alive, part 2

... hey so remember I had this fever? well, I think there's no chance of it still hanging around, I musta sweated it allllll out tonight! seriously! unfortunately I did eat some nasi minyak and beef rendang, we'll see how my tummy reacts to it... my gut's been giving me some unhappy rumbles, but they seem kinda half-hearted, so there's hop that the purgearama's done too :-)

random aside: i would never have guessed my brother could actually look good in red!

Photos and more detailed update later, maybe. depending on if I get the pix and whether I want to deal with dial-up :p ... which reminds me: random aside #2: one of my fave Coffee Beans [across from PJ Hilton] has been taken over by Secret Recipe! Aaarrgghh!! Nvm, I have a date on Friday evening at a new Beanie kat Bangsar Shopping Village II :-)

Time soon to rest my aching feet... In the morning will probably meet up with some of the relatives for breakfast before they head back. After that, the family obligation portion of this visit is d.o.n.e. :-) Then I can schedule my massage/torture sessions, and other chit-chat sessions... next thing you know the 3 weeks will be up and I had better have run all the errands that need running!!

And on that note... g'nite all!

p/s: the postcard offer is still open, so if you want to receive something other than spam or bills in your snail-mail box, then click on the postcards image on the sidebar for details on how I can help brighten up your day :-)

i'm alive... barely!

just a quick touch base...

1. from door-to-door, it was a journey of 37 hrs, including a 6+ hr layover at LAX. The trip itself wasn't horrendous, and all that downtime enabled me to finish off Harry Potter #7, whoohoo! I'll review that at another time.

2. less than 24 hrs after arriving, fever struck. I was over 38.5°C (101+°F), so spent most of the day battling it off.

3. the following morning (4:30am), the fever was down, but guess who started having pure liquid concentrated evil coming out of her butt? Uh-huh, purgerama... no idea if it's related to #2 or just an unfortunate confluence of events...

4. as a result of #2 & #3, I was in no shape to attend the official "akad nikah" at the mosque this morning. Am feeling much better now, although I don't dare eat anything b/c I really don't want to tax my digestive system any more than it already has been... but at least I *should* be able to mark the occasion of my brother's wedding tonight at the reception.

5. so far all I've able to help out with is jazz up a power point presentation and prepare namecards for 4 tables. wow I feel useful!

... and on that note... I might as well go catch some z's... going to be a long night!

ciao!

quiet

Saw the movie Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix [much better than expected, and does more justice to the book it's based on compared to most of the other movies out].

Just re-read Book #6.

Going to re-read Book #5 now.

Perhaps Book #7 will be in my hands by the time I'm done with that.

In the meantime, I'll be away from the blogosphere. [I do have to pack for my trip,,,]

Ciao!

fan tail my a**

So yesterday i was looking for accessories in red/white in a token attempt to fit in the color scheme of a certain wedding I'll be attending in a week's time... found a funky hair accessory Vidal Sassoon's Hair Tail which I immediately grabbed since I'm always on the lookout for things to do with my hair [I have so many hair thingies!], costing USD3, which was a total waste of money. If you see this product on sale and you are tempted by it, take it from me, don't bother. Heck, I even had Kosh play hairstylist trying to figure out how it worked (not that he's an expert of anything, and maaan that would have made for a hilarious photo!) but he couldn't figure it out either. The directions suck! The product sucks!

For some reason, I looked online to see if there was any advice/buzz on this product. Found this. Kinda funny how the winning answer just regurgitates the useless directions. Just confirms my opinion of that whole section of Yahoo.

On to other news: It's amazing how some people are going out of their way to ruin the Harry Potter final book experience for fans [or non-fans, as Dave informs us...]... heck, even the New York Times came out with a review before the book's official release, never mind that they didn't reveal *who* dies, just how many: their "excuse" is that they came across the book by legitimate means and therefore had all the right in the world to read and review it [even though they *knew* no book was to be sold until the 21st!]. I don't get it. Not that I understand the fans either - if you don't want the experience spoilt, then don't read the friggin spoilers! Geeeez!

Me, I just roll my eyes, and just hope that amazon gets it to me before I leave!

And yes, I'm leaving on a jet plane. By this time next week, I should be already in KL, perhaps already having consumed teh tarik and roti canai... Sri Stephen's cheese naan will have to wait till after the weekend. Yummmm :-) The postcard offer is still wide open - go click on the image of the postcard up there on the top of my sidebar to get details. Go! Go! Oh come on, like you don't enjoy getting something *other* than bills in your snail mailbox...

Cheers!

new Neil Gaiman movie out soon!

Neil Gaiman. Storyteller extraordinaire. American Gods will always be one of my all-time favorite reads. Translations of his work to the screen have been rather disappointing so far, though. The tv mini-series Neverwhere was awful! And while MirrorMask was not based off of a book, and it was intriguing, it was also rather disjointed and just not catchy.

But, my ears perked up, my eyes lit up at the sight of a movie trailer I caught yesterday - STARDUST has been made into a movie, and it looked like it might just break the Gaiman screen jinx! Stardust is a delightful fairy tale - a simple easy read, but thoroughly enjoyable. I'm looking forward to catching it on the big screen.

Even better news? Gaiman's been busy with the movie business, it seems. He's written the screenplay for Beowolf [the guy who played Will Scarlett in Robin of Sherwood is playing Beowolf - kewl!] and his excellently dark and creepy children's tale Coraline is also being translated to the big screen. Both animated, though... although I have no idea if it's animated like Shrek or like Snow White... we'll see...

I haven't caught Harry Potter #5 onscreen yet. I hear it's the best so far, and that makes me rather glad, because I've been dreading how much of the book [my fave of the 6 out so far!] gets butchered to squeeze it into a reasonable movie run-time. Haven't decided whether to catch it with Kosh before I leave [his schedule is crap, of course!] or to catch in Malaysia. Hmmmmm...

Oh, and speaking of Malaysia... just to remind readers that my postcard offer is still open - click on the image of the postcards up there on the top of the sidebar for details. My postcard address book is woefully empty, don't you want to receive a piece or two of snail mail next month?

just can't win!

So about a month ago, Kosh and I started getting sloppy on the whole keeping the cat's litter box cleaned out every 3 days or so. I would keep meaning to, but would remember only once I was in the shower, and I just didn't feel like "dirtying" myself afterwards with kitty litter dust and aroma, y'know? So I'd postpone it to the next day, forget again, postpone it, forget again... At one point, I was about 3 days overdue, meaning that her box hadn't been cleaned for almost a week!

Around that time, the cat made her irritation known:

• She peed on the threadbare handtowel left on the bathroom floor as a temporary rug while the real rug air-dried along with the other apartment rugs after a particularly comprehensive laundry session.
• She peed on Kosh's scrubs he'd left on the floor.
• She peed against the closet door which trickled onto a nearby mat.

The thing is, every time she did that, she had been rewarded with an immediately cleaned litterbox [and curses, let's not forget the curses!!], and these occurred within a few days of each other, so it's not like the box was no longer up to her standards... afraid that she was regressing, we decided to limit her exposure: keep both bedroom and bathroom doors closed.

Of course, this is the bathroom where the air vent is something we can't control, it's a centralized thing that has been NOT working more than working for the 1 year + that we've been here. Right now it's technically working, but not by much. So to avoid the worst of mold formation, we need to keep the bathroom door open, for circulation.

But we can't have anything on the floor. So the rug gets "stored" over the curtain rail when we're not in the bathroom. Oh, and other bits of stuff on the floor, like the kitchen rug and the little placemats that are mini-rugs within the kitchen? All collected and stored in the bedroom for the moment. All to reduce the opportunity for the cat to decide something else was going to be her pee spot [did I mention we went through TWO cat beds before deciding it wasn't worth it because she'd use them for a while then one day we'd realize it was now full of pee?]

So right now we're in this whole keeping-an-eye-on-the-pee-crazy cat. About the only positive outcome is that Kosh doesn't leave his clothes willy-nilly around the apartment anymore, whoohooo! :-) It's no fun without rugs on the floor especially in the kitchen. Having the bedroom door closed sucks. Seeing the bathroom floor nekkid is just plain weird.

And then, yesterday, it happened. The rolling of eyes, the exasperation at the cat reached a new level. Because we'd forgotten about another little quirk of hers. With the bathroom door open to air out the post-shower humidity, she is now free to hang out on the bathroom sink, waiting for a drink from the faucet, which is well and fine.... but while she's there, perhaps also to express her annoyance at having to wait for water, perhaps just because she's a cat, she loves to mess with the toilet paper.

Yes, this cat likes to claw at the toilet paper, which is attached just by the edge of the sink/cabinet. Still don't understand how and why she does it: her claws rip deep into the roll PLUS the process of clawing at the roll usually unrolls the thing, ruining over half the roll at one go... and it's only her HIND legs that have claws. You figure out how she needs to perch with her butt over the edge in order to achieve this feat.

I'm just glad she's not decided to pee on the couch - I think that would drive Kosh mega mad!

I'll send you a postcard!

okay, it's official. I will NOT be able to attend BlogHer2007 because I will be in Malaysia. I will NOT be able to attend the Chicago Bloggers Meet-up because i will be in Switzerland.

Geeez! I am away for one month. ONE month. And it's within this one month that these two events occur.

okay okay okay yes that's a lot of hot air from me, since I know I'd have serious uncertainties about coming out from behind this blog and actually MEETING people [I don't do well in "live" situations in general, with strangers even worse!! and I do want to keep some sort of anonymity/facelessness here...], but you know what, having the OPTION of attending taken away is why I'm being ornery :p

... but here's some good news to come out of this tragedy: Any readers want to receive a postcard from Malaysia and/or Switzerland? Yes, a physical snail-mail postcard with exotic foreign stamps and an impersonal message for all postcarriers to read and laugh at before stuffing it into your inbox. Anyone? Hurry, before I change my mind!

Here are the rules / conditions:

• Email me [azlynne1972 at gmail dot com] your name & postal address. Do NOT leave the information in the comments for the whole WWW to see and abuse! By all means leave me a comment saying you've emailed me, that would be fine :-)
• Email subject line needs to contain "POSTCARD REQUEST"
• Please specify if you want a postcard from Malaysia, or Switzerland, or both.
• "closing date": Requests should be received by 8th August 2007 19th August 2007 [yes, that's in a month's time! I may extend this if the load isn't too bad...]
• I will endeavor to fulfill all requests by 27th August 2007.
• I pledge that I will not abuse the information provided: your name and address will be used only for the purposes of this postcard effort - no record will be kept, and the email will be deleted by 31st August 2007.
  
• NOTE: if this effort gets too tiring or expensive, I will give priority to whose who requested only one postcard. Also, I reserve the right to desert this effort if I feel like it: if that happens, I'll email ya an apology from Switzerland/Malaysia instead of the postcard, k?
  
• What I ask in return: Once you receive your postcard, please devote a line or two on your blog to it/me, with a link to http://azlynne1972.blogspot.com/ . If you get two postcards, you link to me in two separate posts. Sound fair?

Allllll righty then! Let's get those requests rolling in!

POSTED @ 2pm 8th July 2007. "Stickified" until 8th August 2007. I'll refer to this post by an image in the sidebar.

= = = = = [leaving room for updates!] = = = = =

wimbledon finals

Federer vs Nadal?

GO NADAL GO!

10:10 am [will update later when the champion is decided. right now it's one set each, and 2-2 third set]

10:32 am [holy crap! no matter who wins, omg WHAT EXCELLENT TENNIS! mmmMmmMmMMM I've missed catching GREAT tennis! one set each, 5-5 third set]

11:25 am [WHOOHOOO! 2 sets each! For the first time in 5 years @ Wimbledon, Federer is pushed to a 5th set! GO NADAL!!]

12n [Federer wins it. But what a match! At least he was made to REALLY REALLY fight to match Bjorn Borg's record of winning 5 Wimbledons in a row. Hard luck, Nadal, but if you continue as you have, next year you'll have an even better chance of finally hoisting that trophy!]

fluff!

yes it's past 1 am... I tend to keep screwy hours when Kosh is on call at the hospital... he's on call again sunday, urrgh!

Here's some fluff to entertain myself:

And I got this rating DESPITE having "sex" appear 2x [only??!!]

Okay so a flaw in this is that it only looks at what is currently on your [front]page, so for the heck of it I pointed it towards my most prolific month in terms of posts [74!! - March 2006]. And guess what rating I got for that??

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:
* porn (6x)
* dead (4x)
* hell (3x)
* drugs (2x)
* kill (1x)

...... Now THAT's more like it!!!!!!! :-)



on a totally unrelated note: there has got to be some sort of noise ordinance to invoke against someone, I assume in this apartment complex, who sounds to be having a party, loud music and all, blaring out into the night, going strong at almost 1:30am??!! Makes me glad I wimped out and turned the A/C on so that the worst of the noise is blocked, but, it's still very irritating, and it's ONE THIRTY IN THE MORNING! Aaarrgh!!

Over and out!

[UPDATE: 7am... still no sleep! I tried! Okay so I went to bed but read. Then tried to sleep. Was dozing off when the cat made as if she'd peed where she wasn't supposed to so that had me bolting out of bed to check - thankfully, didn't seem like she did. Of course, that had me wide awake, so I went back to reading. And soaked my pillow. I knew this book was good, and a tearjerker, but wow, what a book! If you haven't already read it, go get it! The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Go. Get it. GO!!]

... missed opportunity ...

...so there's this joke I read a while ago, where the wife is reading a magazine article and shares the following with her husband: "Honey, it says here that women speak about two times more than men do. How fascinating! Why do you think that is, honey?" The husband's response? "Uh, what?"

So it was rather amusing to hear on the news last night that supposedly this myth of women speaking more than men has been put to rest.

The researchers placed microphones on 396 college students for periods ranging from two to 10 days, sampled their conversations and calculated how many words they used in the course of a day.

The score: Women, 16,215. Men, 15,669.

The difference: 546 words: "Not statistically significant," say the researchers.

You can read about it here.

It would have been nice if they went a few levels deeper and investigated other stereotype assumptions:

1. # of unique words used: is it true that guys in general have a very limited vocabulary? That gals supposedly use a wider range of words in their dailyspeak?
2. content/context of words used: the stereotype is that guys talk about sex, booze, sports, technology and gals about shopping, clothes, makeup, fashion, and maybe some sex ... yes/no?

Yup, what a shame, a missed opportunity to delve into proving/disproving more than just the chatty gal/ taciturn guy myth.

Why 127? Dunno!

... so it turns out this dude Idham decided to propagate a meme with a difference: for every response to the meme by early August 2007, he donates RM127 on the blogger's behalf to his chosen charity: the Darul Izzah Orphanage, Bangi, Malaysia. He'll hand over the dough on August 11th, 2007. So far, I count 64 entries logged on his post although he's got 87 comments, so probably he's close to 90 now. Dude, that's a very generous amount of dough there, biar betul?

Well, I figure, if this is a sincere intention, then by all means let me invest a little time to play with this... and if it's not for real, oh well, the only harm is I subject y'all to a meme, and that's usually not too too bad, right? Right?

The Rules:

• The meme is about completing at least seventeen out of the twenty seven sentences provided
• If you are tagged, you need to write an entry related to the meme.
• At the end of your entry, tag as many people as you like. You will then leave a comment in their blog to let them know they have been tagged. Please include this message: "By doing this meme you are contributing RM127 to the Darul Izzah Orphanage".
• Then, please leave a comment in here - so that Idham can keep count.

The meme:

1. A person is only as good as: his/her own true self
   
2. Friendship is always to be treasured
   
3. To love is to be vulnerable
   
4. Money makes me uncomfortable
   
5. I miss nasi lemak with sambal ikan bilis
   
6. My way of saying I care is by not getting in your face
   
7. I try to spread love and happiness by not getting into people's faces
   
8. Pick the flowers when they are ripe?
   
9. To love someone is to take them warts and all
   
10. Beauty is skin deep
    
11. When I was thirteen, what I remember the most was wanting to be a junior prefect SO badly...
    
12. When I was twenty one, I remember waking up on the floor of my friends' dormroom...
    
13. I am most happy when I can be myself
    
14. Nothing makes me happier than helping people expand their horizons
    
15. If I can change one thing, I will change nothing!
    
16. If smiles were money then I would be filthy rich by the time I was 20!
    
17. Wouldn't it be nice if we could all just get along...
    
18. If you want to be successful then you have to work at it
    
19. Money is not everything but it is an unfortunate necessity
    
20. The most touching moment I have experienced is [heh... I'll skip this one... blank! ... sad, eh?]
    
21. I smile when I hear a joke?
    
22. When I am happy, I smile? Gawd, who came up with these questions?
    
23. If only I don't have to [nothing!], then [N/A]
24. The best thing I did yesterday was snuggle with hubby
    
25. If I ever write a book, I will give it this title,"On the outside looking in"
    
26. One thing I must do before I die is write a book?
    
27. Doing this meme, I feel like an exasperated meme participant
    

The Tag:
Haaahaha I ever so rarely tag anyone. Anyone who wants to participate, go ahead, by all means! I do hope the race/religion of the charity recipients doesn't matter to potential meme participants, just as the race/religion of participants is not [or isn't overly, anyway] an issue with the meme originator.

Cheers!

Learning a new thing every day...

Malaysia boasts of being the location of the world's largest single bloom flower, the Rafflesia. I've never seen it live, only photos: it's one ugly mofo, this large thing that's kinda plopped on the ground. Its main characteristic [apart from its size] is its smell: it stinks to high heaven, like rotting meat.

So I noticed something on Yahoo!News today highlighting that a carrion flower has bloomed in its vomit-inducing glory at the National Botanic Garden in Washington, and was very surprised to see it wasn't the Rafflesia!

Wait, wait wait what?? There are actually OTHER stinky flowers out there in the world??!

But hey, take a look at this other Carrion Flower, of the type featured in that news article... is it any wonder that such information was not made available in Malaysia?

It would have been too embarrassing for ANYone to contemplate its shape, no?

That's the Amorphophallus, btw.

My new thing learned today :-)

tinkering....

no this is NOT a scheme to make you hit F5 / refresh so that I log more page views per visitor... but you'll only see the result of my latest tinkering with this blog if you *do* hit F5/refresh... so humor me please and refresh this page? Thanx! You like? Me being me, I'm going to go for overkill and load up like TEN or MORE since I found so many I liked, LoL!

Sources:
- hack: here
- images: here, here and mostly here.


P/S> the next step is to incorporate elements of / change this into a Neo-type blog. Work in progress: here

I was never a huge fan, but ...

... for some reason, the news that the Spice Girls are reuniting and touring somehow brings a smile to my face :-)

There was something so infectious about so many of their songs, they certainly burrowed into and claimed a [small] place in my heart :-)

Girl power, indeed!

My fave spice gal? Eh, I suppose Melanie C. [sporty spice] irritated me least of all, Lol!

Anyways... so above was Spice Girls at the height of their popularity... here's how they Spice Girls Women look like now:(L-R) Posh, Sporty, Ginger, Baby, Scary.


At least TWO have had their boobs done!