New Phone

I bought a new phone a month ago - Samsung Pixon in standard black.

When I started hunting for a phone, HH told me to just fixate my search on a feature that was very important to me. These days, all phones come with the usual features - phone calls, SMS, MMS, emails, picture, video, games, radio and a whole lot of all-in-one features that will make the kitchen sink seem obsolete!

So I only have one requirement - the SMS fonts must get bigger! There is only one brand on the market that has this feature: SAMSUNG!!

So I headed off to the M1 shop to get my new phone based on that one requirement.

So why the PIXON instead of the cheaper F480 or the more expensive OMNIA - considering that all are touch screen phones?

Simple - PIXON has the loudest ring tone besides the larger font capability.

M1 gave me a $300 phone upgrade voucher, so the price diff between the three phones was something like $50 to $100 depending on which phone I took.

The OMNIA was some Windows mobile phone with Wifi, but the FONTS DON'T GET BIGGER, so that ruled itself out.

The F480 was pretty much the same as the PIXON (java phones), but the ring tones were softer and it has only a 5 megapixel camera. Since I already have a 5 megapixel Samsung G800 in good working order; I would be getting something with the same specs with a touch screen phone. The price difference for the camera size? $50 to me; so being the kiasu person, I took the biggest, bestest phone to suit my requirements. :p

Now I have put my data card into the PIXON and with the 8 gigabyte micro SD card, I have internet access on the move and can watch movies as well.

What more can a non-tech non geek girl as for?

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Frozen meals

Times are bad - we are trying to save $$ by eating home most nights with me cooking dinner and trying to keep the budget down to about $5 for the two of us. Alas, the best of my efforts are often stymied by what is available in the supermarkets.
My bright idea for saving money would be to buy frozen meat from the supermarket, defrost and cook. This is my BIG PROBLEM - everything that I buy frozen comes in bulk packing. To buy frozen boneless chicken legs, I need to buy 2 kg and it is impossible to separate it because it is in a large frozen lump!
Pork is not so bad because they come in 500g sizes.
We can buy some fish frozen in single pieces, but in a large bag - so I just take out what I need.
So far, the "cheapest" way of doing this would be to buy the whole salmon at $9.90/kg and freeze that into individual pieces. This means we are stuck eating salmon for weeks on end because we would are certainly not eating salmon every night!!
Of course I could cook up a large portion of 2kg chicken curry and dump it into the freezer and eat it for the next 6 months - one portion every month.
From the safe food handling process practice, we should not defrost meat then marinate it and re-freeze it.
So what am I supposed to do? Any bright ideas??
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Wedding Food

Food at weddings are generally mass produced meals - sometimes terribly expensive for what they are. In all the time that HH and I have been attending wedding dinners as a couple, I would say that the best meal was at our wedding. That's because I decided what we should eat and wasn't going to have some banquet manager tell me what was allowed in the package.

Anyway, this posting is not about our wedding lunch but about some of the wedding meals we have had over the years. So this post takes pot shots at incompetent wait staff and bad food.

There was this one dinner at Pan Pacific for P - the meal was OK but the table service was horrendous. The waiter is inept and when he brought the soup to the table, he dipped his THUMB into the soup as he placed it on the table. Oops! After that, I told him to deliver the food to the table and I would serve the table. I think he was impressed by my serving skills.

There was another dinner at Shangri-La recently - the waiter was good but the food wasn't terribly fantastic for a hotel of that stature. OK, give them some benefit of being overworked - there were just too many tables for them to attend to and it was chaotic in the ballroom as there were a couple of other functions going on around the hotel.

Also recently, we were at A's wedding dinner at Paramount Hotel in Katong. The food wasn't that great either by the standards of the groom's family. I thought it was OK - very passable for the place. The groom's uncle (a great makan kaki friend) felt that the food was not up to standard and had caustic remarks about the stuff he ate! But my galloping gourmet friend has a great cook in his mother so nothing comes up to his standards - I will feel sorry for any friend who tries to feed him - his comments can deflate a chef's ego even if they are rated 3*** by Michelin.

However the best wedding dinnner we went to recently was at Noble House at UIC Building in Shenton Way. The entire wedding dinner was vegetarian - HH and I are OK with vegetarian food if it is well done - THIS WAS EXCELLENT!!!

There was not a single piece of gluten in sight - every dish was carefully thought out and well cooked. I don't think there was any MSG either because we survived the wedding dinner without being thirsty. There were mushrooms galore but they were cooked interestingly. Aiyah! wait for the pictures to tempt you!

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Weddings

We went to a wedding yesterday at the Jurong Adventist Church - must say it was the most creatively done wedding we've attended in a long time. The decor was great with flowers every where, making the place smell heavenly.

The wedding montage of the wedding couple was brilliant! There was this video on B talking about R and how they are best friends. Then, the video went on to show how B proposed R in total darkness with these tea light candles made into the words "Marry Me". Awww - so romantic and really a good video for YouTube.

Congrats to all the kaypoh aunties who matchmade the couple and orchestrated the whole wedding event for the wedding couple.

HH has this thing about wedding - he hates them! Maybe our wedding was so awful that he does not care the repeat the process :p

Anyway, HH dislikes going to weddings because he needs to get dressed up - put on a well starched ironed shirt and proper dress shoes and sometimes a tie for the occassion as well. There there is the mush of weddings that get to the very practical engineer brain of his that he cannot process - yeah, I can understand too.

My take on weddings - get dressed up in my standard formal event "uniform" of my kebaya blouse and sarong skirt with my Ferragamo shoes and try to have fun.

Yesterday's wedding was a very elaborate affair of a church wedding where the church was packed to the brim. It was beautifully decorated. There were many grooms men and pretty flower girls scattering flowers all over the aisle.

In contrast, our wedding was pretty simple - to church then to lunch. We had 53 people attend the church wedding (including ourselves) then we headed off to the hotel for lunch. The whole lunch was over by 2:30 pm.

HH was feverishly ill - I think he had no recollection of the event other than him having this wet towel on his head to bring down his temperature!! Oh well - we have survived thus far!