My Weekend so far...

Friday Evening: "Aroma Falms"
(otherwise also known as Aurora Farms)
((which actually refers to the Prime Outlet store collection near Aurora))
(((which is a factory outlet thingy)))
((((No, they weren't selling ducks, rejected, defective, or otherwise))))

We were driven there by one of our friendly Marketing Managers, who was also here on training and had a car. But to correctly attribute the impetus behind this trip, I have to point out that it was Pepper's Brand-hungry roomie who 'drove' us all here. She was the one who also insisted that we could only go home after all the shops closed for the day. We got there at 6pm, and we froze there until 9pm. Brrrrrr!

The prime Outlet there, we found, was divided into two sections, the Lake Shops, and the Plaza Shops. The Lake shops surround a frozen lake, inhabited by two great mounds of ice, and some ducks/mallards and geese-like ornithoids.
You can see the two mounds here - created by two stubborn high-sprouting fountains, plus the huddle of frozen boids..


They started honking and quacking when they saw me. I thought I'd disturbed their frosty sleep, until I spotted what looked like gumball machines lining a short section of the lake's fence.
Closer investigation revealed dry bird food, in dispensers. I was struggling to get out suitable coinage when all the birds broke their huddle, and started honk-waddling towards me, wings spread in supplication! Poor frozen birdies! Think I used up $2 in quarters feeding the poor things.... they looked so desperate, and it was too cold for big families to make their way to the outlet. I figure that I was their only meal for that day. Poor things.

After feeding them (and me), I (no, I didn't eat the bird food, I went to Subway, silly!) stumbled over to a nice kitchen/cooking shop where I bought some super-hot cayenne/habanero/jalapeno/chipotle sauce and dry sprinkles... Whooo!


Saturday: Home
Woke up early to go for breakfast at 5th avenue (had yummy lox omelette and bagel), but wandered over to the apartment kitchen first to get some water. Was greeted by an almighty mess. The pic above doesn't do it justice, but it looked terrible. Roomie hadn't cleaned it up since Dinner the night before!!! Thanks man, sheesh!

Had a nice nap in the afternoon, did laundry etc, and then went back to 5th ave for dinner - Corned beef and cabbage:

Quite nice!

Today, Sunday: Asian Market

Had this weird notion to see if I could locate ingredients to make a dinner dish for my supervisor, so I followed Pepper's roomie to the sort of nearby Asian market. Man! That place smells! It wasn't a wet market, but there were all sorts of odours.... meats there looked kinda suspect, so I didn't buy any, but they did have a large collection of preserved/dried asian spices and veggies, and asian seasonings. Even had a few frozen durians...

Came back, and made this, with chunks of a cervelate I bought from a Russian grocer - yummy!

Of Snow Snot and Geysers

Yes, it's still cold. -15 fahrenheit and holding! Earlier this morning, it was -19 with wind chill. Wind has blown away all the clouds, so it's amazingly sunny (and warm-looking, from inside a building).

Here's how cold it is.... Remember some posts back I showed you a geyser/black hole/water fountain? In case you didn't remember, here it is, about a week ago:
Here it was two days ago:
If you're wondering why the photo is so light, you can blame my leaky nose, watering in sympathetic response to the arctic air blowing ever so roughly in my face, up my nose, and into my sinus cavities.

Aaaand, this afternoon:
The ice is slowly creeping in, the fountain now resembles a giant white pimple with free-flowing white pus.


Tonight, Pepper and I are heading to an STC meeting, so hopefully, there'll be some interesting pix of the Pufferbelly and Kent State.

Newsflash: Roomie is rapidly becoming disconcerting. Last night, while chomping noisily on dinner, part two (from a recipe unceremoniously and clumsily ripped off from one of my dinners), he started listening to music on his notebook, using a pair of headphones. Which would have been fine, because I've sorta gotten used to smelling his weird cooking. What made it super-bad was:

• the extremely loud music
• the extremely loud music that I could hear from his headphones, while he had it on
• the extremely goosebump-raising-in-a-bad-way shoulder-rolling-dancing-while-sitting-on-a-chair movement
• the whispered bad yodel-singing he did while listening and gyrating to said music (which, taken out of context, could easily be the soundtrack for a horror movie featuring demonic whispers)
• I was trying to concentrate on watching an episode of CSI: Las Vegas
• He actually asked me what was going on in that episode, in the last 3 minutes.
  

Gee, Thanks.

$*@&%#$&!

there I was, happily digesting my dinner when SCREEE!! SCREEE!! DUUWEEEET!! SCREEE!! DUUWEEEET!! SCREEE!! DUUWEEEET!! SCREEE!! started piercing my eardrums and assaulting my sinus cavities.

Roomie and I started groaning and pulling on warm clothes so that we wouldn't freeze to death outside of a burning building. It's -25 fahrenheit outside...
In case you can' see past the light flare, the police came this time! Gee Whiz! Two firetrucks, two police cars and an ambulance! What now? Thanks for coming so quickly to a fire alarm guys, it's much appreciated.
After the resigned hubbub of disgruntled, frozen firemen grumbling about the cold finally died down, us hapless residents discovered that some resident had his door broken in, or he had broken his door, and the impact, or something set off the fire alarm. Lovely. And this time, the firemen lugged up a hose too. Great. There's always something happening in this building...

Aaand, with all the snow and artic temps we've been having, I thought I would drop by at the company geyser/baby black hole..
As you can see, it's smaller, but still going. I'm surprised. Weather channel sez that 15 minutes out in this weather, you'd get frostbite on exposed skin. No wonder my eyeballs keep tearing.

What is it with this trip?

I've lived in Singapore for almost 2 score years. In that time, I've never, ever had an ambulance or fire truck come screaming up to my doorstep. Well, that's good.

But one should start wondering about things when all one is doing is:

1. Sitting at the table, cheerfully typing in a blog entry and thinking about lunch and shopping.
2. Thinking about the freeze-butt weather and considering thermal points of entry in Parka To Wear Today.
3. Trying to decipher some Eastern European's English translation of a software user manual.

The last thing one would expect is a SCREAMING LOUD DEAFENING SIREN BUSTING YOUR EARDRUMS AND MAKING YOUR ROOMMATE'S MOUTH GAPE OPEN WIDER THAN CAPTAIN AHAB'S WHALE AND SCREECHING OUT this grating siren. Alert readers will remember that the fire alarm incident at my workplace sounded like BREEEE! etc ad nauseum.

Well, this morning's was DOOWEEEETTT! DOOWEEEETTT! DOOWEEEETTT! DOOWEEEETTT! DOOWEEEETTT! DOOWEEEETTT!

After hurriedly grabbing the wallet and coats (it wouldn't do very well for me to escape a burning building only to freeze to death, would it?) we pounded our way down the metal escape route (see, we didn't use the elevators) and finally reaching the ground floor with head swimming (from going round, down the stairs), we made a cautious approach to the front lobby.
This finally arrived, and burly firemen burst calmly into the building, past deafened tenants and a harried-looking building supervisor.

Thankfully, it was just a burst hot water pipe (will I be able to take a hot shower tomorrow morning? Stay tuned...) and not a fire. All the same, it took the fireguys so long to reset the lifts that Pepper and I decided to puff and wheeze back to the apartments to get our stuff, for the afternoon's shopping trip. Man, what a day.

On the bright side, Pepper and I waddled over to the Deli for some hot breakfast..

Nothing like a hot tasty breakfast after braving -4 fahrenheit temps! The friendly waitress, after learning that we were stupid enough to walk there, summed it up nicely.. "Are you guys crazy?"

A windblown blogger..

..is what I am. Temps today for my part of Ohio were (at 7am) 3 fahrenheit. At 8, it was 12. But with wind chill, close to zero. And next week, without wind chill, forecasts are for lows of -4, with wind chill, -15 BRRRR!

Although you wouldn't be able to guess this from these views..
What you see above is a 200 year old stone church, gradually being enfolded by the big city.
Below is a view of the city, from around the corner..
What you can't see are the snow powder-devils whirling around on the sidewalk. It was so windy, my eyeballs dried out and starting freezing.. OW!

In case you were wondering what I was doing downtown, allow me to spin the chronometer back to this morning...


Whoo Hoo! A Cleveland Tour, in a comfy Stretch Limo, sponsored by Rockwell. How lovely!
Because our tour vehicle was a limo, most of what I was able to see out of foggy windows was sidewalk, storefronts, bundled legs, shopping bags, road, construction sites and snowblown cars, all lovingly enunciated and elocuted by our tour guide.

We did manage to escape from our rolling prison though. One such stop was the Cleveland Rock n Roll museum, where we saw props from rock concerts, thoughtfully discard..um donated by Rock artistes such as this food item:
and this disco device:
Interesting diversion, but that's it. Oh, but this marks the 2nd time I have visited an I.M. Pei building, the first being the Lourve.. see the resemblance here?

After a really average lunch (with a weird rendition of beef horfun), the tour ended. Inspired by our whirlwind tour of Cleveland, three of us decided to go visit the Cleveland Museum of Art.

That well-intentioned move was doomed from the start. Aside from the gale-force winds scraping snowflakes into the car's paint job, almost everything at the museum was closed!! They are gearing up for the Monet exhibit later this month, apparently. So what did we do? Followed our Singaporean indoctrination of course! We shopped! I bought a post card, maggie-nets and a battering ram.

This greeted us outside the gift shop.
After a long, cold day, what better food to have than a nice carbo-ey soup?!
If you're thinking it looks like a steel doggy bowl, you're right! Only $2, it's large enough to house soup, pasta, veggies and meat. Yummy slurpy hot stuff on a freezing day!

Who Moved the Arctic?

Ice Burger with economy-sized Oreo-stuffingtopped Hostessvtwinkies..


OK, with that out of the way, let me just tell all y'all that I AM FEELING COLD!
For those of you who know me, you know it's darned cold when I say it's cold! It's 12 fahrenheit, and probably near zero with the wind chill factor! Brrr! There's so much wind, patches of grass are bare - they had two feet of snow blown off! Trudging my way from apartment to dinner, I observe climatic conditions normally seen from the sunny comfort of my TV. The chill wind cuts right through my thick jeans, creeping painfully freezing tendrils into the thermal cracks of my corporate parka and drying folds of neck fat.

After losing feeling in me hands and variously miscellaneous parts of my lardy anatomy, pepperdemon, FragrantRoomie and I scurried our way toward the 5th Avenue deli near Eastgate...

Friday: All you can eat Beer Battered Cod! Juicy chunks of Cod, painstakingly bashed with premium cans of beer and lovingly tenderized by rolling bottles of ButtVisor; yummy hot food rewarding butt-frozen explorers, along with 5th Avenue's warm, inviting hospitality.

More pics to follow!

My Toes are frozen

Ice cream cone, marshmallow topped cupcake, or stone seat meringue?:
An MNC's On-premises geo-psychologically-engineered geyser "new faithful", fallen micro-mini-"Honey I shrunk the Galactic artifact" underwater blackhole, or the early beginnings of Hidero-Fontaine Lollipop Nebula in its star-cradle?

Spoor-trail of: 1) an unknown quadrupedal Abomininumamlnemul Snowman 2) chemically snot-fused-pseudo-siamese-twinned snow bunnies wearing 36 inch platform boots or 3)the U.S. government's new All-Terrain boot-covered Sno-Unicycle on field trials?
No matter what your choice, or what you think the answers are, it's painfully obvious that
Ohio got hit by a whole lot of snow, and temperatures are plummeting closer and closer to zero fahrenheit! It's still a fun experience, but I have to devote more and more brain power to make sure my ears or toes don't just freeze and drop off.

Perversely, the office thermostat is out of whack. Temps in the office are worthy of dry sauna. So much so that I have to take freeze breaks. While pepperdemon takes a nicotine break, I go out and infuse my chinky-pores with cold, dry Ohio air, enough to last me long enough to do some decent work. Here's what else I see on my other butt-chilling breaks...

the office frozen-over lake

Sqweasel sno-blower paths running in straight lines from tree to tree...

Bridge over frozen waters - two feet of snow on the grounds blocks off access to this bridge for anyone who doesn't mind cold feet...
More? Boy! I'm glad you asked..
The remnants of ploughed snow for this week.
The driveway to my apartment is now in a white valley fifteen feet deep. Mayfield Canyon!