Hachiko

Oh and I watched Hachi last night. I've heard of the true story of a dog in Japan waiting at the train station for his master who died to come back everyday day for 9 years, but I didn't know a movie was made out of it until I read chioju's blog.

I cried so so so so so badly during the show especially when Hachi was so old, he could barely walk but he still made his way to the same stop at the train station, still waiting for his master to come back after 9 years. I've never cried so much for a movie. The last time I cried this much was for Marley and Me (the book, not the movie, the movie wasn't that great).

The hubby thinks it's silly to cry for movies (in fact he thinks it's silly to cry for any reason) and I could sense he was doing everything within his will power to refrain himself from teasing me while I was sobbing my eyes out during the movie.

I suddenly wanna go and get an Akita now. I seriously doubt Russell would be so loyal to me. That dog will choose a hotdog over me any day. ;)

This is an article about the real Hachi.

My latest favourite thing

I have a new favourite word. When Yin How says, "Liverpool?", my eyes light up.

Recently found this place, Nasi Lemak Liverpool Cafe. They serve

Nasi Lemak Liverpool
Tom Yam Liverpool
Laksa Liverpool
Burger Liverpool
dan lain lain

I'm just a nasi lemak addict who's happy to find a nasi lemak cafe and is now a Liverpool supporter. :)

Rasa sayng sayang eh

Ahh... the famous Rasa Sayang buffet.

Is it good as what all the blogs say? Well, it's good when it's buy 1 free 1. Otherwise, paying the full price isn't worth it leh. After hearing so much about it, I was kinda expecting more. The only really special thing about this buffet is the desert section. Otherwise, the buffet I had at Parkroyal is comparable.

But what makes is special is all the wonderful touches here and there. Like the spices displayed on each table

And I must say that Rasa Sayang is absolutely beautiful.

Just walking around the hotel makes me feel like I'm on a holiday far far away from work.

So relaxing that I was tricked into believing that it was already the weekend..

 

I made the mistake of wearing my RM23.70 halter neck dress to the dinner (yes, I'm always extremely proud of myself whenever I find a pretty dress on sale and I have no shame bragging about it). After one hour of stuffing myself, I felt that the slim fit halter neck dress was stranggling me. I had to losen the string around my neck in order to breath.

The the worst was my goldfish tummy was clearly bloated and and proudly showing off.

Overall, I think it's worth the RM60 per person to dine in such a beautiful place. I had a wonderful time.

Until I remembered that it wasn't the weekend yet, and there's work tomorrow. Aiii...

Vintage Bulgaria Restaurant & Bar

Had a wonderful time with the girls during the weekend. Nice cosy restaurant, though I didn't think that the food was exceptionally nice. Still, a good place to go if you haven't been there before.

Pork Knuckle

Spaghetti Carbonara

Chocolate Cream Burlee (this was yummy)

The ambiance is perfect for a romantic dinner for two provided you are not sitting next to 3 loud mouth girls constantly laughing on the top of their voices. :)

A book and 3 movies

During the weekend I finished reading Eat Pray Love. Despite receiving a lot of bad reviews on Amazon, I still love the book. My take, if you have never been depressed, don't read the book because you won't understand.

Lately I'm actually finding the time to read the books I bought years ago, I even stopped watching so much TV (that's quite a change for somebody who once burst into tears when the TV broke down). I think I'm going through another one of my phases, I know Looi would say I'm entering his stage of life. :)

Watched a few movies. The Kite Runner is a beautiful movie. I saw the book in the stores a lot of times but wasn't interested enough to read it. But I'm glad I watched the movie. Shows what life was like in Afganistan before and after the Taliban era. Watching shows like this and Slumdog Millionare (absolutely loved that movie), I'm thankful for the life I have here.

The Terminator was disappointing. And Public Enemies was so boring that after half an hour, I found it more interesting to go into the bedroom to pluck my eyebrowns. I think Yin How was bored stiff and kept coming into the bedroom to find me but I kicked him out and forced him to watch the movie.

The rule is that whoever decides that buy that movie has to watch it until the end. Why? Because in my opinion Yin How always picks the worst movies. And sometimes it's so bad that even he doesn't want to watch it and we end up wasting money on unwatched DVDs.

I buy movies based on the following criterias;

1. Must NOT be a superhero movie with a ridiculous superhero costumes (except for Batman, because technically Batman does not have superhero powers, only super cool gadgets and.... he doesn't wear a red underwear over a blue suit, he's all in black which is cool)
2. Good reviews, interesting trailer, good story line (I actually sometimes do research about a movie before I watch it) or Oscar nominated
   
3. Especially digg movies about life with a lesson to learn or action triller movies with a good storyline (not those filled with mindless shooting)
   

He buys anything as long as the DVD cover has the following criteria:

1. Anything related to war (it can be any war... WW1, WW2, the Iraq war, the Vietnam war, whatever...)
   
2. Anything with guns
3. Anything with beautiful girls
4. Anything with war, guns and beautiful girls (considered a bonus movie to him)
   

I've developed the ability to fall asleep during the movies he picks despite the sound of non-stop flying bullets magnified on the home theater system. And he falls asleep instantly when I put on one of those Oscar nominated movies with lots of dialog.

So that's how we usually watch movies together. At the very least we still accompany each other, even though it means one of us is usually deep in la-la land. :)

My Milk Toof

I found this blog today through somebody's blog. I simply adore it and must share it. If you're gonna check it out, start from the first post.

http://mymilktoof.blogspot.com/

A little sharing

After doing some sharing with WY, I'm in my sharing mood.

If you don't know about this site, check out FML. It stands for Fuck My Life where all sorts of people write in what happened to them and some entries are really funny.

Eg.
Today I was taking a picture with my friend who has a camera which can pick out a certain color and only have that color show up in the picture. She chose yellow because of the yellow on my dress, and when she showed me the picture the sash wasn't the only yellow thing-my teeth showed up too. FML

Today, while laying out, I kept feeling something misty, like a spray bottle. Curious as to what it was since it kept coming, I looked up, only to see the painters were peeing over the side of the house, and the heavy breeze was turning their piss into a refreshing mist for me. FML

Today, I went to a barbecue and noticed a girl that I had be interested in. When I walked up to ask how she was doing I noticed she had some BBQ sauce on her face. Jokingly I licked my thumb and reach to remove it. It turned out to be a scab from a pimple she had popped earlier. FML

Today, I was putting on cream and my son asked what it was for. I told him it was to keep the wrinkles away. He looked at me closely and replied, "I don't think it's working." FML

Today, I was eating a sandwich on my bed. I felt something wet on my leg and assumed a tomato had fallen off my sandwich. Without looking I popped it in my mouth, WRONG, it was a hairball my cat had thrown up. FML

Also, if you are a twitter user, you really have got to use TwitterFox. It will save you the hassle of going to the twitter website to update your status. And you get to receive twitter updates almost instantly. It fits nicely at the corner on your FireFox browser as a small little symbol and when you click on it, it looks like the below. It's a really cool tool to have. :)

Music which inspires

I'm into a lot of things. I love beautiful photographs, art, music... anything inspiring which can touch something deep within. So when I entered the blogging world, I found so many things that I love.

I found this from somebody's blog. It's one of the most beautiful music arrangements I heard. It made the original songs sound so much nicer. And I love Jon Schmidt's music. I used one of his songs in my wedding slideshow and the song made the story in the slideshow seem so much beautiful. :)

Enjoy the video below. Use the song below in a slideshow of your most cherish photos and there will be magic.

Finally the finals

American Idol results are out. I’m dying to know who won but I want to find out when I watch the finals tonight. Somebody already sent me a link to who won which has triggered my curiosity even more. Every year I always try to avoid finding out who wins but fail.

First I have to avoid going to any website like MSN, Yahoo, etc which would publish the news.

Then I have to go through a whole session of Yin How gleefully threatening to tell me who won knowing whether well I don’t want to know.

And after going successfully going through all that, I always fail at the last stage when I’m driving home and the radio DJ starts shouting out congratulations to the winner, leaving me cursing. Today, I’m going to switch to a Chinese station. I doubt they care about American Idol and even if they do, I won't be understand a word they say. ;)


I absolutely LOVE this season of Amercian Idol. I even considered taking a day off to watch the finals live but one thought of my list of To-Do’s at work made that thought disappear immediately.

I so want Kris to win (after Danny got voted out, I switched my loyalty to Kris). But everybody loves Adam, so I’m guessing he’s going to win?

Whatever it is, don't tell me. I want to enjoy the anticipation when watching the finals tonight. :)

**Update** - I'm so happy Kris won!!~~~~~~~ :)

A new toy

Mindy has a new toy to play with... :)



Was chasing Russell around for hours, trying to get him to be my model.


And towards night time he was in a horrible horrible mood. :)

99 baloons

I watched Oprah yesterday and yesterday's show was about miraculous children. A video from YouTube which was watched almost 2 million times was shown on the show. Oprah who watched it for the first time during the show was left in tears.

The video is about a father reading out the letters he wrote to his son.



In just 99 days, his parents took over 3000 photos of him. They knew from the very start that their son will not live and the mother said something that really struck me. She said she would tell her husband, "I'll be sad later. I'm going to enjoy every second now".

Truly inspiring.

Kimchi... yummy...

I woke up early this morning because I had a tummyache. If you know me well, a lot of my stories always end with me lausai-ing. I eat a lot of rubbish. And yesterday it was too much kimchi...

KFC obsession is over, now it's the kimchi phase (triggered by the korean food fair at QB and Gurney Plaza). Just talking about kimchi makes me want to eat it again... Yup, I'm going to go for another round of kimchi later... kimchi, kimchi, kimchi, kimchi, kimchi...

Eat now, think later. ;)

The Sire

I usually don't write about restaurants I go to because I'm too lazy. But today I was talking about The Sire with colleagues so decided to share some photos of it.

The Sire is a museum restaurant at the house where Yeap Chor Ee used to stay (I got mixed up with Cheong Fatt Tze heritage mansion which is another place in Penang open to the public). The people behind The Sire are the same people from the Ferringhi Garden, another absolutely gorgeous romantic restaurant at Batu Ferringhi (so gorgeous I almost wanted to change my wedding venue to that restaurant).

Anyway, back to The Sire, the food there is good but a little pricey. The restaurant is really charming with a wonderful cosy ambiance and after the meal, you can go over to see the museum section where you get to see some of the personal belongings of Yeap Chor Ee's family. What amazed me was that from the outside, the restaurant looks so small, but as you explore the museum, you'll find that it's much bigger than it seems.

When I saw the antique stuff there, I started imagining what it was like to live in that era. Then I started wondering whether a century from now, will they be displaying laptops and ipods and LCD TVs in a museum where people will point and say "I can't imagine living in that century".

Also, there are pictures of Yeap Chor Ee's humongous mansion (now donated to Wawasan University). If I lived in that mansion, whenever Yin How pisses me off, I'd just run off and hide in one of the gazillion rooms there and Yin How would never be able to find me. Ha!

I went The Sire twice last year. And I had a great time during both occasions. But honestly I wouldn't really go back unless I'm bringing somebody there who has never been there before. Because this is the kind of restaurant where you pay more for the environment rather than the food so once you've seen the museum, there's nothing much left to make me want to go back again and again.

Enough yapping.... here are the photos. We are only allowed to take photos of the restaurant and not the museum (but I curi-curi took a few photos until Yin How scolded me).

Introducing... Tubey

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music.

3.2 megapixel camera, integrated GPS, WiFi connectivity, HTML browser supporting flash, video recording option at up to 640 x 480 pixels and up to 30 fps, handwriting recognition and a 3.2 inch touch screen. Comes with a 8GB memory card and a music headset (which looks a little like an ipod shuffle) and 1000 free song downloads.

Nokia 5800 battery life is reportedly as much as nine hours (GSM) or five hours (HSDPA), 35 hours for music playback or three hours of video. Nokia claims that the standby time is up to 17 days. (haven't had it long enough to test the battery life yet)

It's no iPhone, but it's still pretty cool and it cost less than half the price of an iPhone. :)

The Brangelina movies

I’m not a fan of Brangelina. But it just so happen that both are in really good movies this year.

The first is Changeling where Angelina Jolie portrays Christine Collins, a mother whose son went missing. The LA police during those times had a corrupted image, so to improve their image they found a boy who matched the description of the missing boy and returned him to Christine. Christine found that the boy was not her son and the story goes on to how she fought to find her real son.

Usually I don’t like movies that have bad corrupted police and the storyline didn’t seem very interesting. And I was wondering, how they could find a boy who is not her son and insist that he is? But as I watched on, I found that it was a compelling movie that it had a twist to the story. And Angelina’s acting is absolutely superb giving a powerful portrayal of a mother’s anguish. Also, this movie is based on true events giving the story more credit.

All in all, a good watch. And it’s a sad true story, which unfortunately does not have a happy ending.

In The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Brad Pitt plays Benjamin who is a person born as an old man who grows younger. Huh? Kind of silly when you think about it. But I have to say that make up and video editing really can do wonders. Using make up to make someone look older is not unusual. But to make a man in his 40s look like a teenager?

The movie moved a little too slow for me. Or maybe it was because I found myself impatiently waiting for Brad Pitt to grow younger. Brad Pitt as an old shriveled man looked terrible though I had to admire how well the makeup was done. Throughout the first half the movie I could feel myself silently screaming, “When he going get YOUNGER!!??”.

And when he finally became younger, damn…. he looked good. And when you think they can’t make him look any younger, the last few scenes showed him looking like a teenager. How the heck did they do that? I was amazed… and drooling at the same time.

This is a movie which reminds us that we will all grow older one day and we will all end up in the same place. So live life to the fullest. And if you think that growing younger is better, you’d be wrong.

Yin How fell asleep during the movie and woke up towards the end when Brad Pitt was young. Maybe you can do it if the movie bores you. Overall, I thought the movie was good. Or maybe it because I was just satisfied after the long wait to see Brad Pitt young and handsome at the end. :P

Wish List

Mindy's wish list

1. More hugs and kisses from YH
2. For Genny to clean up her darn messy bedroom
3. iphone
4. Dell Mini 9
5. A pair of big black rim sunglasses
6. Big loopy earrings or dangly ones
7. A pair of nice white pants
8. A cool bead necklace
9. More shoes
10. A small adorable obedient dog in exchage for my two monsters
11. Still thinking...

My dogs refuse to leave me alone, they want their dinner and they want it now... gotta go and feed them now. Sigh...