Signs of aging

Copied from AC:

(bold = checked... the more the older?)

1. Become hesitated to work overnight, and tend to leave office on time in some idle periods. Never stay in office for a ‘mere presence’;
2. On desk or in side cabinet there are always cereal bars, herbal teabags and vitamin tabs available, instead of softdrinks and chips;
3. Have meals regularly and say ‘no’ to midnight treats;
4. Find more and more friends showing up in reunions, and most accompanied by children;
5. The most frequent feedbacks heard from friends when ordering dishes is “I need to have something light recently”;
6. The most popular topics among friends are Chinese medicines, gyms and spas;
7. Start staying away from western meds and prefer Chinese meds;
8. Go to bed normally before 12am;
9. Start worrying about white hair, big bellies and wrinkles;
10. On and off there are news about friends getting seriously ill/ divorced/ separated/ kick the bucket;
11. Start buying CD reprints and video collection boxes;
12. Start addicted to trivias;
13. “It was better” becomes the favourite word;
14. You can’t wait to share them with everyone on Facebook once you found some stuff of your highschool life;
15. See someone on TV news who are your junior/ secondary school, or university classmates, at least once or twice a year;
16. Start to try clothings with colours/ patterns/ fabrics that never tried before;
17. Wear highschool or uni sport shirts as pajyamas (if they aren’t worn out yet);
18. Look for all those songs in 70’s/80’s/90’s when singing karaoke;

(OK, I just bought Rock Band Beatles too... but that doesn't mean I know the songs!!)

19. Start collecting some old stuffs, while throwing away more and more unfit clothings;
20. Discover that the contribution period of life insurance almost comes to an end; (Only because I bought real early!!)
21. Pay more attention to various ratings (instead of price) when booking a hotel, and stay away from backpackers’ hostels.

It's been a month

... since I blogged about anything!

So what have I been up to? Why is there nothing worthy enough to put up here?

I don't know. Not the faintest idea. Perhaps I just don't have time... perhaps I can't make my words say what I want to anymore...

But, for someone who writes for a living... I should probably find time, energy and perhaps motivation to write more often.

Little feet

Little feet, oh little feet,

Why are you always so sweet?

Solid foods you have begun to eat.

You really are growing like weeds!

Let's see how many I've read from this list

Bold = complete; italic = skimmed version only.

01 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen -
02 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -
03 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -
04 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -
05 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -
06 The Bible -
07 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -
08 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -
09 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald -
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck -
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame -

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy -
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -
34 Emma - Jane Austen -
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen -
36 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis -
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne -

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown -
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy -
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding -
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan -

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen -
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens -
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon -
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas-
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie –
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens -
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker -
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante -
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt –

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro -
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert -
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry -
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams -
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole -
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

Hmmm... 18 is not a real number, but I feel good already. :)

White balance

I don't believe I have spent so much time on a batch of badly taken photos. I mean... come on... WB is perhaps one of the easiest setting one can fiddle with on ANY digital camera... and reading a user manual is not that hard is it? Most cameras are already doing all the calculations for you and with these fancy live view / LCD real time display, it's totally easy to look at how a change in this single setting can make pictures look 1000 times better.

BUT NO ONE CHANGES IT!

I'm talking about tech guys. Those who sit in front of puters doing programming and coding day in day out. I thought they should be techie, and techie should be able to deal with machines and cameras are machines so there should be no problem at all.

I was so wrong.

The batch I worked on came from 3 different cameras: Panny LX-2, Nikon D-90 and a Fuji I don't remember the model number... I bet that means 3 different people. The panny person sucks... only knew how to use wide angle for group photo and 1/2 of the pictures were out foucus. The Nikon person... I mean come on, it was a DSLR... why not learn to use it properly? I think that was the yellowest photo I have ever seen in my life. Fuji person, I don't blame you, the WB works terrible on my first DC.

Perhaps cameras are just like branded bags - no one really care about the design, it's the label that tells other that you have taste / money / trendy mind to use it.

I don't even want to go into photo composition...

Lesson of the day: not all those who can afford expensive cameras can call themselves photographer. Read the user manuals!

What's in my fridge?

I haven't really stocked up, but here's a look at my not very tidy fridge. First the freezer compartment:
Packs of dumplings, vegetarian thingy, and my staple, haagen dazs. Yes, I actually have a few tubs in my fridge most of the time. :)

On the door are some yeasts for my breads. But I haven't made any for quite a while.

And then the lower compartment, which obviously shows nothing of me. It is NOT me.

Except for the expressed milk and the sauces on the door, or, OK, the expired beer at the bottom of the door, NOTHING is bought by me. Seriously, nothing. It's my mom who keeps flushing things that she bought and didn't want to eat in the end. If she hasn't been here this often to take care of SSB, my fridge is basically empty.

I really hate to have my refrigerator hijacked like this!

As for the wrapped up bowls... oh well... they're leftovers, which the kids are not cooperating to finish. We don't throw foods away, so that's why here's a bowl and there's another. If my mom doesn't take her liberty to buy anything at all, my calculation is usually correct and there should be no leftover whatsoever... so... mom... I know you want to help, but please... I really want to have my clean and tidy and no nonsense fridge back...

Is breastmilk really "free"?

I could confirm with a big NO. NEVER! In fact, it must be one of the most expensive baby foods in the world, ever!

Supply is mainly one for one, unless there are twins or other numbered multiple births.

The mother needs to eat A LOT to keep the supply. I, the pig eater, is for one a great example - I am actually eating more than I did when I was preg. This is really terrifying! But the truth, at least with this baby, is that as much as I am eating, I'm not gaining any weight... a bit of fluctuations now and then, yes, big jump on the scale, nope. I think weight wise, I have dropped about more than 13 kgs from my peak weight right before delivery. Minus baby weight and increased blood supply, there still should be half that's got "eaten" by SSB.

And for calculation's sake, SSB should have drunk up about 90 litres of b-milk (assuming daily consumption = 600ml, or five 4-oz bottles) since birth... so, 6kg of fat (don't I wish) translates into 90L of milk. Assuming SSB is going to need another 180L of milk before I wean him, I would need 12kgs of fat to produce that much of milk. Does it mean that I can stay out of exercise and dieting and still lose 12kg? I am so longing for that!!

Back to the topic. For that 18kg of fat on me (now that is sounding really scarry... 18kg is almost 4 bags of 5kg rice!), I would need lots of food to generate them, if that bit is counted, then the milk instantly becomes costly.

Have I mentioned the pumping sessions that I spent at work? I need about 45 minutes a day just to keep up with "some" supply, and to be a very good employee, I shorten my lunch hour a bit and stayed after a bit so that I'm not using too much corporate time to make food for SSB... my 45 minutes can be quite expensive... did I mention the gear and the extra sterilisation needed?

Add those all up, who else outthere can still say that breastmilk is free?

IT IS VERY EXPENSIVE INDEED!!!

But, it's for my boys, so no matter how expensive it is, it is well worth it.

(how many it have I used in this post?)