How brown the peanut

 

Hi Natty!  How are you, Honey?  I hope you are not too lonely.  At least you have friends.  I am very lonely without you.  Loneliness is a fact of life for me, I don't know life any other way.  We will be married soon inshaAllah.  Please be patient and pray.  I want you to know that I love you with all of my heart.

It's Sunday over here.  Sundays are always busy for me, but at least the afternoon was quite pleasant so I was able to take a nice nap before Mary Unknown7 started singing.  In the evening, I made a fresh batch of peanut butter.  When I was at the supermarket the other day, I checked the prices on peanut butter.  It takes me RM 5.50 plus labor to make roughly 12oz of peanut butter, while a 12oz jar of peanut butter costs about RM 12 at the supermarket.  Skippy was about RM 15.  That's an extra 10 bucks more than making it myself!  I roast the peanuts in a covered pot with a glass lid, and pick up the pot and toss the peanuts around with the lid on to stir it.  I guess I should have roasted today's batch longer, because my peanut butter came out white.  It still tastes like peanut butter, but it's white.  I guess I got white confused with brown.  Next time, I'll make it REALLY brown.

Roast beef

 

Hi Natty!  How are you today, my love?  I hope you are healthy and keeping safe.  I'm doing OK over here.  Not much going on, just the usual.  Oh, I made a fresh batch of my generic roast beef!  The ingredients are so simple.  I don't really want to go into the details of the procedure, though.  As I mentioned before, I don't want people selling ¥500,000 bowls of Zam-style ramen.  Well, this is roast beef.  I will reveal one important ingredient: beef.  What's so hard about roast beef, anyway?  Just slow cook it in a covered pot until done.  If you like it rare, then you must use the best cuts of beef.  In my roast beef the gristle and fat are the best parts, so I don't want the expensive cuts.  There's a snapshot of today's batch above, swimming in the drippings.  I use the drippings to make my world famous Cowboy beans.  Famous among cats, that is.

Qur'an 20211030

 In the name of Allah, most Gracious, most Merciful.

32.  Say, "Who has forbidden the beautiful of Allah, which God has provided for God's servants, clean and pure, for sustenance?"  Say, "They are, in the life of this world, purely for them on the Day of Judgment."  Thus do We explain the Signs in detail for those who understand.

33.  Say, "The things that my Lord has indeed forbidden are shameful deeds whether open or secret, sins or trespasses against truth or reason, assigning of partners to Allah for which God has given no authority, and saying things about Allah for which you have no knowledge."

(The Heights 7:32-33)

One

 

Hi Natty!  How are you today?  I hope you are well, and having a blast.  Today is Friday over here.  The morning was pretty chill.  I did my laundry, then had ramen for lunch as usual.  Oh my God, I'm so serious about my ramen.  Right now I'm using beef neck bones for soup stock.  The chunk I used today turned out to not have any bone in it at all!  It was all meat!  What's up with that?  The flavor was OK, though.  Well, the mind and the stomach have a close connection.  Perhaps the flavor was psychosomatic.  The evening was busy, however.  But I managed to get everything I needed done by sunset, so I don't have to go downtown anytime this weekend inshaAllah.

Wow, it looks like Climate Justice is en vogue right now.  It's because of you, my Precious Princess!  Good job, Honey!  I'm a big fan of Bootsy Collins, especially the stuff he did in Parliament/Funkadelic.  Metallica is a big supporter of Climate Justice too!  Isn't that right, guys?

Stuffed

 

Oh Honey, I'm sorry!  I didn't notice those fashion pictures from Paris were old news until today.  This means you haven't been back to France ever since... well, you know.  I'm still quite displeased at what happened back then.  But it's been a while ago, and I guess there's no need to make a big stink about it now.  As long as it never happens again, and they always treat you very cautiously.

I'm stuffed right now.  I just ate banana fritters, prawn fritters, and a kilo of fries, and I'm so damned full.  I wanted more of those banana fritters that I had last Friday, I thought they were quite good.  My mother didn't like them, though.  My mother is a ruthless food critic.  She gets the hawkers scrambling for cover, while she doesn't even need to leave her kitchen.  It turned out that the banana fritters weren't as good as last Friday's.  The last time was greasier, this time it tasted too cautious.  I suppose I can't expect excellence from such a standard recipe.  My mother liked the prawn fritters, so I thought I would try some.  They tasted average to me.  But anything tastes better in my latest blend of hot sauce, that's why I also downed a kilo of fries.  I used a bottle of cheap chilli sauce, the type that wasn't based on ketchup.  Then I blended it with green hot chilli peppers, chilli puree, and pickled soybeans.  So it still has sugar in it, being the bottled sauce that it is, but now it has so much extra kick to it.  The key to a great savory dipping sauce is pickled soybeans.  I swear by it.

Qur'an 20211028

 In the name of Allah, most Gracious, most Merciful.

28.  When they do that which is shameful, they say, "We found our fathers doing so," and "Allah commanded us thus."  Say, "Allah never commands what is shameful.  Do you say of Allah what you know not?"

29.  Say, "My Lord has commanded justice, and that you set your whole selves at every time and place of prayer, and call upon God, making your devotion sincere as in God's sight.  Such as God created you in the beginning, so shall you return."

(The Heights 7:28-29)

It's mostly downhill from up here

 

Hi Natty!  How are you?  Are you enjoying the ride?  How's your back?  Please be careful and aware, because habitual injury can be irreversible.  Try to find a comfortable way to labor.  Sleep on the floor.  I sleep on the floor, and I don't get back pain.  Alhamdulillah.

It can get lonely at the top, but at least you're at the top.  The good news is that nobody can ever reach God, so there will always be steps to climb.  But if our agenda were anything other than God, then we're shit out of luck.  Only one direction to go.  So please be righteous.  I  love you for the sake of Allah.

Cowboy beans

 

Hi Natty!  How are you today, my darling?  I hope you are feeling great, and having a marvelous time.  I'm doing fine here, alhamdulillah.  I didn't have to go anywhere other than buy some breakfast for my mother, then lunch for myself, and that was just to the crossroads.  Traffic is constantly murder there nowadays.  It wasn't like that 10 years ago.

Are you a cowboy, Natty?  Do you eat beans?  Everybody knows that real cowboys eat beans!  Look at Blake Shelton!  After I cut the grass this evening, I had beans for dinner.  I had only 3 slices of bread left, including the butt end.  So I laid down some hot sauce in the pan, and heated it up.  Then I put my burger on that and cooked that up.  I dumped my beans on top of that and heated it until the whole mess was steaming hot, then I made a cavity in the beans and cracked an egg in there on top of the burger.  I put a lid on it and when the egg was done, I scooped it out with the burger and that was my sandwich.  Lookie and Adolf Kitler were all over me throughout dinner.  My cats love my beans.

Married

 

Hi Natty!  How are you?  How's business?  I hope you are handling life and work well.  It's business as usual over here for me.  It's Monday, and everyone seems to be rushing around and standing in line to take care of business.  See that old house up there?  I need to buy the land (and the land where I'm living now, which is at the end of that rubber hose), tear down the old house, and build a new house for my wife in order to get married.  So I need to remind everyone, if I failed to build a house here for my wife, then I will be forced to move out of this village in order to get married.

Yes I need to be married to my Natty, and today I'm very grumpy about it.  People may argue that Allah will take care of me, but it may be that Allah will do something different altogether, something that no one would enjoy.  So what did I do today?  I went downtown this morning to pick up my mother's prescription.  I went to the big supermarket and bought 3 bars of soap and a couple bags of potato chips.  Okra was dirt cheap, so I bought some of that.  I had lunch downtown, that's where I found out my cousin had just passed away.  I made white rice for dinner.  I sautéed onions in soy sauce, then mixed them with okra chunks.  I topped the rice with that, and topped all that with eggs fried in hot sauce.  Dinner was acceptable.  It was certainly better than yesterday's slop.  That was my Monday.  Business as usual.

The pest

 

Hi Natty!  How are you today?  Are you still mad at me?  Please don't be mad at me, because I love you with all of my heart and I will marry you inshaAllah.  How's your back?  Have you been laboring hard?  Try to stretch often, and sleep on the floor straight and face up to help your back.  I just got done with dinner, and it was crummy.  I had to cut the grass this evening then bust ass to feed myself before sunset, and I was in no mood to cook so dinner was crummy.  It was just a burger and fries, but it was crummy.  Goes to show that the product will suck no matter how much skill and experience you have, if you didn't give your work your heart and soul.

Lately somebody has been messing with Mary Unknown7's avatar.  The world of Second Life is made of many regions, and when the viewer program starts up it tries to communicate with the chosen region.  I've made a video of the startup above to show you.  Someone managed to sneak past my antivirus and run a program to hijack my network adapter and modem to deny my access to the region at the "Requesting region capabilities" point of the startup.  Obviously I found a solution, but that avatar is very important to us here at Shadowplay.  I have the task of protecting Mary Unknown7, and the avatar is how she presents herself to the world without having to show her face.  The avatar helps us convey that Mary Unknown7 is perhaps every bit as beautiful as her avatar.  What!  Are you folks suggesting that she isn't as pretty as her avatar?  You better not let Mary hear that.  You'll hurt her feelings.  She's very sensitive.