Ayumi and Sobayaki

There's a stray yellow tomcat who started hanging around my place late last year; it all began when I caught him sleeping on top of my washing machine one morning, and I meowed at him instead of shooing him away. I'm a sucker for a friendly cat, so when he meowed back, one thing led to another, and a week later, he had designated the doormat and the hood of my car as alternative sleeping quarters. I hear the neighborhood kids call him 'Patrick', but when he's in my territory, his name is Nakatsu. I feed him my leftovers whenever I have any to spare. Usually he hangs around in the morning and disappears after I give him a bit of breakfast. When I come home from work at night, he sometimes comes running from a house further down the road, and waits around for food. He meows behind my closed front door whenever he hears the sound of a spoon clinking against a plate.

Several nights ago, he brought a friend with him, a pregnant grey cat with big yellow-rimmed eyes. She looked really starved, so I gave her a bigger share of milk. I had to hold Nakatsu down and coax her over so she would eat. I named her Ayumi, and she disappeared for about a week after I first fed her. Yesterday night, she came back, and had already had her kittens somewhere. Nakatsu was nowhere to be seen, so she had a dish of milk all to herself. She gave me a high-pitched meow and a long look with her big eyes. If cats could talk I think she must have meant to say thank you.

I think Ayumi must have brought me luck, because I had a big payday today, and I didn't even expect it. I went over to a publishing firm to collect one very small check for a job I did last month, and when I got there I was given two more checks (much bigger ones too) for two projects that I didn't expect to get paid for until later in the year. Here's the icing on top of the cake too: I was told to collect a larger-than-usual royalty check by the end of February. Ka-ching! This almost beats my Christmas haul!

My two friends and I headed off to The Block, and I, having suddenly been blessed with unexpected fortune, treated them to dinner at the Banana Leaf. Two orders of roti canai with curry sauce, one black pepper steak, one dish of crunchy spring rolls, and one order of Macau chicken. I love roti bread and curry sauce! It has the same crave-for-it-when-you're-expecting-your-period effect as salt-encrusted french fries with ketchup. Effie and I could eat it all day even if we end up with toxic turmeric breath.

Nipponphilia: still kicking. I've added two more Miura plants to my windowsill garden -- a dark green aloe named Mukai, and a miniature tree named Morita. Last weekend I bought a package of buckwheat soba noodles and a bottle of Mirin; I was intending to make sukiyaki or a soba dish for lunch this afternoon, but because I didn't have the complete ingredients for either the sukiyaki recipe or the soba recipe I got off the internet, I ended up frankensteining the two recipes, with somewhat disastrous results. Soba noodles are really tasty on their own, and I shouldn't have dunked them or the shiitake mushrooms into the shoyu-mirin mixture, which just tasted like a lot of watered-down Kikkoman. I couldn't stop myself from making a face every time I bit into the mushrooms and they squirted out the soy sauce broth. My stomach did not enjoy its introduction to raw egg, and I doubt that it will grow friendlier over subsequent soba/sukiyaki experiments, so I might just drop it altogether or buck tradition and boil it in the broth until it's salmonella-free. Renny christened my mad scientist noodle dish 'sobayaki'. I think I can safely promise never to make it again.