Well I haven’t posted in a few days and thought I should get into gear.
I was fairly sick Saturday and ended up taking a 4hr nap because I felt so horrible. I hate getting sick when I have things to do like laundry but oh well. The rest time seemed to pay off because I was feeling loads better by Sunday with only a slight stuffy nose. Today I’m great so hopefully I won’t get it again. Anyway, I’ve been meaning to post some cat pictures but they don’t like to stay still very often.
and yes that is chinese take out in that bag. I wasn’t up to cooking while sick and Nathan had work so he picked up some soup for me.
What a nice picture of the computer boxes that we have in our place. But I don’t feel so annoyed since we just put our computers together a couple of weeks ago so they’ll probably make it out into the recycling bin soon.
Anyway, those are our girls…you know I do think it was fate that brought us our kitties because we spent about 2 months trying to find the right kitties. I wanted boys but Nathan was really into girls for some reason even though he’s had a lot of boy cats in his life. He wanted a short-haired grey kitty and I wanted a furry black lion. And we also wanted them to be kittens so they’d be friends and get along. We spent so long searching..we went to at least 3 shelters in Santa Cruz, went to San Jose, Watsonville, and Monterey county. Still we couldn’t find the kitties that we felt connected to and I remember feeling a bit upset. And finally Nathan went by our local Petsmart one evening before coming home from work and spotted our girls. The woman told us they were sisters but a lot of people question if that’s true…well I don’t know but I do know that litters can vary in the way each animal comes out. So we got our kitties in the end and we probably baby them too much but I suppose that’s ok. I did get mad though tonight since one of them knocked down one of my rice balls.
So yes today we decided to head up to San Jose and go to this Japanese dollar store called Daiso. I’ve read from “Lunch in the Box” blog about all these great items that can be found there for bentos and it’s super cheap. So we headed up and it was really bizzare to go to Southeastern San Jose. We don’t head up there often so it’s always a bit weird to see how these people live. Anyway, I haven’t been to a suburb area for a long time and it really freaked me out. I felt like I was in the twilight zone because there were no people around. Sure there were lots of cars but no people on the streets. Well we saw one man working as a sign holder but he was hiding behind it to shield himself from the sun…so we saw his arm. I’m sure there are parts of Santa Cruz like that but I felt like this experience was magnified by the fact that there were large, wide streets with masses of cars which were driving by these corporate stripmalls. I remember growing up and stripmalls weren’t home to Bed Bath & Beyond or Macaroni Grill. The stripmalls tended to be places that had dollar stores, bridal shops, etc..stuff that people needed but not a high traffic customer area I suppose. So it felt weird to see no people but lots of movement plus big corporate shops that I usually think of being near regular malls…maybe I’m just a out of touch with regular U.S. life.
So I was kind of freaked out but we forged ahead on our journey…to find the previously unheard of Eastridge Mall. We eventually found it and noticed that the mall was a bit desolate. The other San Jose malls are a huge deal…sometimes I feel like the malls are the main source of entertainment in San Jose which is ok right? Each to their own or however that saying goes. But this mall seemed so vacant…it was huge but I don’t think the housing is developed enough for it to be a main attraction. It felt creepy getting out of the car because of the endless rows of parking space and the single engine planes that were coming in for landing to the nearby airport.
We walked into the mall and looked at the map and there was no Daiso. Frowning, we turned around and started looping around the mall in hopes of finding a Daiso that might be on the outer part of the mall…maybe it was a little island of it’s own? We didn’t know. We looked on Nathan’s iphone to look for the place and we were lost…we spent about 30 minutes going in circles thinking we might have missed the dollar store. Eventually I decided that enough was enough and that we were going to 411 the place. Turns out the Daiso was in the mall. Yup it seems the mall didn’t bother updating all the maps and figured that maybe the local shoppers would know where to find the place.
So we headed in and finally entered Daiso. I read that this location is actually quite small for most Daiso spaces probably because it’s located in a mall. But the place was pretty great…I got some plastic vegetable steamers so that I don’t have to heat a quart or 2 of water for a few pieces of broccoli for Nathan’s lunch. We bought chopsticks, travel forks with cases, a triangualr rice mold, pill boxes, a hand held mirror, and some other small items. We spent under 30 dollars which I think is pretty decent for all the stuff be bought…oh and I got a Fish Grill, but not for cooking fishies.
We headed back and had some In-N-Out food…Grilled cheese and fries…oh so yummy. Although I did get a sodium headache from the food but it was worth it since we only go there a few times a year. Headed back over the hill and saw lots of dead animals and 2 dead deer. It’s always a bit sad to see the animals especially if they are small since they tend to not be whole at that point. I (and I think Nathan would agree) that we need better mass transportation in the U.S. for reasons of lower emissions, energy costs, sense of community, and to lower animal deaths. I know that many feel that we should help humans before we help animals but I think we should do both at the same time. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice one for the other espeically since I think all life is important for the world in terms of maintaining healthy ecosystems. I haven’t read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair for awhile but I do remember that he discusses socioeconomic, political, and animal injustice. And I know that hitting a deer and cruelly slaughtering animals seem different but I think they are very much the same thing. We are so far removed from nature and animals that we often don’t think twice about how these animals live. Even pets have become a commodity since we carry them around like dolls or breed them for physical appearance rather than usefulness. For me, it’s not so much about eating animals but rather how we treat them beforehand. I love listening to the sea lions at night and I remember walking by deer families when I was a student. I suppose I just wish to remember that they have as much right to live as we do and we should strive to protect all life when we can. I’m not perfect and I know I eat cheese every now and then, but I do try. And I’m not saying I’m better than others for not eating meat but rather pointing out that I think we need to continue to care and think about those who don’t have voices. Another point that I’d like make though is that I think how I feel mainly pertains to the first world because most of us aren’t farmers or aren’t working in poor working conditions. Again, I think we need to remember how we rely on animals (for food, entertainment, love, spiritual connections, etc) in a modern/postmodern nation since we are no longer connected to their deaths regardless of the reasons for those deaths. I hope that didn’t sound like I was on a soapbox…but I’m sure it does. I think human and ecological rights are just as vaild as animal rights though so I hope I don’t offend anyone with this post.
Anyway, I made some rice balls when I came home. I made two Yaki Onigiri which are rice balls that are grilled and I brushed them with some soy sauce. They turned out tasty but I think I should grill them longer next time to be more crispy. The other ones are small rice balls in the shape of a bunny and a bear..the one with longer ears is the bunny. It’s hard to tell from the pictures but maybe you’ll be able to tell the difference.
Maybe next time I’ll cut some nori and give the bunnies whiskers and put two seeds for the eyes. But they were yummy so they served their main purpose. Now I feel bad about this post because I’m eating rice bunnies, but really I just like them because they’re cute and not because they’re supposed to look like bunnies…oh well.
::update:: And while re-reading this I feel really hypocritcal for going off about the whole pet thing in terms of appearence when we wanted cats that looked a certain way. So I’m sure I should be slammed for that but to defend my post our kitties were abandoned/homeless and we only wanted kitties that were abandoned because many places end up putting cats to sleep because they don’t have the space. And again I recognize that we could have adopted older cats which are usually the ones that get put to sleep since most people want kittens. It’s hard to justify this post now that I’ve re-read it but I would like to say that we didn’t just want those physical appearences for aesthetic reasons alone…we’ve both had ties to those sorts of cats in the past and I suppose we wanted to remember those past cats that we lost while knowing that these kittens had their own identities and backgrounds and would bring us joy. So again I stick to what I said earlier in that I didn’t want to sound like I was on a soapbox…I was just thinking and that of course I have my own faults and contridictions which came out clearly in this post.
