Random musings....

2 years ago, if someone asked me about whether I watched sex and the city, my answer would be 'No'. I simply don't understand what is this hype about at all and why so many women are crazy about it. To me, it's just a bunch of unattractive old women acting on the show....sorry but that's what I thought back then. But now, I can totally understand it at last. It had taken me a few years of marriage life and hitting the thirties to realize that my life had many things in common with the show, like the pressures women faced in the society about life, love and marriage. It's like when I was watching the show, I would feel 'Yes, that's exactly how I feel too!' For example like yesterday when I was watching a repeat telecast of sex and the city 2, there was a scene where SJP was unhappy that Mr Big was spending too much time lazing on the couch watching tv instead of going out with her. This immediately reminds me of my own situation where somebody in the house practically had the couch glued to his butt and the tv stuck on his eyes like 24/7. It's like the couch is his second home where he eats, sleeps, plays games, watches tv etc. I really wonder what is this thing with men and their couch & tv? Maybe that's why it's called man couch and why the ottoman is called ottoMAN...

SOHO sushi and bar

Wow...its 3am in the morning here and I am still feeling v awake. Think I am truely a nocturnal creature. I feel so drowsy and sleepy in the day but alert and energetic at night. Hubby is probably sleeping like a log now and Poochi had gave up and gone to sleep also.
Went to chill out at this new place called SOHO sushi and bar just now with Hubby and the guys. Its my first time at this place. Its similar to Temple Bar but had a more modern feel and nicer, more variety food.

 Big monsterous plate of fried calamari and shrimps

also have salmon and tuna sashimi

Teriyaki chicken and lampchops.

I drank two glasses of Hoegarden beer. Actually its my first time trying it, been trying many different types of beer since I came here. It taste quite nice, a bit sweeter than the other beers I had drank. Surprisingly, we managed to finished all the food and even ordered two desserts, guess we must have been v hungry. We all had a good time chatting and laughing and as usual WH did not came (luckily...) coz he dont like to drink. By the time I reached home, it was past midnite and I was just in time to catch a repeat telecast of TrueBlood which I had missed yesterday. YES!! I can't wait for the next episode! 

Yesterday, I discovered a shop selling nice cheap stationeries and craft materials. I had probably walked past the shop many times but did not went in coz I thought it just a store selling childrens' toys and books (judging from the look outside). Thank God, I decided to walk in yesterday and discovered it sells many crafts stuffs (which is what I have been looking for) at the back of the store. I was SO happy! :)

 Came back with two bags of goodies...

Got myself a Paul Frank metal container and notepad, some felt, some pompoms, fabric glue, cardboard, graph paper, sharpener..etc

 Also got this v cute sheep folder file

 A story of an insomniac sheep...reminds me of myself...haha

Got a matching insomniac sheep notebook also.

So much stuff and cost only 100 shekels in total, which is quite cheap, considering this place where everything is so exp.

Also, Poochi had a new necklace. Its made from white felt and I embroidered the words on both sides.

 The word 'PUFFY' on one side,

and his name on the other side.

Why the word puffy? Coz Poochi looked so cute and puffy, like a toasted mashmallow with a burnt end. STAY PUFF!

My first wristlet and applique patchwork pouch

 My first handmade wristlet, turned out to be smaller than I expected though...

 The cotton ribbon I bought recently was perfect as tags.

 Think this is the last time I am making rounded bottom pouch as they don't turn out to be very rounded....plus they can't stand on their own.

 I used yellow plaids fabric for the interior lining.

 This is my first applique patchwork pouch. I am quite happy with it. :)

 Back of the pouch was a 3D balloon applique. Added some stuffing to make the ballon pop out. Embroidered my name at the bottom (not v visible) maybe should have used another colour....

I used this colourful water droplets print for the interior lining. Frog lives in water..so inside is Mr froggy's home. Added a ladybird print interior pocket.

Oh dear, tomorrow is Hebrew class again. Had skipped last week as Hubby and the guys were busy with work. So, it had been 2 weeks since I touched my Hebrew textbook and I seriously can't remember anything now.....

Home cooked food

Yesterday, I made Mee Hoon Kway. Its one of my fave food back home and I have been craving for it for some time, so I decided to make it. The most tedious part is making of the dough, quite physically strenuous task. End up I just pressed and stretched it into little pieces with my fingers, so the 'kway' dont look like nice little cut squares. But its ok, since it still taste nice.

I fried quite a lot of ikan bilis, so I can keep the rest and eat it slowly as snack. Love munching on the fried ikan bilis although frying it made the whole house smell of fried fish also. Had to spray air freshener after that to the whole house to get rid of the smell. I added minced pork, shitake mushroom, some cabbage and a egg to it. The broth was cooked using ikan bilis, dried scallops and a chicken drumstick coz I like the soup to be rich and flavourful. It was yummy and nice! Eat until so full that I can hardly moved...haha.....Took me the whole afternoon just to make this one dish but was worth it when I eat it.

Today's menu for dinner was Laksa. I haven used the 'tao pok' that his colleagues brought over the last time yet, so it will be a good chance to use them. I used the Prima Laksa pack for this. Thank God there are such things like Prima Premix sauce kits around! I brought a lot of such stuffs over here and there are like a quick fix to satisfy those Singapore food cravings. I have tried almost all the Prima food and my faves are Laksa, Mee Siam, Mee Rebus, Bak Ku Tet and prawn mee.
For the laksa, I added a chicken drumstick to cook with the premade laksa sauce and then add prawns, fishcake (amazingly managed to find that here), mushrooms and tao pok, and served over a mixture of noodles and beehoon. Yum yum! ;p

 Received two packages in the mailbox today, one from Japan and the other from US.

 Got this 1 yard fabric with four different prints in lavender colour

and 100+ buttons in assorted colours and size.

Sadly, Borders is closing down its business. There will be no more Borders Bookstore in future....I am SO sad!!  :(   Where am I going to get my books and Paperchase stationeries in future! I know that you can always buy from amazon or download from Kindle etc, but sometimes I need to touch and browse something in order to get a feel of what I am buying. That's especially so for non fiction books. As for fiction books, NOT all books are available in digital format, actually quite a lot of very nice fiction books are not available in kindle or digital form. Which means I have to buy it from Amazon, and judging from my current location, its not a very economical way to buy books. In Israel, I dont see big bookstores around here. The bookstores here are small, (smaller than a food court size) and they dont sell much English books (maybe about 2% of all the books) and the English books here are very limited in variety and expensive! I was still counting on my next US trip to stock up on my books but looks like there won't be any..... This week, Borders is starting its going-out-of business sale and HOW I WISH I AM IN THE US NOW!!!! *sob sob....*

Fabrics, yummy fish and a whole new world of Applique

The two fabric packages I ordered from an etsy seller in China had arrived today! It came faster than I expected and the materials were quite good and cheap.

 Actually, I only received notice to collect one package but at the post office, turned out there was still another that just came so they gave it to me. Lucky~

 Got the macha-green sakura fabric (on the left), the newspaper cotton linen fabric (on the right), one yard of lace and one yard of ribbon from Stefanie Style

 I loved this cotton ribbon, just nice to use this to tag my projects.

Got this from another etsy seller in China Minnafabric, both are cotton linen blend fabric. The one on the right has pics of clover leaf and flowers in pots, and the other is a breakfast print.

Yeah, I'm glad my packages arrived safely and its such a joy when I received them. The feeling is like opening Christmas presents, maybe its the element of surprise (although I roughly know what they are) but its just feel so nice to receive them and open it slowly. Thats why I love online shopping more than actual shopping. Haha...  :D

Also, today Hubby and I went to the fabric shop in Rehovot to get some more sewing supplies. I have run out of the cloth-like interfacing and batting. Without these two items, I cant do anything. Sadly, the fabric flower class I signed up for had been cancelled as there were not enough people attending. 

 Ended up getting one yard of pink plaids fabric, one yard of red fabric with white poka-dots, one yard of raw natural beige cotton fabric, 2 yards of the cloth interfacing, some zippers, green thread and (yes! Finally found it) the black embroidery thread.

Got myself two yards of this thicker cotton batting. This is much more cushy and soft!

Such sewing stuffs are seriously not cheap in this place, people in this country dont really have a sewing and craft hobbies here so its very rare to found such stuffs in Israel (since all these stuffs are imported) I found that some stuffs are actually much cheaper if I buy from Etsy and shipped it over, than to buy here, eg, the zippers I ordered from a US seller Zipit, cost about $0.85 USD plus shipping, while a zipper I bought here cost about $1.40 USD. Sewing machines are even more ridiculously overpriced here. You can't even find them in normal household electronics store, I only saw it selling in the fabric shop at Rehovot. After doing a check online comparing the prices here and the one selling in SG Courts, I decided its simply not worth buying it here although Hubby keep wanting to get one for me. In SG, I can get a similar Singer sewing machine at one third the price and at a much higher model compared to here. It just makes no sense to buy it here, having to pay 3x more and getting a old model rite! Sianz.... *_*

Anyway, after getting my sewing stuffs, we went to Ashdod to eat fish at IDI. The fish still taste the best here. I ordered one whole sea bass, half fried and half baked. The skin was salty and crispy on the outside while the meat was soft and juicy inside. Nice~! 

Yesterday, I tried doing applique for the first time. Applique is the process where pieces of fabrics are sewn or stuck onto a large piece of fabric to form pictures or patterns.

I managed to make a frog from felt fabric and sewn in onto a piece of linen. It was fun and interesting and opened a whole new world of possibilities....this gives me many ideas on my new projects. I got so many ideas floating in my head right now and I cant wait to create them out. But I only got 1 pair of hands and no sewing machine, so its going to take some time before I can get my idea to materialize.

 

Newly completed projects

I finally removed the skinny thin strap off the slingbag and replaced it with the thicker strap I bought recently.

Finally, the slingbag is completed. Haven got the chance to use it yet and has been hanging on the threadmill ever since. Poochi loves the threadmill very much (only when its not moving), as in he enjoys sleeping on the threadmill. I cant make him run on it coz he is very scared of anything that moves.

I also made another hair clip, this time using this yellow sakura print Japanese fabric. 

 This is my latest project. A round bottom zipped pouch with a exterior button pocket. I'm trying to make slightly more complicated stuffs now. Its actually quite hard to sew round edges. Made some mistakes here and there (esp with the pocket flap) but in the end, it actually turned out better than I expected. Anyway, this was just an experiment, I hope to make even better ones next time. I got the exterior fabric of the pouch from fabricworm and its called Suzanne Ultman Metro Cafe Mug. Its very cheap, I got it for about USD $10 for 2 yards. 

 Back view of the pouch.

 The exterior pocket of the pouch was lined with green plaids fabric.

Green plaids was also used for the interior lining. The pouch was padded so it had a soft cushy feel which I like and also offered better protection for my stuffs.

 A package from the States arrived yesterday in the mail. 

The one on the right is from Samantha Walker, Enchanted Garden-Butterfly in pink. The other one is from Timeless Treasure collection-little sewing. I love both of these prints!

Someone in my house is a food hoarder.

It finally dawned on me that I have been living with a food hoarder. I know he likes to go supermarket and buy foodstuffs to fill up the cupboard and fridge but I just brush it aside as a cute hamster mentality all along. It just suddenly don't seem normal to me now when I opened the fridge and its packed full of foodstuff from top to bottom, including the freezer compartment when there are only 2 person in the house eating it (plus I don't eat much) and I only cook once a day. It's terrible to see good food go to a waste since most of them are perishable and also expensive. The cupboards are also full of food (dried or canned), and we have 3 full cupboards of food. He just like to surround himself with lots of food, coz it makes him happy. Whenever he is unhappy or stressed, he will go grocery shopping. Like today, I asked him to buy a cabbage and some mushroom. End up, he bought so many other stuffs, like 2 packets of tofu when there is already a packet in the fridge. Amazingly, he can still managed to squeeze all these food into the fridge, filling every single crevices and corners. Sometimes, I can't even find what I want in the fridge coz it's so packed and I can even find stuff I don't even know i have it inside. I think the fridge might broke down soon coz it's so heavily untilized. It's makes this creaking like sound like it's on the verge of bursting. I will try to clear as much food possible, like blending the watermelon with soyamilk later to clear some space, but I know he will immediately replenish when it's gone. He is good at sensing what food is finishing soon and he will replenish it the moment it is gone sometimes even before its gone.

Why I hate summer.....

It's the start of the 1 week meeting for hubby and the guys at work so he will be late coming home for this week. His SG colleagues who came over for the meeting helped us to bring our food supplies from back home. This is our emergency food supplies, consisting of instant noodles, calbee snacks, canned luncheon meat, bak kwa, Tao pok etc, stuffs which can not be found here. It's therapy food....a sense of back home feeling when I saw all these, cheap stuffs that I took for granted before are like gold to me here now.
Been feeling very lethargic recently, think it must be the summer symptom. Makes me think of this song " wake me up when September ends" by Green Day. How I wish I can sleep and wake up when Sept ends! Coz by then, summer will be over and I will be preparing to fly over to the States.
Another thing I hate summer, besides the horrible humidity and the infernon hot temperature is the insect infestation. There are ants everywhere. Any food left outside will attract ants. We even discovered that the ants penetrate 3 layers of zipock bags to get to the 'hei bee' (dried shrimps) yesterday. The ants here LOVE 'hei bee' very much. I remembered I washed some 'hei bee' and left it near the sink to dry for a while before cooking and the next thing I know, it's covered with ants. Arghhh......I hate ants. Sometimes I even found ants on my clothes, on the bed, on Poochi's toys, etc. They are everywhere!!! :o
I finally cut and trim Poochi's nails today. He hates it and so do I. After cutting his nails, I noticed he started to stink so I had to bath him, which he also hates it, and so do I....
During the winter, I only need to bath him once in about 3 weeks, but now he needs a bath every week coz summer heat makes him stinky very fast. Guess he hates summer too.

A disastrous day with curry puffs.....

What a day..... *_*
Today is supposed to be curry puff making day at the guys' place. The last time I made it, it was a huge success and it tasted really like the curry puffs you would find at Old Chang Kee. So, we decided to make it again but this time with more people around to help out so we can make more. Somehow, something went wrong with the dough this time and we din make curry puff, instead it became curry pie.
I remembered I followed the recipe on this website http://rasamalaysia.com/recipe-curry-puff/ the last time, the only difference was that I doubled the amount of flour and butter since we are making more this time round. So, after doing some calculations, it worked out to be about 900g of flour and 600g of butter. But in the end, I used less butter as the dough turned out to be very sticky when I rubbed the butter into the flour. Guess I was just too tired to do the rubbing in method on such big amount and it din turned out well. (I hate doing the rubbing in method most of all in baking) I started having a bad feeling about it when I was wrapping the stuffings and shaping the dough coz the feel was different. (The dough crumbles v easily)

 Hubby and Wee Hong started the ball rolling enthusiastically at first without knowing what lies ahead...

Managed to make some curry puffs but they were very soft, crumbly and had many little cracks.

 Weizhong's first attempt at making a puff. It was very difficult as the dough just refused to behave.

This was what happened when we tried to fry it. The whole curry puff just dissolved into a pile of mash potato. Its NOT supposed to be like this! I was horrified when I saw this and wondered, 'OMG, what went wrong?!'

Anyway, we decided to remake the dough again and Junwen was very nice as to went out and help buy some butter. But end up he mistakenly bought margaine instead of butter. Anyway, we just proceed since I dont think it will make much of a difference. He did quite a good job (considering its his first attempt) at rubbing the butter into the flour until it resembled fine bread crumbs like texture. While I left his to do his kneading, I stared at the crap dough I had made and wondered what should I do with it. End up, we decided to bake the puffs instead of frying it. It was successful, as it did not dissolved into a pile of mush like the last time. 

 The baked curry puffs. However, its still quite soft and crumbly and difficult to make as the crap dough simply cannot take any bending and folding without cracking up.

So, we decided to make it into a flying saucer shaped as it was much easier to make without cracking up and also easier to handle. From this point onwards, all sorts of shapes started coming up....

Like this heart shaped curry puff Weizhong made for his gf,

 And this doggy bone shaped curry puff,

 This was the 3D heart shaped curry puff made by Junwen for his gf,

Different shapes and sizes of puffs, and the one in the middle was a dino egg shaped curry puff...haha...

Junwen's successful attempt at making a proper curry puff using the crap dough, amazing!

In the end, although it did not turn out as expected, the guys seemed to have fun playing with the dough and making the pies. We made a lot of pies and its really very filling. I felt quite full after eating about 2-3 pies. Its considered dinner for us all. For me, I am very tired today. Cooking tired me out easily, such that I usually dont even have the appetite to eat after cooking.(unless the food is really good)

Good news for me today was that I received 3 shipment packages, one from Taiwan, one from US and one from Japan.

 My three packages.

The felt fabrics I bought from a Taiwanese etsy seller.

 The polypropylene webbing for making handle straps and slings.

I loved the fabric prints on the right. It had small purple flowers and resembled the lavender pillow I bought in Hokkaido at Farm Tomita. The other fabric had ladybirds and apple prints on it, so cute!

That's about all for today, except Poochi had been v beastly and peed 5 times, pooed 4 times today! Its amazing how this little dog who only eat once a day can pee and poo so much....Its like he is trying to attract your attention by giving you work to do. Sometimes, he will go and step on his potty and make sounds to lure me out of the bedroom (coz he knew I will surely come out of the room if he shit/poo) and when I come out, there is nothing on the potty at all and he will just give me that innocent silly look. sighz....