Surviving Dengue Fever

Sorry boys and girls, Phoebe is currently trying to survive Dengue Fever..my high fever finally subsided for 2 days but my platelets continued to drop at a stable rate.. There's no need for me to ward now because I never bleed anywhere yet.

One and half week of recovery left. Meanwhile, spray insect repellent on yourself if possible k. Stupid mossies are very sneaky..

DIY: Cat fur keychain

Today is a clear fine day..I mean, enough about the haze already! I've been seeing grumblings on facebook about 3 hour check on PSI, the out of stock N95 mask, the no-more-in-sight skyscrapers, blah blah blah...enoughhhhhhhhh. If you don't like the haze, stay at home! If you have to go out, wear a mask or bear with the haze for awhile, no big deal. Really. The funny thing is, people don't wear mask when they are sick and outside. Instead, they make a big fuss over haze that happens every year and then queue all the way to get N95..One more thing, why smokers still need to smoke when they can have free smoke now? Some smokers even wear mask!! Irony.

I love going out during hazy times, love the smell and the dreamy sight. There was a kind Indian lady who offered me a mask when I was waiting for bus at the driving center and told me how bad the haze will do to me..I politely rejected her and continued appreciating the environment. This isn't Chernobyl. I won't die instantly. I even walked from Dhoby Ghaut to Orchard, no crowd and peaceful..great!

So since today there isn't any heavy haze for me to enjoy outside, I stayed at home and did some DIY while watching Long Island Medium (SCV opens most of the channels this weekend, how thoughtful!). This time is quite special one, using car fur! If you have furry kids and you want to keep a part of them with you (not chopping off their tail to keep), groom them and store their fur in a bottle 'cause you can make things out of them! From keychain to tie pin and little puppets.

Thanks to my BFF, she bought me this book from Taiwan. Love it soooooo much!

That is in Chinese and version 2.0, alternatively you can borrow the version 1.0 in English from our nice library:

So how to make the keychain? First and for most, you must have some volunteers who can contribute the fur..I've got 3 brave donors:

 Bosh. She's the leader of the pack and the mastermind. She's "venomous" because her hair is super fine and once the hair gets onto your face, you are gone in the next breath.

 Mayo boy. The mommy's boy. He has thick shiny hair.

 Oonee. The faithful follower, leader's BFF and daddy's girl. Hate people who mess up her precious hair.

Most of our local cats shed quite little compared to cats in other countries because we do not have 4 seasons. So I collected for a few months to get a ball of fur from the 3 combined..

These are the steps.

1. Comb the volunteers once a week. If they start to run away, stop combing. Cats have very sensitive and thin skin that is prone to scratches. For Bosh, she always screamed to get groomed. She loves it totally until she can doze off.

 

 2. Collect the fur in a bottle. Do not put in a bag as the fur will be flattened and hard to tame later.

3. As long as you have a handful of ball, you are ready to make a keychain! Use your palms to gently roll the fur into a ball until it is smaller and rounder.

4. Prepare a basin of warm soapy water. This can help to wash the fur and at the same time, shape the ball. Squeeze the ball in the water, and roll it until it becomes tighter and rounder. Remove and do the same in the basin of clean room temperature water to rinse out the soap.

5.  Leave it to dry. Best method is to put it in a laundry net and hang up.

6. Prepare felt needle. You can get it from Spotlight at about $5. 

7. Poke the fur ball non-stop into shape illustrated below to make a paw. 

 The back of the paw.

8. Prepare a felt sheet. You can get this from Spotlight too at $0.99. Draw the shape of paw pad with marker and cut it out.

 I chose pink for memory of Ah pink who ran away 1 year ago and didn't come back.

9. Put the cut paw pad onto the furball and poke the pad in using the felt needle.

10. Once it's done, it's time to tag it to a keychain. I like to put some other little decorations, so I chose small cotton ball, also from Spotlight, to put at the bottom of the paw using a T-pin.

11. Bell. Cats and bells..cute right? I think I got this from People's Park Complex.

12. Hook up the fur paw and bell with the keychain using a jump ring. Ta-da! The keychain is done!

Cute right? This is the combined donation from the 3 kids in memory of Ah Pink. She had pink paw pads and the 3 kids miss her everyday.

Have a great weekend everyone!

P.S. For those who curious on how my driving test went, I passed! It was really a great hazy weather, quiet traffic and the tester was not fierce at all. Of course, my instructor was the best! If you are interested to learn driving or refreshing your driving skill, let me know.

xoxo

Do you have BED?

Wait, what do I mean by BED? It stands for Binge Eating Disorder, while binge means that you eat huge amount of food in a short period of time and feel out of control while doing it, without regular use of compensatory measures such as vomiting, excessive exercise, laxatives etc to counter the binge. This is different from anorexia and bulimia but more common than both.

I believe that most girls have the problem of overeating, feeling guilty and decide to starve the next day, but continue to eat and promise to really go on a diet the day after...and the cycle goes on and on...I am this kind of girl.

And then while I was on a detox diet (will share more about my recent successful weight lost in later post), I popped by the library and came across this book "Food: the good girl's drug". Then I thought, great, I should not feel guilty anymore because food is a good girl's drug..but wait, the subtitle went "how to stop using food to control your feelings". Ok, let's see what is this book about.

I rarely finished a book in 3 days but this book really enlightened me. Not only that I know I wasn't the only freak who felt the same way and there are reasons behind BED, it helped me to overcome the craving of food during my detox diet.

Ok back to BED, so how do you know if you have BED? Here are some of the symptoms:

• Frequent episodes of eating large quantities of food in relatively short periods of time
• Feeling out of control over eating behaviour
• Feeling ashamed or disgusted by the behaviour
• Eating rapidly
• Eating in secret
• Eating until uncomfortably full

I think I had the above 2 symptoms during my puberty years when my school life was stressful, friendships were broken, and parents were seemingly unfair to me. Then my mother strongly suggested me to lose weight, so I took slimming pills. It worked at the beginning but once I stopped taking, my weight bounced back and increased! Then I started to have the eat-starve-eat cycle..it gone worse and worse that I went for slimming massage, slimming devices, exercised vigorously, more slimming pills/supplements, all those silly ways...and yes, I managed to slim down alot to wear a nice cheongsam on my brother's wedding and wore bikini at Gold Coast. However, after the failed long term relationship, I started to binge again. I would reject my friends' invitation to gatherings and parties so that I can hide at home and eat until my stomach hurt, and my chest burned, and I would take laxative to remove all my "sins" and starve myself the next day, these procedures should heal me for my "lost" in relationship and distances in friendships. After 3 years of all these and the sudden deaths of my 2 beloved relatives within a year, I think it's time I should take control of my health.

I had all the above symptoms for sure and plus another additional symptom: I hate my body. I never felt slim or pretty enough. Does that sound familiar? I think 8 out of 10 girls feel that way, but that will lead to starvation and the eat-starve-eat cycle..dangerous...

So girls, take control of your health, do not be ashamed to recognize your real problem and seek help if you can't do anything by yourself. Sometimes, starving and exercising do not work because you didn't solve your root cause of overeating. If you think that you have some of the symptoms and wish to get a "quiet" help first, check out this book 'cause you may find the reason behind your BED.

xoxo

Mint Museum of Toys

Toy collectors and lovers, you may love this. This place is full of vintage toys and collections from famous movies/cartoons..some come with a price, some are priceless, some creeps me out. Seriously, I have childhood trauma of dolls ever since watching Child's Play at age of 4 at my piano teacher's house. I never played with dolls anymore except stuffed animal toys, robots and mini furniture.

Anyway I took the courage to go to Mint again as I received 1-for-1 coupon from my bff and I did it for you people because the ticket ain't cheap ($15) just to see toys in shelves. Nothing interactive. Well, maybe collectors will understand and appreciate. Not much education too, unless you get yourself a tour guide under special situation.

Mint is at Seah Street, just behind Raffles Hotel. You will be welcomed by friendly staff and a small counter with old school toys to be sold.

 There's a restaurant downstairs called Mr. Punch. There is also a rooftop bar!

 The interior of Mr. Punch

 Brochure and ticket. Here we go!

 Old school toys for sale.

There are 5 levels of toys of different theme, from characters to outerspace, with shelves full of them from all over the world.
 

 Even stairways have them!

 I have totally no idea how compass will work in space.

 

 Cute cute boy Tin Tin and Snowy..

 When I was reviewing this picture after taken, it creep me out. Look at the human shadow under Tin Tin's left elbow, it was definitely not a reflection of other toys. I was alone all along then, or was I?

 Apparently, Batman has no sense of direction.

 Teddy bears and other stuffed dolls..

 Bruce Lee!

 My favourite Ultraman Tiga

It's like I had taken a time travel machine back to my childhood time, although most of my toys were passed down from my bro and my mother was quite thrifty on buying me new toys. We didn't have technology back then, robots and moving cars were the best already. We will animate and voice-over the toys ourselves instead of playing with pre-recorded talking Tommy cat or angry bird on the ipad. We sewed our own stuffed toys, smelled them, washed them and resewed them when someone else ripped it open. It lasted forever...unlike technology. And we still grew up fine! 

So if you like toys and would like to have some childhood flashbacks, do visit Mint! 

Address:

26 Seah Street, Singapore 188382

Opening hours:

Daily 9.30am to 6.30pm 

Check their website also at http://emint.com/.

Have a great weekend!

xoxo

Tim Ho Wan

Have you all been checking out this blog to read about the famous Michelin Star Dim Sum, Tim Ho Wan? Here we go!

First, what exactly does Michelin Star mean? According to about.com, Michelin is the brand of a tyre..remember the mascot is a white fat marshmallow-look-alike character? Well, Michelin Star has something to do with the company as they started reviewing fine dining in 3 stars system to encourage road trips since mid 20s. The reviewers were supposed to judge based on food quality, technique, personality and consistency of food, NOT interior design , table setting or service quality.

Ah huh! So don't expect good service and nice ambience ok! Also, be prepared to wait for at least 1.5hrs to reach your turn..I've tried twice and gave up due to hunger, but I succeeded the 3rd time. We started queuing at 10.30am so that we can have a chance to start eating at 12pm..how crazy was that?! Well, someone gotta do it so that other people will know more right? Luckily my buddy rushed to the place to spend time (he even spent me drinks) with me while queuing, otherwise I will give up again and decide on other food.

 This was where I started. Not very far from the entrance but it still needed 1.5hrs!

 Almost there..queue started to extend.

Look at the amount of manpower in the kitchen..*counting the total salary payable just to staff*

The interior is small and cramped. I remember customers got to push the table out to one side in order to squeeze himself out of the seat..quite embarrassing...

Most customers came in a big group, so they can chat and eat at the same time, and therefore the long waiting time for the queue..

It was really really noisy..besides the noise from the chattering, the loud background old school cantonese songs were annoying too..gave me migraine. Everyone MUST take picture with each dish arrived and put into their facebook and tag their location etc..and therefore the long waiting time for the queue..

The basic table menu has no price indicated, just a reference. The actually menu (very small size double paged piece of paper) was passed to us when it was about our turn so that we can choose the food we want first before we are seated.

Tim Ho Wan has the 4 heavenly kings dishes..we only ordered 2 of them as we were not very interested in the other 2. So they are:

Baked bun with BBQ pork (3 pieces at $4.50)

 The bun was small, crispy outside and slightly oily..take note that you are allowed to order only 3 pieces per pax.

Pan fried carrot cake (3 pieces at $4.50). Their turnip was in chunks instead of the traditional strands..hmm I prefer strands as I always had in Hong Kong. To me, shredding turnip to strands shows effort and hardwork.

Since we had 3 pax here, we ordered more to have a good taste off! There are quite limited number of dim sum to choose from though..and a lot from the menu were already sold out!

 Prawn dumpling ($5.50).

 Prawn dumpling with pork ($5)

 Vermicelli roll with BBQ pork ($5.50)

 Beancurd skin roll with shrimp ($5.50)

 Pork rib with black bean sauce ($4.20)

 Vermicelli roll with shrimp ($5.50)

 Chicken feet with black bean sauce ($4)

Beancurd skin roll with pork and shrimp (steamed $4). Now I realized they entered this extra dish into our account..

Well, I think as an experienced dim sum eater, I have very high expectation from this Michelin Star dim sum. Besides finding the place too cramped and noisy, the dim sum were kind of average.small and some were too salty, some were too oily and gluttony. There were no surprises from the dishes. However if you are those who still want to try for once no matter what other people say (taste is very subjective), just go..They will be opening another branch at Toa Payoh Entertainment Center in July, so perhaps this one will not need to queue so long..One plus point of the restaurant, the food came quite fast. the tea refilling was promptly too. I just hate the loud background songs and long queue. If you wana have a date there but have no patience or possess bad temperament, you may want to reconsider this place in order not to show your "true color" to your date..hahaha..

Oh ya, no reservations, no take-away.

So here are my views:

Ambience 2/5
Food 2.5/5
Service 3/5
Price Slightly steep
Toilet Availability 0/5 (Please use Plaza Singapura's toilets)

Check out their website at http://www.timhowan.com/. 

So did my review change your mind?  

xoxo