i will have to stay in the lab till at least 11 pm tonight. sigh....

things i will be missing:

1. dinner with tiger and his good friend and his girlfriend.

2. dinner at home with family and mum's old friend and husband from UK.

3. my 10 o'clock shower.

4. my bed.

5. my tiger.

must say tiger's not very happy with my ffk-ing them. i know it meant a lot to him that we have dinner together.

curse this stupid lab work.

curse my choice to do BMedSc.

curse my choice of projects.

sigh...

I'M ON TONIGHT,
MY HIPS DON'T LIE AND I'M STARTING TO FEEL YOU BOY...

nenenenenene

yeah, i don't know the lyrics beyond that. hahaha...
i LOVE that song. there's just something about it and makes me wanna move.
but then i fail quite miserably in that department.
i was just watching the video clip and it never fails to make my jaw drop.
how does she move like that?
shucks. i wish i could do that.
it looks so sexy. hehehe


anyway, was taking random pictures of my sisters and i on the way home from church just now, so here're the products. thanks to lyn for adobe-shopping it. i can't do that for nuts. i'm quite the noob.

anyway, i just spent half an hour cleaning and de-inking squid. went to the pasar malam with mum and lyn and she was buying fish to feed my big fish at home and i saw some squid and i remembered i had this really nice recipe for squid salad. well, i don't know whether it's nice or not since i've never tried it, but then, you'll never know till you try right? so, i persuaded her to buy some and she did. so she told me i had to clean it before keeping it in the freezer, so i, in my gung-ho mood readily agreed.

until i got home.

here, i will give a blow-by-blow account on how to clean and de-ink a squid.

step one:
pull it's head out. make sure the whole head attachment comes out or you're in quite deep shit. if i had a choice, i'd just throw away the whole head and tentacly things. i mean, it looks icky! who's gonna eat that part anyway? but noooo....mum says can cook with something else. oh-kaaaaaay.

step two:
in the centre of the head attachment, there is a tiny, tiny sack that looks like a third eye that contains the squid ink. trust me, don't press it. gently tear it away from the rest of the head and throw away. before i got the hang of it, i ended up squirting ink all over myself. genius. a few times, i didn't pull the whole head attachment out and it got stucks inside. so the whole squid inside just turned blackish from the ink. yuck...

step three:
pull out the plastic looking backbone from the body of the squid. it comes out in one long strip so it's fairly easy an elephant blindfolded with it's trunk cut off and using it's feet would be able to do it.

step four:
peel the skin off the squid's body. if you don't know that it had skin, now you do. the squid's skin is the purplish-spottish colour and once that's peeled off, the squid looks white and clean and feels really rubbery. sorta like dolphin and killer whale skin. not like i've ever touched either sea mammals. but hey, i'm guessing here.

step five:
wash the whole thing properly and pack into a plastic bag and stick into the freezer till you want to use it.

and there you go! now i'm sure all of you will go out and buy squid and be able to clean and de-ink it all by yourself. i'm so proud of all of you.

warrrrgh!! i hate the stupid construction going on behind my house! it's absolutely driving me bonkers! imagine waking up to the noise of drilling and knocking of walls! it's freaking annoying. it's a weekend and i ssooooo wanted to sleep in, but noooooo, the stupid drilling and knocking started at 8 and woke me up! damn it. it's ok if it's a weekday since i NEED to get up around there but it's the freaking weekend!

i'm ready to start throwing really heavy objects out my window and injure them something serious.

hmm...i think my sofa bed would do quite nicely...since I'M certainly not gonna use it anytime soon...

i'm getting extremely stressed out. labwork is seriously getting to me. been doing it day after day and it still doesn't seem to be going anywhere. yesterday my supervisor dropped a whole shitload of work on my lap and says, time is running out. HELLO? do you think i don't know!? stop giving me more work to do! it's stupid that i've the heaviest workload of the bunch. i'm only a BMedSc student. i'm not a PhD student as much as you'd like to think i am. sigh....

and now she tells me i have to start drawing up graphs. WTF! she never told me anything about graphs! ok. call me blur and stupid and dumb, but hey....it would be nice to have a head's up once in a while. sigh...and plus, how am i supposed to do up graphs if i don't have any data?

time's running short and my stress level is running high. not a good combination.

i need help with drawing and plotting up the graphs. someone, help me. please.

i think i'll always be a young girl at heart. if any of you have seen the third floor of my house, you'll know how chock full of books it is. and i'm ashamed to say that at the most, i've only read about 30% of them. yeah....i've got everything. thrillers, romance, mysteries, comics, fables, fairy tales, children's books. you name them, i've got them.

last night, i was looking for something to read to put me to sleep with and instead of choosing one of the many, many books that i haven't opened, i returned to my childhood days and chose an enid blyton book. a very worn and well loved book i must say. the pages are dog-eared and browned and stained as i have the habit of reading while i eat. something which i do not encourage if you're a messy eater, as you'll end up with either very smelly books or books with their pages eaten away by insects trying to get at the stains. hahaha...

so, i went back to my room and opened the book and all my memories as a little girl came flooding back. i would read a paragraph and remember what i felt when i was a little girl reading it for the first time. the wonder and the excitement of anticipating what comes next in the coming pages.

of course i love new books and reading them. but it's just not the same. i think i'm getting a bit jaded and a bit more picky as to what i read. i don't devour the book anymore. i just read and let it flow. it kinda rolls of my back. at the end of the book, it doesn't really impact me in the way it used to. maybe i've got more pressing matters to attend to these days then to let the book sink in. i finish it for the sake of finishing it and reaching the end.

*****

anyway, i was watching made to order just now on channel 11 of astro, a.k.a. discovery travel and living, my absolute favourite channel and the chef on it was trying to cook wild boar with asian-type food stuffing. and the thing i can't stand is how these gweilos try to cook asian food yet they can't really get the hang of it. and it struck me. this particular chef would think he'd have a really wide and varied knowledge of the chinese cuisine but what he knows is really, really, really limited. and another thing that got to me was how he pronounced the chinese food.

siu mai became shao mei

lap cheong became lep cheng

sambal became sembel

and so on and so forth. i turned it off before i started yelling at him through the tv screen. yeah. i tend to do that.

so, i persuaded my sister into baking a cake for her friend's birthday yesterday and basically guided her step by step. hahaha...will let her tell the story and you'll can find it here. read it. it's really cute the way she makes it so real. hahaha...

did a lot of baking yesterday. actually, been doing a lot of baking recently. yesterday i baked apple chunkies, which tastes scrumplicious with ice cream, the week before i baked a chocolate cake to give to my supervisor in uni as a sign of thanks, and i also baked jam and cheese tarts which turned out ok. must try that again to see if i can really get the hang of it.

then i cooked seafood pasta and made a chicken salad for my tiger on friday afternoon and then i cooked lunch for my family today.

i'm getting really domesticated aren't i. hahaha...dunno why. in preparation of going to Queensland and not having anyone to cook. but we'll probably eat out most of the time since we won't really have much time to prepare and cook.

but cooking's fun. i enjoy it, no matter how much i sweat and cut myself. hahaha..i'm kidding. i sweat yes, but i don't cut myself. so i can only use the phrase, 'sweat and tears. and maybe a little bit of saliva'

it's just one of those days where i feel horribly lousy. i feel fat, i feel useless, i feel sorry for myself, i feel absolutely out of it all.

but then...i got this video f rom a friend which i just opened and it changed my whole outlook on this day.

i realise that i don't have to be who or what i think is perfect or right.

i can do that just by being me.

i can make a difference even though i don't think i can.

i am useful.

i am loved.

i am me.

and i know God appreciates me. He loves me and He wants me to know that.

i had the weirdest, craziest, scariest dream last night. i dreamt that my whole life was a lie. that the people around me were conspiring against me and were leading me along this road i called life. they had set everything up. how i talk, how i interact with people, my relationships. it was all a set-up. a very cleverly devised scheme to lead me into believing that i am me and that everyone around me were exactly the way i thought they were. but they weren't. and that's what scared me the most. i kept trying to wake up from that dream but i just couldn't. normally, when i'm in a bad dream, i just will myself to open my eyes and that's it. no more bad dream. but this time, it was as if it was sucking me in, forcing me to see things that i didn't want to, listen to things that i couldn't deem possible at all. it was as if, my subconcious was telling me something.

in the dream, i found out that everything that i went through in life was all planned out by my mum, aunts, sisters and friends. they had read something about how to change someone and they wanted to change me. which got me to thinking. am i such a horrible person that they want to change me? i'm speechless trying to think of something else to write here. my mind's a blank. i cannot even begin to conceive this notion. it's scary! it's like a knife twisting in my heart knowing that my closest loved ones do not actually love me. that they are just putting on a mask and telling me things i wanna hear. i'm scared. do i need to change? am i really that bad? is my life right now actually a conspiracy?

ok ok ..sorry sorry. late late late post. very busy week. too many things to do, not enough time.

we'll start from:

wed:
hmmm....can't remember. OH WAIT! yeah. i remember now. i did PCR and it turned out ok. hahaha. you can never say you've done lab work until you've done PCR and electrophoresis. it's quite cool but quite the stressful.

thurs:
AHH!! this i can remember. sure wan...got to uni at 10, started doing my work, mechanically, like a freaking robot. gosh, it's all quite the mind numbing. step after step. waiting and waiting. so anyway, yeah. did work till about 7, then went to tiger's and had dinner with him and thennnnnn...it was ALL NIGHT PRAYER MEETING! no elaboration, it would take too long. but, i went to church and was the official babysitter for the kids whose parents were in church. so, i had this whole night planned out. was going to start off with games and then some 'conman' rope tricks, guaranteed to wow the kids to sleep. *fer shizzle, my nizzle* and then if they were super stubborn and didn't get conned into sleep by that, i'd play a short cartoon to lull them to sleep. but nooooo....right after they came in, they zipped themselves all into their sleeping bags and demanded for the cartoon straight away. brats. but cute ones. so, halfway through the cartoon, they looked nowhere near going to sleep. so, rushed out to buy a dvd. decided upon 'sky high' and zoomed back to church. just in time as the cartoon just ended. so, put in the dvd and they watched it. i had this little rolly polly lying on me all the time and her feet were literally on my face. she was looking for a comfortable spot and ended up lying on my legs, face on her hands on my knees and feet right in my face. *sweat* one by one, they went to sleep. but i spent the rest of the night chasing these 6 monkeys that didn't want to get into their sleeping bags. annoying. so, didn't sleep the whole night. went home at 6.45 in the morning and KO-ed till 1pm.

fri:
didn't do anything. it was a public holiday! i deserved the right to do nothing.

sat:
guess what? i was in the lab! woohoo!! great. did lab work till about 5 and then sped off home since mom wanted to cook dinner for the gang. so, yeah. ended up sleeping and not helping at all. tired mah...what to do... gang came over and had dinner and then adjourned to watch 'the producers' later. *remember ulla dance? ulla dance again!*

sun:
church, lunch, home, sleep, SU-ANN'S HAIR SHOW! hahaha..yup. she unwittingly got conned into modelling her new hair cut which was coloured AH LIAN RED! hahaha...and it was in this little obscure club, little havana. tiger and i spent an hour getting lost and looking for it. thank god for KZ if not i don't think we would have made it. but true to malaysian form, the event started late and we got there with plenty of time to spare. i sooooooo regret not taking my camera! su-ann was in the poufy, bohemian type dress and in a mask. O_o she looked quite good surprisingly, and i think she pulled it off pretty well, since she's got that cocked-up face that says, 'wat you want?' had dinner at TGIF afterwards and then went home. hahaha...good day, good day. should have brought my camera. shucks. and i've never seen a gay-er guy than the one wearing lace and the drawn on beard during the hair show. *shudder*

oh yeah...happy belated mother's day. i'll post up the message i wrote for my mum.

people tend to show love the only way we know how. for us, it's nagging and bickering. hahaha...love you mum, happy mommy's day.

i wish i could turn back the clock.
i wish i could have known who you were back then.
i wish i could have seen how wonderful you are.
i wish i could have been the right one for you.

i wish you didn't have to have your heart broken.
i wish i could mend it for you.
i wish i could make you have faith again.
i wish i could chase your darkness away.

~~~

feeling randomly emotional now.

got home at about 1am from uni last night. sigh, went through all the slides i'd done and realised half of them need to be restained. if not i won't be able to get good enough results for my thesis. so, double my work. and then my lecturer decided to make me do MORE work and added in something else for me to discover since it hasn't been done yet. so, again, i'm spearheading another project.

got home and was utterly exhausted. earlier on i had hit a dead end in my research. not enough money, not enough material, not enough time. needed a place to vent and decided to splurge my last RM3 credit calling tiger. vented out all my frustrations, cried as i was so tired and fed-up of hitting dead ends all the way.

but i sucked it all up and finished my work for the night and went home. showered and was about to collapse into bed when i thought,

'maybe i should call tiger. let him know i'm home.'

ring ring...

'hey...i'm home'

'i thought you would never call!'

'why?'

'cause i'm outside your house'

!!!!

'seriously??'

'yeah'

so i thought maybe he'd come to say goodnight. turns out he knew i was going to bed without anything to eat since lunch and had come to cook dinner for me. *cue melting heart* ok, so it was just maggi mee. but it was such a sweet gesture.

that's why i'm emo now

i am utterly bored waiting for the mails i'm sending to my lecturer to be sent. so, to keep me entertained, i've been searching for videos to watch. and i came across one of the pussycat dolls video clips. the song's called 'buttons' and it's one of my favourites on their PCD album, which is really good by the way. so, i decided to let you guys view it since i seriously doubt it'll hit our tv screens in malaysia anytime soon. enjoy...

i'm being haunted by the spirit of the dead black cat my dogs killed. yesterday morning when i got into my car, the first thing i saw as i exited the house was a black cat. and it just stared at me. creepy? yes. but wait....

when i arrived at uni and parked my car. i stepped out and guess what? yup. i see a black cat. and again, it just stared at me. do you feel the hairs on the back of your neck standing up yet? cause mine are...

and last night when i went for mamak with my mum and sisters, again, i saw a black cat. it didn't stare at me this time. but it glanced at me and then just walked away. now my skin is really crawling...

now, i know you all must be thinking it's just a coincidence and that there are a gazillion black cats around malaysia. but what are the odds that i keep on seeing them, and they seem to appear everywhere i go? these were the only 3 places i went to yesterday and at all 3 places, i saw a black cat.

maybe a cat really does have 9 lives...

my dogs just killed a cat. yup. you heard me right. they just massacred and tore limb from limb a helpless, black, stray cat that's been frequenting my neighbourhood. part of me is relieved that my neighbourhood is now one stray cat less and the other part is horrified, appalled, disgusted, shocked, flabbergasted, nd everything else that makes me seem sorry for this event. because i am. truly i am. i mean, who wouldn't want to see and hear cats mating right outside their house right? since they sound oh so wonderful and melodious.

i was up in my room taking a drink of water from my tumbler when i suddenly i heard sounds similar to a cat fight only instead of 2 cats, i heard the hissing and spatting of one cat and the growls and snaps of dogs. my dogs had just been let out of their cages for their daily romp around the garden and the cat had chosen this unfortunate time to come strolling around my garden. no doubt trying to see if it could catch one of my fishes to eat.

but i digress.

so, i hear hissing and growling and i put 2 and 2 together.

'the dogs are fighting a cat!' i screamed as i flew down my stairs, my hair flying in a wide arc behind me.

instantly i was outside and horror of horrors, i saw all 3 of my dogs bearing down on the cat. it was on the ground, unable to stand up and i realised my dogs had broken the cat's hind legs.

'oh shit! oh shit! oh shit!'

der lyn and i started calling our dogs and trying to pull them away. but to no avail. partially due to fear that our dogs might in turn accidentally bite us. so, we each grabbed umbrellas and tried to shoo our dogs away from the cat. also to no avail. soon, the were biting the cat and both of us ended up running back into the house, too horrified to watch the scene. the last thing i saw was my rottie dragging the cat back to it's cage and just dropped it there.

my 2 german shepherds were out and we immediately chained them up and started calling for my rottie. and finally we tied her up too. then came the dilemma.

what do we do with the cat?

our maid was also too chicken to do anything and just stood in the kitchen clutching her broom. eventually, we got her to put the dead cat into a black plastic bag and we would then decide how to dispose of it.

so, we had chained up our 3 dogs in our front compound and were punishing them. well, der lyn was suddenly all macho and garang and started hitting them with a slipper. while i, filled with compassion and pity for my dogs tried to stop her when she got too garang. it got to the point where she would just stand in front of the dogs and they would cower. oooo....suddenly she quite the gaya. but still cruel. anyway....

by then, the dead cat was already in the plastic bag and dunno why, but i had to dispose of it. it was utterly disgusting. i was too grossed out to carry it, i took an umbrella and hooked it up and dragged it on the floor to the dumpster down our street. no words can describe the utter disgust and grossness of the situation. at every step, i could feel the cat's weight dragging on the floor. it was so bad, i just ended up chucking the bag in a pile of rubbish in front of my neighbour's house.

yuck....

i wanna go home! but i'm stuck in uni since it's raining elephants and kangaroos. sigh...

was in hkl again today. after a looooooong break from it. and i must say, looking good really gets you places. i wore a new top i bought from the mont kiara flea market yesterday and it's quite nice, if i do say so myself. ruffles and lace. so, i wore it and went to the lab and the usual people who would just snub me and ignore my presence suddenly all seemed very nice and polite. they smiled and greeted me. to my utmost, utmost, utmost surprise, the head of dept was also very nice. and she's known for being quite the mean bitch.

so anyway, after that i met up with ah koay for lunch in BTS. man that place is quite dead. for such a HUGE place, it's not a very nice place to shop. too many floors, too few nice shops. they were all the type of shops i'd find in summit and sungei wang. but didn't do much shopping, although i knew it was a sign when i rode the escalator up to the lower ground floor from the basement car park and as i reached the top, a shoe shop on sale appeared before my eyes. it was definitely a sign saying i need to go shoe shopping for new shoes.

roar, i so wanna go shopping. like all out shopping. but it's quite a waste of time and money yeah? but then again, when have i ever turned down an opportunity to shop? sigh...today. went back to uni empty handed after lunch. did my slides and now i've got a headache from looking too long into the microscope analysing my slides. bleh...

it's so good to be home. even if i was only in muar for a night. it just feels right. i have my couch, i have my tv, i have my computer, i have my room, i have my toilet. ahhh...nice.

anyway....

was in muar last night. drove down at about 6 in the evening. the whole family wanted to visit my grandmother after her harrowing experience of being led to believe she had a heart condition and had to be hospitalised a couple of weeks ago. thank goodness it wasn't true. oh well, the whole way down to muar, oh, i drove by the way. sigh....this is what happens when you get your license. your parents make you drive while they snore in the backseat. so, all the way down to muar, they made me listen to these cds of a pastor in singapore on singlehood and dating and stuff. gosh...could they BE any more obvious? hahahaha....but it not only gave me a new perspective to this whole dating and relationship scene, it kinda opened their eyes too. all their old fashioned thinking about how the ONE will definitely be out there for me and that God will preserve him for me and lead him to me is kinda like a whole lotta bullcrap. God presents us with choices and through Him, we learn how to choose and choose wisely. another thing he said that really made sense was about finding our 'other half's. why should we believe that we are not completely whole since we're not attached? instead of looking for our 'other half' we should be looking for our other 'whole'. well, it's easier to understand by listening to him and not to me. i'm like just summarising and paraphrasing.

so before leaving for muar yesterday, bea, lydia, datin su, aaron and i went out for lunch at Itallianes. love that place. great food, great environment and best of all, great friends to be with. we had a ball of a time there. you know how they serve bread with olive oil and balsamic vinegar there?

ooo..wait...nice breeze now. i wanna take a moment. mmmm.....

ok.

yeah, so we were so hungry, well, actually not really. more like greedy i think, we wolfed down the bread. we had all ordered and since the portions were so big, bea and i ordered the salmon fettucine, lydia and datin su ordered the carbonara, and aaron, being a MAN, ordered spaghetti and meatballs all for himself. since he's a MAN. and can eat a lot. yeah right. and as a communal dish, we ordered stuffed mushrooms. phew...sounds like a lot, yeah. yeah. it was. aaron's order came first and to his utmost shock, there, sitting there straddling the spaghetti, were these 2 HUGE, no. GIGANTIC, no. HUMONGOUS meatballs. they were literally the size of tennis balls. aaron's eyeballs nearly popped out and he looked at us.

' i think you should cancel the salmon fettucine since it's not here yet'

hahahaha....yeah so we did.

by then we were happily tucking into our food and the stuffed mushrooms came. oh and they came with cheeeeeese. mmmm....

so, datin su went,

'we need more bread. waiter!'

and gave a very ladylike, sexy flick of her wrist. instantly waiters were swarming our table. no, i kid. hahaha...but yeah a waiter eventually did come and datin su said,

'excuse me, could we have more bread? oh, and only the herb one ok? thanks. oh, and about 6 pieces, thanks.'

and proceeded on with her meal.

so after polishing off our meal, datin su wanted to dip her bread in the carbonara sauce lining the plate. which was a lot. so, polish, polish, dip, dip. and this waiter comes along.

'are you done with your meal? can i clear the plate?'

and datin su goes.

'no. i still want the sauce. no you can't have the plate'

and there we were with our jaws on the floor while she sits there blissfully dipping her bread.

'what? he's a junior from my school. i know him. it's ok wann...'

hahahahahaha....it was so cute. and 3 different waiters came over at different times trying to clear the plate and datin kept going, no, no, no annnnnd no. at least not until she completely cleaned the plate from all the carbonara sauce. hahaha....

so after lunch, we walked around 1u and noticed kids holding helium filled balloons. so we all had the same thought at once. LET'S GET BALLOONS!

we located the store giving out the free balloons and patiently waited in line, behind all the little children that only came up to about our knees. well, not all of us, more like lydia and datin. and after obtaining the balloons, off we went to a corner and starting sucking up the helium. what for? i hear you say? well, we wanted to see if sucking it would really make our voices squeeky high like how it is in the movies. AND IT DOES!!!! hahahaha...it was so funny!

suck, suck, suck....squeek squeek squeek. took some videos and will post them up soon.