SFAH

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat deserves all the hype its getting. It should be a food textbook. But this post isn't about that book exactly, it's using the principles in that book to diagnose a recent cooking failure. Maybe failure is too strong of a word, definitely a mishap, enough that I considered not eating the leftover portions and I am extremely averse to wasting leftovers.

So I made a curried sweet potato dish, with black beans and cabbage. There was a bit of carrots thrown in, and then topped with extra-fatty yogurt and cilantro. The spices were a mix of cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, and chipotle pepper.

Small problem #1: free-handing the quantities of spices.
I've generally made Indian dishes from recipe, and I've made enough that I have sort of a feel for the quantities of spices. Usually equal amounts of cumin and coriander. The end result was mediocre, so I'd say this wasn't a problem although it didn't help the final dish.

Small problem #2: extra-fatty yogurt.
I've regularly consumed yogurt (like almost-daily) ever since I moved to Canada and my mom put one in my lunch everyday for school. For all this time, I've operated on the principle that the more fat the better, since for most of this time fat-free yogurt has dominated the selection. So I was super giddy when I found 9% Siggi yogurt at Whole Foods and that's what I topped the dish with. This was a mistake as it simply has too much fat for a topping that's suppose to contribute acidity as well. Shoulda used sour cream, which I did go buy today. Daisy's sour cream is amazing and I'm very sad that it's not carried in Canadian grocery stores.

Big problem #1: cooking method
This is the heat problem. I only brought a pot with me, whereas I envisioned this dish as a roast / stir fry hybrid. Needless to say that result was not achieved.

Big problem #2: lack of other sources of acid
My main issue with the final dish is how heavy it felt to eat. This problem was entirely solved by squeezing some lemons onto the leftover portions, which were infinitely better tasting.

Lesson learned: acid is important

...

Which leads me to how great the BBQ sauce at B's Cracklin are. Yes I've finally made the trip to eat there. Yes it's amazing. I even bought some brisket for takeout and holy their brisket is maybe even better than the pork. Even their pancake-formed cornbread is delicious.

magenta

Nothing makes a new place feel like home as returning from a business trip to a even newer place xD

Here's how Atlanta's been looking:

gate f

A photo of my dimly lit, always cluttered table that I'll never see again. Atlanta's goodbye is very neatly tied up.

pier 225

I have completed my Atlanta tourist duties, finally went to the aquarium & world of coke.
Thank you visiting friend.

I actually liked the World of Coke more than the aquarium, much to my surprise. Coke is really well done with all the insane amount of memorabilia, including these awesome posters. Although I don't care for their drinks, Coke's advertisement is always well done.

The aquarium...does not look very big while you're walking through it. There's usually just little windows into the tanks, which is not quite impressive looking. But we were lucky and manage to catch all of the shows, which were great.

Krog

It's depressing how little I can eat. Yet again I've missed my chance to have dumplings, 钟水饺 nonetheless, in Atlanta. This is not meant to be...but in a month and half I'll be having my beloved dumplings in Chengdu again! I swear I'm going to that place the first chance that I have.

Anyways, this is about Krog St Market.

Coworker recommended Yalla and Gu's dumplings. I somehow convinced myself that I can eat both a shawarma and a salad bowl, and then 6 dumplings. It is abundantly clear in retrospect how wrong that is.

I struggled to finish the shawarma, as good as it was (but would be better if they warmed the pita and heated up the meat more) and slowly consumed the salad over the next hour while reading about leather quality on styleforum. I really am not a salad person, but the pickled okra, beets, and cherry tomatoes were fantastic.

The market was also a lot smaller than I imagined, so there wasn't much to walk around in attempt to digest. So I gave up on my dumplings, but did stick with getting an almond croissant from Little Tart to go.

devouring this atm

Also dropped by Xocholatl to pick up more bars of this amazingly delicious "kissed mermaids" chocolate bar (coconut milk, sea salt, cocoa nibs).

This is definitely better than Mast Bros. An intoxicating smell of chocolate bursts out as I unwrapped the bar, and this is not even a hyperbole. I'm also a fan of the bar design. This may just be my favourite bar of chocolate ever eaten.

Of course luck would have it that the store didn't have this flavor in stock today. But luckily they said that another customer told them that a hipster-to-the-max shop in PCM had some in stock, and I was going to drop by on the way back to the Whole Foods across the street anyways. I've finally entered into the category of consumers that regularly buy small batch chocolates and grocery at Whole Foods. Achievement unlocked?

Speaking of PCM, it would definitely be the place I want to live if I move to Atlanta, $1500 rent for a studio be damned. It's got all the amenities within walking distance, right on the beltline (oh yeah I finally walked on the beltline today), and not a hassle to commute to WPM's office. It's comforting to know that so many good restaurants are either downstairs or a short walk via beltline to Krog away. But the priority remains Europe/NYC > Toronto > Atlanta.

It is fast how a year has past...

hanami

Spring, the season for flower viewing and getting sick.

ponce city market

So I finally got myself ~1 mile down to PCM, which is akin to NYC's Chelsea Market and YYZ's St. Lawrence market (it'd be nice if we can start referring to most cities by their airport code).

The original plan is to tease myself of my upcoming trips by eating at Minero (for CHS) and 钟水饺 at Jia (for going back home to 成都). But the first food shop I saw was Hops and the thought of no more fried chicken sandwiches after April is too much to bear.

Nashville style (explained as cayenne pepper plus other spices) fried chicken. Bonus points for having a selection of hot sauces.

Then there are a bunch of specialty food shops, including this candy shop:

Generally I'm not a big candy fan, but caramels are definitely my weakness.

Finally, today's star...well not quite. This is not 钟水饺, the dumplings that haunt my dreams, but nonetheless these wontons are pretty good. It's served in a umami heavy broth (seaweed + dried shrimp) which is a strong backup to the wontons.

Plans for the next visit is to walk down the beltline from Piedmont Park so I can gorge on burgers and milkshakes. Then buy more of that wonderful Annie B's caramel.

...
Bonus structural pic, would've been so cool to work on this project.

windchill

So Atlanta does get cold enough to have a winter proper, although so far the cold days have not coincided with the wet days, so no snow fall yet. But it was funny seeing a smudge of ice on the sidewalk this morning, and then a 3m radius around that covered with road salt in the afternoon.

Here's the return of MARTA sunsets:

suburu

So let's tackle the reflection on 2015 first.

Being on PEY...I don't recall much from the second semester of third year. Yes I remember the municipal project, which was achievement unlocked for staying in the lab past midnight, and all those concrete problem sets that somehow took 6hrs+ to do with multiple do-overs. Yeah not many happy memories associated with the deadliest year of civ.

Nah that's far from true. Third year is when I became closer with a couple people in my department, starting with suffering through survey camp together and continuing with the aforementioned schoolwork. Another contributor is the lack of time to see Chestnut friends with all of us on such different schedules. YNCN was also another rewarding and fun experience, the whole team is amazing. It's also the first club that I thought genuinely cares about and lives up to it's mission. While I loved my experience there, I'm hesitant to rejoin in forth year because of the big time commitment that is required. The two other things that I would want to dedicate myself to is research project/capstone, and grad school application, and I don't want to give anything less than full effort to YNCN if I rejoin. I already feel quite guilty about not contributing much to WISE this year as VP.

...

Onto PEY, I can only thank having good luck to be in my position.

Lucky that I knew beforehand that the person interviewing me was the same person that conducted the info session so I was to stalk the heck out of him online and be more prepared. Also lucky that he was so laid back, my interview was really just two questions and the rest of the time was him giving me advice about grad school. But a million thanks to everyone that helped me prepare for it.

Even more lucky that my direct supervisor is the head of the whole company's building enclosure practice area and that he is new to the company as well. These led to almost a start-up feeling to my daily work, I'm really employee #2, such as being able to work on a variety of projects, listen in on high-level strategy, and meet clients. I can now brag that I set up the template for many of our workflows. Overall, I got a lot more exposure to what being a consulting engineer in building enclosure is like compared to if I had worked in a larger team.

The few complaints that I do have is one, my boss travels to other offices a lot so oftentimes it's difficult to coordinate my workload when he's gone. Two is that I'm not doing heavily technical work, such as modelling. But it's a fair trade-off that I'm learning more of the business side of things, there's forth year for the technical knowledge anyways.

Surprising to myself, I learned that I don't actually value my career as #1 priority in life. Unfortunately I don't have a passion for building enclosure, but do like it enough to do it as a job. Initially I was really upset at this discovery, since I've internalized the whole "love your job so you won't have to work a single day in your life", but has then come to peace with not necessarily feeling like my job needs to be my life's calling. That's not to say that I will merely show up for work, I do still want to do an amazing job on projects because I have a dream one day that even a tiny-budgeted, hastily built residential building will be comfortable to live in and not degrading to the environment. I am fed up with living in shitty buildings.
Through both my trip to New York in November and subsequent discussion with Andrew in Toronto, I realized that leisure is my first priority. Leisure as time for myself, whether that's to have tea, cook a meal, catch up with friends and family, or travel. It feels so precious to have a chunk of time that you have control over how to spend, because one has exceedingly little control over anything and "Time itself, foaming, raging, and boiling like a river, roaring through this room and through all rooms [...] and Time, with its grand, unfightable sweep, taking me along with it" (quotation via Shampoo Planet).

...

Being in Atlanta...is good. An easy way to sum up moving here is that it's not that different and it is different at the same time.

Not that different:

• Living alone - the gradual increment in living alone from previous years (dorm, apartment with friends, own apartment) has prepared me well for living by myself. Fits well with my introversion anyways. The downside is that it's harder to push myself to go out. Gosh I haven't been anywhere yet... 
• General culture - the US is pretty similar to Canada (though arguable that the statement is more true in reverse), though the South is a bit of a different beast. College sports is huge. 

Good different:

• Southern food is good. Chick-fil-a needs to open in Toronto ASAP. Also lots of good Americanized Mexican food.
• Ease of online shopping - I'm keeping every box that I receive from an online order, shall post a photo of every box when I move out. Amazon delivery is so fast in Atlanta that my packages get delivered within two days despite not being Prime. Though this really isn't good for my goal of buying less.
• Skipping the snow and slush of winter is pretty nice.

Bad different:

• Not a walkable city - this is really my biggest complaint against Atlanta and why I don't want to relocate here permanently. Every other bullet point below I can stand. My walkable definition extends to public transit, I left Toronto thinking it'd be hard to do worse than the TTC, and was then swiftly proven wrong. Of course being unable to drive is a big factor in my annoyance, but Atlanta traffic is terrible as well so I doubt I'd want to drive regularly here regardless. To be fair, Toronto isn't very walkable outside of downtown either. Maybe I'm just unhappy that there's not a good farmer's market nor an asian supermarket anywhere remotely easy to get to.
• Socioeconomic disparity between the races - let's leave this at I don't recall seeing a non-black fast food worker. 
• A lot more areas of the city is sketchy.

To tie to above points together, an overwhelming majority of my coworkers live near / outside the perimeter (I-285) in the nicer suburbs. In fact the first acronyms I learned here is ITP and OTP, meaning respectively inside and outside of the perimeter. While inner city revitalization is starting to happen (Beltline, Pounce City Market, West Midtown), it will take time, and for now downtown is still to be avoided.

...

Okay that's about how long I can concentrate for today. Tomorrow shall be a financial review of the year and more thoughts on buying things. 

coma

I really do have a pleasant walk home.

...

Unrelated: I waited 427 chapters from this for this. Totally worth it.
(and how much the art has improved)

Garden Lights

After procrastinating going to Garden Lights for a whole month, today is the day!

The unbelievably warm weather leaves me no excuse to postpone this any later. Also it's a good chance to try night photography, although this is slightly sadistic since my X10 has a tiny sensor. Nonetheless I am impressed with it's results, as it did produce a legible image of tree branches against the dark sky at ISO1000, f2.2, and 2s shutter speed. Sure it's not a usable image with all the noise, but woah I can make out the branches really well.

Below are more successful photos, there's also a couple more over on Facebook (but the butchered IQ...cringe):

 This took some post-processing magic to tone down the reds to something manageable.

 The most fuss-free shot of the night.

 I absolutely love the light reflecting off the handrails.

 I know I'm skipping winter when there's still flowers on tree branches in mid-December. It was difficult to keep my arms steady in mid-air at a 1/8 shutter speed.

 I do like this composition very much.

Luckily there were benches around the fountain to set my camera for a 2s exposure for that lovely soft water. Also important to set a shutter delay. 

persimmon

Today's sunset was not as nice as this day's:

The clarity slider is the trick.

wash

We can pretend this is the sunrise instead and that I'm enough of a morning person to pause and take photos when I'm probably running late to the airport (the latter is true except the morning person part).

See you later ATL.

...

Here is actually a photo from that morning:

I took it because of the full moon, but it had such low contrast with the sky in photo that I gave up trying to bring it out. Instead enjoy the tree's silhouette.

luminance

I am getting better at appreciate the little beautiful moments. Next up is working on being more patient.

side note: maybe my macbook is just old, but it doesn't render color as nicely as my iphone.

azimuth

By the miracle of seasonal shifts in the sun path, my north facing window actually gets some direct light! I am very grateful.

Last of Qi Lan.

flange thickness

It's nice to be out in the field for a couple of days.

Excited to be traveling for work next week too. I really wish they'd send me to enough places to rack up some good mileage, but that would requires a couple more years of experience.

tiles

Battling the remnant of a nasty cold over the weekend, ugh. How I've underestimated thee, Atlanta weather.

But look, pretty colors from leaving work late:

ray

It's always nice when good weather greets you on Monday mornings. That and donuts. Today's donut count is 4.5, only surpassed by LP events when we were trying to finish off boxes and boxes of Krispy Kreme.

turtle

The convenience of online shopping coupled with general laziness has resulted in cardboard boxes making up a good portion of my furniture. Currently using three big boxes as end tables and countless others for storage.

Heck they way outnumber my actual furniture, which consist of dining table, 3 stools, side table, mattress, lamp and a drying rack. This is about the bare minimum that I can comfortably live with, except I'd like to swap a stool for an actual chair and add a full length mirror. Otherwise it's great living with so little stuff, less to clean and less clutter. Though I can't resist a fully stocked kitchen, kitchen gears are my kryptonite to owning less stuff (way more so than clothing or cosmetics, though these 2 areas require some restraint as well). I need to come to terms with the fact that I can either have a fantastic kitchen...or I can relocate more often. Or the third option is to have both and pay insane amount of money to ship my gear durr.
I should make it a life goal to have only as much stuff as I can move with a sedan.

High Museum of Art

I really enjoy going to art museums despite how little I understand its contents. It always brings up a whole mix of emotions.

A couple of my favourite items:

Veiled Rebekah 

I stared at this for a good five minutes, first in shock that the veil is actually carved from the marble and not a textile that's draped over. I've seen a fair share of classical sculptures with beautiful renderings of fabric, but this takes the crown.

 English porcelain

 Coke-cola bottles

The design brief for this involved the bottle being recognizable by touch and even when shattered.

Recycled Coke bottle bowls