One of those dreamy pictures I took with the 50mm f/1.2. Haven’t taken many other pictures since I came back from Ballarat, so hoping to be able to bring the camera out for a spin this weekend.

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It’s budget time at work, preparing for the entire organisation’s budget for the next financial year (in Australia the financial year starts July 1st and ends June 30th). Every month I pick up a little more about accounting and I guess you really have to put the things you learn into practice before everything starts making sense. I believe there’s still a lot I haven’t come across yet but I’m pretty familiar with the organisation now that I know where to ask questions and get them answered. There’s plenty of experience in my department and as the work hours are a little more flexible, it’s easier to ask questions. I recall in my previous job, it was a little more difficult to get answers due to time zone differences (as all the traders were on the other side of the world) or we were just so busy we just did as we were told.

Perhaps I have evolved a bit over the last few years, I’m not as complacent as before, and there’s still the occasional tendency to drift off into a daydreaming state, I’m quickly focused on what needs to be done. Work is a little less mundane now, where if a problem pops up more than once, I will make sure I put in the effort to stomp out that problem immediately so that it doesn’t bug me (and waste my time mostly) again.

Heh, it’s a little frantic with trying to align the budget within the next couple of weeks and the economic downturn has hurt everyone, governments and the private sector alike. Everyone needs to be a little more prudent on whether they tighten or loosen their purse strings.

Have not personally gone through the budget process before, but I’ll figure it out soon enough.

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Cooked yong tau fu over the weekend. Invited relatives over and everyone contributed a dish or two. Heh, it was a rather hectic weekend with little sleep and much to do. I’ve helped Vyanne before making the stuff, but as with most things, I don’t really pick it up until I go through the entire process on my own. So I asked a few questions and got the gist of how it was done.

Burnt my fingers from coming to close to contact with stuff cooking in the pan (it’s since healed). You don’t feel the pain until much later when you’ve settled down and suddenly you feel sensitive to the different temperatures and you know you’ve inadvertently burnt yourself.

As with all the food I cook, it’s edible but doesn’t generally look very presentable, hence no pictures were taken. I was pretty successful with it, putting the fish paste mixed with mince pork, salted fish and seasoned with sesame oil and soya sauce into vegetables. Had eggplants (a little difficult to find the longish brinjals here at times), bitter gourds, shitake mushrooms and fried tofu to stuff the fish paste mix into. Fried the veges to cook the fish paste and later transferred them into a pot. Made a simple stock to simmer the vegetables in to cook the fish paste through.

I wanted to make the dish as it was easy, and I’m just reminiscing those Sundays back when I was a kid going to my grandmother’s place for this, with my aunts helping to prep the vegetables. Heh, I bought my fish paste from the Asian grocers, while my grandmother would make it from scratch. I miss those days. I miss life when it was simpler. Now I have to juggle being a responsible adult, doing multiple things with my life. Heh.