Wonders of Nature

I never ceased to be amazed by the wonder of nature. In this morning's jog, I notice a tree with 2 shades of leaves. The lighter shade leaves are found evenly around the tree so that they appear to be tiny ornaments on the trees.

Teen Lit

You have probably heard about chick lit but not teen lit. I am not sure if this term has been officiated yet. I am using this term to refer to the type of literature that caters for the teens. Recently, I started to read a few teen lit - books by Stephenie Meyer and L J Smith. Surprisingly, I have enjoyed myself very well when I read their books.

Twilight was an enjoyable read which had subsequently been adapted to hit movies. L J Smith was the author of the Vampire Diaries which had been adapted to a drama series. However, what I had enjoyed was more her Dark Visions series which featured a group of teenagers with supernatural powers - the ability to heal, the ability to move things, the ability to read minds and the ability to tell the future. Together, these teens hpoe to save the world from a tyrant who wanted to capture and use teens with supernatural powers to conquer the world.

After reading the heavier and more philosophical stuff, the simple reads can be equally enjoyable.

Awkward Lunch

I should stop trying to be nice.

We have a new addition to your team. When we were organising a group lunch to a Japanese restaurant offering lunchtime promotion, I suggested inviting the whole team despite some of the colleagues expressing reservations and wanted to keep to the usual lunch khaki. I thought an informal lunch would be a good opportunity to bring everyone closer.

Of course, I was proven wrong again.

It was an awkward one hour. The conversations were stiff. As girls, we could not help getting excited over the impending delivery of oneof our colleagues. the new person sounded abit uncomfortable especially when we touched on epidural and other stuffs relating to delivery. We also did not hvae alot of common topics.

Was it strictly due to rong frequency or was it due to simply generation gap? The new person was about 2 years younger than me and might be the youngest among our group.

After the lunch, one of my closest colleagues subtly hinted to me that she viewed lunch time as personal time and would prefer to spend it with people she was more comfortable with. Uh-oh, me and my stupid ideas. Perhaps, other than thinking from the new person's perspective, I should also respect the wishes of my other team members.

Shokudo Bazaar

There is a promotion at Shokudo Bazaar which offered a few Japanese sets at $4.80 each. It was certainly value-for-money. How could we miss it especially when it was only a short walk away at Heeren.

Shokudo Bazaar was a Japanese Marche where one would be offered a card which served as your tab. When you order food, the price of the food would be recorded on the tab. Then after you finished your meal, you could just pay for the value store on your card. It provided a temporary cashless convenience.

With ongoing promotion and lunch-time peak, the place was surprisingly empty. After we ordered our food and started eating, crowd started to fill in, but it was still considered empty. Personally, I thought my udon was ok, but my colleagues who were used to more high class cuisines especially when two of them had just came back from Hokkaido, felt that the food was not authentic enough. Despite the relatively cheap price, my colleagues did not sound keen to come back again.

Playing with My Phone's Camera Again

Recently, the photos that I have taken with my phone's camera ended either blurred or with the wrong light. It simply meant that I ought to be more familiar with the phone functions so that the phone could help me capture the right moment and the right emotions.

I started to practise with the different shooting scenes and focus under the setting of the phone so that I knew which function would be best suited for each situation. As the brand of the my phone and that of my digital camera is the same, the available functions are rather similar.

Compare the 2 photos below, one is taken with macro and the other is taken without a macro as the focus subjects are different. It is not difficult to guess which is the one with macro. *Wink*

Pandan Cake

We have not tried our built-in oven at all. It was big enough for roasting chicken. We are not that ambitious, we only try its function for baking a cake.

My mum is a risk-averse person. Unless it is a tried-and-tested and proven recipe, she is adamant in trying. The only cake that we have ever successfully baked before it is a pandan cake. The choice this time round is again pandan cake.

After gathering the ingredients which can be abit hard to find these days, especially fresh coconut milk and pandan leaves, the process of sifting, beating and mixing begins. With smaller eggs, adjustments should be made to ensure that the proportion of the various ingredients are still round. My mum forgets to factor that into account, so the mixture is slightly off.

The biggest disaster is yet to come.

When everything is ready, the next step is to pre-heat the oven. Alamak, the whole house's power trips whenever the oven is switched on. We try a few more times and the outcome is always the same. We cannot get the oven on for more than a minute.

The melt-down begins. My mum starts to despair. She then starts to feel like a failure and starts complaining and grumbling. She is on the verge of giving up when she recalls she has a smaller portable oven. We quickly fetch it out and heat it up. Uh-uh (fingers wagging), this is not the time to pop champagne yet. More trouble awaits.

The original mixture cannot be fitted into the smaller oven. This means that we will need to transfer the mixture into another container before we can shove it into the smaller oven. Once it is done, it is waiting for the mixture to be heated up.

For some reason, the top soon became charred and burnt within 10 minutes into the baking. This is too early for any burning. To prevent further burning, we turn off the top heat and only allow the bottom heat to remain. More drama await. About 20 minutes into the heating, the top starts to rise more and more and the mixture starts to move away from the side and cracks appear at the top.

We have no choice but to turn on the top heat again. Despite baking for about 40 minutes, the mixture still appear wet. We are starting to get worried.

Fortunately, the final product is ok but not as fluffy as what my mum thinks it should be and except for a little burnt at the top which can be easily cut away. Nevertheless, it is still moist and soft.

Failure

Except for the first time I have tried on plough (almost like a shoulder stand except with your legs at ninety degrees down from your torso and parallel to the floor), I have never failed doing it. Never did I expect me to not be able to do it during today's yoga session.

Despite taking deep breaths and trying to hoist my hips up, I have scarcely managed to only lift my legs up. In the end, I have to lie flat on the flooor to rest while the team members carry on with their plough and shoulder stand.

It should not be a mental hurdle as I have done it successfully before so I no longer am constrained by the fear of toppling over. If it is not a mental hurdle, then it is definitely a physical hurdle. This means that my stamina has deproved over the weeks. It looks like I have to train harder to keep in form.

Tytus' Birthday

The first sign that you have aged came not from wrinkles or grey hair, but from the developments of your peers. Their developments served as a reminder or a mirror that you were no longer young.

When your friends started walking down the aisle, I could probably dismiss that they were the lucky few who met their soul mates early in their lives and could spend more of their remaining lives with their soul mates. When they climbed to a high position on the corporate ladder than I did, I could only explain that they were indeed more capable. All these are not definite signs of maturity or age. However, when they have their kids, I am defeated. I am at once elevated from a "jie-jie" (sister) to an auntie. The children of my peers cannot possibly be addressing me as big sister. If I refuse to acknowledge that I am already an auntie, then I am as good as an auntie of sixty years still trying to squeeze her wide as berth hips into a mini-skirt.

Sharon's son - Tytus held a birthday bash to celebrate his first year birthday. Being a first year old, he could not literally arrange his own party. It was done by his doting parents. It felt strange for an auntie to celebrate a first-year old birthday. For a while, I was slightly freaked out by the notion that I might be surrounded by many toddlers. Well, I am not exactly the most child friendly person in the world. With the creeping up of each year, it seems like I am being more and more disconnected with children. To a large extent, I do not know how to behave in front of children most of the time.

Fortunately, I was too busy catching up with my old friends to have to worry about trying to interact with toddlers. Witnessing Tytus' birthday party, I was reminded of some of the happiest times of my childhood, even though I did not have as large and grand a party as Tytus.

I was also honoured that Sharon allowed me to participate each and every phase of her life - from her coming-of-age birthday party, to her wedding and now to her son's birthday.

Udders Ice-cream

After celebrating Tytus' birthday, the single girls decided that the night was still young, so we adjourned to another place to continue our girls' talk. We decided to avoid crowd and settle on an obscure corner of Novena. The best snack to go with chit chat, updates of our latest development and planning for the next outing would be ice-cream.

Udders ice-cream offered various more exotic flavours such as sour sop, durian, chempelek etc. if you prefer the more conventional flavours, green tea, mango, strawberry and chocolate would be for you. If you wished for stronger flavour, you could try their rum and raisin which had a very strong rum taste which could be slightly bitter and alcoholic for the faint hearted.

Despite it not facing the main road at Goldhill Plaza, it was still packed with people. The patrons ranged from youngsters to yuppies to even families. I never knew ice-cream outlet was such a popular hangout by Singaporeans. With its relatively more affordable price than the more upmarket Swensen's and Haagen Daz, its single scoop was at $3.20. Moreover, the friendly and young crew also made the place rather cosy and welcoming.

If you wish to have a diferent place for your next gathering or date, perhaps you could try this ice-cream outlet instead.

Deception Point

I have been waiting for this book for a long time. In case you are wondering if this is a newly launched book and I was one of those die-hard fans who will order online at the first available opportunity and cannot wait for Amazon to ship over. Sorry to disappoint you. I may be an avid reader but I am way past the age where I will break a leg to attain something. I guess age does mellow people down.

Secondly, although I am not an environmental activist, I do believe strongly in doing my part to save our ailing earth and to prevent the deterioration of global warming. As much as possible, I try not to buy any book. If I want to read something, I will just go over to the library and borrow. I have never had the habit of re-reading a book no matter how much I have enjoyed it in the first place. Maybe I am consumed by novelty and suspense. once, I know how the story will end, it kills the joy of reading immediately.

Deception Point is a Science Fiction cum Mystery fiction by the famous Dan Brown who had raised general awareness of the Musee de Lourve in its Da Vinci Code. If you are familiar with Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons and perhaps even the Lost Symbol, you may be lured into the perception that he is only capable of denouncing religions. It is indeed a pleasant surprise when I read Deception Point.

There were no more churches, museums or some symbols. There was only scientists, the Arctic and a meteorite. Similarly, there are powerful figures all having a hand in one of the greatest deception. The question was who was the power house behind this mastermind. What was the purpose of engineering this deception to the whole world of a meteorite which had fossils? Was this a real meteorite? If it was not real, why was the composition different from that of normal earth rocks? If it were not real, what were the insect like fossils?

It ws hard to imagine that all the suspense, the investigation and the fight to survive the killers close to the scientists' heels occured within 48 hours. Dan Brown could often capture alot of details for a storyline that took place within a week. With the fast-paced development, our heart seemed to beat faster with each narrow escape of the protagonists. If you are concerned that science theories were too mind boggling, rest assured that the theories were explained in relatively simple terms. For just like his other books, one of the protagonists was often a non-expert. In order to help this non-expert understand the concept to be able to participate in the fight against treachery, the theories often were conveyed in layman's terms.

If you are tired of chick lit, or would like to try a different subject matter, Deception Point should not disappoint.

Tortuous Yoga Session

Due to ill health recently, I have missed a couple of my weekly yoga sessions. As many of my classmates were fast learner, this yoga class had progressed faster than other yoga classes with more and more difficult positions. These positions were not only a test of stamina, flexibility and also concentration. Mind over matter was certainly not scientific fluff. On a day where there was alot of troubles of the mind, I was likely to give up maintaining a position over prolonged period of time. Moreover, some of the positions that required balancing over an extended period of time was simple with no test of stamina nor flexibility. Yet, to achieve the positions could require a huge amount of concentration.

After a very tortuous session, my muscles ached all over. I experienced difficulty in climbing down stairs. My legs were wobbly. When I breathed abit harder, my chest and stomach seemed to be in stitches. The good thing about yoga was that it allowed stretches of muscles that you did not know exist in the first place.

Hopefully, I would recover from these bouts of pain soon.

Heart-to-Heart Talk with Mentee

My mentee had joined the company for about 3 months before I had chance to have a more informal chat with him on how he was settling into the company. With the frantic pace of working life, most of our conversations thus far was restricted to how to go about getting the work done. Being a fresh graduate with zero permanent working experience, I vaguely recalled working could be rather daunting. This was especially when you were suddenly hit with a cold harsh realisation that studies never adequately prepared you for the working life.

I always believed that such informal talks should be best carried out away from the office. When a person felt relaxed then could they be more open, both in terms of speaking their minds and listening. Given my meagre pay, it was hard for me to bring the mentee to a high class cafe for such talks. The most economical choice was Killiney Coffee Shop.

Fortunately, the mentee was relatively open about his apprehension and some of his feelings about the job. I was surprised that some of what he felt was similar to my initial concerns in my first job. Feeling inadequate when doing assignments and morale affected by close friends who resigned were common concerns. He was pretty appreciative of this gesture of having informal chats which boosted my confidence that I had done the right thing.

I could perfectly understand some of the disappointment faced during work and the insecurities surrounding a new environment and work performance. However, one had to persevere and weather the storms as it was part of personal development and character building. After the initial steep learning curve, working life could also open up one's eyes to a whole new different world.

The Why Are You Here Cafe

This book followed a queer encounter by a man who decided to go on a sabbathical. His decision to avoid a jam led him to a cafe. In the cafe, he met the owner, the helper as well as a fellow diner who shed some light on how life should be. When he flipped open the menu, he was greeted by 3 questions:

• Why are you here?
• Do you fear death?
• Are you fulfilled?

These questions seem to relate to his dining experience or it could also refer to everything in life in general.

The reason for existence led to the purpose of existence. What do people do when they find out the purpose of their existence? Most people will do all it takes to fulfil this purpose. In order to gain greater mileage from your effort, the analogy of a sea turtle was used. A sea turtle might not seem to exert alot of effort when it swam. Yet, it could swim further and longer by learning how to ride with the waves. If the sea turtle was moving away from the shore, it would paddle very hard when the wave was moving away from the shore. However, it would just float along when the wave was moving towards the shore so that it would not exert too much effort going against the flow.

The story that got me thinking for a long time was the story about a businessman going on a vacation and meeting a fisherman. The businessman was very surprised that the fisherman would only catch enough for his own feed per day. He would not fish more despite the abundant supply of fish and ample time. One day, the businessman approached the fisherman to ask if he could and would catch more fish. The businessman proposed to the fisherman to catch more fish and sell the excess to get money for an early retirement. The fisherman was curious on the purpose of the retirement. To which, the businessman replied that with early retirement, the fisherman could then do whatever he wanted, including more time with family, or to fish more leisure. Yet all these finer things in life could already be enjoyed by the fisherman if he just devoted some time a day to fish for what he needed. On the contrary, if he wanted until his retirement to be able to play with his children, his children would have grown up by then and would not want his company. Many people lost their focus and the reason for work after a while. This led to us doing things which we have already forgotten why we were doing it in the first place.

The book also linked the pursuit of wealth to the prevalence of advertisements. The advertisement inculcated in our minds desire for material things to fulfil our emotional well-being, especially happiness. Hence, we worked to buy something to cheer ourselves up. After we bought, we became guilty and had to work harder. As we worked harder, we became depressed and wanted to buy more things to pamper ourselves. This itself became a vicious cycle.

The reason why we feared death was connected to the first question. We feared death when we did not know our purpose or when we knew our purpose but were not doing something. While doing things to get fulfilled, we could meet with obstacles. Passion would help fuel our determination and pave the way as passionate people influence others around them to want to help them achieve their goals. In addition, sometimes the solution can also be as easy as adapting to the situations rather than working against it.

After completing the book, I started to reflect on my life. How I was just like the author of the book wanting an escape and not knowing the purpose of my existence. Maybe I should start searching and do more to fulfil this purpose rather than cruise along each day.

Pizza Hut

I have heard about the Pizza Hut pasta for a long time with its rather aggressive marketing strategy on pasta tasting and guessing. It was hard not to take notice of the new item on Pizza Hut's menu. With a free pizza that my mum got from her insurance company, it was the perfect opportunity to try the pasta.

We were slightly overwhelmed by the Pizza Hut menu. I have not walked into any Pizza Hut restaurant for ages and was pleasantly surprised by the choices from starters to main course that it offered now. Not only was its pizza selection plentiful, its pasta and baked rice also catered to vegetarian, meat and seafood.

Finally, we decided on curry rice and pizza. The pizza was as good as before. It certainly stirred up nostalgia with its familiar aroma and cheezy flavour. The curry rice was pretty spicy. However, the taste was not as rich as the baked rice of Swensen's. Personally, I preferred the baked rice of Swensen's.

It was still a good meal but perhaps I have grown up of Pizza Hut and taste has changed. Despite its wide selection, its taste seems not to have left such as last impression as before.

The Zahir

There are many important lessons that I have picked up from The Zahir which I have extracted for remembrance.

The Concept of Favour Bank
Favour Bank is what a senior management told me to be brownies point. It basically worked on the concept that we needed to do favours for each other. When we offered favours to up-and-coming people, we would be making a deposit in the Favour Bank of others. In future, as we needed favours, we could go to these people for help. Of course, the beneficiaries of our favours could at this juncture refused to return a favour. On the other hand, most would be obliged to return the favour. If they refused the favour, word would get around and no one would offer them favours in future.

The Law of Jante
In a small town of Jante, there were ten commandments telling people how they should behave. The commandments promoted that mediocrity and anonymity were the safest choice. When you are a nobody, you have no impact on others and your work deserved to be praised. When you succeed, you defy the Law and you deserved to be punished. Hence, we are often harsher to the successful people than we are to of the average.

True Friends
Contrary to popular belief that our true friends are those who stick by us through our toughest times, the author believed that our true friends are those who are around during happy times to cheer us on. Our false friends will only surround us during sad times wearing their mourning faces when our sufferings are consolation for their miserable lives.

Best Movie
No movie adapted from book can ever be as good as the book because the best adaptation often happens in the mind. When the movie is adapted, we often feel that it is not as good as the book when the movie differs from what we have imagined it should be.

It is also a difficult book to read, not because of difficult concepts to grasp or bombastic words to mull upon. It is difficult because each paragraph is communicating a message and making us think back on our own lives. We need to pause to reflect if we too fall into some of the common fallacies that the husband or the wife was going through.

If you have the time, I would recommend that you pick up this book. It is indeed a fantastic read.

2 Books by Paulo Coelho

I have read 2 new books by Paulo Coelho recently. Paulo Coelho seemed to be my favourite author of the year. One of the books left me with many question marks on what the author was trying to convey and the other left me many question marks on life.

By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept was meant to be a celebration of love - but I was puzzled by the development of the plot and the conclusion. It was one of the hardest book I have read so far. After finishing the book, I was still very baffled by what the author was tyring to emphasise. Was it simply a love story? Or was there some hidden morale that I was blind to?

The Zahir was a book where the plot was simpler to follow with a husband's search for a missing wife. As he progressed in his search, he became more aware of his own dreams, his own weaknesses and how to love. Page after page, through the encounters and character development of this husband, I was also shown to various important life maxims. Strangely, these advices were very fundamental and logical but we often never thought of them at all. Just like many of his other books, The Zahir served as a wake-up call for me to reassess my priorities in life.

Casuarina Curry

It was meant to be a belated birthday celebration for one of my colleagues. We decided to have some Indian food for a change. I never expected the Indian restaurant - well-known for its prata at its main branch along Upper Thomson, to be so crowded.

We ordered diffferent things. Masala Murtabak was a popular choice among us. We then ordered curry to share. The food was surprisingly quite big portion or perhaps the taste was too rich for us to consume too much. In the end, we could not finish the food and had to pack.

Indian food was quite a refreshing change from the normal Chinese, Japanese or Western cuisines. I never expected to enjoy the food so much given that I normally did not take food with to much spices. I would certainly come back for other Indian food in future as it was at a much more convenient location than the main branch at Upper Thomson.

Sci Fiction

It has been ages since I read any Science Fiction. Just like other things in my life, my reading interests also adopted various phases - from fantasy, to Science Fiction to Romance. I concentrated on different genre in different phases of my life. Science Fiction used to be one of my loves when I was in Secondary School - Robin Cook was my favourite author then.

Robin Cook taught me alot about medical conditions including the different types of cancer. Robin Cook stories typically included some mystery but involving some diseases or virus. It was not purely Science Fiction like perhaps Star Trek. Yet, it was the closest I have ever been to reading about Science outside the Science School Textbook. Well, Science was clearly not my favourite subject.

When I recently picked up the book Philip K Dick's Minority Report, I was struggling with the concept despite it being a rather short story. I was completely lost in the description of precogs and how data about the future was extracted from them. The Department where the Police Commisioner Anderton worked used the precog to determine if there was any potential murders to happen. These potential murderers would be detained before the murder dates to prevent the murders from happening. Hence, the town was free from murders for many years, until one day the precogs predicted that the next murderer would be Anderton himself.

Anderton refused to believe it was true and suspected it was a ploy to remove him. He started his own investigation. was predicted to kill someone in one week's time. Was it a wrong prediction by the precog which meant that it would draw public outcry to the entire system as it meant that many innocent persons might have been unduly locked up in the past? Was it a correct prediction that Anderton was to kill someone?

I would keep the plot and the ending in suspense here.

After all, where is the fun in reading a Sci Fi than to discover the ending yourself? Moreover, this is a very short story which took place in the span of less than a week.

Btw, this was adapted to a film starring Tom Cruise.

Making Pancakes

Truly inspired by Julie and Julia, I decided to try my hands on cooking. Well, I am not as ambitious as Julie who aspired to stir up a storm in the kitchen with the 542 recipes of Julia Child. I am truly aware of limits and is a staunch upholder of the concept of professionalism, ie not everyone can be good in everything. Certain things are best left in the hands of the expert.

Having set relatively low threshold as a starting point, I decided to try making pancakes from off-the-shelf premixed packet. Again, it was because I believed in the experts and also to build up confidence. If the food producers can sell those packet premixed pancakes successfully, the recipes had to be well-tested. Gaining confidence in everything we did would be a good way to start.

We took a part of the mixture out and added water until the mixture reached a thick and even consistency. Then the mixture would be poured onto a preheat pan and fried until the surfaced turned slightly brown and the inside was cooked. We tried testing this by sticking a toothpick into the pancake to determine if there was any mixture on the toothpick as we pulled out.

We did not have a stencil to contain the outflow of the mixture on a large pan. Instead of making a few of the small pancakes, we made a big one instead. It was a concerted effort with my mum and sis. My sis and I did the mixture while my mum fried the pancake. Similarly, it was a concerted effort to eat it as well. Despite the not so good looking pancake, it still delicious. With our confidence in the pancake, we could have pancake as breakfast in future. This will be a good alternative to the defaulted choice of bread.