last step is to fry the spring rolls. The oil depth should be just a little less than the depth of a spring roll so that they don’t float about in the oil and you can line them up neatly. Cook until the pastry is golden brown then take out and put on paper towel or baking rack to get rid of some of the oil.

Spring rolls can be a picnic or party snack on its own or a dinner feast served with rice vermicelli noodles, bean sprouts, pickled carrots, chopped cucumber, mixed Viet herbs and plenty of Viet lettuce for rolling. Dip in Mum Pham’s delicious fish sauce mix.

Amy Winehouse (may she and her unique flair rest in peace) and I have not much in common. I can't sing to save my life, I'm generally alcohol and drug free and I prefer to wear clothes in public. It's a good thing Amy likes to appear topless in paparazzi photos otherwise I wouldn't know that we have my fave Elle Macpherson Intimates Sheer Ribbons Contour Bra in common, as seen on Ms. Winehouse in this photo from perezhilton.com:
At first when I realised I’d accidentally published my bra collection on the interweb in my milk crate wardrobe post, the prude in me was mortified. Then I remembered I love my bras and this blog is about things I love so decided I should dedicate a whole entire post to them.
I have tiny boobs. Almost non-existent, really. I’ve struggled through many years with the most ill fitting and uncomfortable bras because of this. Then one day I was watching True Blood when Jason Stackhouse is fooling around with the trippy hippy Amy chick and I noticed her bra. It was designed for deep neckline tops so really cupped her breasts and I had an Oprah ‘aha!’ moment - I need to get me one of those! Thank you TV, you teach me everything I know.
I was already a fan of Elle McPherson Intimates because her padded bra range was such good quality so I went a-hunting in Myers – yes, people, remember the days when we used to shop in physical stores and paid cash or credit, not via paypal? Oh, the effort. But it was worth it because I discovered her amazingly comfortable Intimates Contour Bra range. I started with the black (modeled by Amy Winehouse), added a couple more blacks, added a pink/grey, added a nude, then added a pink/cream then a teal/white and I probably should stop adding to my bra collection now but I still wander through Myer’s lingerie section every few months hoping for a new colourway.

I don't have time to sit down and pretend like I know how to read these days. Good thing Acclaim Magazine is choc-full of pretty pictures to look at. I managed to get my mits on the new issue before it hits news agencies this week (file that under perks of the day job) and I've been "reading" all weekend.

This morning, I found out my oldest friend's father passed away. Karl lives in my memory as the really tall man (possibly because I was really short as a 6 year old) who took B and me for ice cream on the way home from school whenever I went over to play.

He'll also live on in my parents' memory because the one time they walked me to B's house for her birthday, I took them in the opposite direction towards the school then down to the ice cream shop before circling back to B's house 'cause Karl's route was the only one I remembered.

Thanks to Karl and his delicious ice cream treats, Mum and Dad Pham thought I was a dumbass for many years of my childhood.

Rest in peace.

It’s been nearly three years since I’ve seen my friend who the Germans call ‘Trouser’ so when we planned a catch up dinner out then tasty teas at mine I was mightily embarrassed by the state of my bedroom and did a quick clean up.
The upside of letting your room become a disaster zone is you get to crawl into bed earlier. The downside is you can’t find anything you want the next morning while you’re rushing to get to work. Every time I clean I tell myself I’ll never let it get this messy again. Now I have found a reason to live in a pig sty.
In my pre-Trouser clean up, I came across a cougar head necklace I had completely forgotten I’d bought two months ago! Yippee! I should be concerned about my whoppingly bad memory but, um, what was I talking about? Oh, the necklace – yeah, check it out! Bought online from Dragonfly By Emma.

Apart from my tendency to fall on my face rather than land on my feet, I am very cat-like for a human being. I communicate with telepathy then don’t understand why idiots don’t do my bidding, I sometimes head-butt people as a sign of affection but the main cat trait I have is I’m easily distracted by - ‘Ooh! Something shiny!’
When my beloved sequin shoes from Japan finally carked it I just had to get a new shiny black pair or my life would be over. Converse had a sequin range that I’d been admiring for a several months but their shoes pinch my wide feet so it was eBay to the rescue!
I found the perfect glitter meets punk shoes at iAmTrend ebay store and the great part is I don't cut my dopey hands on the sharp sequins. The glitter feels sandpapery so I like to think of it as hand exfoliation every time I clumsily rub against it. I got a pair in black, which I call my Michael Jackson shoes ‘cause they glitter like his jacket in the famous live Billy Jean performance. And a silver pair, which I call my space boots because a Tibetan man once saw me in them and said, ‘You look like you are from space.’ And I said, ‘Huh?’ and he said, ‘Your clothes – beautiful.’ And I said, ‘Thanks!’

It’s none of my business who my housemate brings home for a one night stand, except when that one night stand walks into my room butt naked at 4.30am in the morning and thinks it’s hilarious that she interrupted my favourite kind of sleep - Friday night sleep after a week of early wake up calls - then it does become my business.
When visiting someone’s home for a sexual rendezvous, the younger generations seem to have lost all sense of modesty and respect. Maybe it’s because of all the graphic sex scenes and casual nudity on television, in movies and on the Internet. Reality is a bit different to TV so I thought I’d write a few basic guidelines for the younglings to follow:

1. Close the front door behind you when you enter - it’s common sense
2. Cover up when leaving your fuck buddy’s bedroom - it’s modest
3. Learn the difference between left and right so you can find the bathroom
4. Don’t walk into other housemates' bedrooms butt naked - it’s rude
5. Don't walk into other housemates' bedrooms butt naked twice - it's really rude
6. Don’t wake all the housemates up then laugh about waking them up - it’s disrespectful
7. If you’ve failed to do all of the above it's best to sneak out unseen the next day

In retrospect, it was really our fault for not making our linearly designed house easier to navigate - the hallway does go in two directions after all (up/down). In my follow up Sharehouse Sex Etiquette (For Housemates) post, I will suggest housemates put printed photos of their heads on bedroom doors and a picture of a toilet on the toilet door to help random sex partners find their way.

At least the pig shaped pencil sharpener looks cute smiling up from her desk.

Joshua Garden from Grafton Primary designed my head tattoo. It’s two infinities that touch to form two hearts. To me the symbol means ‘infinite love’ – yup, what a tough tatt to have on your head – but I hesitated because it looks similar to 88, which equals HH, which equals Hail Hitler. Then I realised no one would be dumb enough to mistake me for a neo-Nazi skinhead so I inked my infinite love. It didn’t bring me much love when I went home to Brisbane.

Mum Pham slapped my face in a rage. Later on, when she could speak again she explained it was the shaved head she hated, not the tattoo. Dad Pham loved that I was expressing myself, though later on he told me ‘infinite love’ cannot exist because the only a vacuum of nothingness can be infinite as soon as you put a quantitative element like love to it, it is no longer infinite. I said the tattoo is forever. He said, you’ll die one day and the tattoo will rot and end with your body. Thanks Dad Pham.