Crab attack!

We bought blue-craw crabs this weekend (2 dozen mediums for $8!) while out on Long Island.

Dear deciding which crab to clean next

We (more like Dear, who are we kidding?) sorta stopped up the sink so that the crabs could have one last swim. They were kinda cute crawling all over each other and flipping themselves over. We thought (for about a minute) about keeping some as pets.

This guy (yes, they were all male crabs) lost his claw but you could see a new one growing (left side of photo); check out the ferociousness of his full-sized claw! After seeing that the claws could re-generate, I toyed again with the idea of keeping a few as pets and ripping out their claws once in a while. :D Too bad the claw meat is not the most delicious part of the blue crab....

Cleaned crabs -- do they know what lies in store for them?

I moved too slow to capture a pic of the crabs in the steaming pot, but it basically looks like the above. One ornery fellow managed to jump out of the wok, onto the floor. Not sure if that killed him or not but he snapped his claw off. I quickly picked him up, rinsed him off and threw him in. Dear put chopped scallions and julienned ginger on top -- very simple. In just a few minutes, we were ready to eat!

Yummy!

I laid down newspaper on the table for easy clean up (no, we did not eat off the newspapers, as we saw is the custom in Maryland).

Tools of the trade

Since we got home late, we didn't start eating until 9 or so. It took about 3 hours to finish up but that meat was so sweet, juicy, and delicious! Dear realized that he has an upcoming appointment for bloodwork and was concerned about his cholestrol so he just ate a few and removed all the meat from the rest of the crabs so that he could make crab cakes! Poor Dear -- it took him forever to take out what amounts to less than a pound of lump crab meat. :( After a while, the mallet (for the claws) was causing too much noise so Dear switched to a nutcracker, which I think is a more effective method anyway. It was much harder to save the claw meat so I ended up eating about 12 of those at the end!

When cleaning up, I pondered saving the steaming liquid where all the juices from the crab had dripped down into, but refrained. That liquid must be so good though! I wonder if the liquid is more salvageable from a crab boil? I'd like to try that next but Dear is all about the steaming. :T

Pins and needles

You know you're getting old when things snap, crackle, and pop when you do something simple like attempt to catch a ball and turn quickly to toss it to someone else. After landing somewhat weirdly on my left foot, I felt my knee lock for every few steps that I walked but not much pain (yet). I iced it as quickly as I could, but after sleeping through the night, I still had trouble walking (not sure if that was because I was afraid to put weight on the leg, which would cause the knee to lock, or because there were spurts of pain depending on the position I stood in). We went to get a cane from my in-laws so that I wouldn't have to put weight on my leg -- I was so worried that I had torn a ligament or meniscus (Google is hypochondria's worst enemy!). Then I went to the acupuncturist (a first for me) this afternoon.

His office is in one of those old tenement-like buildings in Ctown and it was quite interesting to walk/limp up those three flights of stairs. Unlike other doctor's offices in Ctown in similarly old and narrow buildings, this one had no markings at all on the outside and I thought it was all residential apartments. Upstairs, the first thing you see when you walk through the door is an old sink by the window, then some chairs and couches throughout the kitchen-like room. You would have no clue that this is a doctor's office except if you look carefully, a few certificates and doctor's credentials are hung up in the corner.

The old dude, which Dear has seen for various ankle twists and a knee injury, didn't try to be friendly at all, even though I was there with my FIL, who can be quite friendly and was trying to turn on the charm. My terrible Chinese was an embarassment, which I think added to his condescension towards me, and I ended up having to explain myself in English. I'm not sure he fully understood though (he has a certificate from a SUNY so he must know enough English, right?). He started to press various parts of my knee which caused no reaction at all. Then he pushed one of his fingers into the back of my knee, right above the calf, and it started to hurt like crazy, but not enough for me to scream out instinctively. After a few more squeezes, he said he'd know for certain once I lay down. He walked through curtains and I almost lost him, not knowing where the curtains opened. A few more squeezes while I lay on my back, and then face down and he determined that I had twisted/pulled a tendon so that it is very inflamed. He disappeared for a few minutes and when he came back, I was so scared of the impending pain. He first swabbed some iodine on my calf and then stuck a needle somewhere. Then another and another (five total, I think). All I felt were pinpricks and miniscule sore points where the needles were. I thought I'd be safe from pain until he attached a bunch of wires to the ends of the needles, turned a few knobs on this old-looking machine and flipped a switch. The first set of exercises?/massage?/electrocutions? was a vibrating sensation and it hurt at times, but not too terribly. It felt like the moment right before a cramp would start where any slight movement could cause the entire muscle to cramp up, but prolonged over a 30-minute timeframe. This made me very afraid to relax my leg and I'm surprised my flip flops didn't just slide off my feet. At times, I also felt undulations of warmth around my legs (I didn't notice he had moved a heat lamp right over my leg). The warmth, coupled with the classical music being pumped from somewhere caused me to drift into sleep, despite the weird tingling in my leg and the loud talking in the other room. But my relaxation was disturbed by the acupuncturist coming back and switching the nodes to what he described as a numbness mode (I think the needles started to move in circular motions instead of hammering up and down). This was a new level of discomfort/pain/weirdness but I quickly got used to it. Before I could drift again, the treatment was over. Everything was removed and my leg felt stiffer in the calf, but freer to bend at the knee. Now, as I sit, the muscle just feels very tired and sore, like I need to stretch it, but I'm afraid to. And I have another treatment Thursday. Hope I'll be healed to non-limping by this weekend! (I also wonder whether an orthopedist's treatment would be more effective?)

Bored meeting

I rushed home today to attend the annual (and my first ever) co-op board meeting. Not many people gathered in this dingy room in the basement (it'd be perfect to make that into a gym) while this man droned on about the financials. I want to say that it was a waste of time and that I now know to not attend in the future (so boring and all polite talk to keep people somewhat satisfied that they won't move out) but I'm afraid I'd miss something important if I didn't show up.

What was truly a waste of time was the time described on the agenda as "new business." People went off on complaints that the corporation really can't do much about -- noise. Maybe we're lucky to have relatively quiet neighbors, but gimme a break, you live in an apartment building, there is going to be noise. You really don't need to dwell on the issue for longer than 10 minutes. This one woman, though, kept going on, unsatisfied with each suggestion. The management will check the above apartment for the proper carpeting... but what if...? She was told to keep documentation of the noise to make a strong case in court... but how much documentation is enough? Keep a log, write letters, bring in neighbors/super/doorman to be witnesses.... But she wasn't interested in "winning a court case"... ad infinitum.

Then there was a quick, unorganized vote for the new board. When trying to give a description of their work, they did not make the work seem appealing -- they described how they've been deciding between carpet samples for the past several months. In the end, I made an uninformed decision (no one described their qualifications and we were choosing 4 members out of a pool of 5 -- not much choice). It kinda pisses me off about this democracy thing b/c I'm not sure it works. And is there a reason why co-ops are so prevalent in NYC and nowhere else throughout the U.S.? I think it's all a scam. Either that, or liberal NYers just have nothing better to do than to create extra bureaucracy, even where they live. Maybe it's both.

Foiled once again!

I really wanted to finish sanding the doors today, but I got lazy/distracted (yes, I finished painting the hallway, however shoddy it came out). To fend off the whines we'll likely hear about wedding pictures come Father's Day, I turned on the computer to do some uploading and editing. After running into some issues, I started to surf (oh, how I've fallen behind on my regular reading!) and here I am blogging about nothing. I am due a blog on Fallingwater and more fascinating topics, but I've only had time to update the Pittsburgh posting with pictures. My perpetual to-do list (perhaps the list would disappear if I actually did these tasks):
- sand, then paint doors
- create parent wedding albums
- clean/organize
- hang shelves

* * *

Kung fu or writing? I'm trying to decide whether I should take a kung fu class (need the exercise) or a writing class. The woodworking class I was going to take is cancelled :( so I now have time/money to pursue other interests. But which one? Help me decide!

Just one wall left!

And six doors and a whole bunch of trim. Three of the doors have been sanded, three more to go before I slap on the first coat of paint. I am worried about the doors since I'm painting them a light (almost white) color and they are currently blue with bright red panels. I am also not looking forward to sanding (am I ever?). I am so sick of sanding that I started to skip the in-between sanding.

My driving motivation: finish before the heat really starts. I couldn't get anything done the last few days because it was so hot and humid. I was so afraid of things not getting done in time that I left work on time today just so that I could take advantage of the cooler weather. But now I am so tired and I still have a wall left to do. :( There once was a time when I thought we would get a fixer-upper and fix it up exactly the way we wanted it by ourselves. If I can't even finish painting, how could I even think to do that?