I was first attracted to this book by the cover, it intrigued me, so I picked it up. At first, when I looked at the cover, I thought that it was about an adoption story. White woman, dark-skinned child, that’s the first thing that popped in my head. Hugh and Dana, who are both white, are about to have their first child. When Dana gives birth, they are surprised that their baby, Lizzie, is dark-skinned. Hugh’s family ancestry can be traced back to the Mayflower, whereas Dana has never known who her father was.

With the birth of their child, Hugh begins to struggle with his emotions. Although he trusts Dana, his family keeps on suggesting that she might have had an affair (especially as they are close friends with their neighbour, a single black man). Eventually, he asks Dana to do a DNA test on the baby, insisting that it is the only way to prove that it is really his child. After the test proves that Lizzie is his, Dana begins a quest to search through her family tree, to try and discover who her father was.

It was a very readable book, easy to read, and interesting. I felt myself wanting to smack Hugh at times for not having more trust in Dana. I suppose that it’s easy for women, the baby is always definitely theirs, whereas men never know for certain. And if you are both white, suddenly getting a dark-skinned baby must come as a huge shock, thus breeding doubt in the man’s mind.

I wouldn’t nominate the book for any awards, but it’s definitely an enjoyable book to read if you’ve got a few hours free time!

Book: Family Tree by Barbara Delinsky
Read in: February 2009
Rating: 7/10

Related posts:

1. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
2. Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult
3. Personality tests galore

Anyway, I went to the website to check it out. Well, it’s clean and simple, but that’s OK. Normally application websites should be simple, not overly cluttered with design. On the right, there’s a space for a user login … but no place to sign up as a user. Hmm, that’s strange…who is the login for, then?

You can choose one branch from each hypermarket for comparison purposes, and there’s also a category listing to select which products you want to compare. I selected a few basic products, and here’s my results.

I’m not sure how accurate the results are, it would be interesting to take note of the prices and then go to the hypermarkets to check it out. According to the site, the prices are updated daily. Interesting to note, some of the Tesco items had red plus signs next to them, which states that “Dijamin Tiada Ketandingan”, but upon comparison, it’s the most expensive of all the hypermarkets!

I wonder how useful this site is, will consumers actually use it? For me, I don’t go grocery shopping (unless it’s for the office, or for my own snacks) and I don’t see myself using this portal. The selection of products are the most basic, and the items I would buy are not listed down there. I’m definitely not their target market! It was interesting to take a look at, but I doubt I’d go back for more.

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About three weeks ago, I picked up both of Khaled Hosseini’s books (Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns) from MPH at 30% discount. I started reading A Thousand Splendid Suns, and within the first few pages, I was enthralled.

In the book, one of the main characters is Mariam, who is an illegitimate child. Her father is a rich man with three wives, who had an affair with one of the housekeepers, resulting in the birth of Mariam. She and her mother were moved to a secluded area, where they would never meet people, and her father, Jalil, came to visit her every week. Things were not ideal for her, as her mother was very bitter their situation, and she sounded a little unstable to me! So, she always looked forward to Jalil’s visits, as they were the highlight of her week. Soon, she discovered that Jalil didn’t really love her, and then her mother committed suicide. She went to stay with Jalil for awhile, and then his wives forced her to marry an old man as they didn’t want her around. Part one of the book relates her early life with her mother and Jalil, and then continues on to her story with her husband, Rasheed.

In the second part of the book, it switches to a little girl called Laila. She has two elder brothers who have gone off to fight in the war, and her mother’s depressed as she seems to love the brothers more than Laila. Her best friend is a lame boy called Tariq, and everyone always jokes that eventually the two of them will get married. We read more about the conditions in Kabul, and about the war that affects everybody. Eventually, most of their neighbours move away from Kabul, but Laila’s mother refuses to go. Tariq’s family leaves as well, leaving Laila brokenhearted. Eventually, Laila’s mother gives in, and they begin to pack their belongings to leave. Unfortunately, just as they are leaving, their house gets bombed, and Laila’s parents die. Now, here’s when the two stories really intertwine. Laila gets taken in by Rasheed and Mariam, eventually agreeing to become his second wife when she discovers that she’s pregnant with Tariq’s baby!

At first, Mariam and Laila don’t get along. Mariam accuses Laila of trying to steal her husband, and is jealous because Laila managed to have a baby, whereas she has never had a baby before. Eventually, things change, and she becomes somewhat of a mother figure to Laila, protecting her from Rasheed’s cruelty.

This book is so well written, but I hypothesized that perhaps I felt that this book was great due to the fact that I had been reading not-so-great books prior to this. However, on reading people’s reviews of the book, everyone seems to think it was great as well! It gives you a glimpse of life in Kabul, as well as how it would be like if you were a woman in Afghanistan. I’m sure this look at a woman’s life is only applicable to a certain group of women, but it still does affect you very deeply. At the end of the book, I cried! It’s rare that a book evokes such emotion from me.

What I found really hilarious was Mr T’s reaction to the book. I updated him on the storyline every time I read some of it, and he found it really weird that I kept on rhapsodizing about the book when it was so sad! He said that only happy books are good books. You can tell that that’s a comment coming from someone who considers reading as browsing through a magazine!

Book: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Read in: February 2009
Rating: 9/10

Related posts:

1. Family Tree by Barbara Delinsky
2. Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult
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Step 1, wash the mushrooms and cut off the stalks, and fry them for a short while. Now, here’s the first mistake Mr T. and I made. I asked him, “So, how many should we cook?” His response was…”All of them lah, otherwise what are we going to do with the rest.” Normally, stuffed mushrooms are an appetiser, where you probably eat no more than 3 – 4, right? We ended up with this many….

The next day, when we we were telling my extended family about it, I estimated the number to be about 20, and Mr. T said no way that it was 20. Well, I counted from this picture, and it’s 22!

Next, we fried up all the other ingredients, garlic and bacon and some tomatoes, and heaped them onto the mushrooms. This was a teeny bit difficult, as some of the mushrooms were so tiny. I was also unsure whether to use the mozarella cheese as a base and then pile everything on top, or whether to pile everything first, then drape the mozarella on top. So, as a compromise, we did it half – half. Yes, I’m a cooking newbie…So anyway, at the end of the exercise, here’s what we ended up with.

It looks a bit messy, but it was hard to stuff everything in there! Also, by this time, it was about 9, and we were pretty hungry. So it went into the oven like that (pre-heated at about 200 C), and it baked for about 15 minutes. And here’s our finished product!

Presentation isn’t great, but hey, I’m a developer, not a designer! :p As long as they’re on the plate and cooked, that’s what counts, right? They tasted pretty good, obviously nowhere close to Dave’s standard, but definitely a success. And hey, my mum ate two, and considering that there’s unhealthy CHEESE on the mushrooms, that must mean that she liked them! We were oh-so-tired of eating mushrooms by the end, it was just so many! And because the finished product picture didn’t look that great, here’s a close-up of one of the mushrooms before it went into the oven, it looks really yummy and juicy.

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SkyTrex Adventures is a place where you can enjoy jungle trekking from a level never done before – through the canopy of the forest! Test your agility, challenge your fear – walk, crawl, glide and swing through our different trails in the sky, in total safety while appreciating the wonders of Malaysian tropical rainforest.

I had read about it in the newspapers quite some time ago, but never got up the energy to go and check it out. This provided me the push I needed in order to get going. Together, Eel and I googled several blogs that talked about it, and it looked really interesting, if not a bit scary at certain points! Anyway, we decided to go, and invited our group of school friends to come along.

My advice? Don’t wear shorts. It bunches up and feels pretty uncomfortable. Guys, be prepared, the harness enhances your “package” a lot. And also, it would probably be better to wear a long sleeve shirt, I wore a short sleeve shirt, as you can see, and by the end, I had rope burns. You can also rent gloves there, if you want, it does save you some pain. Oh, and don’t try to be a smarty-pants and put the harness on by yourself, unless you really know what you’re doing. Some of the guys in the other groups tried that, and during the training session, the person in charge had to go and fix the harness for them.

Once we got our equipment on, we were taken to the side where we were shown some of the different obstacles we would be encountering. The trainer briefed us on the pulley, carabiners, harness and the correct methods to use them. It felt really overwhelming at first, but after we went through all the obstacles, we kind of got the hang of it. That was only the “easy” part, I believe the height was only a couple of meters of the ground. Later on, the actual course was up to 17 meters above ground!

After graduating from the training, we started off on the main course. The first obstacle was climbing this ladder, which seemed to go on forever and ever! Furthermore, only one person at a time could climb the ladder, so I felt doubly pressured to go faster, even though all I wanted to do was stop and rest for awhile.

I don’t have too many pictures of the obstacles itself, it’s hard to take pictures whilst going through the course. For the picture above, it looks easy enough, but what you can’t see is that it tips from side to side as you walk along the wooden bars! One of the hardest tasks that we went through was this one where there were horizontal wooden planks. In between the planks was a rope dangling, and you had to lean forward to grab the rope, and swing yourself to the next plank. Sounds scary, doesn’t it? But you feel a great sense of accomplishment after finishing it. If you’re too scared, they do have these alternate routes, I think they call them “Chicken Exits”, where you just flying fox your way past to the next obstacle. There was actually a guy in the group after us that did it! Hehe, I felt really smug because I completed it and he didn’t!

In this obstacle, we had to swing on a rope from a platform, and we would smash into this rope net. We then needed to cling onto the net, let the rope go, and climb up to the next platform. See Terence in red, and a sliver of green beside him? That’s me! All in all, it was a fun outing, although at times, I had the thought, “What on earth am I doing to myself??”

And guess what? The advanced course should be opening up some time this year, where it’s even higher and tougher than the current one! Hmm, not sure if I’d want to go for that, though. Definitely something you should try (although you can’t try it if you’re over 100kgs, there’s a weight limitation!). There’s even a children’s course there, a kid was having a birthday party on that day, and it looked so fun! Something different from the normal A&W / McD’s birthday parties I used to go for!

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Alright, so what have I been up to lately? Definitely too much to fit in this one post, so I’ll just pick one.

I watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button about a week ago. It’s about a man (Brad Pitt, of course!) who was born old and ages backwards. His mother died giving birth to him, and when his father looked at him, the father thought that he was a monster, as he looked almost mummy-like, with old wrinkled skin, cataracts, arthritis, and more. So, his father took him to an old folks’ home and left him on the stairs. The housekeeper, a black woman who was unable to have her own children, took him in and looked after him.

In this home, he meets a young girl, Daisy (played by Cate Blanchett), who becomes the love of his life later on. It’s a very touching story, moving between stories of Benjamin and Daisy, throughout their “growing up / growing down?” phases. The main part of the storyline is how they keep bumping into each other at different ages. They finally get together when they both look about 40, and live happily together for awhile. However, Daisy gets pregnant, and Benjamin realizes that they can never really have a life together. He’ll never be able to be a proper father to the child, because as she grows up, he will become younger and younger, and he’ll end up being more of a playmate than a father. So, he leaves and asks Daisy to find a proper father for their daughter.

As I watched the movie, I really felt the fact that love is such a precious, and in some cases, fleeting thing. If you’re lucky enough to find a love of your life, grab hold and don’t let go! It would have been so tough for Benjamin and Daisy to have a relationship, knowing that there could never be a happy ending, as their age gap would keep on widening more and more. Anyway, I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t watched it yet, so I’ll leave off here. I can tell you that I did cry at the ending, though, it was that moving!

Movie: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Watched in: February 2009
Rating: 8.5/10

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3. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini