Opinions

Just after I bought my first house, I phoned my parents and told them excitedly, "I'm getting a roommate!"

Dad, who was ever so hopeful since I had been single for a few years, promptly asked, "What's her name?"

When I answered "Maxine," there was stunned silence on the line for maybe 10 seconds. They're old-fashioned in many ways.

Then Mom asked in a quiet voice, "So, you decided to rent out your spare bedroom?"

I responded, "No, it's more like I'm taking her in," and there was more silence.

I broke the silence this time and said "She's got long, brown hair and big, beautiful eyes." And taking pity on them at last, added, "And a long, bushy tail."

They twigged.

Made dumplings on the weekend. We've made dumplings many times but this is the first time we made the wrappers from scratch.

We made two versions, one pork, one veggie. The veggie version was made with mushrooms, black fungus, transparent noodles and more. The veggie dumplings are shown here.

Delicious!

This is in Tai Wai, New Territories, in Hong Kong.

This is my cat Monty. Not always the bravest one.

Can anyone identify what this package contains? I don't recognise it. The photo was taken at an Asian supermarket in Toronto.

My name is Byron Martin and I've been running this website since 1999, though for the first couple of years the domain was bfmartin.com. It's a hobby site to fill some niches.

Website

The Dilbert Strip Finder started back in 1999. I'm such a fan of the comic. I keep track of the words people search for and my biggest surprise is the lack of naughty words.

The restaurant review section was added in 2005 by a couple of mates and me. We've been going to Vietnamese restaurants for longer than I can remember and we decided one day to keep track of which ones we like best. After installing a blog package, Pho Ottawa was born. It has had many more readers than we thought a local review site would get.