it's all goood in the hoood :D

Diehard taught me a new way to eat my favourite breakfast of all time, soft-boiled eggs. Just add Bovril :DI cooked the cold eggs in simmering water for about a little less than 3 minutes and they turned out great. the taste was DIVINEE~~ seriously, if you haven't tried this, get some eggs and bovril and start boiling water, NOW!! lol

met the Old Man when i went for lunch with Diehard and he didn't even say hi! so i texted him to tease him and ask him if he would pay for lunch, and he actually had the nerve to text me back!

this was delicious by the way, it's garlic chicken rice for RM4.50 at Fu Bin Seafood Restaurant, 2 & 1/2 Mile commercial centre. the chicken strips were crispy and coated in a sweet tangy sauce, while the rice was cooked in our favourite way, not too soggy so you could taste every grain of rice in your mouth. mmm....

this is the skintone difference between my hairy arm and a golfer's leg :D :D :D which is not to say a lot~!!

on the street where i lived..

okay i know this is horribly overdue...i've cheated again with the date, actual posting is 1st March :D
my uncle lives in my old house now, it was my grandfather's. i didn't take a photo of my old house, but this is what i woke up to evry morning for the first 12 years of my life. except it was in daylight. *aHem* i remember being forced to go to bed every night at 8pm, and i would be awake for the first half hour just listening to the various sounds that made up the nighttime soundtrack of my neighbourhood.

my eldest aunt provided a whole load of food for my big family, including all-time favourites such as 'ngo hiang', chicken curry, kachangma and steamed fish. MakKo brought along roast pork from Mandarin restaurant, it was sinfully fatty ;)


this evil, evil place is where my extreme fear of earthworms sprouted. this bathroom is the only one in the house with hot water, and it's situated right at the back of the house, beyond it is the garden. imagine being a little kid and enjoying your shower, when suddenly, without any warning, a black, slimey, long earthworm writhes its way out from the cracks between the tiles and starts heading for your scared-shitless nekkid body. omg even writing about it i get the creeps :S

went driving again that night with Diehard for company. i thought this was the perfect photo to end my Chinese New Year posts :)

unexpectedness :)

i like being happy. and the kueh chap at 5 in the morning with the crispiest you cha kueh in town makes me extremely happy. the kueh chap was so delicate and the soup was deliciously hearty.

of course, the company helped too :)

Shanghai Renjia Cafe

met up with an old friend a few days ago for lunch. was supposed to go with Angelic Scamp too but her dentist's appointment was too overextended for my hungry tummy so i went with Sleepyfish first.

i call him that because i think that's his email ID or something, and it sums him up nicely :D


so i wanted to try this place that was really near to where Sleepyfish works. It's a cafe off Jalan Keretapi, i think it's after the Digi building, right opposite where the old PBK entrance used to be. ah, sweet memories. and by the way i did NOT drink beer ok! that is warm chrysanthemum tea served in that particular glass for some weird reason.


i've been wanting to try this place for ages, as it belongs to China Aunty, whom i met at Bestie's granddad's house a couple of months ago. we had a very stilted conversation in Mandarin, as she can't speak anything else, but i found her to be a very nice lady and promised i would try to drag Bestie and Lausai for lunch there one day.

the interior of the cafe is very nice, it's open air (which means no a/c :P) and is not overly cluttered. even the window opposite (where you can see the bright sunshine) has been covered with some nice cloth thingy that has a village scenery which doesnt feel too tacky (or maybe i wasn't sitting close enough to observe properly :D)


Bestie and Lausai's cousin works there, and he told us all the noodle dishes were pretty alright, so Sleepyfish ordered the pork noodles while i had the mushroom pork noodle. each noodle dish comes with a small bowl of seaweed soup which was quite yummy and the noodles tasted quite good, quite firm and not too floury or oily.

i ordered the mushroom pork noodles cause that's my favourite thing to order at Jade Tea Pot but i think Shanghai Renjia's version is better because of the larger servings and less oil used, which makes it not taste so 'jelak' :D both the noodles were rm4.50 each, so quite cheap for me. the service was quite fast too, we got our noodles in under 10 minutes, if i recall correctly.

i thought this was cool, its a huge poster of one of the (hutongs?) in Shanghai. looks like you could just step right into it ;)

China Aunty also recommended the 小龙包 (xiao long bao) so we chose the 小龙汤包 (xiao long tang bao) which has crab meat and soup in it. the 小龙汤包 was about the size of half a tennis ball, quite large and we got 8 pieces for RM10.

Sleepyfish warned me not to eat it straightaway as the soup was super hot and would probably spew all over the place. he told me that usually they would have a bigger spoon, almost like a ladle for eating this. i've not had much experience eating 小龙汤包 but it tasted really really good, except that the filling had a slight "te hian" smell to it. the soup was really comforting and nice on a cold cloudy day.

Sleepyfish was very smart, he bit off a small section of the 包 skin and let the soup flow into the spoon. the tang of the accompanying vinegar with sliced ginger cut down the rich flavour of the 包 nicely. we each had about 3 and couldn't take anymore, so left some for Angelic Scamp who came a little while later. she WHINED for a bit but finally ate them. forgot what you said la. drop me a comment if you remember ya :D

later that night i went to Koko's for dinner as usual. and as usual, after a big fat meal, she loves to stuff me with more food so she brought this out. it's crunchy bites of fried dough with pork floss stuffed in it, all the way from Sabah. Tasted reaalllyy great~ :) we brought some back home and someone is now a great big fan :D

Happy Birthday in advance to Lausai!!!

sorry for the boh-sim-ness feel of this post. i give no reason for it, it's just one of those days :P

骗自己 (lying to yourself) #1

changing the theme in your cellphone so you feel like you've got a new one :D :D :D

Sunday family dinner

i'm going to try and start posting my family sunday dinners. i love this tradition, even though it mainly consists of the same meal, PORRIDGE, which is served because of the demands of the Old Man. he loves porridge, he even likes his rice cooked close to a porridge-like consistancy. food is usually provided by Koko, with one or two additional dishes thrown in by MakKo. This Sunday we had, clockwise from bottom, roast duck given to Koko by a friend, fried mackerel courtesy of Old Man's big haul from last time, fried gluten 'kio-sie' style, eggs fried with chai-po and the BEST, rajang dried shrimp with soy sauce and lime juice and chopped shallots, omg as i'm typing this, i'm positively drooling from hunger!!

sunday family dinners are always great, not just because of the food, but also the company. i love sinking into the raucousness that is my family :)


after dinner there was some kuih salat, provided by MakKo. OMG they were the softest tastiest things imaginable, after such a great meal. had Diehard taste some the other day for objectivity and i think he liked it too :)

can't wait for the next one :)

crappity crappity crap crap crap

i hate unhappy people. i just hate it.

not being around unhappy people. more like unhappy friends or family and i can't do anything about it.

last night was fun. felt extremely fat but it was fun.

and then today the pukey feeling is back and unhappiness is all around me. maybe i should just stay home and hide from everyone.

thanks for always being there and listening to me rant though. like i told you, i wish there were more people in the world like you and me, then we could all be happy friends :D there wouldn't be any babies though. lol~! :D :D :D

aftermath

So.late night driving two days before CNY

been going around doing heaps of nothing. pretty obvious when i stop blogging.

fish in the water feature at a relative's house

This new year's seems so so different without her around. It was expected, but like everything else that's expected and unwanted, it still hit like a bitch though. wow. first time i've sworn on the blog :D

2-day old baby birds at mom's best friend's house

Despite the keeping busy, despite the alcohol...certain things just seem to have firmly taken root in my heart and brain. my grand master plan of pretending to act like everything is fine seems to be falling down around me.

taken during the Damai trip, 5th day of CNY

i keep trying to push it out of my mind, but it just keeps coming back, slamming back, relentlessly pulling me into a deeper state of confusion that i just cannot crawl out of.

fireworks outside the Hilton, on Valentine's Day.

i give up and give in. i can't do anything else about it.


today's post is the 67th post, which is one more than the old blog. seems appropriate.

don't want you thinking i don't get asked to dinner

my SE phone cable has gone missing and so i will not be posting up any photos for a while. it's sad that i have to accompany each post with some sort of media just to make it a little more interesting, as i don't think my writing skills are enough to get this blog by :D was listening to this song as i woke up. what a way to greet valentine's :P

TWO posts today! maybe there will be one more tonight..

if you would just realise..

To the owner of Soho and Ipanema: please please, at least think about having a ladies' night? it would probably make a significant difference in your revenue, considering all the other venues that have ladies' night that i know of are pretty much packed while yours stays quiet and plays cheesy old techonofied music, which, while i like the originals, sound so damn sloww..please don't send people to beat me up. it's my own crappy opinion which counts for pretty much almost nothing amongst your scores of customers.

why are there no photos? guess cause i didn't take photos without people tonight. it is one and one quarter of an hour into valentine's and my only male companion is snoring in his own bed (or not), hopefully dreaming of all those precious valentine days he spent with his wife. at least i know they had one good valentine's together, in India of all places! the Old Man gave her a (ugly-looking but at least the thought counts :D ) gold pendant which is probably in the bank now.

my most memorable valentine's: i was sick as a dog, but was welcomed with tea-lights spelt in my name, a whole heap (as in, heap) of presents, including a meter-high card which has now been shoved to the back of my wardrobe, a plate (or two) of purple risotto (which tasted pretty damn good, i think things that other people cook for you always tastes better than things you cook yourself) and a bouquet of roses plus one. sounds great eh? how things can change. still, i'm grateful that i had at least two great valentine days.

the question now is, who do i want, or do i even want anyone? i have thought and thought about it till my head ached and i still don't know the answer. sometimes it's this, and sometimes it's that. i told someone (i think it was Genius) that i wished there existed a device that measured your emotions, you would hold it to your chest and it would tell you exactly what you were feeling or thinking, so you wouldn't get confused. is this why i hang out with people younger than me? because i haven't matured enough to know myself well enough to know what i'm feeling? in all honesty i shouldn't even bring it up, some of them probably know themselves more than a person who's lived well into his 60s.

the only thing i know for sure is that i don't want to be alone. i have tried my hardest to be okay with it. but maybe some people are just not built a certain way. at least i know well enough not to use this as an excuse to hook myself to the nearest possibility. at this very very moment, my feeling is that i am waiting, biding my time until he realises...just realises...and then everything will be okay..more than okay..everything will be just right.

what a joke eh? wake up!!!! still..i can't help but cling to my sliver of a hope...