Sirih leaves, gambir, tobacco and chalk

These are the typical ingredients for sirih chewing — a common habit amongst the Kadazandusuns women, as common as smoking — in other parts of the world, the sirih chewing is quite similar to tobacco chewing.

The chalk (made from burnt and crushed seashell), gambir and sometimes betel nuts (pinang aka areca catechu); are all wrapped in the betel leaves (sirih); and chewed for about 3- 5 minutes; the paste is then mixed with the tobacco where it forms about a pencil-tip sized ball, to be placed on the mouth for its bitter, and pleasing (??) taste.

The sap from the sirih ball actually makes the lips red (yes, this can be a traditional form of lipstick); and also stains the teeth.

And this is what my mom has been consuming for more that half-century now… and she does own a beautiful sets of stained teeth.

Tada!!

Tada!! How do you like your surprise gift? Muffin loooves boxes. Big box, small box, even shoe box she’ll just dive into it and fell asleep almost instantly!

We have not found the most concrete scientific reasons why cats love to be inside a box or to play with them. Probably for Muffin, she just thinks that the box can be used as a great hiding place, and was trying to temp her to play the hide-and-seek game. Some just doesnt need explaination!

total pleasure, zero guilt

Life’s full of irresistible enticements.

And we’re proud to grab yet another .. on photo. (btw, the first two sentences are almost 100% honda taglines. total pleasure zero guilt – this is a honda tagline indeed). This CRV comes with full leather and modulo sets.

lok lok STREET steamboat

this is on the first row of shophouses, on the opposite ends of CIMB, Citibank and OCBC lots in bandar puteria. this is our first time here, thus this place got its special place in this mobilephotos (pic below is snapped on n95).

again, like the typical makan (eat) place in malaysia, lok lok is a great example of communal dining – this place has clear chicken soup and tomyam soup; and they offer a wide range of fresh foods such as prawns, meat, cockles, quail eggs and others — skewed and arranged on a large stainless steel plate that resemble the back of a lorry — cool enough, it has a real lorry head on its other end!

if you like masak-masak, then lok lok is a great do-it-yourself makan place.

btw, we noticed there are 3 or 4 more steamboat places close to this one: competitions and everyone — just like us, all cari makan!

Food & price: great — will come back again!

Lok Lok Street Steamboat
No 9 Jalan Puteri 1/4,
Bandar Puteri, 47100 Puchong
Tel: +603-8061 3959

boredworkers.com has done quite a good review of this restaurant — they have more pictures too, including pictures of the lorry head and the plates.

you should go ahead and view them here: http://www.boredworkers.com/2006/06/19/lok-lok-street-steamboat/

Updated Entry: we went back here again yesterday (Oct 6th 2007) — this time we tried the herbal chicken soup and the food was excellent, as expected.

The only drawback (quite a disappointment) was that one of the skewered cockles was not fresh, making us to discard the two sticks we grabbed. The shop was so apologetic and had taken these two sticks out from the bill.

This was a great experience and how honest we felt when the manager came over to apologize — good food, good service, friendly staf … we would definitely come back!

aim for the sky

This is probably the 120th nap-style that muffin was perfecting for the whole day! We call this one: aiming high for the sky.

what a catnap!

mms from kampung

lunch with tambunan durian, rambutan and the coldest beer in the world: that’s what they say :-D, we were tempted to go pass airasia dot com and be in tambunan on time for the remaining half of that king of fruit — especially that this is the merdeka weekend anyway; but the wallet was a bit hesitant.

** so listen up now, hey we heard durian and beer do not mix well together. be careful!

Merdeka Day 2007: Fireworks @ Putrajaya

More pictures here.

1st try at capturing fireworks on digital camera – the fireworks were launched from an area next to the Putrajaya Convention Center and these pictures were taken from across the Putrajaya Lake; at Cyberheights Villa where we stay.

for those that were not told before, aug 31st 1957 is the date where the federation of malaysia got its independence from the british rule; and on 16th sept 1963, both sarawak and sabah (on the borneo island) joined the federation to form the country of malaysia. happy birthday malaysia!

cat in a box

So cats do really like to be in a box — muffin for one used it to hide and she thinks no one can find her there. She was hopping sideways and racing all over the house for a while, and ended up sleeping in the box.

She is also probably dreaming that she is on tv now!

arab street, sg

My first time to Arab Street in Singapore — a prominet non-shopping building is this Sultan Mosque – this is probably one of the most beautiful mosque in singapore that I have seen at this time of the day. Adjacent to this is the Istana Kg Gelam, the palace of the Sultan during early 19th century. I think this is now converted to a cultural or heritage center.

ps: it’s obvious that i am still learning how to capture photos using this new mobile… seems there is a lot of bluish hue to the pic.

relaxing sunday

relaxing yet boring sunday bah… another “hidden camera” shot on muffin, caught taking a nap after lunch.

Why do cats sleep so much?
Because they stay up late watching TV? Yeah, not the best joke but muffin actually sleeps for more than 10hrs a day, not because she is lazy but she needs to regain her energy (after chasing so many imaginary friends) with lots of catnaps.

Background kadazandusun music: hain jasli, nobolou nangku iti tupusku (is my love blind?)

Background voice, if you listen very closely: banyak jirawat sia oh.. crash….tinguk.. (… i’ve got lots of pimples, crash … have a look [sarah showing her forehead to her sister])

Trackback revisited.

No photos this time.

Trackback in my own perspective — so that most would understand what the friggin stuff this is! So I did some reading and this post by Emily on how to use trackback really helps.

For me, a trackback is very much similar to setting a person on a cc list if you are writing an email: you want to let the person in the cc list know that you are talking about them. To do a trackback, instead of using email address in the cc, you will use the Trackback URI instead.

The trackback doesnt need to be in the same blog domain like zenoed.com (why would you?); of course, the whole purpose of trackback is to be able to tell people that you are talking about what they have written; anywhere .. as long as you know the trackback URI (given at the end of this post).

Linking to other websites, which will automatically be called trackback, means several things:

1. It shows appreciation and acknowledgment.

2. It indicates worthiness of the article linked.

3. It’s one way of expressing your reaction to another blogger’s articles.

4. It’s one way of getting comments. If you send trackbacks to other blogs, there’s a great possibility that the blogger will compliment you through commenting to your post.

5. It’s one way of building inbound links. Inbound links are used by search engines to rank web pages. Just as much as it’s a great help to bloggers, it also gives headaches to some. This feature has been a spam vector with some individuals abusing it. A trackback spam can affect the blogger attacked by it. It may “clog up” the server, which may lead to your site’s suspension. Your blog could be regarded as spam, too. It will also significantly affect your search engine rankings.

So how to prevent trackback spam? Try Spam Trackback Validator plugin.

This plugin works in two ways:

• It checks if the IP address of the trackback sender is equal to the IP address of the webserver the trackback URL is referring to and
• It retrieves the web page located at the URL used in the trackback and checks if the page contains a link to your blog.

Other trackback spam blocking methods:

• The WordPress team recommends removing the wp-trackback.php but this might not be a good idea because it blocks all the legitimate trackbacks to your site. You won’t be informed on who links to your site.
• Removing any tagging plugin might work. Blogging platforms, like WordPress features automatic pinging which sends a note to tag services that you’ve updated your blog using your tags. However, removing your tagging plugin is not good for SEO.
• Use other plugin such as Spam Karma which automatically blocks spam bots from entering your blog.

Hope this helps.

Planning a trip…

The actual dates are not determined; but just to say we are planning a trip using Yahoo Travel. This planner allows travelers to save selected travel information (including hotels, attractions, restaurants, travel dates, maps and more) to a customized trip itinerary for use as a travel planning reference and to share with the larger Yahoo! Travel audience, cool eh?

We have not used the travel journal, but i’m sure this would come in handy! The link is here