Dini Blogs: November 2008

Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Sometimes I miss all the times I had when I was not working

I salute all of you out there who are a working mom.

I'm not a working mom, at least not yet. I'm working, married, but no children yet. Even now I found it is not easy keeping up with house chores while I'm working full time 6 days a week. I can't imagine what to do when I finally have a baby... *hopefully soon, though*

Sometimes I miss all the times I had when I was not working. I can do whatever I want, I can have 'me' time, I can go here and there whenever I want. I can do the house chores without having to rush it just because there won't enough time to do all of it. Beside I have the whole week. I can choose to do my laundry today, and do the ironing tomorrow or the day after, or the day after. I can do the clean up and mopping today or tomorrow, or two days later. I can plan to cook this or that at a second and then shopping for the ingredients the next second, and even cook it right away the next second. I have all the freedom of when to do what. *At this point, I think I love doing house chores*

But not now. I practically only have Saturday and Sunday to do house chores like sweeping and mopping the floor, ironing, grocery shopping, etc. I have to sneak in the rest of the chores into my daily schedule. Every two or three days I have to do the laundry, which I usually do at night, or at dawn right after my morning pray. Bye-bye to hanging all my laundry under the bright sunshine which i love so much. I don't do the ironing regularly anymore. I just do it whenever i want to, or whenever the clothes are piled up too high my laundry basket can no longer hold them in it (that equals to 2 weeks without ironing). Sweeping and mopping the floors is out of question to be done at night after work. Too tired for that, or maybe just too lazy to do that.
I don't cook anything too complicated anymore. Every cook is just a simple, a quick-and-easy-to-prepare one. Instant spaghetti, instant cream of chicken soup, instant pizza, sausage, and of course instant noodles are the must-always-available items. Sometimes I feel guilty to MR about this.. :P

So.. how do I cope with all that?

Well, on Saturday/Sunday I cook A LOT!
I prepare half-done cooked chicken, keep it in the fridge, ready to be fried any time. The good thing is, the chicken can last verrryyy long time in the fridge, up to one month. I have never tried if it more than a month.
I prepare beef stock, lots of it, put it in several plastic bags, freeze them. Then I can just take out one bag whenever I want to make a soup.
I buy lots of fish, season them, and freeze them. After thawing, they're ready to be fried or grilled.

That is how i deal with cooking problems.

But there's another problem.
Most weekend is well spent outside the house! After a week of not going anywhere except to work, we just crave for some fun: shopping, photo hunting, gathering with friends, etc etc etc. This means, weekend is as unreliable as weekdays for me to do house chores. Doh!

Oh, well... I got dizzy just to think of what to do about it. So, I just let it be... :D. I'll do whatever i need to do, whenever i need to do it.

Note to myself:
Need to buy a vacuum cleaner to solve the tiring task of sweeping the floor and cleaning up furniture of a week (sometimes even two) long dust accumulation.

Monday, November 24, 2008

Tempura party and butter sauce chicken

I share you...

...tempura party and butter sauce chicken

>>Tempura batter
2 cups of rice flour
1 egg yolk
cold water
Mix them all together until all lumps are gone.

Roll shrimp/spinach onto rice flour, dip it in the batter, and then deep fry it.

>>Butter sauce chicken
Season 0.5kg chicken with 1tbs salt, 1tbs pepper, 1/2tbs garlic, 1/4 tbs nutmeg.
Put it in the fridge for at least one hour (i usually leave it overnight)
Fry the chicken.
Prepare another wok, heat it up.
Put 1 teaspoon of oil and about 3 tablespoon of butter, melt it.
Stir fry some yellow onion until fragrant, put the chicken in, mix them well, add about 2tbs sweet soya sauce, mix well.

Saturday, November 22, 2008

Crocs Sale

This post is a delayed post. I was going to blog it last week but.. well,.. due to this and that and so many other reasons I didn't.

It's the Crocs sale.

I bet some of you now are smiling while saying... "sale freak". :)

At first, there was crocs sale on the 1st and 2nd of December. But that sale was just a small one carried on some kind of a hallway of some office building. So you can imagine: small space, maybe 5x2m office alley, with so many people all cramped inside digging up these knee high boxes filled with crocs products, they were soaking wet in sweat because there were no proper aircons (it was saturday and sunday, i guess they didn't put the AC for such crowd). The sale price then was around 50% off. I went there on the first day and didn't buy anything.... fortunately....

... because Crocs was having a sale again on 14-16 November.... yayy!!!

That time, it was a more decent one: the sale was in Expo, occupying 1 hall. And now, they reduced the price even more, up to 80%. I remembered I was planning to buy Mary Jane Crocs at the first sale and the price was SGD27.00. On the second sale in Expo, Maryjane costed only SGD20.00, and i think they even lowered it to SGD15.00 on the last day. Crazy! I can't imagine how did the people who buy Crocs on the first sale feel... :P

As a sale freak... *cough*... of course I voluntarily presented myself, and my husband, on the sale. I came on the second day, and I had to join a very long queue just to get inside the hall. It was a 1 hour long queue. After I got in, picked up this and that, I had to queue again to make payment... and this one was a 2 hours queue. I thought each of us were going to buy 2 pairs, max. It turned out that i went home with 3 pair (Cleo, Alice, Troika Womens), and 1 pair (Off Road) for my husband. Well, at least the total was still 4 pairs, right... haha!

This is the queue to get in on my first day there. The queue became so long and the weather were not friendly so the officers had to move the queue into the hall next to the event's hall. Thank God for that.

The queue to make payment, and the crowd in the background.

Here are the victims of our first day at the sale.

In this picture: 3 pairs are mine, 1 pair is my husband's, 2 pairs are my mother in law's and my nephew's, the rest are my housemate's.

(My) total damage: SGD135.00 to get 6 pairs of Crocs.

Second day... we decided to go there again because I want to buy the Cleo sandals for my mother. So there we were. Kind of fed up with all the foot wear, we turned our head to... the apparels. Oh my God, it was also crazy price...adult apparels: SGD8.00 for long sleeves, and SGD5.00 for short sleeves. Kids apparels were reeaallyyy good and veerryy cheap: SGD9.00 for 3 pcs. I think I would have had a panic buying if I already have children. I was sooo eager of buying those cute kid's clothing, I called my friend if she want some for her son... :P .. So, second day, I ended up with 10 pcs of clothes: 2 for me, 2 for my husband, 3 for my nephew. Total damage: SGD38.00 to get 7pcs of clothes.

Oh well... that's another sale freak story of mine...
I love Singapore for these kind of sales... :D

Thursday, November 20, 2008

Changi Boardwalk to Changi Beach

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Maybe that's why...

Global financial crisis...

No, i'm not trying to get serious here and talk about why or how it is happening. I don't consider myself knowledgeable for that. I'll talk about something else.

Here in Singapore, the news has been about how the government expect companies to do retrenchment, if they have to, as the last resort. Cutting down some costs is preferred than retrenchment. To my understanding, it can also mean lowering salary for their employees.

Then, I ask myself these questions:
How would I react if I got my salary cut off?
How would I react if I got retrenched?
How would I react if my husband also got retrenched?

Things are different when you are working in your own country. But, if you are a foreigner, and become jobless because of retrenchment... things can get scary.

It is a good thing that we are not working in an industry. Then we don't need to worry so much about retrenchment, remembering the fact that my husband and I are both foreigner here in Singapore.

Maybe that's why...

So many people out there are having a hard life even long before the global crisis. And things must have gotten worse now for them. I'm just really grateful that my husband and I still have my job without any cut off in our salary, we can still pay our bills or even go shopping to any sale in town, and everything.

I have to be grateful with what I have. So, to show my gratitude, now i have to go back to work ... :D

Monday, November 3, 2008

Cats Legacy

I don't feel like writing anything lately. So I'll just post pictures of cats. I cannot say that they are my cats since I don't take any part in taking care any of them. But I do know them ^_^

This is Buna. She's the kitten in my home in Bandung. My sister and my brother have been taking good care of her. 'Buna' is actually a short form from 'BUNtelan Air', it means 'water bag', literally. She's been called Buna because she's so fat for a 2 months old kitten, just like a water bag. :p

This kitten still hasn't got any name. Let's call her number 1. She's my-brother-in-law's cat.

This is number 1's brother. Let's call him number 2. Sorry, also still no name yet.

Now, she is a step sister of number 1 and number 2. Cat's life can also be so complicated, huh! (LOL)
Number 1, number 2, and their step sister are living in my husband's house, also in Bandung.

This is Bojes Samsudin. Ooh! What a name! (LOL). He's the father of Buna, and he's sooooo big.
I forgot to take photo of Buna's mother.

This little missy here is my friend's cat. Well, it's actually friend-of-the-sister-of-my-brother-in-law's cat (not the same brother in law who owns number 1 and number 2). I bet you are now reading very slowly trying to understand friend-of-the-sister-of-my-brother-in-law's.... (LOL). I forgot her name, i mean the cat.

This is my-brother-in-law's-sister's cat. I forgot her name also, i still mean the cat.

Enjoy!

I love cats!