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After procrastinating for many many months, I’ve finally printed and framed a few photos to be hung at my Photo Wall.

I selected some photos that I’ve taken from my Japan Trip recently (yeah, I didn’t blog about that… ), printed it, framed it with some cheapo Ikea frame and here’s what I have so far.

Assortment of pictures from Japan

Another angle

Well, sorry about the weird lighting. The photo wall doesn’t really have proper lighting yet. Now brainstorming on how to get some lights there to shine at my photos. That’s another project for another day.

Had a wonderful X’Mas eve gathering over at my house on X’Mas eve (duh..). Thanks to Darren & Celine, Ah Hwa & Peh Ling, Yonn & Feng for coming by and making it a memorable event.

Peiwen and I cooked some spaghetti, salad, wings and ribs. We also got ourself a cheesecake from Hilton. Then we had Ah Hwa sponsoring some white wine and a beautiful looking biscuit house, Yonn and Darren with red wine. A glutton night it was.

Ribs

Biscuit House

After dinner, we had to work off those extra calories of course. And how best to do it other than having a Wii Party! It really got us to use our brains and us all moving about.

Thinking Hard

Moving About

Trust me, the pictures don’t do justice to the wonderful event that night. Hope to do it again soon…

It’s been quite a while since I had any updates. Well, not gonna be talking about anything significant in this post either. Will just introduce my new site header. (look at header above…)

This is an image downstairs of where I live. Took 6 images and stitched them together and then with some post processing.. voila. You get the image above.

Hope you all like it!!

Happy Malaysia Day!!

To the benefit of readers, today is Malaysia Day. Might not be something that you would know especially if you’re not Malaysians. And if you’re Malaysian and yet you don’t know about it… all I can say is SHAME ON YOU!!

A little bit of history (source Wikipedia)…

Malaysia Day is held on September 16 every year to commemorate the establishment of Malaysian federation on the same date in 1963. It marked the joining together of Malaya, North Borneo, Sarawak, and Singapore to form Malaysia. The formation of the new federation was planned to occur on June 1, 1963 but was later postponed to August 31, 1963 in order to coincide with the sixth Hari Merdeka. Several issues related to the Indonesian and the Filipino objection to the formation of Malaysia delayed the declaration to September 16 of the same year. The postponement was also done to allow the United Nations team time to conduct referendums in North Borneo (now Sabah) and Sarawak regarding the two states participation in a new federation.^[1]

The formation of Malaysia was made possible through the introduction of the Malaysia Bill to the Malayan Parliament on July 9, 1963 and consent from the Yang di-Pertuan Agong on August 29, 1963.^[1]

Prior to the formation of Malaysia, Singapore and North Borneo unilaterally declared independence from the United Kingdom on August 31 1963, thus coinciding with the sixth anniversary of the Malayan independence.

Malaysia Day is not a public holiday. However, it is coincidental with Birthday of Yang di-Pertua of Sabah, making the day a public holiday in Sabah.^[2]

So Malaysia isn’t just about Hari Merdeka (Independance Day) which falls on 31 August 1957 since that’s only for the formation of the Federation of Malaya. Malaysia should have been about 16 September 1963.

Anyway, I’ll be following the developments of Malaysia quite closely in the coming weeks…. there might be another independance. Independance from the weakeast government that Malaysia has ever had……

What in blazes is the BODOWI administration doing!!! First they take in Raja Petra, then the Sinchew journalist and now even Teresa Kok. Is he trying to hasten his own demise. Bloody Hell. I’m pissed. BLOODY PISSED.

The government has gone to the dogs. Wait… dogs deserve more respest. MCA and GERAKAN, if you bloody hell keep quiet now, forever lose any form of respect, no matter how minute from yours truly anymore. (though there isn’t much left if any anyway)

For context please visit sites like www.malaysiakini.com, rockybru.blogspot.com and others.

DAMN I’M PISSED!!! It’s a dark era for Malaysia ….

Me: What shall we have for dinner tonight?
Sis: How about pizza?
Bro-in-law: We just had it recently.
Me: Let’s bake our own pizza! We just buy the base and top it up as we wish.
Sis: OKAY!

Well, that’s the conversation we had in the car earlier this afternoon. At least that’s what I remember of it (let’s not be so accurate shall we?).

So we got the following items from Cold Storage.

• Pizza crust
• Garlic and Herb Lamb sausage (we want the insides)
• Salami
• Tuna
• Mozzarella Cheese
• Mushroom
• Tomato paste

So here’s the result.

Topped and ready to be baked

Baked Meat Lovers Special

Tuna Mayo with Prawns (Seafood Delight)

Salami

The finish four flavoured pizza topped with beer!

What a fulfilling dinner. Looks like it’s gonna be another dish that I’ll make more often in future.

Peiwen decided one day that we should have a photo wall. A wall where we can hang some nice photos that we might have. That of course is something I would like as well and voila, we identified a wall and went off to get some paint to make this wall a nice feature photo wall.

We settled on this Kiwi Green Nippon paint and started work immediately after.

Prepping up the wall

Taping the door frame with masking tape.

Nippon Vinilex. Mixed at a hardware shop. Kiwi Green Colour.

The painting begins.

3 coats later.

The finished product.

Pretty decent don’t you think? The Kiwi Green fortunately goes quite well with the colour scheme of the house. So all that is remaining is to slowly hang photos up there.

Darren just sent me a very funny video on youtube. Only Singaporeans as well as my fellow Malaysians in Singapore will appreciate it.

Just a quick terminology. ERP stands for Electronic Road Pricing. Basically it’s just like Toll’s in Malaysia with the difference that for Tolls, you pay to use the road and for ERP, it’s used to deter motorist from using the roads during periods of heavy traffic.

Anyway, just watch the video.

Spent some money and got some new flooring for my bathroom and kitchen. Previously it was normal tiles with rather noticeable wear and tear. Didn’t do anything to it when we moved in last time due to lack of funds as it would cost quite a bit to hack and change them.

Well, we didn’t hack them off this time round as well. Just had some people come in to “glue” a layer of decorative flakes on top of the existing tiles.

First off some old pictures of the existing flooring of the bathroom and kitchen. Notice the stains which can’t seem to come off even with the all powerful “Easy Off BANG”.

Doesn’t look all that clean and eye pleasing ain’t it. So here comes the people from Xtoria Marketing with their gear and they start work.

Protected the cabinets with newspaper. Cleaned the floors.

A bucket of the decorative flakes. It’s like sand..

Put a layer of adhesive on the floors and spread the flakes.

Close up of the flakes before lacquering.

Some interesting custom clogs. Used when they are spreading a layer of hard lacquer over the flakes so they don’t have to step directly on the lacquer.

New shiny kitchen flooring.

Clean bathroom.

The whole process took about 6 hours. Most of the time was actually spent waiting for adhesive to dry and lacquer to dry. Basically we couldn’t use the toilet for the whole day and the earliest we could use the bathroom was midnight. Anyway it was fine since we went back to JB right after when they were done and once we were back the next day all was good.

The total damage? $1.8k for the 2 bathrooms and the kitchen. Not cheap, but less expensive and time saving compared to hacking and re-tilling. Did I mention we LOVE the results?