Baltimore eating, summer reading, and Derrick the driver

I have to be back on campus starting this afternoon. But the last couple of weeks have been great. I took a wonderful trip to Baltimore and New York. Loved being back on the East Coast and seeing so many good friends. I also met up with my old boss, who is now the head of news at NPR, and got a cool tour of the studio. Watched as Lakshmi Singh (in a very casual flowy button-down blouse) gave the 4 p.m. news roundup.

The trip made me consider expanding my job search outside LA. New York would be great, in part because it would allow me to see my hairdresser Sunny in Chinatown on a regular basis. He is from Hong Kong and his English is atrocious, but he has flair. Actually, he is Liz's hairdresser since college days but I have adopted him as well. Here we are:

The other highlight of my trip was a dinner with Brent at the Charleston Restaurant in Baltimore. For all my foodie-ness, this was my first fine dining experience. The Charleston's chef, Cindy Wolf, offers a flexible tasting menu, in that you choose the number of courses you want and then you choose your courses from a seasonal list.

My most delicious course was the grilled sea scallop on a bed of pureed sweet potato. It was a really smart combination of flavors and textures: A sprinkling of toasted pine nuts and bacon for salt and crunch, and a smooth lemon-butter sauce for a bit of tartness.

Even though this was a world-class restaurant, there were lots of small homey touches to make you feel very pampered: Small glasses of champagne (3 oz) for people who want to celebrate just a little bit; a complimentary dessert course; free valet parking; and a staff that treats guests like gold. It was the best dining-out experience I've had in my life.

Sadly, I didn't finish much of my summer reading list. This is how far I got:

- I finished about two-thirds of Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, which was as much as I could take. See my previous critique.

- I read all of Horse Sense: The Key to Success is Finding a Horse to Ride, which is a bit dated (1991) but still contains some useful tips. The biggest lesson I took away is that you shouldn't bet just on yourself and your innate talents or ambition, but rather on other people and on good ideas when you're lucky enough to come across them. Planning to Xerox one of the chapters for my little bro, who has a tendency to want to do it all himself.

- I am a few pages into The World is Flat, but it's not as interesting as I thought it would be - perhaps because I am a year or two late in getting to it. A lot of what Friedman talks about regarding the information age and outsourcing has already become commonplace thinking (in part thanks to him, I'm sure), so it's very much like reading a recap.

In other news, Derrick the delivery driver-rapper disappeared a few weeks ago and I have been meaning to write an update on him. He didn't pick up his last paycheck, so we were concerned that something may have happened to him. But then it appeared that he sold his Nextel phone (a pricey one), so that was slightly reassuring as it was at least a sign of life.

I even searched for his name in the Times to see if he turned up in any unfortunate news reports - but I forgot that this isn't Baltimore. We don't have a crime blotter here, and the city's so big that it would be a 1 in 10 million shot that he would turn up in the paper. I thought about suggesting that we report him as a missing person or something, but then again he doesn't seem like the type who would appreciate that.

R.I.P. good Szechuan restaurants

My family has a handful of Chinese restaurants that we always go to. They are

1) Dumpling House, Temple City
Operators: A Northern Chinese family who lived in Korea
Actual Chinese name: The Home Village

2) Szechuan Express, Monterey Park
Operators: A Szechuanese couple and their sons
Actual Chinese name: Little Szechuan

3) Lu's Garden, San Gabriel
Operators: Taiwanese
Actual Chinese name: Little Lu

4) Oriental Pearl, San Gabriel
Operators: Mainlanders
Actual Chinese name: House of Szechuan Flavors

The Oriental Pearl and Szechuan Express tragically closed their doors recently. A little tribute follows:

The Loh family à table

Mom, Dad, Scott and I sit down at the Oriental Pearl.

Dad [opens menu, pretends to read]: Okay, what do we want to eat?

Scott and me [rolling our eyes]: C'mon, Dad.

Dad: Everybody pick one dish.

Me: Okay, how about salt-and-pepper pork chops?

Dad [snorts]: Don't be a fool.

Mama chuckles, shaking her head at us. Dad waves a waitress over and proceeds to order our habitual menu, refined over time and now as good as set in stone:

• A combination cold plate: Fu qi fei pian (thin slices of beef and tendon, spiced with smuggled Szechuan peppercorns and cilantro), marinated slices of pork tongue, and blanched celery salad
• Twice-cooked pork (the true test of a Szechuan restaurant)
• Mapo tofu (the other true test of a Szechuan restaurant)
• Water-boiled beef (water is a misnomer here, unless water is something that is a deep red color and turns your tongue into a mass of numbness)
• Soup of white fish, pickled greens, and hot peppers
• Stir-fried bitter melon (the only non-spicy dish on the table).

Braindeadedness

I'm almost afraid to put this out there because of what people might think. But I think I should, if only to have a formal record of when I began to lose my mind:

I've always been very forgetful, as a lot of people can attest. However, today I reached a new low. I was checking out my credit card statement online and noticed a weird charge dated earlier this month that I didn't for the life of me remember placing: Days Inn, $65.69. Had a minor freakout --not just because I've never stayed at a Days Inn, but also because I didn't recall traveling anywhere recently.

Considered calling my credit card company and asking for an explanation. Instead, I sat myself down and concentrated. Eventually, I noticed that this hotel charge was made on the same day that I charged my membership for the Leggers running group, and -- sleuth that I am! -- suddenly remembered that I had booked the Days Inn because I needed someplace to crash in Long Beach the night before next month's half-marathon.

The next sad development to this story is that I started looking in my Inbox to find a confirmation of this reservation, and couldn't find it. Mildly freaked out again because I didn't remember where this hotel was located, and thought that might be useful information to have. So I googled Days Inn and Long Beach and called the number to the hotel that came up.

Did they have a reservation under my name? Yes, of course. And as the man read my confirmation number to me, it suddenly occurred to me that I might have cut and pasted the details of this reservation into a note in Outlook, where I sometimes keep important little tidbits of info.

Guess what? I had.

This was a small event in the great scheme of things, but still unsettling. I suddenly had a feeling of being dropped into someone else's life and trying to piece together what she does and where she's supposed to be.

Maybe I should check into a place of rest, somewhere.

Sleeping late and books that suck

Finally settling into vacation mode. This morning, I woke up after 10 am. Yesterday, too. That's very unusual. I am usually up and at 'em around 8 am at the latest, because I can't relax.

Besides sleeping in late, I have been chipping away at the old summer reading list. I think that Starbucks book will be my undoing because it's the first on my list and I can't finish it. I keep looking for nuggets of business insight but I am having a hard time getting past the CEO Howard Schultz's self-congratulatory tone. It's really kind of repulsive.

The ends of chapters are especially bad:

"In daily life, you get so much pressure from friends and family and colleagues, urging you to take the easy way, to follow the prevailing wisdom, that it can be difficult not to simply accept the status quo and do what's expected of you. But when you really believe -- in yourself, in your dream -- you just have to do everything you possibly can to take control and make your vision a reality. No great achievement happens by luck."
....

"At thirty-four, I was at the beginning of a great adventure. What would keep me on track was not the size of my holdings but my heartfelt values and my commitment to building long-term value for our shareholders. Every step of the way, I made it a point to underpromise and overdeliver. In the long run, that's the only way to ensure security in any job."

Oh, and the title is Pour Your Heart Into It.

This is the type of book someone writes when they get on top of the world too young too fast, and no one is giving them honest advice anymore. Not even Dori Jones Yang, who helped the big man write the book. It gave me a pang of regret to note that she is one of my countrywomen, yet couldn't do something to salvage things.

Blessed by cloud cover

I've just returned from an 11-mile run along the beach that was wonderfully free of sunshine. I don't much like the sun. I do realize it gives us food and life, and that most Westerners soak it up every chance they get. But for me, as prone to freckling as I am, the sun is an environmental hazard. I tan in about 5 minutes, and these freckles that people deem so cute are PERMANENT.

To combat the freckling and the unwanted tanning, I wear sunblock every day, SPF 45, even in the winter. The only time I relax that rule is when I leave LA, because the sun doesn't seem to shine quite as harshly elsewhere. My three years in Baltimore were an excellent hiatus for my skin. Even in Taiwan, which is closer to the equator, I can spend a summer and come back paler. Over there, people have the right idea. The women carry umbrellas around to shade themselves from the sun.

Sometimes I'll see a picture of myself as a child, and I'll marvel at the freckle-less face and get sad. I've even gone so far as to get some freckles burned off, years ago. Pretty unpleasant, and it didn't do much good.

Wish that more people in the Western world were anti-sun like me, because then there would be a bigger market for sunblocking technologies. Scientists would design these little clouds that could follow you around and provide a nice spot of shade wherever you go. Or they would invent some kind of permanent sunblock that you could tattoo on or something.

Epilogue: Despite the nice cloud cover and cool temps this morning, I still got a freakin' tan. And probably helped along a couple of as-yet unborn freckles.

Can't relax

It's my first week of vacation now that the internship is over. I should be lolling around the house and doing nothing useful. But here is how my morning went:

1. My landlady's bulldog woke me up with its barking. Bad Bella.

2. I turned on the computer and took stock of the crapload of things I have to do from now through Sunday:

• Go to Kinko's and figure out how to print a giant poster I made for a school club.
• Drive home before Friday afternoon traffic to make it to family dinner with grandma, who is returning to Taiwan tomorrow.
• Do research on Chinese businesspeople I can invite to sit on a conference panel about cultural differences.
• Meet a classmate for dinner to discuss this panel.
• Mail out registration for Long Beach Half Marathon.
• Write a letter of thanks for a school fellowship.
• Accept school loans and e-sign promissory note.
• Drive to Koreatown for a bridesmaid dress fitting.
• Have dinner with the soon-to-be bride and groom.
• Run 11 miles with my running group.
• Figure out where to get brochures printed for the school club.
• Go to school to hang up the poster.
• Possibly get together with high school friends.
• Pay a parking ticket.
• Buy groceries.

3. I took 15 minutes to blog about this, wasting valuable time. Tick tock tick tock

Pumpkins no more

From: Laura Loh
Sent: Fri 9/1/2006 10:20 PM
To: [Company higher-ups]
Subject: No more Smashing Pumpkins

Hi all,

Unfortunately, the band has decided not to continue with our customized meals after this week. Please see the note below. I’ve asked them to give us some honest feedback, so that we can understand what went wrong. Thank you to everyone for a big effort – I know that the kitchen did the best it could on short notice with this unusual request and I am really grateful.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Laura
..........................................
From: Krista [Accountant for the band]
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 12:14 PM
To: Laura Loh; Jared

Subject: RE: Smashing Pumpkins menu for Week of Sept. 4

Hi, Laura.

The band has decided not to continue the meal service with [your company]. We thank you for your services/meals thus far and appreciate all that you have done.

Thank you,
Krista
...........................................
From: Laura Loh
Sent: Friday, September 01, 2006 10:36 AM
To: Jared; Krista
Subject: Smashing Pumpkins menu for Week of Sept. 4

Hi Jared and Krista,

Attached please find next week’s menu for the band. I do hope they’ve been enjoying the food. If there is any feedback we should be aware of, please don’t hesitate to let me know. We’d like to do everything possible to make them happy customers!

Please note our new delivery schedule. We will now be delivering a lunch/dinner package every day instead of twice a week.

There were two reasons for this change:

1) We realized the band’s refrigerator is a bit small to accommodate 3 days’ worth of food at a time
2) It is easier for our kitchen to produce a fresh meal each day, rather than several days’ worth of food that must be kept fresh for more than one day.

As the invoices you’ve received show, the pricing we came up with is $35/day per person, or about $15/person for lunch and $20/person for dinner. The delivery charge is $7.95 and is expected to increase companywide to $9.95 sometime soon. If you have an issue with paying for a daily delivery, please let me know and I can try to arrange something with our billing department.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Best regards,

Laura Loh