£231,000 for one kambing

Deveronvale Perfection, a Texel sheep, sold for £231,000, a new world record

Worth it? As ever, answers on a poskad

:D

the answer to the question about the meaning of life :)

Cavebaby's first curry (chicken korma for beginners)

Verdict: "It's gorgeous!""Thank goodness I got an ear to hold on to.......!"
Spot the winner for the best impression of Ah Lian the tourist
Note to self: What were you thinking!!!

"Thank goodness I got a cheeky monkey to hold on to.......!"

After a trip into a cave that was once at the bottom of the sea and is now on the top of a hill

And that was our day yesterday. Thanks to my sweethearts for making it so wonderful.

Cuddles and muaks! Babe's birthday is next!

Move over, Imelda, here's Cavebaby!

Was waiting for a roundup of news from the last fortnight or so before posting an update, but couldn't resist this:
It's part way through school hols, and I'd taken a week off work to spend with Capt Caveman and Cavebaby. I'll blog about the other days later..... but today's task was to go to the movies and get a pair of new school shoes for Cavebaby. New school term starts at the beginning of Sept.
So off we trotted to the Trafford Centre which is one of the UK's bigge$t $hopping mall$, and also has a multiscreen cinema, i.e. 2 birds with 1 stone lah. For those of you that really want a bit more action, there's also a LaserQuest and a 9-hole mini golf course.

We watched G Force (Cavebaby being slightly too young for us to sneak her into Transformers 2, HP & the Half Blood Prince, GI Joe and even Inglourious Basterds etc). Quite a good larf - didn't realise guinea pigs could be so much more than some Peruvian roasted *ahem* delicacy. Basically laughed till we cried. Oh yah.... it's been a long time as well since we watched a 3D movie. The wearing of the specs with the weird lens was kinda novel. But just for today.

We spent the rest of the morning going through what felt like a thousand shoe shops trying to get a pair of school shoes for Cavebaby.

Small snag........ a lot of the shops did not have her size as she is at that awkward age where the kiddie shoes are too small and the teenager shoes are too naff.

Large snag........ Cavebaby the fashionista did not like any of the shoes that were in her size. Or else she would pick some really impractical shoes really unsuitable for school wear.

Really, how hard is it to pick a pair of sensible black leather shoes?

To cut a very long and tedious afternoon short, we eventually got her a suitable pair that we all agreed on in the very last shop we went into. And it's the most expensive pair of shoes I have ever bought for school. Really, these retailers really know how to con us poor parents into buying the "very very best" for the spawn of our loins. (To the uninitiated/ kid-free parents/ potential future parents out there, you have been warned - the shoes that have no price tag on quite often have a sting in the tail......)

Come back, Badminton Master, all is forgiven! Remember these? I wore a pair like these pretty much entirely through my primary school days, before graduating to the Fung Keong canvas basketball shoes when I started playing volleyball.And the damned expensive new shoes have now been added to Cavebaby's vast collection of current footwear. Current count lies at 13 pairs, and that's after recycling the two pairs of old school shoes that are too small for her this evening....... by 'eck, that Imelda Marcos, she ain't a patch on my little monkey!

If I turn this, will ais kacang come out???

Do you think we got our ais kacang? Answers on a poskad!

Keep it in context

On Sunday our neighbour rang to ask us to go queue up on his behalf to collect a dose of Tamiflu for his young son, who had a high temperature and was feeling really ill. So we duly drove into town and picked up the medicine from the collection centre, which seemed to be as closely guarded as a Kampong Koh gold jewellery retail outlet tra la lala.

On Monday the boy ran down the stairs, ate a healthy breakfast and asked what they were going to play today. Temperature & other symptoms gone. And he had not taken any Tamiflu.

There seems to be a bit of a blather going on about the swine flue pandemic. What's important for me is to keep in mind that most cases of swine flu worldwide have been mild so far and most hospitalizations and deaths have been of persons that also had underlying conditions such as asthma, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, or a weakened immune system (according to the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, and the UK Helath Protection Agency, at least).

Incidentally, the 1976 swine flu fiasco could teach us all a few lessons.

Also not always commonly known, Tamiflu is not suitable for under-21s due to adverse side effects including hallucinations and psychological disorders.

The infection rate may be high, but the death rate worldwide is only 0.75% (good table shown on the Wiki webpage). Or put another way, so far, there have been fewer than 1500 deaths worldwide from the 2009 swine flu pandemic. Compare that against seasonal influenza, which apparently kills 0.5 million people a year. I won't even make a comparison here against the number of people who die every year from (i) heart disease (ii) lung/ respiratory disease (iii) hunger (iv) automobile accidents.

..... maybe we ought to be more worried about the recent outbreak of pneumonic plague in Qinghai, China!