Turtles - Assam & Laksa

As some of you may remember,Sean gave me a pair of turtle in 1999.... When I recieved them, they were tiny ( from SF chinatown) - the turtles are still alive. 8 years later..:)

We named the turtles, Assam and Laksa.... For those who dont know, Assam Laksa is a name of a spicy sour Malaysian noodle dish....I think the reason we gave them these names were bcos back when I was in Malaysia, my sister and I had turtles and they were named Bobo and Cha-cha.... However, Bobo and Cha-cha died after a couple of months.... (can't remember what killed them)....

Anyways, I took care fo Assam and Laksa for a few years and when I had to move to San Francisco in 2004, Ee Ling has said she can take care of the turtles for me.... so... being a great owner, I handed my turtles over to her...:) .... Ee Ling and Eric have taken very good care of the turtles. They even bought a filter for the turtle tank to keep the water clean.

Ee Ling is on vacation in Malaysia, so the turtles are now back with me..:D it is nice to have some pets sometimes as they add to the little noises in the house. Gordon is enjoying them too.... urm... he keeps feeding them!!! I left for work one morning and told him I already fed the turtles and when i got back in the evening, he said "I fed the turtles"....... urmm....turtles only eat like once a day! They can even not eat at all for a few days...

Here is a picture of Assam. I went ahead and weight the turtles. Assam is 8.4 Oz. Assam is the super shy one. If you pick Assam up, he will hide in his shell and never come out. He also never fights for his food. He lets Laksa eat everything and Assam is very not assertive. The quiet one, I guess.

Here is Laksa. Laksa is aggressive. He moves around a lot and wll go on top of Assam if he sees food. Laksa is only 6.o Oz. I think Laksa eats more than Assam, but because Laksa moves around more, he burns calories faster...:)

My assumptions are that both turtles are males.... but who knows.

Here is a video of the turtles swiming and eating. Check out their claws!

Gong Xi Fa Chai - Welcome Golden Piggy year!

Happy Chinese New Year! This year, we did not go back to Malaysia for Chinese New Year and we missed out on a lot fun. San Francisco was quiet as usual with simple family dinners. Hardly heard any Chinese Gong Xi Ni songs....

We did meet up at Lily's house for a pot luck lunch on Chinese New Year day..:) it was totally a day of eating and hanging out.. Here are the eating highlights:

Morning - Gordon's mom made Buddha's Delight a.k.a.Chai. Chai is a vegetarian dish that has glass noodles, mushrooms, beancurd, gingko nuts, and a lot more of other stuff!

Noon - At Lily's house, we have curry chicken, fried noodles, dried pork (loong yook), prawns (this is called "ha" in chinese, so supposedly during Chinese New Year, it's good to eat "ha" so that we can go "ha-ha-ha" a lot)...:). We also had assam laksa (spicy sour noodles), duck and much more. Gordon and I brought San Francisco famous egg tarts and sesame balls..... Some wonderful food pictures below..

2.30pm - We had agreed to meet up with Gordon's friends, Pauline and Ken at a Taiwanese restaurant. They did not have lunch yet.... so we kept them company and ate some more. We had goose, some meat, noodles and egg with oysters.

5.00pm - We headed back to Lily's place to continue hanging out and eating. This time, I ate some durians (courtesy of the Saw Family). It was yummy!! Gordon did not eat this...:)

Dinner - Dinner was the left overs of lunch.

We spent the rest of the night playing mah-jong. The four players were, Gordon, Lily, Seong Jiun and Cheng Lin. We laughed a lot as the players kept making mistakes and Lily kept winning all night! There were also like 3-4 rounds where no one won as there were no more mahjong tiles to go around. Gordon won the first round and ended the day paying 10 cents to Lily...:)

Here is a picture of Mun Mun in her Chinese New Year outfit...

Here is Lily, Jaden and Mun-Mun playing Dance dance revolution...:)

Here is Gordon with Little Alissa...

Lunch, Checking out homes and Ice cream

Gordon and I have been busy watching tv.... so here is my life updates..:)

Two weekends ago, we met up with Ee Ling and Eric for lunch. We ate at Xyclo, a Vietnamese restaurant in Piedmont. It was so-so. Maybe a 6 out of 10. We especially like the 7 treasures dish and hope to try and make it for one of our home gatherings..:)

After lunch, Ee Ling and Eric were checking out homes, so we decided to tag along. Our highlight was this home in Oakland Hills. The views were just amazing! Gordon and I are wondering why we never saw this home when we were shopping for homes a couple of years ago...:P Check out this link.

http://www.sherrybenninger.com/4421_terrabella_way/index.html

maybe ee ling and eric will buy the place... so we can enjoy the views of San Francisco...:)

Home hunting ended with us heading over to Fentons Creamery. They have good ice cream... but huge portions.... Gordon and I shared the Toasted Almond and Rocky road ice cream. Lately, we have been having a lot of ice cream - starting with my sister coming over and buying Starbucks ice-cream and Gordon eating a whole tube of Dryers ice-cream... After Gordon ate the Fenton's ice cream, he said "I have never eaten so much ice cream in the last three months"..... I guess we are on a ice cream craze...:)

Henry's Birthday!

In celebration of Henry's birthday(Gordon's brother), we went over to Koi Palace for dinner.

We have been wanting to try geoduck (a.ka. elephant trunk clam)for the longest time. Gordon's fren, Mei, always talks about how good it is.... so here was our chance......

Here is a picture of geoduck in the tank...

Geoduck is best eaten RAW!! So, we had sashimi style geoduck... not too bad. Taste like raw tuna fish with a tougher texture. Wasabi and ginger is provided as well.

For those who are interested in how much this cost.... it was $28/lb with a minumum purchase of 2.5 lb.........oh... i should add... that the picture above does not include the head part of the geoduck. The head section was fried with pepper and salt and tasted like fried crab brain..

ok... for the rest of the dinner, we had the Peking Duck Family Dinner. Here is the menu....

Duck duck and more duck..... QUACK!

Happy Birthday, Henry!!!

A FREE ballet and girls night out....

I had made plans to go out for dinner with some gal frens Saturday night and since we were planning to head to SF, I decided to see if there were any good deals to a ballet by the San Francisco Ballet.

The Firebird by Stravinsky had just opened... so I checked Craigslist and scouted some tickets..... the deal I got was 30 bucks for two tickets on the dress circle level (a super deal!!). The deal was that I met the seller in front of the theater... So, armed with the camera and binocolurs.. we headed to SF. Here is me, while waiting for the seller to pass us our tickets.

However, when we met the seller at the entrance of the ballet theater, he gave us some balcony circle tickets instead... BUT he said we could have it for FREE. We think he sold the other ones for a better price and that's why we got out ticket for free.. Here is how high we were from the ground....

The ballet was nice.... it was divided into three different composers and dancers... each for about 25 minutes followed by a 15 minute tranmission... short and sweet. Gordon actually enjoyed it and said he was willing to watch other ballets. The binoculors really helped too!

Dinner was with 6 other gals at House Of Prime Rib.. yup... we had MEAT!! It was more of just being able to hang out with great people and talking gal stuff...:) I forgot to take a group picture..... but here is me with the meat..... YUM!

I also have a picture of Anastasia and Annie..but I should ask them whether it's ok to put their pictures on my blog......(is it bad to publish people's pictures in my blog without asking them first?!??!?!?)

my comments on Vista and laptop....

After using the laptop for a few days.... here is my take....

1. Vista is.... not very good. Gordon wanted to download his trading software (Fidelity Active Trade Pro) and..... it's NOT compatible with Vista. We contacted Fidelity and they tell us that a new program will be out later this year....

2. Vista is.... not very good. We tried to download some m o v i e s. and there are some firewall issues. (this could be due to user error....) The new layout is also confusing. I seem to have a hard time finding some basic stuff like windows explorer!

3. Laptop is.... an ok deal. As many of you may have noticed.... this week's ads were all about laptops! Everyone electronic company is selling laptops with Vista. The good news is.... so far, we have not found a deal that is better than what we have... the bad news is.... i hear there are some bigger deals for the President's day holiday.... oh well...

4. Laptop is..... confused. Toshiba's keyboard feel a little different. The keys are not very standard and I see to be making more mistakes typing. Also, there are some questions about the core duo intel chip.. supposedly it's not really a superior intel chip....

That's all for now... our main aim of the laptop was to download m o v i e s.... and that's not starting out well....

New Laptop!!! Vista!

Woo hooo!!

Gordon and I finally bought a laptop!! We are SOOO excited. Have been looking for one half heartedly and found one in HP one in december but realised that the HP one only had 512MB memory and Gordon wanted 1GB so that he could upgrade to Vista...

but... we found one this week.

Toshiba A135-S4407. Comes with 15.4", 100GB hard drive, 1GB memory, Intel dual core, dvd r/w, media adapter slot.... and finally... Vista Home Premium!

Vista is ok... i am trying to get use to how it's a little different from Windows XP.. but, i think I am just too excited about having a new laptop....:)


Now I just need to look out to see if the price comes down and I can get a price match..........:)