The Household COO

The Body Shop recently had a huge sale with up to 70% off all their merchandise.  Taking advantage of the sale, I discovered some really affordable sheer butter creams for the skin condition I have, called Keratosis Pilaris.  Having been told a long time ago by the dermatologist that there is no cure for this condition, I have long given up the hope of having flawless skin.  When I discovered I could reduce the effects by applying an emollient such as sheer butter, I was naturally quite agreeable to giving it a go.

Recently, I started developing hives on my arms and legs.  I strongly suspect my skin has sensitised to something present in the sheer butter by the Body Shop - I’ve been using the Pomegranate variant.  I have since stopped using the Body Shop Sheer Butter to test my theory and have yet to come to a conclusion on the cause of my hives. 

To be fair to the Body Shop, I’m not entirely certain it is due to the Sheer Butter I’ve been applying.  It could also just be an ingredient unique to the Pomegranate variant that is causing my hives, in which case, using the plain sheer butter variant should correct the problem.  The best way to test is to do a patch test on a small part of my skin - I’ve read that the under arm is a good area to test because the skin there is a little more sensitive being less exposed and keratinised.

It comes as a bit of a surprise if my hives are indeed due to the Body Shop Sheer Butter.  I don’t know why but I’ve always thought that if there were any skin product that would be extra gentle to the skin, it would be Body Shop products.  Perhaps I’ve made the mistake of construing that kind to the animals and environment would kind to all human skin.

Looks like I’m going to have to find another emollient for my skin.  Anyone got any recommendations on what I can use instead?

I received this tale of a remarkable love story through email and decided that I just had to post about it.  We all know, since I came out of the closet, that I’m such a sucker for these stories.  However, this is a change from the usual Hollywood romance scene - it is the real McCoy.  I hope it serves as a source of inspiration in a society that is now too quick to file for a divorce and discredit the whole sanctity of marriage. 

An incredible love story has come out of China recently and managed to touch the world.

It is a story of a man and an older woman who ran off to live and love each other in peace for over half a century.

The 70-year-old Chinese man who hand-carved over 6,000 stairs up a mountain for his 80-year-old wife has passed away in the cave which has been the couple’s home for the last 50 years.

Over 50 years ago, Liu Guojiang a 19 year-old boy, fell in love with a 29 year-old widowed mother named Xu Chaoqin.

In a twist worthy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, friends and relatives criticized the relationship because of the age difference and the fact that Xu already had children.

At that time, it was unacceptable and immoral for a young man to love an older woman.. To avoid the market gossip and the scorn of their communities, the couple decided to elope and lived in a cave in Jiangjin County in Southern ChongQing Municipality.

In the beginning, life was harsh as hey had nothing, no electricity or even food. They had to eat grass and roots they found in the mountain, and Liu made a kerosene lamp that they used to light up their lives.

Xu felt that she had tied Liu down and repeatedly asked him, ‘Are you regretful? Liu always replied, ‘As long as we are industrious, life will improve.’

In the second year of living in the mountain, Liu began and continued for over 50 years, to hand-carve the steps so that his wife could get down the mountain easily.

Half a century later in 2001, a group of adventurers were exploring the forest and were surprised to find the elderly couple and the over 6,000 hand-carved steps. Liu MingSheng, one of their seven children said, ‘My parents loved each other so much, they have lived in seclusion for over 50 years and never been apart a single day. He hand carved more than 6,000 steps over the years for my mother’s convenience, although she doesn’t go down the mountain that much.’

The couple had lived in peace for over 50 years until last week. Liu, now 72 years, returned from his daily farm work and collapsed. Xu sat and prayed with her husband as he passed away in her arms. So in love with Xu, was Liu, that no one was able to release the grip he had on his wife’s hand even after he had passed away.

‘You promised me you’ll take care of me, you’ll always be with me until the day I died, now you left before me, how am I going to live without you?’

Xu spent days softly repeating this sentence and touching her husband’s black coffin with tears rolling down her cheeks.

In 2006, their story became one of the top 10 love stories from China, collected by the Chinese Women Weekly. The local government has decided to preserve the love ladder and the place they lived as a museum, so this love story can live forever.

Here’s the link to the news story.

When I was down under for a holiday a couple of years back, my SIL recommended this ice creamery called “Cold Rock“.  The concept is basically this:

1. Pick your ice cream flavour
2. Pick your “mix ins” (from a range of chocolate, cookies, and lollies)

Then watch as they blend your “mix ins” into your ice cream scoop over a cold plate (yup, it’s exactly like a hot plate but it’s cold) to create one seriously cool ice cream.

It’s a pretty neat concept. 

Recently, I discovered that the Cold Rock concept that come to Malaysia.  It’s here at Baskin Robbins, Pavillion branch.  Actually I saw it probably about a week before at some other ice cream store but I can’t seem to recall where (that’s the problem with losing your memory after having a baby).  I think it was at The Curve but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t one of the regular ice cream brands.

The original concept of mixing sweets into ice cream began in the US with a company called Cold Stone Creamery whose history dates back to 1988.  Cold Rock only appeared in Australia some 8 years later in 1996, however, Cold Rock appears to be hitting international waters because I’ve discovered they now have a store in Holland Village, Singapore.

I’ve only tasted Cold Rock once, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.  As for whether the Cold Rock copy-cats here are as good - well, I still have the pleasure of sampling them to find out so watch this space…

I’ve always known that the customer service in this country is well below par but even I couldn’t help being shocked by the service I received when I went to buy Gavin some ice cream from Baskin Robbins a couple of days ago. 

My SILs and I were at Midvalley Megamall doing some last minute shopping for accessories for a family portrait we were scheduled to take.  Deciding to reward Gavin, who had been most accommodating on that particular shopping trip, my SIL and I nipped off Baskin Robbins to get him some ice cream.  I always order a regular double scoop ice cream to share with Gavin and that particular morning was no different from any other.

This is the conversation that took place between me and the serving guy:

Me: I’ll have two scoops, world class chocolate and, er…
Serving Guy: Is that a double scoop?
Me: Yes.  I’ll have the world class chocolate and hokey pokey.
(At this point, I turn my attention to Gavin while the guy starts scooping out my ice cream.  After a while, I look back at him and realise that he’s put each scoop in a separate cup.)
Me: Erm, I said ”double scoop”.

The serving guy shot me a greasy, clearly put out by the mistake.  He then retorted: No you didn’t.

I look at him disbelievingly thinking, “Is this guy for real?  He’s arguing with me?”

Out loud, I repeated, “No, I asked for a double scoop.”

Expecting him to transfer the scoops into one cup, he stood there and repeated, “No, you didn’t.”  The argument probably would have continued if my SIL hadn’t interrupted by asking, “Are we going to argue all day?”

Honestly, at that point, I felt like walking off without the ice cream, but since it was for Gavin, I didn’t have the heart to deny him his ice cream after promising to get him some.

I was extremely annoyed because I clearly told him I wanted a double scoop. Secondly, even if I had made a mistake (which I didn’t), I am the customer who contributes towards his wages through my ice cream purchases so who is he to argue with me?  Thirdly, he didn’t just throw me a greasy (which is usually about as bad as the service gets), but he stood there arguing with me about whether I said “two single scoops” or “a double scoop”. 

I would boycott Baskin Robbins but the other outlets that we frequent are usually okay. 

Well, except for the one at The Curve.  There’s a serving girl there who gives such miserably small scoops by Baskin Robbins standards (if you’re familiar with ice cream, you’ll be aware that Baskin Robbins scoop size is larger than all the other ice cream brands).  What she served me was more like the junior scoop size.  I thought at first it was because she was new and that she didn’t know but she continued to do it on subsequent visits.  Now I just make sure I don’t get served by her.

One of hubby’s and my favourite passtimes before we had Gavin was to head out to the cinemas for a movie.  When I become pregnant, our friends who had a baby before us told us to watch as many movies as possible before I delivered because there would be no more movies for a good long while once the baby was born.

Indeed, I have yet to see a movie in the cinema since I had Gavin.  Restricted to home DVDs on muted volumes and reading subtitles so we wouldn’t disturb the baby, it hasn’t quite had the same effect as watching it in the cinema.  While movies like 27 Dresses and What Happens in Vegas are perfectly watchable on the home TV, you really have to watch something like this on the big screen:

Yup, it’s the Mummy 3.  It’s scheduled for release in January 2008.  Gavin will be two by then so I wonder if Mummy and Daddy will be able to sneak out to enjoy a movie date? 

They say that all the spontaneous spark flies out the window when you have a toddler.  Indeed, all our plans revolve around how the little one will take it.  So how’s this for advance date planning - a movie date seven months in advance? 

I’m probably rather late in posting about this but anyway, here’s the other trailer:

Rob Cohen also has a production blog complete with pictures and various details about the movie.  It looks great, but I’m a little disappointed to see that Rachel Weiss won’t be back to reprise the role of Evelyn.

Well, okay, so it’s been in for a while now.

I have to admit, when I first saw the shop Papier in The Curve, I didn’t think this hobby would survive here -especially not when it cost so much just to get the materials. Imagine my surprise when I noticed more scrapbooking shops popping up all over the place, while shops that didn’t normally offer scrapbooking products started supplying them. I guess the whole scrapbooking thing has really taken off…

This is the first scrapbook I ever made after our honeymoon as a gift for some friends in Japan:

Somewhere around the middle of the album, I was starting to lose my enthusiasm for scrapbooking. By the time I got to the end of the album, I pretty much got over the need to express myself artistically.

Recently, after much nagging, I finally developed more photos of Gavin and decided to make another scrapbook of Gavin’s baby photos. I ended up developing so many photos that I had enough photos for three large albums.

Since I had so many photos, I adopted a rather minimalistic approach to decorating my pages. Firstly, I crammed too many photos onto one page.

Secondly, I used very little decorations for each page.

Forgive me for sounding cheap and miserly when we’re talking about happy memories, but when you consider that these sticker letterings cost me RM15,

and these stickers cost anywhere from RM15-25, and add the fact that I have 180 pages to decorate, it is starting to get a little out of hand, don’t you think?

The up side of taking the minimalistic approach was that I completed one album a lot more quickly than it took me to finish the album I made after our honeymoon.

Only in Malaysia does a hobby like this cost so much. I remember being able to buy art and craft supplies from Spotlight in Melbourne for such reasonable prices that it didn’t seem so outrageous to keep such hobbies.

That said, there is a trick to scrapbooking in Malaysia at a more affordable price. Instead of using the stickers and all those fancy supplies, you can buy the decorative cards that they have available for the backdrop and cut out the pictures for decorations. Instead of costing some RM15-25 for 10 to 20 stickers, you can get a whole lot more pictures for RM5-15.

If you really want to go cheaper, just use some cutesy wrapping paper which will give you a heck of a lot more pictures for RM1.50-2.00. I don’t think you can get cheaper than that.

Now I can go back and add some more colour to the first album I made…

That said, though, I have to admit my efforts at scrapbooking are rather lame when you compare them to stuff like this.

With a taste from heaven and a smell from hell, you’ll either love it or hate it.

It’s categorised as a fruit but for some reason it’s never occured to me that durians might actually have some nutritional benefits.  Or rather I think a lot of my presumptions about durians being bad for you stem from the fact that the Chinese believe durians to be a “hot” fruit. 

To explain this further, food are usually classified as “heaty” or “cooling”.  When I was young, I seemed to get the impression that “heaty” foods were bad for you and “cooling” foods were good.  In reality, it really depends on your situation and your health.  In general, young people should not eat too much “heaty” foods and old people should not take too much “cooling” foods.  There is a long and more complicated explaination behind this which is partially explained here.

Anyway, I never even thought to look up the benefits of eating durians until it “cured” a minor little problem I had developed during the course of my pregnancy. 

During pregnancy, the body increases the release of the hormone relaxin which acts on the smooth muscles in the body, including those in the digestive tract.  The purpose of this is to facilitate the absorption of nutrients by slowing down the digestive process.  Unfortunately, it causes the unpleasant side effect of constipation.

When I introduced durians into my diet, I’d also noticed an improvement in bowel movements.  Intrigued, I decided to take a look at what nutritional benefits durians actually provide to the consumer and needless to say, I was quite surprised by what I discovered.

One serve of durian (about 243g) yields 9g of fiber (no wonder it brought an end to my toilet worries!).  It’s also a great source of Vitamin C and some forms of Vitamin B (such as Thiamin, B6, Riboflavin, Niacin and Folate).

For the full details about the nutritional value of durians click here.

Since we got married, the hubby has been encouraging me to take cooking lessons from his Mum so that I can learn to cook his favourite dishes. While I am open to the idea of improving my haphazard and makeshift cooking style, I have found it rather difficult to learn how to cook under the tutelage of my MIL.  It was only recently that it really hit me as to why I ran into such difficulties…

I guess the fundamental problem lies in the fact that my MIL doesn’t trust modern technology, whereas I depend upon it like my body relies upon the blood in my veins.  I believe in automating and letting a machine do the hardwork because that is fundamentally what a machine was created to do - to make our lives easier. 

My reliance on technology extends well beyond the four walls of a kitchen.  For instance, when I used to live in Melbourne, I never visited a bank personally.  If I needed money, there was the ATM (and later EFTPOS where I could also withdraw money from the cashier’s till while buying my groceries).  If I needed to pay a bill, there was telephone banking (internet banking was still relatively in its infancy at that time). 

I throw everything in the washing machine, even the clothes with labels that state “handwash”.  While my MIL believes that handwashing produces cleaner clothes, I believe that nothing cleans better than the washing machine.  To my MIL, bread that isn’t kneaded by hand doesn’t taste as good, while I happily throw everything into the mixer for kneading.  I don’t particularly enjoy making bread by hand because I dislike getting dough stuck to my fingers.

In the kitchen, the microwave is my best friend.  In the kitchen, the stove is my MIL’s best friend.  I don’t trust myself to cook rice in anything other than a rice cooker.  My MIL prefers to use a pot to cook her chicken rice.  Even when her rice cooker went on the blink, she resisted using my rice cooker, claiming it was too “complicated” for her with all its fancy functions.

I like my machines because they allow me to just push a button and let everything run with minimal monitoring and guess work required by me.  For instance, one morning I wanted to steam a bun for my son and I started preparing the rice cooker since it has a steam function.  My MIL saw me and asked why didn’t I just use a wok with some water since it was faster.  Sure it may be faster but I would have to wait until the water was boiling and then I would have to keep checking on the flame and the bun to make sure everything was okay.  The steam function on the rice cooker, on the other hand, would do everything by itself and I would be able to prepare my own breakfast without having to worry about the bun.

Beyond our technological differences, the other difficulty I meet lies in the fact that my MIL often cooks using her instincts for quantities.  She doesn’t have a specific recipe that states, for example, 1 tablespoon, 3 cups, etc.  My scientific mind that dislikes having to “guesstimate” quantities, prefers specific instructions and quantities.  In order to replicate someone else’s masterpiece, how else can it be achieved if you don’t have their exact method?

This was the reason why I wanted to shoot a friend of mine who once gave me his “famous” mushroom soup recipe that merely listed the ingredients that went into it but not the quantities.  Anyone with a little bit of cooking sense can make a guess at what ingredients are required in mushroom soup, but getting a great tasting soup requires knowledge of ingredient quantities.

I suppose I sound rather spoilt by technology and perhaps rather lazy to do things by hand.  However, to me, it’s all about speed, efficiency, multi-tasking, minimising errors and simplifying processes.  Yeah, I guess that what having worked in the corporate world does to you…

Our recent trip to Tanjong Jara reminded me of a trip the hubby and I took a long time ago to Pangkor Laut.  This was before we got married so you’ll notice that hubby look a lot trimmer in these photos.  It was also back in the days when I could be bothered to wear my contact lenses…

The trip was a planned surprise for me, which I thought was rather sweet of the hubby to go through all that trouble.  He refused to tell me where we were going, only that we were taking a few days holiday at some unknown destination.

I caught on to an island retreat because he let slip that we had to make it to a certain place by a set time.  I figured that meant we had to catch something.  Since we didn’t need our passports, it clearly meant we would still be in Malaysia so it had to be a boat.  Turned out I was right, except I never guessed it was Pangkor Laut.  I was thinking something along the lines of Redang or Perhentian (although my geography of Malaysia is so bad I didn’t know any other islands existed anyway).

Here are some of the photos from our trip:

Below: Waiting for the ferry.

Below: On the ferry.

Below: Arrival at the resort, just after checking in.

Below: Scoping out the menu for lunch.

Below: Checking out the island - I think this was outside the Chinese Restaurant.  It was a long time ago so I can’t remember…

Based on the decor, I’m pretty sure it was a Chinese restaurant.  Can’t imagine any other restaurant with a large gold coin stuck to their front door…

A cute way to place mosquito coils:

Just goofing around outside the spa:

“I wonder if these rocks are climbable?”

Heading down from our room in the “hills”.  Pangkor Laut offers you “hill” villas, “sea” villas, “spa” villas, “beach” villas, garden villas and the suites.  Back then I was really into rock climbing so the hubby figured I would prefer the “hill” villas.  It was rather sweet of him considering the “hill” villas were located the furthest away from all the amenities and it meant we had a lot of walking to do - not exactly the hubby’s favourite passtime…

The food at Pangkor came included in the room package and was “all you can eat” at a variety of restaurants and cafes throughout the island.  This was breakfast on the second day:

All around the island you can see lovely peacocks showing off their tails.

There are a lot of activities to do around the island, but aside from the spa, most of them involve physical activity.  For instance, you can take a kayak around the island.  The hubby very sweetly accommodated my passion for physical activities and agreed to go kayaking with me around the island.

You can see some of the “sea” villas behind me in the background here:

We decided to take a break and headed for shore…

So hubby could get some “oxygen” - he was still an active smoker at the time…

A great workout deserves to be followed by a great meal.  We had dinner at the Chinese restaurant on the second night.  Dessert was homemade ice cream.

The waiters kindly accommodated us by taking a photo…

And another at the entrance to the restaurant.  There’s a cool looking boulder inside the restaurant that caught my attention, although I didn’t get a photo of it.  If it weren’t such a feature within the restaurant, I might have attempted to climb it.

Dinner on the second night was at another restaurant where a three piece Phillipino band was playing.  They were fantastic.  They went around from table to table serenading all the couples.  When they got to our table they sang a Phillipino song called “You are my Soul” - at least that’s what I think the title was.  I loved it, but it’s a shame I never managed to get hold of a copy of the song…

Here’s another peacock…

A view of one of the sea villas.

Taking a walk along the walkways by the sea villas…

Along the walkways they have seats where you can take rest stops, or just sit and admire the scenery.

Alternatively, you can look out for the giant lizards swimming in the water or sun bathing on the rocks.  Can you spot the one in this picture?

Pangkor Laut is a rather romantic getaway.  It is definitely the place to bring your other half and definitely not the place to be if you’re by yourself.  I can’t really comment on the child-friendliness of the place since I never really noticed those sort of things back then. 

The food at Pangkor was a lot better than the food at Tanjong.  There’s more variety as well.  The only downside is that because it is located on an island, there isn’t much else to explore except what’s on the island.  At Tanjong, you can take a drive out to the surrounding towns, explore the night market, and so on.  But if I had to choose which place I would rather go back to, I would choose Pangkor.