Busy, busy, busy

I've been busy doing the preliminary work for the kids' birthday cakes. I have 3 more days to complete two cakes for the birthday party this Sunday. I ordered the third cake because I didn't think I could handle making three at once! It's also because Eva wants the Barbie doll cake which is better with butter cream deco, and that's not in my field of expertise. So I'm only making Claire's and Solomon's.

This means I'll be busy with food shopping, cake decorating and cooking for the next few days! I'll be quiet till next week then!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Claire is 5

On Sunday Claire turned 5. I'm planning a combined birthday party for kids no.2, 3 and 4 next Sunday cos daddy will be home, and their birthdays are all pretty close. Saves time and money as well!:)

So since Claire's birthday fell on a Sunday, and the party was the week after, I told her she would not be cutting a cake, as she would be doing so the next day in school. She was a bit disappointed, so I decided to buy her a small cream cake to cut during dinner with the other cousins.

Later that night, Annie, along with cousins Amanda, Allyson and Michelle attended a dance concert, with performances from Australia, China, Korea and more, at the Borneo Convention Centre. It was a long drive away and Sis no.3 and I took a while to find it! Some of the roundabouts we had to go round twice! :) I never knew there was such a huge structure all the way out there.

We had to drive past a dam/bridge/road thingie cutting across the Sarawak river. This thingie actually blocks the flow of water so that the water levels on either side are unequal! I do not know the purpose of this dam-bridge-road, (cos it definitely ain't for hydro-electricity) so who would want to play God and go against the flow of Nature (literally) right? There are rumours that since the palatial home of a certain white-haired big shot has the Sarawak river flowing behind it, he wanted the water to be permanently full, so one can jet ski anytime??!! Hmmm.. maybe that's just small town gossip, cos what'll we do without gossip eh?

I remember when we were teenagers with too much time on our hands, we used to park there in our friend's yellow pick-up and eat burgers while watching people illegally race their cars!! My, that was the era of carefree life! :)

Okay where was I? Oh yes, the concert marked the end of three days of dance workshops and charity concerts. Annie and cousin Allyson attended a funky/ jazz dance workshop that afternoon, taught by an Australian lady. There were also workshops on yoga, Korean drums, classical ballet and so on.

Anyway, the next day, during their school break time, I brought a cake which I made for Claire to school and also 30 balloons for her classmates! We got Eva out of her class to help celebrate jie jie's birthday as well. The kids were all so excited to see a Spongebob cake!

Solomon helping with the balloons!

Eva helping with the cutting!

Happy 5th Birthday Claire!

Two moons

When I read this email, I immediately thought of my blogger buddy, Uncle Lee and his two moons!! Arhahaha... (Those of you who follow his very interesting blog will know what I mean!) So this post is specially for you Uncle Lee!! :)

I'm an astronomy buff, so intriguing celestial events excite me. However, Mars is red and I think it's further away than Venus, so I seriously doubt the accuracy of this article, but I suppose it doesn't hurt to keep an eye on the heavens around mid-August, for the possibility of witnessing an extremely rare occurrence. I hope the weather around that time will improve though, because right now it's raining everyday even though it's supposed to be the dry season!


So anyway, here's the email I recieved:

27^th Aug the Whole World is waiting for......... ....

Planet Mars will be the brightest in the night sky starting August. It will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. This will cultivate on Aug. 27 when Mars comes within 34.65M miles off earth. Be sure to watch the sky on Aug. 27 12:30 am. It will look like the earth has 2 moons.

The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287.

  

Share this with your friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again

If this is true and Mars will be at its closest, I think that it would just look like an extremely bright star, and not as large as a full moon! But, it would be cool if it does look like two moons eh?

So Uncle Lee, on 27th August, everyone will see two moons!!! Hahahaha...



15 mins later: I Googled it and yup, unfortunately, it's fake. You can read about it here: 
http://www.universetoday.com/2007/07/25/will-the-mars-look-as-big-as-the-moon-on-august-27-nope/

Rock climbing

*eheh*... I've been busy watching Grey's anatomy recently. This is why I try not to get into a t.v. series; there's just no stopping! You just have to know what happens next! So lately all I've been doing is watching Grey's anatomy episodes on my laptop and not doing anything else!!

There have been 6 seasons of Grey's anatomy. I've only watched it on and off ages ago when it was on t.v. during seasons 1 & 2 I think. So, when I discovered free streaming on the internet, I started watching from Season 5. George O'Malley died!! I couldn't believe it! Then episode by episode, I finished everything till the end of Season 6, so there isn't anymore to watch until September!!

So what am I doing to get my Grey's fix? I'm watching everything from Season 1, episode 1!! Right now I'm starting Season 2... and I'm not very productive in everything else, like work for instance, blogging for another. So before I switch back to zombie mode, I thought I should just post some photos of last week's rock climbing session.

We were at The Spring shopping mall and they had set up a rock climbing wall thingie so we all had a go. Annie was great at it and Claire, after much persuasion gave it a try and managed to go halfway up. Even Hubby and I tried once cos we've always wanted to see what it was like. It was quite fun actually and we would love to go rock climbing for real in the future.

 Annie is very agile.

 Cousins Amanda and Alaena were there too!

Claire was very brave.

Alaena wasn't afraid at all!

Mum and Dad joined in...

Okay I'm done.... Now I'm off to watch Grey's! Adios!

Eclipse-The Twilight Saga

Hubby and I went to watch Eclipse on Friday night, on my insistence of course. We went the week before without buying tickets ahead of time, so we ended up queuing for almost half an hour (the cinema's ticketing system was down!) only to find out that the tickets were sold out! On Friday, since the movie was a already week old, we had no problems getting seats.

However, halfway through the movie, the reel jammed and the film started burning and melting right in front of our eyes! I must say, neither Hubby nor I have ever experienced that before! They switched on the lights and the film guy (or whatever you call the guy sitting up in that small room) must have clipped off the burnt bits and taped it back together or something. After a while, they resumed the movie and only a small bit was left out. I always thought even cinema movies were digital nowadays.. hmmm....

Anyways, I didn't enjoy this third movie as much as the second. I think it must be because I didn't revise the books or watch the earlier movies beforehand to get myself into the silly, teenager-in-love mood! It was a pretty good movie with great special effects, thought the acting as usual, left much to be desired. But who needs great acting when you look as good as these kids eh? At least Taylor Lautner looks older this time, so ogling at him makes you feel less like a paedophile! hehehe...

Don't worry, I haven't changed allegiance; I'm still Team Edward! *swoon*  Though I wish he wouldn't look so pasty all the time... it's like the whole Cullen clan is using that 'bedak sejuk' thing! (a Malay traditional white, powdery paste applied to the face like a mask!)

Anyways, for the next movie, I'll make sure to do my revision first, that way, I can watch the movie in giggly, lovestruck-teenager mode. Yeah, that would definitely be more fun  ;)

So don't watch the movie while you're being a crabby, cynical adult and come up with 'intelligent'-sounding criticisms, cos movies are our Never Never Land; they're meant to be ridiculous and impossible! Otherwise, what's the point eh?

Tree people from the east

Disclaimer: This post is merely the superior opinions of the mind-bogglingly talented author (hyuk hyuk), at times exaggerated, to satiate the readers' appetite for anything moderately appealing to read on the internet which nowadays can amazingly contain so many endless pages of mundane nonsense about nothing in particular. (FYI, I'm rambling cos I'm bored) 
It is not the intention of the author to provoke or offend anyone, especially West Malaysians, unless of course you still think we live on trees... 

This post was inspired by a recent chat on FB with my secondary school classmates. We were reminiscing the good old days and happened to recall an encounter with a substitute teacher from West Malaysia. It was so hilarious I decided to write a whole post on this issue.

Okay, so here's some history and geography. On the left side, we have West Malaysia, consisting of 11 states (12 plus Wilayah Persekutuan?) and on the right side, we have East Malaysia, consisting of just two states, Sarawak and Sabah. My beautiful hometown of Kuching is in Sarawak, and Sarawak is almost as big as the whole of West Malaysia put together. So West Malaysia + East Malaysia = Malaysia, or One Malaysia as everyone likes to call it nowadays!

So the history part: it started off as Malaya first. West Malaysia gained independence from the British and formed a country, Malaya, on 31st August, 1957. (This is the only historical date I can remember, thanks to Sudirman!: ~Tanggal tiga puluh satu... bulan lapan, lima puluh tujuh... Merdeka, merdeka, dadada... dadada...~)

Some years later (when I said the only historical date, I was serious), Sabah and Sarawak decided to join in the party. So, we formed Malaysia. Now, the general sentiment is that we got duped, (and Singapore very clever) because we are the ones rich in natural resources, like timber and petroleum and West Malaysia only has empty tin mines and pineapples in Johor or something like that? (never paid attention during geography either) So, East Malaysians are resentful that West Malaysians have super highways from top to bottom and billion dollar buildings in Putra Jaya, while we still have people with no access to piped water and electricity here. (I'm merely stating facts for the sole purpose of enlightenment here, so don't kill the messenger mmkay?)

Anyway, don't get us wrong, we love Malaysia, the country and the people, minus the politicians. So, all this resentment is exacerbated when West Malaysians don't consider East Malaysia as part of Malaysia! Or, they are so ignorant about the other half of their country that they think we still live on trees!

Okay, to be fair, this was more like 10 years ago. I think with the advent of affordable air travel and border-less communication and internet access, most West Malaysians have already travelled to East Malaysia or at least know that we don't go running about in loincloths, indiscriminately chopping off people's heads! So, note that the following encounters are from 10-20 years ago.

To give you an idea of what I mean, my sister told me that when she was studying in the UK, her friend from Kuala Lumpur asked if we used the same currency as them! Perhaps she was imagining gold coins and seashells?? hehehehe...

It's one thing for a European from a whole different continent to fancy us as butt naked savages from the mythical island of Borneo, but for a fellow Malaysian, it is pretty sad.

When I went to KL to study, I lived with my Aunt's family. They were really generous to have me for 2-3 years. I remember the day I arrived, my cousin Tanya was out but kindly left me a note saying: "Welcome to Malaysia!" though I've lived in Malaysia my whole life! (You're a dear Tanya, thanks for putting up with me as a roomie!)

I remember going to KL for a Leo Club convention with a few of my secondary school friends. There were Leos from schools all throughout Malaysia at that convention which was held at Genting Highlands. When we told people where we were from, the most common question was how we got there!! The audacity of that question merited an equally ridiculous response. Being the cheeky teens we were then, we told them we had to row a sampan (small wooden boat) over and started out about a month before!! hahahaha! And most of them actually didn't know whether to believe us or not!

My mum (she was a nurse) also told me of a case where a junior doctor from West Malaysia was posted to Kuching to work. His mum made him bring over a whole box of Maggi Mee!! :)

Okay, back to that substitute teacher. I think we were in Form 4, so that made us around 16 years old. One day we got this guy substitute teacher from either Kelantan or Terengganu. He must have been fresh out of teachers' college, the poor sod.

So he introduced himself, talking in loud, slow, monosyllables like we were slow in the head or something.

He said, "Na-ma... sa-ya... xxxxx..., sa-ya... da-tang... da-ri... Ke-lan-tan... de-ngan... me-nai-ki... ka-pal... ter...?" (my name is xxx, I came from Kelantan, by aero...?)

He actually expected us to say aloud the last missing syllable like in primary school!!! I can't remember if we actually did, for fun, or just sat in shocked, open-mouthed silence!

The second we registered that he was an idiot, we began to have fun with him!

We were going like, "Wow! Aeroplane??!!" etc...

We told him stuff like he'd better not go out at night cos there were still headhunters on the loose and not to mention man-eating crocodiles everywhere. Also there was petroleum in my backyard and we'd never seen aeroplanes... or something to that extent!

I seriously think he was unsure of what was happening! The poor guy was just grinning away!

Then he decided to go around the class and read our name tags out loud. Bad call. He was okay with the Chinese and Malay names. When he came across Christian names, his tongue was tied! Yvonne became "Wy-vonnie", Michelle became "Mik-kel"...

I think he darn near fainted when he got to Jacqueline! "Jak... Jak-koosh"!! Poor Jac, the name stuck for quite a while! :)

Who ever let this guy out into the world to teach our young should be shot in the head! Hahahaha! He was a real sport though. Either that or too stupid to know he was being made fun of! We were actually pretty mean. Once again... poor sod. 

To all West Malaysians: Aww... don't be angry... we still love ya!!

13th Rainforest World Music Festival

Every year, the Rainforest World Music Festival is held here, at the Sarawak Cultural Village, over a span of 3 days. Groups from around the world are invited to perform traditional, folk-like music. During the day, there are music workshops, where people are introduced to various traditional instruments and tribal music and dance. At night, there will be al fresco concerts, with traditional performances which get more modern / rock as the night progresses.

Annually, this festival attracts many tourists from around the world. This year was the 13th installment, and Hubby and I have never ever been to a single one! We thought it was high time we went to see what all the fuss was about! Since the kids are all out of 'baby phase' (Solomon, the youngest, is almost 2, so officially a toddler), there are so many things that we now have more freedom to do (finally). 

So, Tai Ku (Big Aunt) so kindly had the kids over for the night. It was a grand pyjama party for all! Only Solomon was not comfortable with the arrangement because he had never slept at TaiKu's house before.

Shortcut to the beer. Never mind slippery and treacherous... anything to get there faster... 

Important things first. Hubby beaming with his cooler bag of beer-on-the-go.

Hubby and I only went for the first night's concert. The tickets which cost RM110 per person was for a whole day pass, but we could only spare a night and got there a bit late, after seeing to the kids' settling down. It was raining heavily before we got there, so the night was fresh and cool. We had to park our car a distance away, at Santubong Resort and then take a shuttle in. There is always less people on the first night and since this year was World Cup Year, I suppose it contributed to the smaller crowd which we encountered.

I love the ambience there, the whole concert-in-the-jungle thing had a carefree, hippie feel. The crisp sea breeze was splendid and the smell of mud and grass reminded me of great times sliding in the mud while playing softball in secondary school! Ahhh... those were the days, I was tempted to roll myself in the mud for a minute there! 

This also reminded me of the only rock concert we have ever been to. It was a Bon Jovi concert in KL and Hubby and I were only 18! We went with a bunch of his housemates and man was it a blast! Okay, that was eons ago... back to the present...

Very appropriate sign placement. Notice the position of the totem pole man.

It was a lovely night in a quaint setting.

 

They placed screens all around. Even across the lake.

The Sarawak Cultural Village is quite a pleasant place, it is dubbed a living museum. There is a lake in the middle, and around it are houses built in the style of the traditional houses of the different ethnic tribes found here in Sarawak. During usual times, you can pay to visit the Village and see the ethnic people in traditional costumes pretending to do "daily activities" in their respective houses. One can also catch a performance showcasing all the traditional dances.

During the Rainforest World Music Festival, the Village is transformed. There are two outdoor stages for performances, an area for craft stalls, exhibitions, another for workshops and also a beer garden and food stalls.

 

The earlier performances were slower paced. Here is Hubby's "favourite", three Russian sisters doing something similar to yodeling! Accompanied by bagpipes some more! :) But to be fair, though it's not in everyone's taste, I think it is technically quite challenging to sing like that!

 

The crowd warming up to a Russian group with a more lively beat.

The last group was from Sicily and they were more "rock".

 

These kids obviously had a deprived childhood!! :)

Hubby and I enjoyed ourselves. I think we might go again next year...

Waterfront

A few days ago we decided to bring the kids to the Waterfront. I remember we used to bring Annie there to see the musical water fountains quite often when she was small, and realised that we never brought the three smaller ones there before.

So, we brought them to have a look at the river with sampans rowing lazily to and fro and also the fountains and statues scattered about the length of the Waterfront. There were also many teams practicing their rowing for dragon boat races. Solomon enjoyed watching them row, in perfect unison, the long boats up and down the river. They were surprisingly fast!

There are plenty of cat statues around because this is Kuching and "kucing" in Bahasa Malaysia means cat.

Green toes

We went to visit Grandpa Titus a while ago because Sis no.3 asked me to drop by to check on his foot. Apparently he has a sore or a growth or something on his big toe which is painful and making him limp a bit. Being the stubborn Grandpa he is, he wouldn't open the plaster to show Sis no.3, so I was sent over to investigate. You see, Grandpa will downplay anything from pneumonia to broken ribs, so I had to make sure it wasn't anything serious!

So we were in the car and I had just told the kids we were heading to Grandpa's house:

Claire:  Why are we going to Kung Kung's house?

Mum:   To look at his foot.

Claire:  Why?

Mum:   Because it's painful.
  
Claire:  Why is it painful?

Mum:   I'm not sure, maybe there's something 'growing' on it.

Claire:  Is it a tree??

'Lady' in red

 The Sarawak Rainforest Interhash 2010 is being held here in Kuching. The city centre is currently crawling with hashers from around the world and huge tour buses are parked everywhere. Yesterday, I found out (through the marvellous Facebook) that they were having the Red Dress Charity run, to benefit a few local foundations. So, apparently there were plenty of hairy men in red dresses about town!

Thus, yesterday evening I decided to add spice to our boring daily routine of 'school-shop-home' and bring the kids for a car ride to the city to see if we could spot some cross-dressed hashers!! :)

We spied a few, to the kids' delight; they found it simply hilarious!

Annie spotted the first 'lady', whom I thought was just a fat, aunty-type woman in a sparkly red dress with long blonde hair! When Annie told me it was a guy, I asked her how she knew.

She replied, "He got moustache and hair at the armpits!" :)

Well, can't argue with that...