William Chong

Got a fantastic article today from my AWAD email. Motherjones.com has made a list of 20 interesting euphemisms that have been employed to describe the physical appearance of Britain’s Got Talent megastar Susan Boyle (you know the one…) – a little snapshot of the power of the English vocabulary (and the creatives that put it to good use).

A few highlights below:

… and how we wrote her off because of her not-hottitude. Right?

1. “The plain Jane superstar,” – Daily News article

2. “Like Shrek come to life,” – Rosie O’Donnell to People magazine.

4. “Plain, dowdy, unemployed,” – New York Magazine round up.

5. The Age of Melbourne let an imaginary Jane Austen do the dissing and refers to her as “ill-favoured.”

“Ill-favoured” – interesting…

6. “Stocky, beetle-browed,” is the word from The LA Times.

Do beetles have eyebrows?

9. “Hairy angel” and “unfortunate gait”Daily Mail

14. The New York Post gave us “ugly duckling” and “golden-throated spinster,” which has to be the most Brothers Grimm take.

Well her story is almost like a Brothers Grimm fairytale, no?

18. “Avatar of yearning” – Tina Brown, The Daily Beast.

LOL.

19. “Badger in a dress” – Wales on Sunday.

If you have been hiding for the past few weeks or just haven’t seen her amazing performance of Les Mis’s “I Dreamed a Dream”, you have to check it out.

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Had a great day today. Just rediscovering the peacefulness of the guitar, and a great hymn to go with it.

Lyrics:

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Refrain:
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.
- Horatio Spafford, 1873

You really have to hand it to this particular Ray White real estate agent, who’s advertising a cosy 2 bedroom unit in Pakuranga.

I just had to highlight what could well be the understatement of the year:

… its location in a quiet cul-de-sac street is within walking distance of Westfield Pakuranga and the Panmure Basin. Motorway access is nearby…

Thanks to Streetview function on the Trademe listing, astute readers get to see through the spin as follows:

View Larger Map

Nearby? I mean, the house is sitting right next to the motorway! How is that a quiet cul-de-sac street?

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Website: www.foodbox.co.nz; Ph: 09 265 1054; Email: orders@foodbox.co.nz; boxes from $32.

Most of you know I’m a pretty busy bloke. Between working, commuting, serving, tidying, writing, singing, dancing and sleeping, there’s usually very little time to do groceries on a regular basis. When I do it’s usually bleary-eyed after a long day, and I’m on autopilot through the supermarket aisles picking whatever looks colourful and edible. As many of you can testify, that doesn’t equate to fresh fruit and vegetables most of the time… (hint: soft drinks and chips are very colourful, and very edible!)

So when I got a flyer in my letterbox introducing foodbox.co.nz, I was intrigued. Basically the folk at this venture source whatever fruit and vegetables are in season around New Zealand, pack them into boxes, and deliver them to your door once a week. Little fuss, little use of airpoints to get your 5-plus a day (bananas are obviously the exception to the home-grown rule). They had an option for a once-off delivery, so I decided to try it out.

On Thursday we gather round and open our box. We’re pleasantly surprised – for $32 it’s bananas, kiwifruit, apples, pears, green beans, mushrooms, a head of lettuce, tomatoes, a leek, capsicum, onions, carrots, gourmet potatoes, and passionfruit. There’s an envelope with some quirky notes about the food we’ve just received. I like the trivia about where passionfruit comes from (answer: Spanish Jesuit missionaries in South America named the fruit as a symbol of the Passion of the Christ). They boast that we have got in our hands New Zealand-grown grapes, and include a recipe for a Moroccan cous-cous that can be cooked using the ingredients in our box.

It’s definitely not a replacement for all your shopping. You’ll still need to shop for meat, rice, milk, all your other balanced-diet necessities. And if you have Asian-cuisine inclinations, vegetables like bokchoy and Chinese cabbage may not be a regular feature. While you’re allowed to replace any fruit and veg you don’t like from your box, it’s still a lucky dip of produce that may not suit the guy that’s hell-bent on getting some papaya, or the gal who demands peaches come hell or high water.

But I give it two thumbs up because of one simple fact: I’m eating more fruit and veg. I won’t claim to now eat exclusively at home, but the guys at foodbox.co.nz give you this stuff in such a jovial, non-patronising way (take heed, Ministry of Economic Development TV ads) that you’re motivated to eat what you buy. And that equates to savings from the takeaways, the fast-food outlets, the pubs and restaurants. And the variety of fruit/veg we’re eating is definitely a plus. It’s a joy to try a passionfruit for the first time in my life, and to be given stalks of rhubarb and challenged to cook it in a meaningful way (I did a sugar-laden rhubarb crumble).�

Foodbox.co.nz can make something as mundane as your fruit and veg a present-opening, diet-altering delight.

(This post is replicated on our wedding site, which is off to the side for now.)

Cheryl:
My mind has always gone for the small, intimate wedding: more meaningful, and less expensive (in general). So we construct our guest list, and without at all intending to we are edging on 150 people. Great, stop right there, that’s fine. Happy, happy, all is well. We present the guest list to our parents for the final approval, having estimated a few people here and there that we think they’d like to invite as well. Everything seems to chug along smoothly, so we start making more detailed plans according to our very long list of to-do’s.

When the parents get back to us, we very quickly learn of one item of asian culture neither of us expected to encounter, despite that we have both been asian all our lives: The parents are supposed to invite EVERYONE they know.

(Deep breath. Note to self: negotiate guest list numbers to the glory of God.)

And negotiate we do, as humbly as we can. After a lot of discussion and back-and-forth-ing, we agree, just as happily as we have the first time, on another, final, number. Praise the LORD, we’re all still alive!

William:
And that’s a big interlude to the topic of this post… which is about invitations!

Most of you know that we like doing creative things. And we like saving money. So our approach to invitation designs were no different. We’ve elected to design and make our own invitations (all 200+ of them!) by using the following:

- nice card, bought at bulk for a cheap price – we can then print our invitation text on them
- a stamp purchased on my recent impromptu Malaysia visit for the red seal with our surnames written in Chinese
- green organza-like ribbon tied betwixt some well-placed hole-punched corners

Here’s a preview of some of the designs we’ve tested out:

Experimenting with different invites.