Oat and Durian?

Hey, I checked my blog today and my last article was read 15 times! I usually get like 4 hits, and that could be myself reading my own blog. So 15 is good, since I posted it only 2 days ago. Hmmmm, wonder who have been reading my blog :P.  Anyways, hope you come back often and bring more friends so that I may soon have enough traffic to become a fulltime professional blogger! (Yeah, right...)

Back to reality. I got great news last night from a dear dear friend. She is getting married in 2 months. I am super happy for her. CONGRATULATIONS, PY!!!!

So I don't know why I am super excited about her up coming wedding, probably because she totally deserve every happiness in the world because she is such a dear. So you know what came to my mind after she told me, I need a diet and I have 2 months for that! I plan to dress to the nines for her wedding dinner and I definitely can't do that with my spare tyre around my waist. SOOOOO, my target is to lose 15 kgs in 2 months! Ambitious or not?? Hehehhee....

Actually, I don't eat a lot. But problem is I don't move a lot either.... so where to start?

I am sacrificing lunch for at least 2 months. When I am hungry in the afternoon, I will drink some oat beverage. Lets see what we can achieve with this diet in a week! I will start tomorrow because I am going for durian lunch in Broga today :P. So I am bracing for tomorrow, ok?

Appetising?

APPETISING!!!!!!!!!

My Week Off

Was off work for the whole last week. We went to Legoland in JB on Monday and then sent the boys to BP to stay with my mum for 2 weeks. They are still there. Legoland was ok, it's more for kids between 6 to 12. Except for 2 roller coaster rides that adults may fancy, the rest are too kiddy for adults. If you ask me, I would say, go once. It's nice to visit at least once but I wouldn't go again personally. Not sure if you get the same answer from the kids though. Plus the wait for each ride was excruciating! We had to pick the ones we really like cause there wasn't enough time for all.

Legoland, good for kids only.

 Back from Bangkok after a 4 day trip. Had a pretty good time with my daughter while my husband went to work there. She is a brave 4 year old! We went on planes, vans, limo, taxi, motorbike taxis, motorised (James Bond) long boat, boat on oars and even went on elephant! All that and she didn't even wince a bit! I was surprised, I actually thought she will be afraid, especially on the elephant but she was like, "Yes, I want to ride the elephant!" Even after me reconfirming with her a few times! There went 900 baht for our elephant ride...

My 2nd son talked to his sister on the phone from my mother's house in BP and the 1st thing he asked her was, "Was it fun?". His sister of course said, "Yes!" and the poor boy was so jealous... But I have promised to take the 2 boys on a trip on a plane somewhere next year, so wait your turn :).

People in Thailand look very much like Malaysians, most of them speak to us in Thai, thinking we are locals. This was the same when I went to Chiang Mai. Bangkok looks a lot like KL too, but I think it's about twice bigger. The jam is worse than KL and another scary sight was the electrical and phone wirings running like some tangled mess along the road on posts. We don't see that in KL, thank God. I heard there are about 10 million living in the city, no wonder the jam is so bad. Otherwise, the city is nice for shopping and food, relatively cheap. Still, I prefer Malaysian food.

Authentic Tomyam Koong POWER!

The best place we visited has to be the Floating Market in Damnoen Saduak, which is about 1.5 hours from Bangkok. Things there are very expensive but the experience to ride on the boats which bumps and slides into each other was pretty cool. It's like traffic jam in the canal where boats slide along each others' side and the boatmen and women maneuvering expertly through. We were reminded to keep our hands and fingers inside the boat, if you don't want to lose them...

We also went to the Grand Palace but I think that isn't that nice. I wouldn't recommend that. When I came to Bangkok some 15 years ago, we didn't come here but to another temple, I think it was the sleeping Buddha temple and that was more beautiful. The Grand Palace is less interesting compared to that.

My girl and me at the Grand Palace.

The hotel area where we stayed was largely a Japanese expat area, so there were lots of Japanese restaurants apart from massage parlours. There were no tourist pasar malam, so I didn't get to shop alot. We did go to Tesco Lotus and BigC (equivalent to Carrefour here) and bought some clothes. I brought some 20,000 baht but couldn't finish it :(, I wished I had more time and more places to shop.

This Friday, we are off again to Johor to bring the boys home. We need to be home on Friday evening because my eldest has Confession and Confirmation (correction: it's Communion not Confirmation) on Saturday and Sunday.

Alexander Tan Shi Rong!

And I am officially a godma! My new godson, Alexander Tan was baptised last Saturday. Isn't he a cutie!

Election 2012

We have planned out what we are going to do and go for the whole of next week. Starting from Saturday evening we will travel south to BP, on Monday we will proceed further south to the tip of the peninsular for LEGOLAND! And we will be back in time for our flight to Bangkok on Tuesday. Then Friday late night we will back back home in time for next Saturday, the baptism of my godson, Alexander. I will remember to take photo of Alexander and post it up :). Will be a busy busy week, but something different from our routine. Kind of a busy break.

In the meantime, today we see the USA having her election. Me, having some weird kind of fixation with US of A (A lot of us are, come on, admit it!), am also following the results live on the CNN website. Looks like Romney is winning for now. I am glad, because Romney is pro-life although I don't dislike Obama. But what the heck, like it matters who I support. Now I am itching to vote for my beloved Malaysia, when will the PM call for election?! Well, he only has until March 2013, so our long necks will be able to rest soon.

Well maybe you will find this interesting like me, the amount of money (2.5 Billion USD) spent on the 2012 US election campaigns and where the money is coming from. Watch this link. Wow, that's a lot of money! Imagine that being used for other more worthy cause!

Back...

Okay. I am feeling loads better, so I am back to post here. Been a good week for me, much better then what I had been going through recently. We have been having busy weeks with Rosary prayers at BEC members' houses almost every week night as it is October Rosary month. As the lovely Auntie A said, the BEC members have been very supportive of late of all the BEC activities and this Rosary month has been the most participated in our BEC history. I agree. It is lovely to have prayers in homes, as one or two gathers in HIS name, HE will be amongst us! Having Jesus in your homes, isn't that lovely!

Amongst other things, I am going to be godma to a lovely baby boy, almost 3 months old. Cannot wait to manja this baby with lovely gifts. We are also going to Legoland in November, tickets already purchased! The boys will be at their grandma's place for a week after that and the girl and I will be going to Bangkok with their dad, if all goes well. He is there to work, so me and the girl will just tag along for a few days. The boys, especially the 2nd one, weren't that happy to be left behind but being able to spend a week at grandma's helped convinced him abit. Also, we promised him to bring him somewhere on a plane next year. The boys do not have passports yet and I am waiting for next year to make them theirs since the government will give half price for kids passport. Next year is just a few months away mah. I feel a little guilty leaving them behind but dragging all the kids along will be hard since hubby will be working during the day.

Nothing cooking tonight, having pizzas!

Sad Loss

It's been such a long while since I last updated my blog here. People who know me, know that I had recently been through a very tragic family loss. I have blog about it in my other blog so I will not repeat them here.

Things are getting a little better for me as time passes but life will never be the same. I won't let it be. That's all I can muster today here. Maybe, later on, when my mood is better, I will upload more notes here.

Harvest Time! Yam Seng...

I am back in the office today, after a long long weekend with a trip back to BP. The whole Brady Bunch was carted off in our Exora to BP. This is the first time that baby Emily has gone back to my hometown and her first time meeting her grandpa. Everything went well, too bad most of the eating shops were either closed for Raya or were too busy that we didn't get to taste much of the nice food in BP. But nevertheless, we are thankful for a safe and fruitful trip.

My sister just delivered a baby boy on Saturday while we were in BP. I was about to harvest the rice wine I was brewing for her anyway, so when we reached home on Monday, we started the harvesting. The wine tastes and smells really sweet and good. But we learn that the brewing time should be shorten next time to 20 - 25 days instead of about 35 days like what we did this round. This is because, we could see mold starting to form on the side of the ceramic pot and on top of the rice. We managed to rescue this by wiping and scoping the mold off before we start harvesting. We also learn that proper sterilization will work wonders in keeping other organisms from growing. We only want the wine yeast to work its magic, not the other microbes.

Another thing we learn is the importance of filtering. The wine produced is clear liquid with slightly golden reddish tinge. But there is lots of residual in the pot too. We tried scoping very careful, it works in the beginning but towards the end, it's hard since the residuals started to surface and get mixed up with the liquid. So we had to resort to cloth filter (those used by the kopitiam uncles). Next time, we will try to find even more fine cloth filter for better results. After harvesting, bring the wine to a quick boil and then put off the fire and let it coll before bottling. Make sure bottles are clean and dry, possibly sterilized with alcohol. Overall, I am pretty pleased with the result, we had our first dish with it yesterday, ginger fried egg in rice wine. So sweet and tangy, yummy.

My rice wine success!

Repeal 114A