“Ice Kacang Puppy Love” is the latest hot Malaysian Chinese Movie which was just released about a week ago.  Have you watched this movie?  Do you think that ice kacang and puppy love are always related?  I think it is.

Ice Kacang (red bean ice) is my favorite.  ”Kacang” means beans, ice kacang is a popular dessert served in Malaysia and Singapore.  In other country there may be similar dessert with ice, but with different recipe and name.  To my reader who have not been to Malaysia, if you come to Malaysia, do not forget to try the ice kacang.  Nowadays, many stalls selling ice kacang have their own formula, they give more than one choices, and allow customer to customize the ice kacang also.  Ice kacang is a common name, some stalls in my hometown - Kuching here even have given name to their invented product such as “white lady” (icy lime and fruit).  However, the new icy product might not have kacang (bean).

I have not watched this movie yet but I believe it is a good movie because from the review I can see that the production team have had good ideas, and it is localized to Malaysia culture.  Yes, I support local production.

This movie also reminds me of a song which I have almost forgotten.  It is a Taiwanese singer, HuangAn’s song called “ChuLianDeGuShi” which means “The Story of First Love” in 1989.

From this song, we can see that first love / puppy love is always related to icy dessert.  :)  In Malaysia, it would be the most popular ice kacang.  I think it might be because of the beautiful weather when a couple is having a date which is sunny and hot, and the heat generated from a couples’ love which needed to be cooled down.

SiewPeng is my first love and also the only love… forever…

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ps:  If this post involves any copyright issue, please tell me and I will remove it immediately.  I just want to share my thoughts and share a nice movie and a nice song.

ps again: Sorry for those who do not understand Chinese, but I am sure you can feel the romantic feeling that radiated from the movie and the music.

This is the third time, I bought a new pair of slippers which is exactly the same as my old slippers which were unusable anymore.  It can usually last for about 2 years to 5 years.

The slippers soles were just like my car’s tyres.  The more I walk, the shortest life it has.

There is usually a symptom to tell me that I need to get a new pair of slipper in a few weeks time.  First, I can feel that my heel is touching the ground.  Then, within a month, the slippers cracked, and my heel can really touch the ground if I continue wearing it.

The slipper soles are getting thinner and thinner from the first day I wear it until the end of its life.

I believe the expert can tell a person’s posture by looking at his / her shoes sole.  We might need to correct how we walk.  Some people put their body weight on the toes, but some on the heels.  Which one is correct?  We might need to do wheel alignment like our cars wheel.  :P  Our feet is the wheel of our body to move us from one place to another, we should not take them for granted.

Shoes are wear and tear, but if our posture hurt our bones, we should do something.

My car’s front tyres always wear fast.  Recently the mechanic just told me that I need to change the arm bush to make it run properly before doing the wheel alignment.  I hope the tyres can have longer life now.

A beautiful butterfly at Stutong Park, Kuching.

How many kinds of animal have you met up until now?  Do you know them well?

We have met cats and dogs.  I am sure almost everybody has.  They are known as the human’s friends.  And when we go jogging at a reserved park, we meet a lot of animals.

We see monkeys swinging from trees to trees.  Sometimes they appear in groups, looking for food or playing among themselves.  We sometimes see a special breed of chicken if we are lucky.  It has a special comb on its head.  Its comb is blue.  I think it is called junglefowl because it looks very similar to this.  When it walks, its head and neck moves forward and backwards.  If we approach it, it will increase its walking speed and its head and neck will move forward and backwards even faster.  Can you imagine if human walked like that?

We also meet squirrels.  They are very good and quick tree climbers.  In a matter of seconds, they have already reached the top of the trees.  Compared to monkeys, their tree swinging technique is highly commendable too.

Ants are also a has a huge population in the park.  From big ants to small ants, they can be seen every where!  And we have to be very careful not to step on them because they sometimes move together in lines and the their lines can be very very long.  We think that they could be either moving their nests or looking for food.  From songs, movies to documentaries, ants are known for their hardworking spirit.  Do you agree?

At the entrance and along the jogging track, we also see lots of butterflies.  One of them is like the one shown in the picture above.  Sometimes, we also see frogs crossing the track.  They hop from one side to the other.  And we also meet slimy worms, caterpillars of different sorts, fish, tadpoles and do you know what was our latest encounter? A snake! :O Yes…it’s a snake.  We ran as fast as we could when we saw it.  Fortunately, we were not hurt but we did warn a couple who was going towards the direction of that track.  Wow, that was really close, we thought.

Do you still remember when was the first time you played your first Sudoku?  I still remember I played my first Sudoku puzzle on South China Sea when I was on a flight from Kuching to KL.  It took me the whole journey but I have to continue after I have landed.

Now it is my favorite, and I can finish a hard level sudoku from 10 to 30 minutes.  :P  A Sudoku puzzle is published in the newspapers almost everyday.  I usually read the newspaper in the evening while I am having my dinner and watching news on television at the same time.  Sometimes, I found that the sudoku on newspaper has already played by someone, I thought it was my brother who filled in the number 1-9 (most of the time unfinished :P), but finally I found that it is always my mother who plays the sudoku.

Some sudokus might have multiple solution or there is a bottleneck where it is quite hard to move forward.  At this point I will use a pen with other colour and start a trial and error process (guessing).  If anything goes wrong, I will erase the number filled with the new colour and try again.  Most of the time, I need only one colour, but there is a rare case where I need 3 colours.

Sudoku can sharpen our logical mind, do you agree?  If I have more free time, I will study the algorithm to solve the sudoku using computer programming language.

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Logical mind can help us think rationally and make decision wisely, but it might not be able to solve all the problems when it is mixed with emotion. There is not only black and white in this world, there is also gray as well as other colours that you can find in a rainbow.  Therefore wisdom is important to help our logical mind work perfectly.

I found about 8-10 tiny snails in our garden last weekend.  I guess they were just born not long ago.

I took four of them and placed them on a piece of white paper and started a photo session with them.  Their body is semi-transparent in yellow, and each of them have two black dots (their eyes) on top of their antenna.

Let me show you how tiny they are.  Their shell’s lengths are between 5 mm to 8 mm.

I used a 10x macro close up filter held with my hand in front of my camera lens to magnify the snail (because I do not have the adapter ring).  I also switched on the light of my light box.  At first each of the snail crawled into different directions, then two of them put their heads back to their shells, I guess it might be too hot or too bright for them.

There is only one snail in each of the photos here.  I do not have a good photo of more than one snail in a single photo.  The most challenging problem is the depth of field which is too narrow even I have used the smallest aperture setting on my camera (after adding the macro filter).

Look carefully and you may notice that there is another problem caused by my macro filter when I held it with my hand, it creates rainbow colour in the photo.  This is called chromatic aberration.  May be the filter does not match my lens, or may be I did not hold it 100 % parallel with my camera lens.

When the snail put its head back to its shell, it still sticked on its ground.  I can sense that it does not like to be disturbed and they want to have some control of their position, therefore they sticked themselves on something.  I did move them a few times to get a better angle for my photo, and finally, four of them all hide themselves into their shells.  I was afraid that they were too dry inside my light box, and I put them back to a container, took a break and took their photo again.

This evening I am going to release them back to the nature.   they are not pest but they are our friends.  We have a little corner in our garden, where we let them eat the leaves freely.  We try to tell them do not go out of the border to destroy our plants.

We never kill a snail, they are cute.