Virtuoso At My Piano

"There are two kinds of talents, man-made talent and God-given talent. With man-made talent you have to work very hard. With God-given talent, you just touch it up once in a while." - Pearl Bailey

A very talented young friend of ours played Jay Chou's "The Secret" on our piano and got it 80% correct after only 2 tries (he had never played or heard this song before)...amazing! Watch his fingers fly on the second song!

Signs That Caught My Eye

I saw this restaurant in Singapore called No Signboard Seafood....maybe to save money on putting up the signboard and lighting it up?


Speaking of unusual signboards, here are some that I came across:


A play on words...taken at the Insect world exhibition at Sentosa Island


Go figure!


Shows that we may grow older but not necessarily wiser.


One of the young men in our church has this very interesting T-shirt that takes a while to read.

Carolling Fa La La La La....

About 40 of us from our church went carolling (all dressed in red!) on 23rd December to spread some Christmas cheer. This year we had the biggest turn out for carolling and we went about in a convoy of 8 cars to 4 homes around Cheras area and Petaling Jaya. Was tiring but lots of fun as we sang and snacked at every stop.


We have 2 guitarists this year :)


Singing in the dark...should have brought along some torches!


Young and old alike...all sang at the top of our voices


Our very own special reindeer...with 2 sets of antlers! XD

My Garden Revived

Hubby went to Cameron Highlands and brought home new plants to replace my pitiful shrivelled ones on my kitchen window sill.

Notice the pretty white holders for the little pots

He even bought a bottle of fertiliser. Now the challenge is to keep them alive...at least until the next trip to Camerons!

Last Minute C'mas Shopping

Christmas decorations at Berjaya Times Square

Christmas is just round the corner and I have been on a shopping marathon for the past few days getting presents for family and friends. Went to Sungei Wang and Berjaya Times Square yesterday, braving the horrible traffic snarl in KL. Went to Mid Valley Megamall twice this week and everyone else seems to be doing last minute shopping like me...the queues at the payment counter seem to stretch for miles!



Have finally bought all that I need to buy...except Mr CoolTeen's present. He's gone to Cameron Highlands for a few days for the Youth Camp and I need to get his pressie and wrap it (and hide it!) before he comes back :)



The number of levels at TS is enough to make my head spin


Cages at The Gardens...??

The stage performances at Mid Valley Megamall are always colourful and fun

Sunrise

I am not an early bird but last week we had special morning prayer in church at 6.15 am from Monday to Thursday. It was difficult dragging myself out of bed but once I reached church I was glad that I went...we are blessed when we make the effort to seek God early in the morning (amen!)

I don't remember when I last saw a sunrise so I took a photo for remembrance...because now that the morning prayers are over I don't think I'll be seeing one for a long, long time...well, at least until school reopens (next year both my kids will be in morning session school)!

Snail Mail Greeting Card

Close To Home by John McPherson

Saw this comic strip in The Star newspaper the other day and I thought it was so true...how it has become a trend to upload our photos to a photo-sharing website and just send a link to our friends via email for them to view our photos. Even my pre teen daughter has become quite an expert at sending e-cards whenever a family member's birthday comes round.

I received a lovely Christmas card through snail mail and in it is a handwritten greeting from a friend in Austria. I think nothing beats a hardcopy greeting card even though the virtual ones are a whole lot more interesting and interactive. I have already written a Christmas card for this friend in Austria...now to make the trip to the post office to buy stamps...

Black Thumb...How Sad!

We all know the meaning of green thumb, right? Well, I have just the opposite...People always tell me how easy it is to take care of cactus but I have not been successful in keeping my cactus alive for more than a few months. When we renovated our kitchen I asked hubby to design my kitchen window with a little space to grow small plants. What I envisioned would be a pretty little garden on my window sill has now become a graveyard for plants! (big sigh)


What used to be a thriving bean plant...


These were my favourite...now the one on the left has shriveled.


At least this money plant is still alive! (not sure for how long...)

Putting Up The Christmas Tree

Christmas is coming, and every year my hubby would put up the Christmas tree and all the decorations as I am quite clueless when it comes to decorating trees. This year he felt that Mr CoolTeen was old enough to take up the challenge.





So Mr CoolTeen turned up the volume on his mobile phone...it's always better to work with a bit of music, I suppose...and about 10 minutes later the tree was all decorated.





This is a pic of the tree after some minor adjustments by hubby. Not too bad, eh?

And 5,6,7,8...

I teach a beginner's line dance class on Tuesday nights at our church and my class is mainly made up of ladies who don't speak English. As I speak English a whole lot more than Chinese, I have the challenge of now teaching in Cantonese (the only Chinese dialect that I can converse in). My mother tongue is actually Hokkien but I only know important basic words like eat, sleep, bathe...

My Mandarin sucks big time and the reason I enrolled my kids in Chinese school is for them to pick up the Chinese language. My grandparents' generation believed very strongly that we Chinese must be able to speak Chinese...but my parents had other ideas...they sent me to national school where I only learned English and Bahasa Malaysia. And they didn't even teach me any Hokkien but spoke to me in Cantonese!! Confusing?


I usually print and hand out step sheets for every dance I teach, but I realised that my students couldn't practice their steps at home because they couldn't read the English instructions. So I came up with a pictorial step sheet instead, using the MS Word document and a lot of cut-n-paste. Hope this works...will know how effective it is next Tuesday when the ladies come for class again...

Creative Advertising

A friend of mine sent me these photos through email (not sure where they're from). My favourites are the drinking cups...

Unique Layer Cake

Since my previous topic was about a cake, Hubby showed me a photo he took of this special layer cake at a function in Universiti Tenaga Nasional. Every time the cake was sliced the word UNITEN would appear but he just couldn't figure out how it was done. I was rather puzzled too but I have some theories which I will try out in the kitchen one of these days...

Green Tea and Red Beans

A friend gave me a sponge cake from RT Pastry House in Subang Jaya yesterday. It looked like an ordinary pandan sponge, until I noticed red beans on top of the cake. That made me quite curious as red beans don't usually appear on sponge cakes. Had a taste of it and discovered that it was actually green tea, not pandan flavour. Nice combination...very Japanese.

Afternoon In The Kitchen

My modem finally came to the end of its useful life (how sad), and the kids and I had no internet connection for the entire day. So while the kids went at each other's throats out of boredom, I decided to put my bread machine to work...and hid myself in the kitchen to escape my noisy kids.


I have a cheap breadmaker which I use just to knead dough. Then I transfer the dough into my larger electric oven for the baking process. When using a breadmaker, the order in which we add the ingredients is very important:

1) 300ml of cold water

2) 1 egg

3) 4 Tbsp of dried yeast

4) 60 g of butter

5) 600g of bread flour

6) 4 Tbsp of powdered milk

7) 12 Tbsp of sugar

8) 1/2 tsp of salt

Just set the machine to knead, and switch it off before it starts to bake.

Let the dough rise for 45 mins, then shape into buns.

Leave in a dry, warm place for 45 mins before baking.

Bake for 20-25 mins at 190 degrees. Brush with melted butter when removed from oven.

Some cinnamon rolls which Miss PreTeen helped to make (her favourite).

Aaah...nothing beats the smell of buns baking in the oven...except eating them, of course!

The Power Of A Snapshot

I took this photo of a signboard placed behind a lamp post and submitted it to The Star newspaper hoping to win RM50 because there is an ongoing contest for original photos of anything news-worthy.


But my photo didn't appear in the 'thumbnails' page; instead, 3 days later the large signboard was relocated...to the right of the lamp post!

Leg Power In Singapore

Went on a 4-day family trip to Johor Bahru and Singapore. We thought we would try taking the bus from JB to Singapore each day, and move around Singapore using the MRT. On the 1st day, we had a long wait at the Larkin Bus Station for our bus to Woodlands. So we got smarter and on the 2nd day we took the bus from the KotaRaya terminal instead.

trying to figure out the MRT route before buying tickets

It was quite an adventure, taking the taxi to KotaRaya, go through immigration, catch the 950 bus to Woodlands, get down and walk through the immigration checkpoint, hop back onto the bus, then head to Kranji MRT Station. The rides on the MRT wasn’t fun either, as there was usually standing space only by the time we get on. We would explore Singapore island and then do the same thing but in reverse order to get back to JB. Got left behind by our bus once when we took too long at the immigration checkpoint! The next time we filled the immigration forms first before we reached the immigration complex.

Orchard Road Christmas deco

Went to Orchard Road to look at the Christmas deco, which was rather minimal this year. My daughter finally got to ride on a double-decker bus. On Day 2 we spent a whole day at Sentosa Island and all of us rode on the luge…the kids rode it twice!

traffic jam at the end of the luge track

The Songs Of The Sea show at Sentosa Island

It seemed like a fun idea using public transportation to move around, but in reality it is a whole lot of waiting and walking…we were really tired by the end of Day 2! Haven’t been so happy to finally travel around in my own car on Day 3!

Spent Day 3 hopping from one shopping complex to another and discovered that 2 large shopping malls have already closed down...but hey, it’s been 10 years since I last visited JB.