1st Hike in Washington: Mt Rainer

Yup, it's summer and we decided to go hiking. Our choice: Mount Rainer -Paradise. It's beautiful sight and have 2 totally different terrain like 20min drive away.. And like what the park ranger told us, the trail is 75% covered with snow and the only way to get down is to knee down.

Ehmm.. That's Derrick doing the park ranger's way. As for me... I chose the lazy way, sit on bum and glid down. Well, my jeans got wet.. =P

Next we headed to another 2 hour walk and came across these floating tree trunks, To get to the campsite, you need to walk across these tree trunks. Somehow, it reminds me of those computer games where you had to jump across moving obstacles.

And that's me.. Walking super slowly and testing each step before i walk on the floating tree trunks. But it was quite an experience

Shoes for a baby

It's baby Curtis's 1st month birthday and he has his first pair of shoes from his aunt. It's so cute.. Imagine a 1 month old bb wearing this pair of shoes when he's still wearing booties.. hmm.. I wonder how long it takes for him to outgrow this pair of shoes..

It's a balloon, It's a moo moo cow

Hee.. I received this balloon from linda and kevin. Cute right? For now, it sits pretty in the living room. But i guess it will get deflated soon..

It's been a while since i blogged

Hmm.. taking an unintentional break from the blogging due to some matters. I apologize to my "fans" for that. It's been a while and a lot of things during which. I will try to back post some of the events..

p/s : Cheers, I have ordered my Harry porter book from Amazon and i promise i will be a good ger that I won't flip to the last to read the ending. I wiiiiiillll read from page 1.

Independence day in USA

It's our first Independence day in USA and was told that the fireworks are spectacular. So i jio the others to go Kirkland where they have a fireworks event. And it faces Lake Washington where u can see other areas and their fireworks.



We went earlier to the event and saw that everyone else is prepared for the event. Pinic, chairs, kids, etc... Every1 seems happy lazing ard on the field.

Here are the guys with us:


The only preparation we did for the event was to stop at 7-11 for our slurpee. Junyong and Ricky also bought the cooler cups too. So next time, we can all head to 7-11 for the slurpee refill.. Note.. there's a bigger size than our extreme slurpee, it's ultimate slurpee..

Yeah.. i found internet

Yup.. "free" wireless internet was detected.. So here i am, blogging with the "free" service. The cable guy is coming to install this coming friday, so till then, i can only survive on free services.

Well.. We just moved to our new place 4 days ago. And it was very tiring. More so, because we had to cleaned and scrubbed our old place before returning the keys to the rental office. We are still stayin at the same estate, but we have moved from a 1bdr to a 2bdr. Sharing the new apart with junyong and eve.

And what do 2 silly person do after they cleaned up the old apartment? Take photos lor...

We have moved...

Tired and exhausted from moving a lot, lot stuff.. And without internet and tv for the week. We realise how much reliance we have on those 2. I hate to admit, but i'm a geek. I can't survive without internet....

More posts to come once i get my internet-fix-at-home

Mayday

It just occured to me that we are less than 48 hours to our move.. And.. the house still look intact like every other day. Well, we been busy with work, CSI Miami episodes.. Somehow, it just dun feel like we are moving yet..

Welll, we still have sat and sun.. That's our excuse.. Whatever the case, we booked the rental truck for fri afternoon already and the move date and time is set. Good luck to us... =P

Free lunch from Seattle 5

Today i having free lunch from Seattle 5. They were invited to our company to promote having 5 servings of fruits/ vegetables a day and I signed up for it when i received the email earlier. So here's a picture of the healthy brown bag which comes with a free lunch insulator bag.

When it's 12noon and the receptionist announced about the lunch. Everybody was abuzz about it. The sandwich looks delicious and is yummy. Comes with chilled 100% juice and baby carrots for snacks. The sun chips were healthy and yummy too..

It's an interesting way of promoting the adoption of healthy eating. It reminds me of the Health Promotion Board back in Singapore. Both have the same purpose.. But this one is certainly more cool and good. And it really made an impression to all, that healthy lunch can be very yummy too...

明星三缺一

Does this game rings a bell? Well.. I was just mentioning to derrick whether there's any mahjong game for pc. And both of us recalled this fun mahjong game with jackie wu's voice. It didn't take too long for us to find the name of the game 明星三缺一.

Seems both of us played this game before. But it took us really long to find the game to download. Reason? The 2006 version is free is for online play, is easily available but I wanted the pc version and it took derrick 1 whole day to find the pc version. Imagine plouging through all the chinese websites trying to understand the technical terms like sign up, download, etc. I chipped in too, helping him translate the phrases. =)

Time for me to start the game =P

Panic.. Petrol flowing out of our car

Yesterday after work, i went and pump petrol. Well the petrol is cheaper in Mukilteo, where i work. The thing with petrol kioks here is, it's all self service. You get the nuzzle and pump petrol. I have never ever pumped petrol on my own.

Back home in Singapore, everytime i go to the petrol station, there are uncles and aunties to do the job. There was once, i lifted the nuzzle and i hear the uncle screaming from far away "Waaait, i will do it for u"

But over here, you do your own. Today as i was pumping, the click went off. Meaning that the fuel tank is fuel. But seeing that it's a few cents more to hit a round number, i gave it a few more clicks. Next thing i know, petrol is flowing out..

PANIC** i grabbed tissues and cleaned the car. But there's excess petrol in the petrol pipe when you put the cap back. Feeling scared, i asked the petrol assistanat. And she told me coolly, it's ok. huh??? Reallly??

So what i did was, i drove off and pulled over at some shops 5min to check on the petrol cap. Phew.. the excess petrol disappear.

When i told Derrick about it, he told me. That happened to him once too. Seems the petrol nuzzle here click much later than Singapore's. So back home, you could click a few more time to make round number. But over here, you better stop when it clicks..

Xtreme glup in USA

I saw 2 colleagues of mine holding each an Xtreme glup when they came back from lunch. And i was curious, so i asked them about it. And the first thing they said was: All programmers need sugar to stay focus, so i shld get 1 too. But at 54oz, it's huge. One of them justify the size by getting the diet version while the other said he will drink only half of it.

And it seems that you could refill it for 99cents by bringing it back to 7-11. SO i told Derrick about it and we went and got 1 for ourselves that evening.

The largest size Slurpee which i had in Singapore is small in comparison. The cooler is huge and has thick walls. The inside aren't that big. But the coolest part is the slurpee doesn't melt for very long. And extra info to all those jy-weight-watchers, we only filled half of the cooler.

It's a baby boy

Nay.. it's not me. It's Linda's and Kevin's bundle of joy. Congrats to them. We were just chatting on msn with linda earlier today during lunch, and linda was complaining of backache and it seems to be a sign of labor. Well.. what happened next was fast. She checked into the hospital in the afternoon and baby curtis was born.

And here are the pictures taken at 10pm, where baby curtis is only few hours old.
Once again, congratulations...

Fat? We are fat?

ok.. I am peeved when people back in Singapore say "You all always do gatherings. Better eat less, very fattening" The thing is, please judge yourself first before you judge others.

I like to take this opportunity to do some justice to my American counterparts here. Before i came to US, i was always under the impression that Americans are all very fat. But it's really all about the media exposure we were under back home. Simply said: "We are the toads in the well"

Not all Americans are fat. Only a few are super fat, the ones we see on TV. Recall your meals for the past week, my meals are definitely more healthier. Lots of greens and non-fried, cos we dun wan to mess up the kitchen.

How many of you will ask to have breast meat when you order food? How many of you have a small bowl of salad or a bag of baby carrots for lunch? My Americans colleagues does that..

I guess i'm influenced too. We have watercress soup and rice for meals, wrap with cheese and lettuce for lunch.. It's only when we gather with the rest, we will make the effort to cook better food.

So please.. keep your negative energies to yourselves. And don't judge people without undertstanding the full picture

Home made bubble tea

Hee, i finally convinced Derrick to buy this bubble tea pack from Uwajimaya. Bubble tea cost $3+ per cup over here in USA. It cost $4+ for the bubble tea pack and $1+ for the pearls. Derrick got the non-microwave pearls version as he don't trust the quick microwave pearls.

While i was napping for the afternoon, Derrick made these bubble tea. So nice of him..

Verdict: The pearls were QQ. Better than the ones they sell in USA. But the tea is rather powdery.
Guess we need to finetune that..

Sat: Rummage sale

While waiting for the rest to join us at the brown bear car wash, we were hanging ard to kill time. We drove pass this sign that says "Rummage Sale", since i've been wanting to go to a garage sale, we thought "Why not?

As it was 3pm, they were wrapping up the event. Everything was at 50% off list price. The items weren't expensive to begin with. We bought a vase to plant the money plant that i cut from office and a basket for decoration. These for 25cent in total. Although they are second hands or discards? But i feel that they are still good and i can do my bit for earth. Cheers...

Sat day out

We met up with the rest to catch Fantastic Four in the morning. After which, we had dim sum for lunch. Thennnn.. The rest suggested washing cars... Well, most of them have new cars and would like to keep them shiny. They suggested going Brown Bear Car wash where you DIY. Well, since we have never been to one DIY car wash, we decided to go along too..


So here's a group picture of 5 cars.. You pay $1 for 5min of vacuuming, and $2 for 5min of car wash/ soap/ conditioning. It's pretty impossible to rinse, soap, rinse, condition, rinse in 5min. So most of us topped more coins. But it's pretty fun.

The verdict: me and derrick prefer to wash at our car lot. As you can take your own sweet time to wash.. =) But it was a fun experience

You are from Singapore?

Today during a meeting at work, my American colleagues were asking me questions about Singapore. They discovered i'm from Singapore becos one guy guess it. Well.. It seems that Singaporeans talk with an British accent. That's wat they say..

Some questions they asked :
Ask) How far it is from USA?
Ans) It's 16hour behind USA and 20 hours of flight (not including waiting time)

Ask) Wah.. Isn't that the other part of the world
Ans) Yup. it's on the equater line

Ask) What language do we speak? Mandarin?
Ans) Mainly English and Chinese. But becos we mix a lot of words, we called it Singlish

Ask) Have u watched Pirates of the Carribean? Is that how Singapore really looks like?

Now that's the most funny part. Here i have 5 ang mos asking me about Singapore. A place they seldom hear but "seen" on movie. They have never been to this island of ours. And ppl who have asked me how's Singapore like:
1) It's hot and all year rd ard 90 (~30deg).
to the ang mos, that's scorching hot summer all year

2) It's 4 million ppl on 1 dot on the map
They thinks we are too crowded

3) We ban chewing gum, i can't think of another country that does that.
They think we are mad.

Popcorn Alert

This old-name aka old-branding popcorn turned out yummy.. I saw this featured in American eats and since it was on offer, bought 3 for $1.50 to try.

Last min grocery

Yup, just came back from the nearby supermarket. Earlier on, i was reading thru the supermarket's weekly special circular and i saw Maggi Mee at 10 for $1. Then i exclaim, "Ya hor.. There's no maggi mee for tmr"

What happen is, we have 2 kinds of maggi mee.. The super cheap cheap and expensive kind. The cheap ones are these nissin ones and we boil them to add the soup we cook. Maggi mee and watercress soup goes very well together. We have some soup leftover for tmr lunch but ran out of cheap maggi mee. So we dragged our feet out to buy.

What's weird about this:
1) The cashier wave a pack of mee 24 times to enter the price for 24 packs? OR
2) us buying 24 packs in 1 go?

Happy man and his black box

2 weeks ago, when i fetched Derrick from work, he said "Can i buy? The model i wan is more expensive, ard USD$500. BUT.. There's only 1 game i wan to play"

Well.. by now, maybe u are still clueless what it is. Derrick wans to buy Xbox 360 elite. The one that has the HDMI cable, in short, the more ex version. The thing over here in USA now is, a lot of places are out of stock on this. Maybe becos it's new? or maybe it's becos they are tryin to sell the older version, the white box?

So Derrick on chancing upon the availability of Xbox at circuit city, wanted to buy one. Well.. there's nothing for me to stop him from buying. So within 15min of ride home, Derrick rushed to the computer to buy the Xbox. BUT.. it's out of stock.. oooh, you should have seen the sad look on him. he retried for a few more times and the same thing.

Well.. there's nothing u could do about that.

The thing is. Derrick tried to buy again the next morn, it's out of stock again. Then.. 1 hour later, for some miracle reason, when he order again, it went thruu... He became the proud owner of those rare black boxes.

So now, despite spending $500. He's a happy man, playing games on the Xbox. As for me, i'm happy as i can watch the recorded CSI Miami on the TV. =) I'm a TV addict and now, we have dinner everyday over CSI Miami.

I hereby present the happy man and his Xbox.

Yam Cake Round 2

Did i mentioned that i made yam cake on sat morn? Well, i did the week's laundry, cleaned the floors, cooked lunch while Derrick is still sleeping away. Seeing the yam and flour remaining from the previous yam cake attempt, i decided to try making it again.

The last round, i think i added too much water and too much yam. The yam cake turned out literally purple in color and too "yam-my" Too much yam.. Too little salt was added and it was rather bland too.

So this time round, i used lesser water and lesser yam and more salt. And for the yam, i cut it into cubes instead of stripes. Result: A little hard, could have added more water. Taste-wise, yam cake lor.. =)

We 2 can't put it right. It doesn't taste bad but it simply just doesn't taste like the ones my mum make. It's the mama's touch that's lacking. My mum makes really good yam cake in super big quantity. And the best part is.... She wakes up and fries it ready for ur breakfast.. I guess mum's are all very noble. So cheers to all mamas..

As for me, i'm no noble chef. Despite my love to cook food, i have to work smart and save time. So i fried all the yam cake and they are now sitting in the fridge. So Derrick.. If u wan to eat yam cake, pls heat them up in the oven/ microwave..

Special thanks to Kevin

Kevin emailed me a copy of the news. So here's the copy of the news article of ella in full color.
http://rex-oink.blogspot.com/2007/05/im-in-news.html

Weekend dinner / feast?

Today, we went Ranch 99 to do grocery shopping with the rest. More importantly, to buy crabs for chilli crabs tonight. Since coming to USA, i have eaten chilli crabs twice with them. We were commenting that we dun eat so much crabs when we were back home. Guess, all of us miss home food. It's a way for all of us to catch up with one another too..

Today's menu include: 2 chilli crab (Dungeon crabs) with fried man tou, Kang kong and roast duck and meat. With 9 of us, each of us paid $6 for the super full dinner. It's definitely cheap to cook at home. The super huge wok of kangkong only cost $2 at Ranch 99.

Oh ya.. If you remember my previous rant about expensive kang kong. It seems that that particular veg is expensive at some supermarkets. Viet wah and Ranch 99 seems to sell them cheap. Uwajimaya sells them for a whopping USD$3 for 0.5kg...

Freeze prawns

We just did our grocery shopping at Ranch 99 at Renton. We haben been to this supermarket before and went with the rest today. While we were there, i wanted to buy frozen prawns but the other gers were telling me to buy fresh prawns instead. The thing is, fresh and frozen prawns were about the same pricing. i chose headless prawns where the heads have already been removed.

The good thing about fresh prawns is : It's still fresh? But i had to clean it and prepare it for my meals..

Frozen prawns on the other hand have been cleaned, and deshelled. The best part is the prawns are individually frozen and you dun have the prawns sticking together in a big pile.


Derrick deshelled a whopping 2lbs (~1kg) of prawns within 30min, which was very fast. We called him a machine desheller.. =P I did the slicing to remove the intenstine of the prawn. After which, we washed and here comes the challenge *To freeze the prawns individually*

Derrick laid the prawns neatly in a 2 plates and left them in the freezer. The next morn, we removed them and put them into a ziplock bag. We have more success with the round plate as the prawns are indivually frozen. As for the yellow plate, the prawns are stuck together in a row of 12. But it's fine for us.

I have learnt a lot from my mum and cooking shows. To save time for my weekday cookings, i prepare all the food during weekend when i get back from grocery. This way, we can cook very quickly every evening. I am glad that derrick helps me out in the housechores and we have fun experimenting with the cooking.

This 2lbs of prawns will most prob last us 1 mth. So the next time for our prawn purchase: Should we buy frozen or fresh prawns??

Sun Dinner: Ramen Showdown

Back in Singapore, JY and I loved the tom yum instant noodle. Although we're in US at the moment, there's lots of Korean/Japanese/Chinese supermarket around. And, along with them, tons of different types of instant noodles to be found. Our mission now, to find a ramen that reminds us of the tom yum instant noodle! "Ramen Showdown" begins!!!

Neoguri
Jingying's Score: 5.5 /10, I find the udon noodles rather thick and it was rather spicy.
Derrick's Score: 6/10, I didn't eat much of this packet. However, I didn't like the thick noodles. It was quite spicy though, so it'll be nice for a hot winter night.


Shin Ramyun
Jingying's Score: 6/10, The soup was just spicy, good for cold days
Derrick's Score: 5/10, Again, I didn't eat much of this packet. I found it to be quite bland. All I could taste was the chilli. The noodle was not fantastic, but ok.

Kimchi Ramem
Jingying's Score: 6/10, It's not too spicy with a strong taste of kimchi
Derrick's Score: 8/10, I enjoyed eating this one. The noodle was very bouncy and the soup was tasty. However, would have been better if it was slightly more spicy.

Chapagetti
[We have yet to try this. To be updated later.]

Jin Ramyon
[We have yet to try this. To be updated later.]

An Sung Tang Myun
[We have yet to try this. To be updated later.]

Sun Lunch: Prata in USA

We were shopping in this korean supermarket when Derrick saw this prata was on offer. 5pcs for $1.50 at 30cent each. I was telling him, are u sure frozen pratas will taste good? And we dun have curry to go with it too..

In the end, we bought 1 pack to test it out. And it was really good. Best part was when i did the prata-action, when u crush the prata when it's done. It's really flaky and wasn't oily. I preferred my prata with sugar while derrick preferred his with condensed milk.

Jingying's Score: 8.5/10,
Derrick's Score: 9/10,

Flash news: 9 June 07- We bought 2 more packs of this during our weekly grocery shopping.

Sun Breakfast: Garlic Bread

Somehow, today we are in the mood of cooking food. And so we decided to make garlic bread for breakfast since we have bread and garlic. I guess now that i'm working, it's only during the weekends that we get to cook "better" food, or rather food that requires more time to cook.

This is a rather simple dish with some butter, Extra virgin olive oil and of coz garlic... The bread turned out crispy and fragant. Surprisingly, the garlic wasn't overpowering and we felt that we could have used more garlic. It doesn't taste like those buttery garlic spreads we have back at home. Well.. i guess for now, my vote goes to garlic bread in olive oil..


Jingying's Score: 7/10,
Derrick's Score: 7.5/10,

Here's the link to the recipe that i got from:
http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,,FOOD_9936_17548,00.html?rsrc=search

Sat day out

Yeah.. we got a Nikon D40 to play with while waiting for our movie "Pirates of the Carribean". It was fun shooting with the real-sized camera. Only issue was.. It's made of paper.. =P

side note: We took this full sized shot of us to show that we did not put on much weight now that we are in the states. I guess our faces are round, so all previous closed up shots made us look fatter.. =)

here's a close-up pict of Derrick that made-him-look-round

Fri evening: Traffic is miserable

Yup.. I heard the radio DJ said "Traffic is miserable". And she got me to listen hard.. I was about to make my way home from work and had 30min to go on the expressway. In all, she said that there were 2 accidents on Expressway 405-north.. and 1 accident 405-south (=T i'm takin this). And there's accident on 520 bridge (bound to seattle).

Oh my.. It's friday evening and jams everywhere? ermm.. It's almost 6pm, but considering the sun doesn't set until 830pm? so the night is still young, but i dun wan to waste it waiting in the jams..

Well, there's nothing i could do except drive on... I'm rather lucky as every morning and evening, my path of travel is against the jams.. Well.. Ppl drive towards Redmond in the morn, i leave Redmond. =) As i come to this interesection, i was slowed down.. I was thinking out to myself.. "The jam better not be that bad..."

As it turned out, my lane is the only path free.. All other paths are jammed up.. It's such an awesome sight where all cars are stationary and our little red car is moving.. And i simply couldn't resist this moment to capture it down..

Is this weird?

I was on the highway when i saw this weird looking car and couldn't resist taking a picture of it.

I was driving at 60miles/hr which is approx 100km/hr lo.. And that weird looking car can even drive faster than me.. Guess, he drives faster than me cos his wheels are bigger. =P

How we spent Memorial Day

Yup, it's the public holiday in USA on Monday. Time to relax?? Nay.. Somehow, we decided to wash and wax our car for the very first time. It's quite warm and feeling that we needed to be out of the house, washing car seems the best activity.

It's a gruelling 3 hours for such a small car. Step 1 and 2 aren't too bad. The worst was waxing the car. Seems that the wax had harden, making it super diff to rub off. It's literally stuck to the car surface. Lesson learnt: Next time, wax and clean off the car in small sections. This way, we could avoid the wax hardening onto the car..

Despite the hard work, we had fun washing the car together. Not forgetting to take pictures as well. See Derrick's self potrait picture.. Can you see me? I'm still hard at work cleaning off the wax.. Time to scream at him and get him back to work.. =P

Memorial Day weekend out

It's the long weekend as Monday is a public holiday in USA - Memorial Day. This morning, we decided to have go out and have breakfast instead. So i chose Brown bag cafe based on online reviews.

The place was nice, cozy and country-style. When the pretty waitress served us the maple syrup, we were thinking, "Hmm.. This place is very generous with the syrup." A side note to all: Derrick loves pancake with a lot of syrup..

We finally knew the reason why, so much syrup was given, when the food came. The portions were HUGEEeeeee.. Derrick ordered the "Big Mike" which came in 2 big plates as shown above. It comprises of 2 super huge and thick pancake (1cm thick), lots of hashbrown, eggs and bacon. Interestingly, it wasn't oily and the pancakes were thick and fluffy..

I am amazed by the sheer size and thickness of the pancakes, as i have tried making them before. And they really need super-low-even heat to cook without burning. On top of which, it's difficult to cook it through with a thick pancake.

For me, I ordered the "Light fare combo" and i must say, it's definitely too huge for me. Derrick did managed to finish 80-90% of his pancake.. Amazing.... So i hereby crown him the pancake king. As for the other food, we packed them home as we couldn't finish. It was an expensive breakfast at $25 but it wasn't too ex considering that we gave lunch a miss later..
For those interested: http://www.brownbagcafes.com/
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We met up with Junyong & wife and headed to the Premium Outlets for shopping. It's the Memorial day sale and they have extra discounts at the factory outlets. There's Coach, levis, Sony, etc.. Yeah.. time for me to buy my super cheap levi's jeans at $25 each. =)

It's my best buy in USA. Can you imagine paying more than $100 for a pair of levi's jeans in Singapore? When it only cost $25 at the USA Factory Outlets.. Later on, we bought quite a bit of stuff at the Walmart too and filled Junyong's car to the brim. The 2 were super shocked at the amount of things we bought at Walmart. Well, now that i'm working, we have lesser time to make the "pilgrimage" trip to Walmart. With this in mind, we bought the things in bigger quantity such as 5 big boxes of cereals. =P

No prize for guessing who's having which cereals. =P

USA KFC

We didn't feel like cooking today so we decided to have KFC for our dinner. Mind you, this is the first meal we 2 eat out on our own. Most of the time, we cook our own meals and it's only for weekends that we eat out with the other frens..



We ordered a 3-piece combo of black meat to share, this consists of 3 thigh/leg, salad, potato, biscuit and a drink for USD$7.65. There are some observations we made:
1) Breast meat which is "White meat" is more expensive by $1
2) The combo meals spells exactly the number of breast/wing/thigh/leg. It's not like in Singapore where you will smile nicely to the KFC staff and say "Can i have more thigh meat please.."
3) KFC in USA is 0 trans fat.. =)
4) I think it's healthier than KFC in Singapore, cos you don't find lumps of fat underneath the crispy skin.
5) The drum is so smalll... i think it's a mini drumlet
6) Biscuit is like bread with a crispy-buttery layer on the top.
7) I miss the lots of chilli sauce that goes with crispy chicken. KFC just doesn't taste right without the chilli sauce..

New milestone - I'm working

Yup.. I have just started working in USA as a software engineer. Although it's a temporary job, i still feel happy about it. It's a true blue American company, i.e 99.99% of the employees are Americans except me.. It's quite a whole new experience working with Americans and so far, i feel they are very professional and funloving.

It feels so raw to feel like a new bird reporting to work.. It's been quite a while since i felt this way. For the past few days, I been feeling tired from work. Maybe it's because i'm not used to driving 20miles to work, or more so because i'm trying to work hard every minute, balancing work with life and house chores.

Yup, i still cook our every meals to save money.. so there's the grocery, cooking, etc.. It amazes me how working mothers can do it all. For me, now i'm still coping being a career woman. I'm thankful, Derrick is not too fussy about food and he helps me with all the house chores too..

I'm thankful for the Memorial Day holiday for me to catch a breather..

I'm in the news

yup.. Ella made the news yesterday.. Nope.. I didn't rob the bank or got into any trouble with the law. =)

Dot, Kevin's sis is an editor and she did an interview on us on the visa issue. It's one of those after dinner chat that we had. Thinking that it will never get published, i gave her a crappy pict of me. One that i for-once-never-act-cute pict. i was looking for a nice pict of me for the interview. And i realised a lot of pict of me were those act-cute-shots, or had some people in the shot with me.

Well.. I had some bad comments about the pict in the article. But i'm still happy, cos it got people around me excited. i wasn't expecting it to be published, so i didn't tell any1. So when it was published, even i didn't know.

My sis-in-law was telling me about my brother's reaction. He was reading the papers and suddenly screamed : "I was just thinking of her and she suddenly appeared in front of me.. See.. my cute little sister is in the papers"

Well.. at least i didn't do anything bad to hit the newspaper in Singapore. And i am happy that i hit the newspaper for once in my lifetime. Everyday now is a new experience for me and i just added that news article to my whole experience.

From this, i learnt something valuable:
1) Do dig for nicer picture in future
2) I bet there's not too many WU JINGYING in Singapore. So there's no mistaken identity about it.

Pottie

Yup.. We bought a plant for the house, it's african violet. The plant hat i been growing in Singapore, which-have-yet-to-flower. It seems so much easier to buy a pot that's already flowering. See how pretty it looks on the bar table.

It took us a while to decide on the plant. I wanted to add some colour to the house and wanted to buy those plastic flowers for easy maintenance. Derrick was against it, he wanted real plants. The issue we have is, we need a plant that's easy to maintain, looks pretty of coz, and minimum sunlight needed. Considering that we only have warm in spring and summer..

In the end, we settle for african violet. For now, it's sitting pretty on the bar table..

University U-District and Pike's place market

Yeah.. it's sat and time to head out. We met up with the rest at the University U-District for the fun fair. It's quite an amazing fair.. While at the fair, we bought this curly fries. It's a potato literally shredded into stripes by a screwdriver. Yes, they used a screwdriver to cut the potato.. It was interesting. Here;s the box of curly fries for sharing. Yummy..


Next, we headed next to Pike's Place market.
http://www.pikeplacemarket.org/frameset.asp?flash=true

We wanted to go this place for pretty long. It's an old market in Seattle where all tourist flock to. The first Starbucks in the world is located here. See the number of people queueing to buy a coffee. We didn't join the long q, guess we didn't had coffee at the first starbuck outlet..


And.. we got Piroskhy.. It was yummy... It's like a cross betweeen bread and puff. In the pictures is Eve, Derrick and Ricky..

Technical nightmare

It all began on friday morning.. The MSN for-some-god-knows-reason fail to start at all on the laptop.. All attempts such as re-install, downgrade to MSN 7.5, restore to older system restore point all failed.. So it's time for the long awaited format of the laptop. Well this HP laptop is very new and was preloaded with a lot of redundant stuff.. The 10GB of harddisk containing the recovery and other "sponsor-ware" was terrible.. Can you imagine, a 80GB hdd laptop and i kept having "System on low memory..." AND.. mind u, i did not install or download any big big items so faar...

So it all seems like a sign to format the laptop finally after 3 months of purchase. We had created the 18CDs of recovery disc.. yes.. 18, as the laptop has no DVD burner.. So after backing up my stuff.. it's time the nightmare begins..

Part 1-------------------------------------------------------------
We loaded in the Media Centre 2005 OEM OS, and the familiar blue screen appears. and guess wat, it failed to detect any hdd.. HUH@#?!!?
We tried again, same error, but with the VISTA CD, it can detect the hdd..
So we called the hp support line who treated us like idots who dun know how to shut down the laptop. Argghh.. In the end, i found out, you need to disable SATA controller in BIOS before the format..

Part 2-------------------------------------------------------------
Time to load in the drivers.. HUH@??? No Lan? How to connect online to download drivers?
After many rounds of downloading and restarting the laptop, the LAN miraculously appeared.

Part 3-------------------------------------------------------------
Where's the sound? The.. Took another hour of wild-goose-chase and many installations to finally get it working. by now. we have already spent 9 hours on the laptop already..

If any HP guy is listening, i have a few advice for u:
1) I still love my recovery discs, pls dun eat my 10GB of hdd instead of disc
2) Ermm.. your call support definitely needs an upgrade. I dun need to spend 5min on call just to go thru step-by-step with you on how to shut down a laptop
3) Please have all the drivers on the same support page
4) Maybe a magical blue button "like the IBM ones", will be sweet. Just press to connect online for the drivers
5) HP is very good for non-techies. With the recovery disc, you can easily reload back factory default. ie. 40GB useable space from a 80GB hdd.

To date, this is my most painful computer reformat so far... Derrick didn't even have to sweat when he did Vista on the other computer =( but at least now i have more than 70GB of free space on the laptop.. Woohoo =P

Telok Blangah Rise in USA

Yup.. This is literally in Seattle, Washington, USA now. We were over at Dot's and Jay's place for housewarming and saw this at their house. Doesn't it look familiar to Singaporeans? Seems that Dot's used to stay at Telok blangah rise with her parents and she got her dad to send this road sign to her when LTA was auctioning off the signs. Well.. you could say it's a piece of home in USA..

Mobtv

Yeah.. we got the free trial of MobTv and can download the shows from the Singapore mediacorp channels.. I just downloaded the show "Mars vs Venus" and it's such a typical Singapore show.. It's funny and soooo.. Singaporean..

So sign up for the free trial if you are overseas =)

www.mobtv.sg

Jicama

It's a jicama or Mexican potato or Turnip? Yup.. they all refer to the same thing. Previously, i saw frozen spring rolls being sold at the Uwajimaya (Asian supermarket). So on the spur, i bought ingredients and made spring rolls and invite others over. And i guess i could say, everybody loved it.

So i'm going to make fried spring rolls again... Nothing makes a chef more happy than to see the happy smiles of people finishing up all the food

Laksa

Last night, we cooked the box of laksa premix by Prima taste and it tastes really good. Hee.. we had a lot of ingredients too like noodles, egg, bean sprouts, prawns, tau pau and chicken. We were slurping away the laksa and it made me realise that we haven't been having spicy food for a rather long time..

Most of all, we bought the correct thick noodle for the laksa. Yes.. it's difficult or should-i-say-impossible to find those thick white noodles for laksa here. The others have tried bee hoon, tong fen, udon with laksa. In fact, we chanced upon this noodle at a Thai restaurant and i even asked the waitress where they got this noodle. There's hope to find this noodle..

Yup.. derrick and i pored through the entire section of noodles at Viet Wah. This is another Asian supermarket that we haven't been to before. We saw this pack of noodles that looked like it and we bought it to try.. Results: Very good.. We found the noodle...

p/s: To fellow singaporeans in USA, if you are looking for noodles for laksa, below is a picture of the packet. Good luck finding..
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/198/488886821_be4111112a_m.jpg