Bubbles and the blogosphere: love it.

So yesterday I had a blog date with Tales of a Tai Tai. I have no photo to post, as we were too busy chugging down champagne and wine to take any snaps!

Oh yes, two Australian girls spotted sipping drinks in a Hong Kong bar... we are travelling in dangerous territory here, my friends.

You absolutely must check out Tai Tai's blog - it's fabulous. Her writing style is engaging, funny and insightful, and her tales of Hong Kong life are bang on target and quite hilarious at times.

We do live in a fairly kooky city, us Tai Tais.

p.s. If you are wondering if I'm on some kind of crack every time you read the words 'Tai Tai' within this post, it is a Hong Kong term for basically a "lady who lunches", or "the non-working wife of a wealthy man."

Although, in reality, most Tai Tais do work and rarely whittle away the days gossiping over manicures.

How many new friends have you made through blogging?

Happy birthday, Buddha.

Ahh... don't you just love enforced holidays? Otherwise known as public holidays, bank holidays, and utterly joyous days off work. I especially love work holidays that involve Buddha... I've always had a soft spot for the tubby little guy and his infectious smile.

Short of boring you with tedious descriptions, here are some photos to show some of what we did on this stinking HOT and sunny Tuesday, instead of what we usually do: sit at computers and bring home the bacon.

p.s. I'm kind of embarrassed about the shameless promotion, but if you look to your left you'll see I've been chosen by Kidspot as one of 2011's Top 50 Bloggers! I was really surprised to find out and absolutely thrilled. Oh and here's the shameless promotion bit... If you feel I deserve a vote (you can vote for more than one blogger) please click through to the voting page and make one click to vote for me! It's super easy and there is no signing up or membership of any kind required. And thank you SO much for your support and for reading.

Hmm... yes... another day well spent.

I'm loving: Priscilla Presley.

While perusing a few photos of Priscilla Presley last night, my boyfriend said to me, 'she's as beautiful as they come.' Of course he was talking about exterior, conventional, superficial beauty, although I'm sure Priscilla is a wonderful woman on the inside too.

But he's right. Elvis' once wife is a true beauty and I've always loved looking at photographs of her. In fact, in some of her paired shots with Elvis, my eyes fight over which of the two to gawk at because they are both so gosh darn tootin' pretty. I think she just might be the prettiest woman I've ever seen.

When they met... Priscilla was just fourteen

In more recent years, I do wish Priscilla would have laid off the plastic surgery; Hollywood's self-inflicted and rather shameful disease, which I have blogged about before. I don't even want to dwell on it. So, while I do flinch at more recent photos of Priscilla with her face tweaked and tortured almost beyond recognition, older images of her almost take my breath away.

Side note: When I was a child I read Priscilla's wonderful autobiography, Elvis and Me. In it, she tells of the day she discovered papers inside her childhood home revealing her father wasn't her real father and that he had adopted her. I thought it sounded just like the sort of big-scale drama a bored little girl needed, so I searched high and low through our home looking for my adoption papers. I never found them, because - shock, horror - I wasn't adopted after all! I will admit I was momentarily disappointed because it meant my life would stay normal. Ahh, the antics of children.

Which celebs are you loving right now?

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Happy Mother's Day, Eva.

I love you with all my heart.

DIY: Hainanese chicken rice.

You can find this dish sprinkled all over Asia, with subtle variations, but it's always delish.

I made my virgin attempt to make it the other day, and while the presentation would have made any Masterchef snigger, the taste was pretty darn tootin' close to the real thing.

This recipe comes from Adam Liaw's amazing book, Two Asian Kitchens. Enjoy!

Serves: 4

Ingredients:

1 whole chicken

5 whole garlic cloves

2 chopped garlic cloves

7 thick slices of unpeeled ginger

1 tablespoon sesame oil

675g jasmine rice

1/2 teaspoon sea salt flakes

1 tablespoon light soy sauce

coriander, sliced cucumber and sliced spring onion, to serve

1 tablespoon neutral-flavoured oil

Chilli sauce:

6 red birds-eye chillies, seeds removed

2 tablespoons grated ginger

2 garlic cloves

1 teaspoon caster sugar

1/4 teaspoon sea salt flakes

1 teaspoon lemon juice

Spring onion and ginger oil:

4 thinly sliced spring onions

2 tablespoons grated ginger

1/2 teaspoon sea salt flakes

3 tablespoons neutral-flavoured oil

Dressing:

1 tablespoon sesame oil

2 tablespoons light soy sauce

Method:

1. Place the whole garlic cloves and 5 slices of ginger inside the cavity of the chicken and place it breast-side-down in a large pot. Cover the chicken with water and bring to a low simmer. Simmer for 25 minutes, then cover the pot and turn off the heat. Leave for 30 minutes, then lift out the chicken, keeping the poaching stock in the pot. Brush the chicken skin with sesame oil and then wrap it with plastic wrap. Set aside.

2. Heat the 1 tablespoon of neutral-flavoured oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add the chopped garlic and remaining 2 slices of ginger and stir-fry until fragrant. Add the rice and toss until well-coated and turning opaque. Add 1.25 litres of the reserved chicken stock, the salt, and the soy sauce. Adding any extra water only if needed, bring the rice to a simmer, uncovered, then continue to simmer for around 5 minutes until the water is level with the top of the rice and tunnels appear in the rice where steam is escaping. Put the lid on the pan, reduce the heat to very low and leave for 10 minutes. Remove the rice from the heat and leave it to stand for a further 5 minutes.

3. Meanwhile, to make the chilli sauce, combine the chillies, ginger, garlic, sugar and salt in a mortar and pound it to a paste. Add the lemon juice and 1-2 tablespoons of hot chicken stock and pound it again. Set aside.

4. To make the spring onion and ginger oil, add the spring onion, ginger and salt to a heatproof mortar and pound lightly with the pestle. Heat the oil in a small frying pan until smoking and pour onto the mixture. Once the sizzling stops, combine lightly with the pestle and leave it to infuse for a few minutes.

5. To make the dressing, mix the sesame oil and soy sauce with 60ml of the chicken stock. If you have any remaining chicken stock, season it and add a few spring onion slices. This can be served as a light broth to accompany the meal.

6. Slice the chicken and pour the dressing over it. Scatter it with a little coriander and serve it with the rice, condiments, broth and cucumber slices.

Viola!

Monkey brothers and wandering minstrels.

I'm about to make a confession.

Sometimes, I can be one of those people who is always right. Even when I'm not.

I know, we're a total disgrace to humanity aren't we, not to mention irritating, especially at dinner parties.

When I feel well-versed in a subject, it hasn't been unlike me to morph from a sweet little girl into a charged-up finger-waving know-it-all, pushing my point across dinner tables over innocent tossed salads and second bottles of savignon blanc. Someone shut that woman up!, I'd hear myself think.

Oh but sometimes I do get it wrong.

When I was much younger and much dreamier, I used to want to be an actress. In fact, I was one for awhile. I even got... wait for it... acting work. Yes, I was paid to act in things. Amazing, isn't it.

All us Sydney-based actors had our photos printed at a little hole-in-the-wall studio called The Jungle Boys. It was run by a group of young guys from inside their home; a seedy little basement dressed in Nirvana posters, Star Wars figurines and the faint stench of marijuana. But that's where everyone always went to get their photos printed. The Jungle Boys.

One day I secured my biggest acting coup yet: a top Sydney agent. I was all of about eighteen years old, about the size of Kylie Minogue, and bursting with industry knowledge and research. I couldn't wait to show this off during our first meeting.

I sat down with my impressive new agent and rattled off my plans for that week, including getting my photos printed at The Monkey Brothers.

"The what?", he asked, puzzled.

"The Monkey Brothers," I repeated firmly.

Uh, what kind of agent is he if he doesn't know the pot-smoking Monkey Brothers?

"Do you mean The Jungle Boys?", the agent asked.

I blinked.

"Oh, yes I meant the Jungle Boys."

I'm not sure what came next, my beetroot-red face or the entire agent's office howling with laughter.

Screw those darn Jungle Boys and their pot.

Then there was the time I kept serenading my then-boyfriend with the magically haunting Stevie Wonder track All in Love is Fair.

There is a line in the song that goes, "the future none can see". Except I thought it was, "the fusion none can see."

I'd sit there gazing lovingly into his eyes and singing, "the fusion none can see..." and couldn't quite work out why he'd look back at me a little oddly and rather amused, although he never said anything.

One time I even hand-wrote out the lyrics in a card and gave them to him:

But all is changed with time
The fusion no one can see
The road you leave behind
Ahead lies mystery

And the worst part was: he was a professional musician. He loved Stevie Wonder. Of course he knew I had got it wrong. He still never said anything.

And I was, once again, the idiot.

My dear auntie once told me she was had been talking about the band The Traveling Wilburys at a party and called them The Wondering Minstrels. Ahh, bless her. I wonder where the Wondering Minstrels are right now... likely hanging out with their mates the Monkey Brothers.

What about you? Have you ever got any song lyrics wrong in embarrassing situations?

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The worst job I ever had.

This post was inspired by Fat Mum Slim's eye-gouging post about the woes of living nearby to a backpackers hostel.

It reminded me of The Worst Job I Ever Had.

It was back when hadn't yet hit twenty years old, so of course I knew absolutely everything there was to know about anything.

Following high school, and before university, I had been working inside the pokey, stinking hot and cigarette-choked office of a fruit and vegetable wholesaler. The chain-smoking owner was an Italian named Mario and the dealings were a thousand shades of dodgy. I had to crawl through a hobbit-sized rickety steel gate to get inside the warehouse, past the mouthy forklift drivers and the stench of rotting fruit.

Unbelievably, this was not the worst job I ever had.

My boyfriend at the time tipped me off that his uncle owned a backpackers hostel and was looking for an Assistant Manager. The hostel was located in

Sydney's King's Cross, a red light district known for little more than druggos and seedy strip clubs. Just a few months prior, one of the backpackers staying at this same hostel had wandered up the street and was killed by an axe murderer in a random attack.

I thought the job sounded perfect

. I was, clearly, a total idiot.

Part of the job of being Assistant Manager was having to live on the premises. And not even in a private room. The Assistant Manager always shared a tiny twin room with a backpacker.

Our room had a small balcony, and as I stepped out onto it on moving day, I noticed a man staring at me, open-mouthed, on a balcony directly opposite ours across the street. I died momentarily when I realised it was my ex-boyfriend, a cheating mongrel who I absolutely could not stand. He waved at me. I shut the balcony door and vowed never to open it again.

My first day of work I slept through my alarm and was woken by the sound of incessant pounding. I groggily opened the door in my pyjamas to be met by the grumpiest man alive: my boyfriend's uncle, who proceeded to yell at me about punctuality. After I threw on some clothes and ran downstairs to meet him, he spent the rest of the day angrily scolding me and I did what any teenager would do in this situation - cried my eyes out.

Most of my job consisted of night duty, and I cannot tell you how utterly disgusting and depressing that was. As the only staff member on duty (plus being all of five-foot-three and skinny as a rake) I had to confront drunken backpackers in the hallways in the early hours of the morning, asking them to please be quiet as they waved their arms at me and yelled profanities. I cleaned up beer and vomit. I regularly woke to the orchestra of singing, shouting and the violent clashes of bottles breaking.

I NEVER WENT OUT. I hadn't really considered the fact that I had sacrificed my every evening for this godforsaken night duty. My days consisted of wandering around Kings Cross, dodging drunks and drug addicts through puffy, sleep-deprived eyes with no money to spend and noone to see, as all my friends were working.

One night I woke to the sound of a man moaning and shouting in total panic and despair. It was one of our residents, who had taken a bad LSD trip and had started to scratch his own skin off. He broke a window and held his hands up in claw shapes and screamed like a Tasmanian Devil. Thank god another manager was on duty at that time and looked after the situation as he was taken away in an ambulance. It was terrifying and I vowed to never try LSD.

The camel's back smashed into a thousand tiny pieces under the weight of a final straw when I was accused of stealing. The takings weren't quite matching the books, so naturally our boss jumped to the conclusion that one of us had to be pinching money. And given the sorry circumstances of the workplace, I suppose the idea wasn't totally preposterous. But I certainly hadn't nicked a dime, and the mere suggestion was enough to send me upstairs packing my bags. I'd had enough of this cr*p. Plus I missed Mario and his fruit.

Within a few weeks Mario had generously accepted me back and I returned to his wafts of smoke, infectious smile, dodgy dealings and lewd comments from his Italian forklift drivers. And not a backpacker in sight. Ahhh... bliss.

Me back then

What's the worst job you ever had?

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