Here's My Story

Text messages... Ban: Just lost 5 men on Impossible Ironman mode in Xcom. Was about to rush alien base. Me: So are you restarting the game? I accidentally deleted your contacts in my phone. I also lost my phone's stylus again. Haiz. Ban: I can play on actually. Considering. Me: Honey, aren't you going to comfort me over my misfortunes? :) Ban: Hahaha, sorry. I don't understand. All your contacts or just my numbers? Me: Ya, I noticed that you tend to remember only part of sms. So I usually try to keep it short. Just your contact. I can't find the stylus. Looks like I have to order new one again.

If someone is rude to you, how will you react? It will depend on the consequences of your reaction, won't it? However, that itself will produce different reaction for each person because, among other things, it depends on how far ahead the person thinks of the consequences. During the pen-and-paper RPG sessions I am in, there were at least a couple of rude incidents (by different people) where I was at the receiving end and these occurred without the knowledge of the rest of the people present at those times. I would like to believe that the reason I didn't react (yes, I just moved on) was because primarily I didn't want to cause severe unpleasantness during those sessions and thus spoil them, especially since I have a tendency to get angrier as I reprimand if the culprit doesn't make amend soon. Still, at the end of the day, I felt aggrieved not only because of the rudeness inflicted upon me but perhaps more so due to my inaction to get the grievance addressed, a...

Yet another new restaurant that Ban and I tried after purchasing Groupon/Living Social vouchers (can't remember which one). Unfortunately, it was off to a bad start: it was hard to read the details of food in its menu. Something about the colour combination of the background and the words. So it took us even longer than usual (compared to other new restaurants) to decide what to order. Instead of amaebi sushi (raw sweet prawn sushi), they served me cooked prawn sushi (ebi sushi). I told them that amaebi was supposed to be raw and yet the waitress, even after talking to the kitchen staff, responded that the cooked prawn was amaebi. I was quite stumped. I then asked them what was the ebi sushi in their menu and whether that was the raw prawn. If so, why was it cheaper than amaebi sushi. My question actually got like a whole gang in discussion: at least 3 waitresses and 3 kitchen staff. Goodness. They then admitted their mistake and after a long wait (I'm not exaggerating he...

I learned decades ago that one can almost never expect food to be presented exactly the same as its picture shown in the menu. However, I do expect some sort of semblance, especially not a blatant disregard to its description. For example, if the picture and its description indicate prawn will be in the food, then I expect prawn in the food. It does not need to be as large as the one shown in the photo or match the number of prawns but there has to be prawn. With that in mind, here's a photo of OldTown White Coffee's Coffee Lava in their menu: What do you see? Some sort of chocolate/coffee powder on top of the ice cream and a lava of presumedly coffee syrup at the bottom, right? I expect the actual thing to have some sort of semblance (again, no need to be exact) to the photo. Here was what I was served: Where's the powder? Where's the lava? Tsk tsk tsk. Sloppy. Very sloppy.

About two weeks after my first appointment , my tooth was so much better than pre-treatment. It was time for my follow-up appointment at iSmile. It was still sensitive when I had cold drinks or dessert but it was not quite noticeable. This time I brought along my mouthguard. At the end of the treatment previously, the dentist, Dr Mah, said that I should still be able to use it since she didn't alter the shape of the tooth. Unfortunately, it turned out that it was difficult to push it in place and hence needed to be loosen. Her checks showed that the tooth looked fine. The air-jet test confirmed that the sensitivity was slight. So she just suggested that I continue my observation and to apply toothpaste for sensitive teeth directly on the tooth for 5-10 mins. In addition, upon my request, she modified my mouthguard so that it now can fit in easily. Yay! I was supposed to pay RM15 for that 10-minute session and I already had RM50 note in my hand to pay the receptionist...

After hearing about it from my family for at least 6 months, my sister and her husband finally had the opportunity to bring me to Zhi Wei Yuan to have steamboat. There were attempts to do so previously but didn't materialise due to circumstances. My first concern was whether we needed to wait for seats as surely it would be crowded if it was good and inexpensive, right? Yes, it was quite crowded but there were many tables and staff there were efficient in taking order, serving food and clearing tables. Mind you, they did all these without being pushy, as some restaurants do. Instead of mini-gas stove, they used charcoal. Naturally it was smokeless but the bigger question is how was it fanned to get the remaining charcoal burn? Ta-da! They used this battery-operated mini-blower. Neat, eh? So cute. Took a few minutes to get the charcoal hot enough to burn on its own. As with any normal steamboat, there was a base price for a standard set of food and then you could pa...

It was time again to go for my annual cholesterol test. The results (as compared to a year ago) are as follows:                                         Dec 2012             Jan 2014             Ref. range Total cholesterol            5.5                     5.9                      < 5.2 HDL ("good")                1.32                   1.67                    > 1.04 LDL ("bad")                   3.8                     3.8          ...

(Update: The name of the dessert should be pomelo icy sago watermelon. I left out "watermelon" in my post below. Sorry about that.) This is a dessert shop on the ground floor of the mall. It's been there for quite some time already. I had wanted to try its dessert a few times but the problem each time was that it wasn't appealing to me after I was full from dinner. So one night, I felt that I had room for dessert (or greed just took over hehehe) and decided to try their daily promotion: pomelo icy sago. It's normally RM8.90 but it was RM5.90 that day (both excluding service charge and government tax). It looks great to have on a hot weather, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it didn't meet my expectation. The watermelon was not sufficiently sweet and I couldn't taste any pomelo in it. Quite disappointing. The only bright spot was its sago. Overall, I believed it was fine if it was RM5.90++ but definitely not at its original price.

Here's something peculiar about Ban: he knows how to get to, say, a particular restaurant but he usually won't know the name of the building the restaurant is in (if it's such restaurant), the name of the area (Damansara Utama, Damansara Jaya etc), or the names of the various roads leading to the restaurant. This doesn't help him when giving direction to someone else. I usually consider this an idiosyncrasy of his until recently... Ban's mum: Oh, let's have lunch at the shop opposite the road Me: (Huh? What road?) What's the name of the shop? Ban' mum: Don't know Me: Ummm ok, which road is that? Ban's mum: Along the highway, where the church is. Me: Oh, opposite the church. Ban's brother: I just bought a new aircon Me: Oh, good. What's the brand? Ban's brother: I don't know. Me: Huh? You chose an aircon without knowing the brand? Ban's brother: I just asked for an aircon that will cool the room sub...

It's been donkey years since I had my last filling. Alas, I had to do it again recently. About a week before end of 2013, I had an unfortunate incident. I bit onto tiny bit of stone while having my meal. Normally, that isn't something to shout about but this time, it seem to hurt my teeth a little. Then it happened again during the next meal (or maybe the next next meal). Collectively, this hurt my teeth, upper and lower at the back right side, a lot. At first, it hurt when chewing food. After a couple of days, it was fine when chewing but there was still sharp pain whenever I drank hot or cold beverage. I doubted but did hope that it was just due to the teeth suddenly gone sensitive. So I paid extra attention to those teeth when brushing with Sensodyne. However, after about a week, the sensitivity was still there and I was getting worried that it could be tooth decay. Hence I made an appointment to see a dentist at ISmile Dental Centre. It was my first time there. The ...

It was the year I finally managed to sell my house in Seremban. Thank goodness. It was such a hassle. *shiver* I can finally channel more fund into share investment and thus make my investment portfolio less unbalanced. Also, I finally got myself a new laptop. I'm thankful it's working well (came in good condition, phew!) and that Windows 8 isn't as scary as I thought it would be. Some preparation and googling helped a lot. After having raised this possibility few years ago, I finally got some freelance actuarial projects from an actuary in Singapore that I know and worked with previously. So far, we have worked quite well together and for that I'm grateful. This not only supplements my rather thin income (compared to expenses) quite substantially but also let me use my actuarial skills once again and thereby not letting it go rusty for much longer. I had my share of fun, new food, new games, new books etc. But on what truly matters, aside from the above (which ar...