5 Things About Me

I've been tagged for a meme by The Lone Beader to state 5 things about me so here goes:

1. I'm a recovering compulsive planner and control freak. Case in point: For my NYC trip with my cousin A in the spring of 2005, I read up on restaurants to dine in, museums and art galleries to visit and plays/musicals to go see and compiled detailed spreadsheets for review. After making my choices, I called ahead to book tables or reserved online on OpenTable.com and bought tickets to our shows online. To keep track of it all, I made up a colour-coded Master Schedule of our 5 days and 4 nights broken up in hourly increments - yellow for sights, green for dining, pink for entertainment and orange for to-do's. Yes, I have a problem. But I'm working on it. (The boy actually thinks I'm laidback!)

2. If there was one food staple I could not live without, it's rice. Maybe it's because I'm Chinese and that's what I've eaten at meal times for much of my life, but it's so versatile if you think about it - it can be eaten plain or fried up in infinite ways. It can be made up in congee or in a dessert (black glutinous rice with coconut milk is one of my favourites!) and it can be served sticky or wrapped in lotus leaves (my aunt makes the best sticky rice ever!) It's divine when steamed with coconut milk and so good in sushi...yum. And that's just skimming the surface of the Asian methods of preparing rice. There's risotto, another favourite...and the many different types of rice - there's long grain and short grain, there's brown rice, basmati rice, jasmine rice, arborio rice....the list just goes on and on.

3. I had to change my Chinese name last year just before I bought my condo because my superstitious mother had a feng shui master friend of hers do a reading for me. As a fire dragon, my name was entirely inappropriate because there was too much fire in it and changing my name to something softer is supposed to have an affect on my personality and luck in love. Ya right. I had a choice of 3 new names to choose from so I picked the one that sounded the least country bumpkin to my ears - the bonus is that the Chinese character is easier than the original. Aside from the name change though, I had to find a condo that met a seemingly impossible combination of requirements, one of which was that it must not face west. Why, you may ask? Too much fire. I had many an argument with my mother about how crazy it was but I'm still enough of my mother's daughter that I couldn't completely go against her wishes. In the end, I was able to find a floor plan that met all the requirements to a T...thankfully, it was in short order too.

4. I majored in Economics in university but didn't like it at all. If I could have, I would have switched to History instead because I love to research and write papers. Some people dread them, but me? I'd take a paper ANY DAY! If only the upper-year courses I wanted to take in European history had been offered...but they weren't so an Economics major I remained.

5. I used to read cheesy Harlequin romances like they were going out of style. I'd come home for the weekend from university with my first stop being the library where I'd pick up a dozen paperbacks. I'd then go home and settle in for the weekend. Not a single call to my friends. I'd spend the weekend in my PJs devouring 4 or 5 in succession, reading into the early morning hours and then head back to school recharged and refreshed.

I'm now supposed to send it to 5 blog friends but I don't have any to send it to - the blogs I frequent on a regular basis don't often have a comment facility so this is where I fail. : ( This was fun though! I do love these things. : )