Flying the Frustrating Skies

Well, I made it to Vancouver in one piece, except for my peace of mind, which didn't really arrive intact.

Changi Airport's Terminal 3 is nice and new, with a lot of a Sea Barnacle theme going on. If you go there, you'd know what I mean. I initially thought that those were Big Brother Security Cams, but there's nothing inside. Found out later that those are Air-Con vents! Nice idea, if visually as appealing as giant barnacles.

I was happily anticipating my Vancouver Tech Comm conference and a few days thereafter of relaxing with friends, so I was in a nice mellow mood when I strolled into Terminal 3. Trying to get my boarding passes at the United counter was slightly trying, when they told me that although my United boarding pass was ready, the Air CanaDUH flight was scheduled for the day after. After a lot of brow-furrowing and exasperated e-ticket pointing, they confirmed that my e-ticket dates were correct, and told me to get the boarding pass for the Air CanaDUH flight in Hong Kong. Hm.. Okaaaay..

The Singapore to Hong Kong leg was fine, plain and uneventful. I even had the entire row of seats to myself. Wish I could have brought that with me though...

I was supposed to fly Air CanaDUH for the Hong Kong -> Vancouver leg. So I got off the United code-share flight, and speed-walked past sloths in human guise to arrive a short queue (yay!) of people, waiting to get boarding passes for the Air CanaDUH flight. And waited.
And waited.
And WAITED.
In the course of one hour, 4 people were served. Bleah! (un-yay!)

Turns out that Air CanaDUH "delayed" the flight to the next morning! ARRRRRGHHH! Pepperdemon and I harangued the counter staff mercilessly for alternatives (I'm imagining that the now-very-long-queue-of-frustrated passengers would have done the same thing). The haranguing must have worked, because an hour later, a frazzled-looking transfer counter person emerged from her cave to pass us Cathay Pacific tickets. Whoo hoo. (at least I got a seat).

Habitat Capitulation

ARGH!

One of life's most stressful, um, stressors has sunk its putrid claws into the conveniently located series of blowholes in my quivering psyche. It's time to.... Ban Jia! (oops, I mean, Move House, or perform a lateral translocation of the locus at which my corpulent collection of carbon, water, trace iron, calcium molecules, assorted protein-amino chains and adipose tissue prefers to dump its butt.)

The reasons for doing so (moving, not butt-dumping) are nefarious and myriad. Suffice to say that prevailing fickle but inexorably southward property market conditions preclude any attempts to imitate a mossy stone (as in, a rolling stone gathers no..).

But Hark! Alert Blog-readers will now have a light-bulb moment, and realize that my butt does have dump itself somewhere, since the favored domicile is now slated for Ownership Transference.

Today, I, the hereforetoknownas the attachee, to which the aforesaid butt is normally attached to, bravely went forth into the seedy underworld of cut-throats, brigands and clueless owners, otherwise known as www.condo.com.sg.

Yes, I registered myself there, searching hopefully-not-in-vain-y for suitable digs for butt-dumpage. Barely had I registered an e-interest in a few properties till/then/before a perfectly-normal-sounding-for-a-property-agent indicated somewhat excitedly through an invisible microwave wave that he had a Great Deal for me! Wow! (No, that was actually meant ironically). Fast work for 2 minutes of surfing... oh well, on to see my first (1st) prospective rental unit!

I hurriedly pulled on some decent clothing (ok, so I tend to slum it at home, big deal), and shuffled out to meet the agent, squinting in the bright Sunday sun while grimacing at three rowdy kids trying to splash hot, chlorinated pool water onto an obliviously roasting Caucasian in an alarmingly skimpy bikini (yes, it was a woman).

Said agent drove me ALL THE WAY, an entirely whopping 200,000 millimeters, to the neighboring condo. (Wow, what a guy.) We did the usual thing, him gesturing ineffectually at the 12 year old apartment's features, I murmuring meaningless nothings in reply etc. After I'd given all the rooms a prefunctionary glance (it was quite decrepit) the slimy protozoa had the wherewithal to try and corral me into signing a rental agreement on the spot. No amount of protestation would deter him, in fact, it only encouraged him to spout more gibberish and circular logic. Yeesh!

I quickly divested myself of his tenticular sales pitch and nonchalantly strolled out of the condo premises. I must admit, it was quite satisfying to see him age 10 years in 3 seconds, but he had it coming. The meeting and the showing of the hovel took a grand total of 5 minutes. Only an idiot (or completely inexperienced prospective tenant) would make a decision on the spot like that.

Bleah. Woe betide any other pushy agent from this day forward! Karrrrrrr-Poui!

Hiatus

Gee that was a long nap!

Lots of things have happened in the time spanning August 2007 and March 2008. Lots of boring work, office conflicts, workplace violence, anti-ethics training, you name it.

So why the sudden, seemingly-at-random resurrection of my blog? I'm going to Vancouver!! WhoohOoOoO! No, not for good. You don't get rid of me that easily.

Nope, I'm just going for the Doctrain West 2008 conference! In case you can't bothered to click the helpfully-provided hyperlink to see what it is I'm talking about, it's a Technical Communications Knowledge Sharing and Networking Conference For People Who Really Like To Use Initial Caps!

Ok, seriously, a Technical Communications Conference, where Technical Communicators (like me) go to hobnob, exchange biz cards, scrounge for possible career contacts, while attending helpful lectures and workshops to improve our skills and knowledge.

Aside from the 4 day conference, I'll also be going to visit friends and generally rubberneck in Vancouver, and blend in the million-or-so Occidentals milling around in Hongcouver.

I might be a little busy recording thoughts from all those seminars, but faithful readers can expect some blog activity! Oh yes, it'll be in early May. I'll try and post plenty pics too.

More Later.

Slightly-less-faux-Muffinery

Woot!

Made another 2 batches of Muffins on Sunday! (Am I on a roll or what? [yeah yeah, go snicker] )

Here's a blur pic. Sorry, but hands were too buttery and oily and zesty to manage a better one.
(Click the pic to see how blurry it is)

I made Coffee Walnut muffins (the darker one) and a modified version of the "Rich, Delicious Orange Tea Muffins", in that I added chopped peanuts. All just for my family to try out, since they like eating nuts, and one in particular really hates raisins. Which has nothing to do with the orange muffin recipe, since it doesn't have raisins in it at all, but I'm just saying..

If I had a picture of Batch#1 to show you, you'd have noticed that these are nicely formed, and symmetrical, unlike the gooey-Mr-potato-head types I made before.
Here's the secret - I used moulds. My turbo broiler is too small for the conventional muffin tray, so I managed to get my oily fingers on some tart moulds. Come see! (again, click the pic for a better view)
It was quite gratifying to see those suckers rise and brown nicely in muffin-like shapes...

And now, some random spot-the-cat-pics.

Aaaand, as a bonus, a What-the-hell-is-this-supposed-to-be pic.

heh! I should submit this pic to Engrish.com!

The almost-Muffin Man

Alas, the tumultuous life of the erstwhile muffin baker!


Apologies to my avid and crestfallen readers, for being too busy at work to blog, for I was... um, yeah, what I said.

Some of you might know that I caved in and bought a turbo broiler, since I was too broke to buy a full fledged catalytic convection oven, and also too broke to pay a carpenter for a cabinet to sit the damned thing in. Also, there's no space among the existing junk and detritus of my life's accumulated experiences to actually fit in a 55 litre oven.

For those of you who are kitchen-handicapped, a turbo broiler is nothing more than a big thermo-proof glass bowl with a heating coil and a fan. The coil heats up to a user-specified temperature, and the fan helpfully circulates the hot air around the bowl, thus cooking whatever is intended to be cooked. It's like a fan-assisted oven, except that it's round. And because it's round, I can't use a standard muffin tray!! :(
But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Ahem.

So, after enjoying a few roast chicken/pork chop dinners and pizza snacks, I blackmailed Pepper for her painfully transcribed-until-her-fingers-wore-down-to-wrist-stumps Muffin cookbook, and greedily scoured the e-pages for a suitable guinea-pig recipe. I mean, of course, a recipe that I could easily try out, not a Guinea-pig muffin. Although, the e-book does have savoury recipes like for bacon and cheese muffins, so perhaps the idea of a guinea-pig muffin isn't too far fetched. Apologies to my vegan readers. Please be comforted in the fact that, in the end, I chose an Orange Muffin recipe, aka Rich Delicious Orange Tea Muffin. (there's no tea in it, it's for Tea).

Virgin baker that I was, and muffin-tray deprived, I set about halving the recipe and constructing silver foil muffin cup supports. Kinda like Madonna's performance bra, except much smaller. And I had 4 of them. And those cups wouldn't have been able to hurt anyone, unlike said person's bra cups, which could put an eye out. Serves the eye right for ogling in the first place.

So, virgin baker that I was, I muffed up the first half-recipe, in that I confused the full-recipe wet ingredient quantity with the half-recipe quantity for melted butter. While the first four muffins that emerged steaming from Muffin Forge™ looked slightly too bronzed (I had to adjust for time and temperature), they actually tasted a little too much like orange scones. And looked rather mutant-like, for muffins, since the dough was deficient in butter.

The second batch turned out much much better, moistrous (heh), more even, and less craggy. Tastier too (with that much butter, why not?). You could say that the first batch was rather like David Niven in the original Casino Royale, and the second batch like Daniel what's-his-craggy-face in the remake of Casino Royale.

So I shall present two sorry specimens to Muffin Mistress™ tomorrow morning for her disapproval.

Unfortunately for one particularly interested reader, this was all that was left... since i forgot to take more pics...

A night at Le Bistrot

Roasted Goat's Cheese!

Poor man's Caviar (the one in the small bucket) - garlic puree, chicken liver mousse and somethings...


Dark Chocolate Tart!

These were just some of the offerings some friends and I feasted on at my friend Thaddeus' newly-relocated restaurant, Le Bistrot. If you're ever in the mood for good, unpretentious french food, drop by!

I had the Goat's cheese entree, and the Pig's Head Galette main course. They don't serve a Ter Tau like an illegal moneylender trying to get money back, but rather it's all cut up, breaded and served like a roasted terrine. It's quite flavourful and very tasty. It's a little fatty, but it's soothing. The stuffed rainbow trout was good too.

I got there early, and worked my way through the various construction sites surrounding the Stadium Waterfront area, and found and this bridge connecting the Waterfront dining area and the expensive condos on the other side of the river. Quite peaceful, and picturesque.

The company was good of course, I had a grand time telling them all about my roommate and Pepper's too.

One of my dining companions runs her own Cookie Bakery. If you need cookies, call Christine!

So much for the Easy Stuff

In case any of you have been wondering why there have been so few entries of late, it's because nothing of real interest has happened to me lately.

Except for work. Then Work, and also WoRk.

However, for my friends outside Singapore, here's a pic of my usual type of lunch at the nearby hawker center (outdoor food court):
Doesn't look like much, but it's mixed veggies, with a chicken thigh in curry and a fried egg (the yolk I dump). Quite yummy, and relatively affordable.

Also, I've posted a pic of my workspace in Cleveland, so I think it's only far that I post one of my workspace here in Singapore:
As you can see, it's not really a cube. on the other side, are two people, and we're sharing 360 degrees worth of space. It's nice open space, but walking through the office is a little difficult. On the plus side, I have a Cisco IP phone and an LCD monitor, and a docking station. You can also see the little kettle I use to heat up water for my french press, and the coffee mug and aforementioned Bodum cafetierre.

Hm. That's about as much as I can stretch it. Looks like I'll have to start scouring my noggin, looking for blog-worthy topics!

Hmm. I could tell you about the bag of potato chips that I bought from the supermarket that turned out to have been surrepticiously 'sampled' by a rude shopper.

I know. How about this:
For those of you who don't know Bahasa Malaysia - it's Lizard Man! and something like "A blockbuster film with a budget of Malaysian Ringgit 5.2 million (USD 1.5m?), and "a Super-hero comedy". Almost collapsed laughing when I saw that.