Thirty Years, Aging Fears

The thing about aging is that you come to miss things when they disappear. Or change. And in our case, this year, as we hit the big three-oh, we noticed a rather obvious change.

Admittedly this change is not something never experienced by anyone else, and we should think it, well, normal, but we must say we rather dread what this may mean for us.

See, during our first birthday party this year, halfway through our fajitas we started feeling sleepy - a sign associated with eating till we were stuffed and ready to start sweating as our metabolism burns off the extra food, and sleep while we're at it.

Only, throughout dinner feeling slightly groggy and full, we never felt the burn. No spontaneous sweating, not until we were all in stuffy George And The Dragon.

Then sometime the following week we celebrated with our family at El Cerdo. There's the three of us, attempting to finish off a baked oyster with bacon bits each (good but we find we prefer raw oysters with lemon and salt), a platter of three large sausages and four mini-sausages (very tasty, mashed potatoes include bacon bits too, yummy!), a pan of seafood paella (the rice turned out a bit wet, disappointingly), and a plate of spare ribs (to die for).

Naturally being small eaters (ahem) the three of us couldn't finish everything and we ended up tapau-ing the rest of the spare ribs, and upon reaching home all of us ended up just sitting on the couch feeling slightly dazed. After which we proceeded to head upstairs, change into our sleeping togs, and hit the sack, sleeping heavily till next morning. Again, during the trip back home, no sign of metabolism burn.

Hence how people normally go, "Once you reach your thirties ah, your metabolism slows down, will get fat."

We is the sad.

Thirty Years, Birthday Peers

And the birthday parties this year begins with the weekend out with the TTDIans, celebrating the birthdays for the January babies! This time we celebrated our birthday together with Puddy and Steward 'Suf, at Chilis BSC.

Now usually Chilis is a bit...difficult when it comes to group celebrations because of their reservation policy - from what we understand they have a no-booking policy and the entire party has to be there in order to be seated. And not everyone will arrive exactly on the same time (yours truly here is a prime example of not being able to arrive punctually, sad to say, even with the disciplined Chief who hates to keep others waiting trying to get us going!) because, say, some unforseen circumstances or other. But luckily for us Chilis BSC allowed us to be seated with just five people, half our party! Thumbs up for them for this.

It's been a while since we had dinner at Chilis, especially their fajitas were yummy - our only issue is that they only supplied three pieces of fajitas to eat our mushrooms and chicken with. Instead of being able to apply a sensible amount of chicken strips, mushroom, sour cream, diced tomatoes etc and eating it something similar to a popiah, we end up stuffing it to the point where it's more like we're eating a taco.

Cue Taco Neck Syndrome.



After dinner it was off to George And The Dragon for more drinks!

Unfortunately as some of the other tables were booked we had to make do with a couple of tables against the wall, where, while it could easily seat the twelve of us, was not well ventilated and the lot of us were feeling stuffy not before long, making it hard to chill and enjoy our drinks. Speaking of drinks, we'd the Soft Snake Bite Black, a mix of (if we're not wrong) cider, Tiger, Blackcurrent and Pernod and worked well for us after our meal.

Thus the card-and-present giving ceremony was brought up to speed, starting from the youngest: Puddy, followed by Steward 'Suf and then us (ah, so far we're destined to be the first to have his birthday in any group...).

What did we get?

A new home!

Gosh, we were so excited! Honestly, we just recently went to pay a visit to Setia Alam, and they've got a spanking new development coming up that looks very nice on 3D rendering as well as a rather attractive concept to said development, we're so tempted except for the RM1.6mil+ price tag which will put a crimp in our spending power. Scratch that. It'll put a total STOP to our spending. Period. Here's chicken rice for lunch every day.

Anyways, back to our new home!

It's much bigger than our current home indeed!

And it's twice our current home!

So big that we can actually fit our current home inside!

See since our last Sporeland trip recently we've been toying with the idea for a bigger Crumpler, one that will be able to fit in our iPods (Touch and Video) and a X-mini speaker. So that we don't have to rely on our earphones. Yes, it would be a tad obnoxious if we'd plugged in a X-mini to our iPod Touch, prop it up on the table and proceed to eat lunch while watching some noisy show at near-full volume without a care to what everyone else thinks. But it would be okay if we were in some quiet place or for some music to go with a spontaneous party! All right let's not try to justify carrying an X-mini around...

The birthday babies also got Sticky candies from Germ! Brill stuff.

We were seated in the corner dominated by iPhones, hence there were talk of what's new in apps and games. And the highlights?

Run Like Hell!



It was funny, but the slow response of the gameplay was a bit of a turn-off.

Then we moved on to watching Talking Carl fight with each other!



All in all, it was a great time spent and, well, to all the TTDIans (interestingly it's not as if everyone stays in TTDI), we're gonna be welcoming you all to Club 30!

Thank yous going out to our Chief for organizing this, and to lingo, NJAPF, lad, esteban, 'Vin, otousan, Germ, Stewardess Sal for being part of the celebration, and happy birthday to Steward 'Suf and puddy!

Thaipusam Trivia

And so, there we were, surfing on the iPhone while mum was watching footie on telly, when we got into the conversation of where to have our birthday dinner. The date was decided easily, the venue, not so, and we mentioned about taking leave around the Thaipusam week, and the next thing you know we learn from mum that we were born on Thaipusam as well, there's a 30-year cycle to when it falls back on the same date, and that around that period there were three public holidays.

Ok. Let's see if 30 years from now, this still holds.

Bon Annee 2011!

And we're well into January of the new year! And what better way to celebrate than to have a party! Lad had put out an email for a Christmas-cum-New Year's party, and although we were a bit beat from having to help out with Christmas parties our family had, we were looking forward to meeting up with friends for a potluck, banter and the likes.

From us, we brought ice cream and mini ice cream cones for the potluck, and our Wii and Jenga for entertainment.

Turnout was good, with everyone bringing food from 6 liters of sangria (and so much chopped fruit in it that it doubled as a fruit salad!), a dessert made from humongous pisang tanduk, chicken and beef satay, nachos with cheese, fruit salad, Jagermeister, and roasted chicken with potatoes!

Once everyone was stuffed, we turned to Jenga as yours truly here forgot (we went home to check, and shall now say, couldn't find) the step-down power converter for our Wii, hence we couldn't set it up to play.

It's interesting how the Jenga games vary from one group to another. With the bloggers we get Freeform Jenga, where instead of placing the pieces neatly on the top it could be placed any way, any how as we liked. And the game could start with someone building the tower any way he liked too rather than the default 3-by-3!

With Nut and gang, it became Orgy Jenga, with everyone taking out and replacing pieces at the same time (we didn't watch this too much as we were too busy enjoying Booker's lovely cocktails).

With the Taman Tun-ites, so far it's normal Jenga. Well we guess it's also because it's a rather big group, hence not everyone was keen to play only to find that when it's finally their turn, they're given this tottering structure destined to crumble upon touching. Maybe Freeform Jenga works better for groups under 10 people?

And we've yet to get people to try Shot Jenga, where when it's your turn, you take a shot, then remove and replace a piece.

Oh well. Twelve days of Christmas and it's time to take down the tree!

iPods, iPods Everywhere

Last night when synchronizing music and videos and apps, we just found things getting to a ridiculous point.

For we had to sync music to the iPod Video 30GB (which is reaching full capacity, all of which is just music and no videos at all).

Then season 3 of Dexter as well as a couple of movies to be sync'ed to the iPod Touch 8GB (also at full capacity, but hey, it's only 8GB).

Then a bit of music, a bit of videos, and synchronize updated apps between our iPhone and desktop.

Goodness from cutting down to a single iPhone instead of carrying about a Nokia and the iPod Touch, it seems that we will be carrying all three if we wanted to be equipped with our media! Goodness knows how if and when the iPad (we'll wait to see what's new in the next generation!) comes into the picture.

And here's hoping the iPhone goes to 64GB with a battery that can play music, videos, surf etc and last two days.