Since my trip to Hangzhou's Dragon Well tea fields, I have made use of the famous leaves less often than I should have. See, I went on a tea-buying binge after coming back to Beijing. In my cabinet right now there is an ample supply of not only Dragon Well (longjing), but also sheng and shou Pu'er, rose buds, chrysanthemum, barley, hibiscus, a fruit tea mix, and regular green and black tea. I'm sure some native Chinese would scoff at my puny tea collection (just like I would scoff at their wine collections of Great Wall and Dynasty bottles from Carrefour), but for me that is quite a lot of tea for the months ahead.

My right-brain demeanor also leaves me unfulfilled when I just drink the tea. (Purists, you may not want to read ahead.) I also must do something with it. Things like making rice pudding with rose tea and alcoholic granita with hibiscus. But before getting too experimental with my longjing, I thought I should whip up the classic Hangzhou shrimp dish that uses the tea.

Yesterday I cooked without water. Well, not completely without water, but with trickles from the faucet. When the trickles eventually stopped, I used purified stuff from the water cooler in our living room. To rinse food, boil noodles, wash dishes, everything. Trickles.

See, Jacob and I live in a brand new apartment, so new that construction hasn't even stopped. Anyone who has visited Beijing (or China) in the past 10 years will know that the entire city (and country) is over-dosing on construction. In order to clean up the air for the Olympics, the government had mandated that all construction projects stop by June 1. Well, that deadlines has now been pushed back to July 1. And I'm annoyed not only because the air is still dusty, but also because we get periodic electricity and water outages, both announced an unannounced.

According to a notice in the "lobby", the water outage was supposed to occur between 10pm and 6am. Fine, I thought. We go out to a bar at night, come back late, and try not to use the bathroom 'til morning. Then the water stops in the middle of the afternoon. Not very convenient when you're making curry laksa. Laksa paste, bird's eye chilli seeds, and raw shrimp juice are not things you want to leave unwashed from your hands.

Thank goodness for the purified water, though I did feel a small amount of guilt.

Before I get to this delicious coconut milk shrimp dish, I want to share my misery. I'm one of those people who is terrible about backing up files. Two days ago, my hard drive crashed. Jacob and I spent all of yesterday trying to recover everything new since my last back-up in September, and managed to save my important documents and music. However, about 80% of the photos I have taken since September, including many many food photos, stand a good chance of being completely lost forever. (Agh!!!) And what pains me the most is that this could have been prevented by just taking a few minutes every week or two to back up my data on some external drive.

"If it makes you feel better," said Jacob, "in all my years of working in tech I have never known a photographer or videographer who hasn't lost of sh*tload of work because of they forgot to back up." So the lesson to you bloggers, writers, and photographers out there: Back up! Firewire drives are a cheap alternative to this anguish of losing months, or even years, of hard hard work. Computers are fickle and can die at any minute, even Macs.

I think my beloved iBook will work again with new hard drive. But the photos are most likely lost forever. For the time being my work has to be done on Jacob's laptop in the morning before he needs it for work. I know this crash isn't the end of the world, but for a writer and blogger who does most of her work with a computer (and with deadlines looming) this is a major setback. I will be kicking myself for a long, long time.

But for now, the shrimp.