Another Snatch Thief

Today when we went over to my mum for dinner my sister told me that my mum was a victim of a snatch thief again. This time the idiotic swine came right into the porch of my mum's home and snatched her very low cost necklace. It happened around late morning and my mum's house is an intermediate unit of a double storey terrace house. She was crouching to get something out of her car from the passenger side when she just returned from town last Wednesday. She did not close her gate first.

People let us not give these idiotic swines a chance, be suspicious, be aware!!

Burglary

It was like any other hot afternoon after having our lunch and it was time for me to have some shut eyes. My children were out doing part time job leaving my wife and myself the luxury of a long nap on a real hot afternoon. My wife was awoken by a phone call and I by an irritating marketing sms message and we continued napping after that.

In the evening my neighbour informed that their house was broken into while they were out visiting relatives. They were away for less than two hours. Their house was ransacked by the idiotic swine of a burglar and it got away with some cash.

We were burglarised before and the feeling was just horrible. What are the authorities doing? Just not long ago there was a snatch thief which I witnessed also in broad daylight. I have lived in this neighbourhood for more than thirty eight years and I believe the amount of patrol here by the police is becoming lax or non existence at all.

In the past I can see policeman patrolling on foot, then on bicycles and onto motorbikes. Now no more foot or bicycle policeman, motorbikes ....... where are you Mr. Policeman? Patrol car, WOW!! it is great to zoom around flashing the siren lights in the comfort of air conditioning.

People be aware of your surroundings and be suspicious of any kind of characters that do not fit into the scenario. Those idiotic swines are everywhere.

Fish Maw 花膠

Fish maw is a delicacy in Chinese cuisines. It is really nice to eat when properly prepared and I really do love it ....... yummy!! It is more of a texture food and it does not have a fishy taste. Because of the high cost it is only found in the supermarkets before Chinese New Year.

When we first started buying whole fresh fish from the central market I started collecting the fish maws which was in June last year. Before that we usually get our fish from the frozen food supplier, we decided to buy fresh fish because they stopped importing the fillet of the Dory fish. They replaced it with some kind of fresh water fish which is not to our liking.

When I saw the fishmonger gutting the fish and the maw popping out I was instantly reminded of how yummy fish maw with sea cucumber was. My mum used to collect the maws too and having watched how she prepared it for storage and cooking, I decided to give it a try.

The maw had to be cleaned of all things that were not supposed to be there and the best way to do it is by bare hands with some help from the finger nails. Most of it were fats anyway with some gooey stuff here and there ........ yes your hands are going to smell fishy for awhile after that, hehe!!

After the cleaning is done it had to be dried under the sun for a day or two until it turn transparent golden colour. I dried mine with a length of roasting string and hang it on the clothes line. You can do it any way you like as long as it is hung.

Once it is dried I stored them in the freezer until a week or so before this Chinese New Year to do the second last process of frying them before cooking them to be eaten. Frying the fish maw need some skill in getting the oil to the right temperature and the only way is by trial and error. If the oil is not hot enough then it will not rise, if it is too hot it will rise suddenly and get burnt real fast with the oil splattering all over. Good luck! Before cooking it just soak it in water for awhile and it is ready to be made into a delicious yummy dish.

Not all fish have maws and not all fish maws are of the same quality. From my experience with market bought fish I would rate the threadfin salmon as the best, then barramundi and snapper being the lowest. I judged the quality by the colour and the thickness, the thicker it is the greater is the yummy feeling ........... starting your collection??

Chinese New Year

Enjoy some yummies!!! The "ang pao" is for luck.

Chilly Winds

Normally about a month before Chinese New Year chilly winds will blow and these winds are from the northern hemisphere. Geographically these are the North Easterly winds from Central Asia. This is the time when the humidity level in the air is greatly reduced causing much of the lawns in most houses to dry up with the help of the ever hot sunny sun.

This year the wind had been exceptionally cool until it is chilly in the early to late mornings. I had not experienced this phenomena for a very very long time but I am glad to have this opportunity again. Taking a deep breath in the early morning reminds me of the time when we were staying in the village when I was just a kid. During this time our mum would make sure that we had our sweater on in the mornings so that we would not catch a cold. This was also the time when we had to help out in the kitchen to make Chinese New Year goodies like rolling the love letters, grating pineapple for pineapple tarts, cutting pastry into shapes for kuih bangkit, pounding hundreds of eggs to make kuay nang koh or steam egg cake and so on . It was hard work but we know Chinese New Year was close by and the fun that goes with it.

It was really a nostalgic moment and I am glad that Chinese New Year is just round the corner.

Annual Leave

Annual leave and Chinese New Year used to be a little bit of a problem because my staffs were all Chinese and were from out of town.

The weather a couple of weeks before Chinese New Year is normally very dry and the lawn in my home usually dries up before the festivities. After the harvest of my last leafy veggie which is water convolvulus, I decided not to continue planting any kind of leafy veggie or new plants until after the dry spell is over so I gave the leafy veggies their annual leave ....hehe!!!

This year the Chinese New Year winds or the North Easterly is really chilly in the early to late mornings and they are dry winds. Working in the mini farm makes me thirsty much faster than usual and I can see that my lawn turning brown day by day.

Work on the mini farm had to be continuous because the beds had to be turned over and fertilised for the next batch of veggies when the dry spell is over. The perennials had to be taken care of because the weeds and the pests do not take annual leave instead they work over time. The zucchini was masjestic when I first planted it but now it looks pathetic. It was attacked by some kind of bugs which I had to extermidate them one by one by hand. GRrrr!!! I hate the destructive kind of bugs.

Just can't wait for the dry spell to be over so that the mini farm can once again be green with veggies.

Kuala Lumpur

Last Sunday we made a trip to Kuala Lumpur which I could do without if possible but I had to enrolled my youngest daughter in the The Legend International College of Hospitality and Tourism for her chosen course the next day. She had chosen to do culinary arts and together with her sister decided on this college. Her sister is now in UTAR doing her final year.

We took the old trunk road to Seremban since we had a lot of time and also hoping to eat the famous beef noodles yum!! yum!! in the Seremban central market. We arrived at the stall just in time to watch them close arr!! well!! maybe next time. Well we left Seremban without gaining any weight and headed to Kuala Lumpur by the PLUS highway.

Traffic was already building up from the returning crowds to Kuala Lumpur who had left the maddening place for a more peaceful and pleasant place like Malacca. Luckily we started on our journey much earlier than scheduled. I remembered I had to push my way through with the returning crowd to Kuala Lumpur every weekend when I was working there ...... thank god I don't have to do it anymore!!!

We had dinner in Kuala Lumpur, a brief stop in Vistana Hotel because my youngest daughter needed to answer an emergency call of nature ....... she had food poisioning from the lunch which she had when she was out this morning. She really had us worried for awhile but luckily she recovered later at night after we stuffed her with ultra carbon and a tube of Po Chai Pills.

We spent the night in my sister's place and left for the college early next morning trying to avoid the unnecessary traffic jams. I made a wrong turn and we were in a expressway flooded with traffic which should be renamed "snail way" which is more appropriate than expressway.

Ding dong ding dong ding dong, it was pass noon after getting her registered, paid her fees, inspected her hostel and got her settled more or less before we left. We were happy to be going home back in Malacca but there was a strange feeling like something is missing just like when I sent my eldest daughter to start her university course almost three years ago.

We missed you "Princess" and "Only Daughter".

Convenient Inconvenience

Last Tuesday was just like any other ordinary day except for some people busy laying pipes for underground electric cables on the outside of the west side of my home. The pipes that they were laying have to go across the main road and the were equipped with state of the art underground boring machine to minimise the inconvenience to the public which is very convenient for them. WOW!!! what great technology, passerby did not even notice that a pipe was crawling across under the road as they pass by. The machine is compact and only need to be parked on the road shoulder to carry out the whole process.

I actually stood at my wall fence to watch them feeding the pipe into the ground ....... suddenly water started gushing out near the boring machine where the pipe was supposed to come out. The workers were running here and there trying to contain the leak. At the same time a large tourist bus full of tourist was passing by but was abruptly stop on its path. The rear wheels had sunk breaking the tarmac at the weakness point where the water is gushing out at great pressure making a big hole.

The tourist bus was immobilised for a while because the rear left side wheels were trapped in the hole and was resting on its chassis. That was when I rushed into the house to alert everyone at home to watch the greatest excitement of the day ....hehe!!! When I got back to my strategic location to watch the excitement of the day, the bus already managed to pull itself out of the mini trench created by the power of the gushing water. From then on it looks like a geyser?...a fountain?....or a natural gushing spring? I left my camera in the car and my son had taken the car out so I was not able to catch any of the excitement on err ...... I think it is now called digital code, no longer on film. Luckily my eldest daughter managed to catch some of the excitements with her handy cell phone camera.

No it was not underground water but an underground water supply pipe that was punctured. I don't think it was the boring machine or the large tour bus fault ...... your guess is as good as mine.

After the excitement was done the inconvenience set in, yes the taps were dry and it was just about dinner time with a whole load of laundry to be done not mentioning all of us have not had our bath yet. GRRRR!!!!!! Ooo that nincompoop!!!

The morning after the burst pipe was already replaced and the taps were flowing again but the water pressure was worst than Manneken Pis, more of a trickle. Half of the road had to be closed so that the huge hole can be covered and the road surface repaired. The photos taken in the morning of the big hole were all lost due to some problem with camera. I had to take it apart to repaired it and is now working perfectly again.

The damaged done was major and heavy machinery's had to be brought in to do the job. Lots of lorry loads of sand and stones were needed to fill up the hole.

Finally by evening the road was completely repaired and the traffic flow was back to normal. What a big mess for a simple job.

Coronation Park

It was a lovely place to be at with lots of of things to play with .... seesaw, monkey bars, slides etc-etc. Yes it was like a giant play ground for me when I was a kid. Once in a while my father would bring us to this place with a real large playground equiped with all sorts of playground equipments one can think off, it was like paradise to me then ..... oh ya there is a beautiful garden too!!

No more playground now and the whole place have shrunk .... the beautiful fountain where I used to stretched my arms as far as possible to catch the droplets is also gone. The car park is now converted to a display area for some old retired transportation machines.

The iron cross was erected in 1954 by the Malacca Historical Society to replace an earlier cross made from wood. The site is the location of the legendary "St Francis Xavier's Rock". Legends says that St. Francis Xavier first set foot on this rock before landing in Malacca. Before the area was reclaimed, it was said that the rock was never covered by the sea during high tide. Others had different tales to tell.

The public swimming pool was built in the late sixties early seventies I think is still popular. I used to spend lots of hot afternoons there during my teen years. No there were no bikinis to see because Malacca girls were very shy I think, I just love to swim and soak in the water. I learned to scuba dive there too!

It was a beautiful park but now b-o-o-ring.

2009

To most having to start work for 2009 is tomorrow. The long year end holiday ends tomorrow. Tomorrow is also the start of a new school year for most and for some the very first time.

For us it is a different kind of new year, no more school going children also means no more sending them here and there for tuitions. My son is now waiting for his Sijil Tinggi Persekolahan Malaysia results and my youngest daughter for her Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia.

My youngest daughter had already sign up to do a course in culinary arts and is starting this month in Kuala Lumpur. She wants to be a chef.

I guess in life there are many chapters and we just entered into a new chapter.