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Like I said I’m not a big TV fan. You can hardly find me watching more than 3 hours of TV a year. But here, I’m totally hooked on Food Network. It’s a never-ending parade of chefs whipping up meal after meal after meal.

My favorite chefs to watch are Rachael Ray, Sandra Lee and Tyler Florence. I love how Rachael Ray has 2 or 3 dishes going on at the same time. That’s very real for me because that’s how I cook, I multi-task .

I love Sandra Lee’s tips too on saving money and using both fresh and prepacked items to save time. Again this combining fresh and storebought is very real for me. So it’s great to watch and learn.

And Tyler is very interesting because he talks about being hungry and can’t wait to eat what he cooks. That’s me too!! I’m an impatient person and his pace of cooking is pretty similar to mine – dancing back and forth and getting everything quickly together.

Do you watch cooking shows? Who’s your favorite and why?

So here I sit, Steev’s gone to class and the thing that strikes me is this certain what do you call it… quiet. A quiet that I’m so unaccustomed to.

On any regular day back home, I’d be dashing in and out the door every other hour, picking up one teen, dropping off the other, and my car would be so full of tales from school and college and plans for the weekend that I can’t even hear myself think!

So let’s face it, there aren’t many any days like this when I’d be home with no alarms going off relentlessly on my cell phone and computer (sometimes on both at the same time), no place to go, nothing to do except sip my tea and watch the minutes tick by till Steev walks in the door.

Yeah, so this feels weird, you know. Usually I’d be cooking up a storm, a huge pot of something or other! But here, who am I going to cook for here?!! Hmm, so I end up munching on the simplest meals you can imagine and I have all day to get through my lunch.

Guess what? Forget the mommy time sans kids. I’ll have the noisy banter, kitchen clanking, loud music and traffic madness any time. That is so much more fun. This quiet is a little too much for me!

Earlier this week, I was having breakfast with my girl friend who is now living in Vietnam. Hard to believe she moved there a year ago, seems more like yesterday. Thing is she’s not very happy there as she’s quite lonely and language is a problem.

She also had a couple of frustrating stories about being overcharged and has also been warned against wearing gold or jewelry. She was joking that she should just melt her jewelry down to gold coins and keep them under her bed !

Apart from that, she’s thrilled that she’s been able to visit the neighboring countries and experience their cultures. She tells me the handicraft by the local village women is beautiful and she already has quite a collection to boast of. Trust her to always find a silver lining in everything she does.

Being that Hip2bDad and I pride ourselves on being such incredibly responsible parents (ahem!), we rounded up our teens and took them out to dinner Saturday night. At a bar, no less !!

Well, okay, so it’s a bar that serves real food, real German food, besides the hard stuff, high stools and beer taps the size of fire hydrants! We were there way ahead of the happy hour crowd so we practically had the Gasthaus (aka Guest House) to ourselves, save a couple of men discussing business over biers and a pair of lovebirds in the back.

There were regular tables and there were bar stools, pretty exciting to our teens on their first bar experience. But all they got to drink was this… (so boring, right?)

.. and a sip each of Hip2bDad’s bier! And in case you’re wondering, ja, that would be a rare glimpse of yours truly in the background !

With every breath of secondary smoke we inhaled, it’s hard not to be reminded why being in a bar feels so much to me like being stuck inside a chimney. And as Skye promptly reminded us, her teacher says secondary smoke is the most dangerous, duh !

The meal though was absolutely brilliant, beyond scrumptious. But we can’t go there too often or we’d break the bank ! Thing is we had a grand old time laughing and snapping funny pictures of each other. On the way home, Hip2bDad thrilled us with a crash course in German. Definitely my kind of family night out!

Remember the Saturday we dropped everything and hurried out to the small town where Raine had been taken for her driving course? Well, on the way back, we stumbled upon a couple of fast food restaurants in the middle of nowhere. Had we driven past this place earlier, we would’ve stopped here to take out lunch for Raine and her friends.

The parking lot was huge with only a few cars and no one to fight us for a parking spot. Can this even be happening?

And can you believe this is the inside of the fast food restaurant during lunch hour on a weekend ??!! There was practically no one there but us chickens!!

Where were the screaming kids? The parents carrying trays heaped high with burgers, sodas and French fries? The table poachers waiting to pounce on diners even as they tried to choke down their meal, bones and all?

Outside at the al fresco dining area, there were pretty red tents with a table and a ceiling fan whirring under each but they were all empty. Tell me, what are the chances of this happening in the city?

Nil, right? That’s what I thought!

In fact, we had such a lovely laid-back lunch we sat back and lingered on to enjoy the peace and serenity for a while. After all, there were no table poachers giving us the evil eye. There were no kids attempting to decorate our hair with French fries nor the fear of a stray soda flying at us from across the room. Heck, there was no reason to leave.

Here in the city, we can rarely find a fast food restaurant this big, this clean or this empty!! Yup, even I, a true blue city girl, have to admit a small town can indeed be heaven on earth! We can so see ourselves coming back here on a saner weekend .

We just got back from a nice lunch at a small Chinese restaurant called the Little Dimsum Place. This is our first time there. Nice little place, not too busy and the dimsum (little delicacies from the heart, being the literal translation from Chinese) is pretty good.

We ordered several types of our favorite steamed dumplings, pork and century egg porridge, barbecued pork buns, fried yam dumplings, chicken in glutinous rice, shrimp rolls, fried carrot cake, all piping hot and a pot of hot Chinese tea.

Scary but true, we really pigged out. We haven’t had dimsum in ages so you have to excuse us . Even though the food is a little salty and I’m drinking anything I can get my hands on, even weight loss drinks, I still have to say the food is yummy .

Since we’ve barely left the house these few days, I guess this has to be the highlight of our long weekend. Are you cooking or eating anything this weekend that you haven’t eaten in ages?

I honestly had no idea this could be so addictive. When my two girls were little, sand art was one of their favorite things to do. I would help them peel off the stenciled parts bit by bit and watch them happily scoop colored sand on each part to create these cute picture cards.

Recently we were at a family day event. We got there too early. I had three teens with me and a full hour to kill. Steev was busy playing cameraman so I wasn’t too worried about him. I was more concerned that the girls and I were just going to wilt away . Seeing as how it’s near impossible for any teenager (or their mom!) to survive for more than a few minutes without the internet or their MP player, I realized we had to do something. Fast!

Thankfully we spied a sand art booth nearby with a handful of little kids milling around. But that landscape was about to change! Three utterly shameless grownies would soon be dancing around those colored sand pots, with kiddies half their size, making cards for themselves!

Sand art is really fun. I felt like a kid again and couldn’t resist making, not one, but two of these cards. Can you guess which ones?

My dad spends most of his days hanging out at the shopping mall with his old cronies. I guess for seniors, it’s a pretty cool place to meet up with friends, chit-chat over lunch or tea, walk around and window-shop a little bit and call it a great day out.

And of course, what’s a few hours of idle chit-chat without recounting the old days and how much things have changed. Gone are the days of buying medicines and medical supplies from the pharmacy miles away. There’s the convenience of online shopping and products like kendall briefs which didn’t exist then.

Well, it’s all in a day’s “work” for my dad and his friends. Sometimes I run into them when I’m out shopping and it’s great to see them all happily chatting away .