Flour Power

… this is what I see. Not bad, eh?

Yesterday me and a Portuguese friend undertook a very interesting experience: cooking “Bacalhau à Brás”, a typical Portuguese dish made basically with codfish, potatoes, onions and eggs. “And what’s so interesting about that?”, you may ask. Well, the interesting bit is that it’s impossible to get salted codfish here in Galway (I’ve heard it’s possible to get it in Cork, so I’ll probably bring a few kilos when I go there). They only sell fresh codfish, and that is not proper bacalhau, right?

Well, even though we were apprehensive at first, and although we had to add quite a bit of salt right after the first bite, it was actually quite good (kudos to the chef, who was not me), and a great alternative to all the junk food I’ve been eating.

And it even looked somewhat nice, complete with olives and all

In my early days of the Internet, it was considered quite impressive when the combined shared files of everyone in a Direct Connect channel passed the 1TB mark. Well those times are far gone and today Western Digital released a new hard drive that can take 2TB. And it’s not that expensive either – around €170. It’s also released as part as their green range of eco-friendly hard drives. I could sure use one of these, as the 500GB external disk I bought just a few months ago is getting filled real fast.

I’ve just seen the first episode of the fifth season of Lost that aired last wednesday. And although I’m a bit disappointed, that didn’t really surprise me.

It’s just that it keeps getting weirder and weirder. What’s up with making the plot more complicated in each and every episode? What about finishing up on some stuff before moving along? I miss “The X-Files” (the first few seasons), where most episodes had all kinds of bizarre stuff happening but in the end everything was wrapped up and explained. The explanations were always quite… “supernatural”, but at least they didn’t leave us wondering what the hell just happened and salivating for next week’s episode in the hopes of getting some answers. And people kept coming back to watch it next week anyway.

Getting back to the season premiere, we do get some answers on this episode (or maybe just one), but those answers come at a cost… You guessed it, more questions! I don’t want to reveal any spoilers… but I don’t like the direction where this is heading, with so many time-travel-related stuff. It never works out! It always makes everything too confusing and most of the times completely incongruous. I only remember it working out well a few times, like in “Back to the Future” and “The Butterfly Effect”. I don’t even want to get started on how wrong it’s working on “Heroes”…

Anyway, I was a bit afraid of what might show up in this fifth season and episode 1 just made me confirm that I only keep watching this show because I’m too stubborn to stop after I’ve watched the previous 4 seasons. I mean, there has to be some kind of unifying story behind all of it. Although I’m really starting to doubt it will make any sense at all.

Oh well, at least I still have stuff like “How I Met Your Mother”, “The Big Bang Theory” and “Californication” that continue to be a lot of fun to watch.

I really couldn’t take all that pinkness. Maybe if it wasn’t so strong, or if the stay was shorter, I could have endured. But not this way. And the pink curtains with the pink Playboy bunnies didn’t help either…

So I spent this past weekend repainting the room. I decided for a red color. Not “Benfica red”, but a darker shade of red. They call it “English Fire”.

Saying the painting process was hard is an understatement, but I’ll describe all the pains in another post, if I can get myself to write it. It started on Saturday afternoon (was supposed to start in the morning, but I couldn’t wake up early after one week of sleeping only 5 hours per night) and lasted until just a few hours ago. That included going to the shop to buy the paint, removing everything from the room, placing some masking tape, applying the first coat, waiting for it to dry, applying the second coat, waiting for it to dry while washing the brushes and the roller, removing the masking tape, and finally moving everything back inside the room. That basically meant spending the whole weekend stuck inside the house and, to make it even worse, the weather was the best since I arrived. Even the sun decided to show up…

All things considered, I still think it was worth it. I can now spend bigger amounts of time inside my room without going nuts, and it’s somehow cool to have a room that you painted yourself. Ando so, without further ado, I present you “The Room”, now in red: