Sleeping butterfly spotted!

Some nights ago, I spotted a butterfly on a plant in my porch.

I quickly snapped a few photos, in the dark without a flash, since I was worried that the butterfly would fly away.

After that, I switched on the porch light and came back for more photos.

It seems that the butterfly reflects the surrounding light…in the second photo, which was taken from the right of the butterfly, its colour is orange, which is reflecting the colour of the street lamp. On the other side, the colour is white, because my neighbour had a white light on.

The butterfly didn't move at all throughout my photo shoot...which led me to conclude that it must have been sleeping by the time I spotted it. I didn't try using any flash...I wonder whether it would still have slept through that if I had!

Introducing Knotwords

Some time ago I said that I had stopped my Photo Fridays and would be using Minesweeper to make regular posts instead.

But now I have thought of a better (prettier) way to keep my blog alive.

Recently I have been playing a game called Knotwords.

The game consists of a crossword grid divided into zones, and we are given the letters that need to be filled into each zone. The goal is to complete the crossword using only these letters as the clues. (It will be easier to see it from the screenshots than from an explanation)

Every day there is a mini puzzle and a classic puzzle. The mini is a smaller grid, with five or six rows/columns (but not always very simple). The classic is a lot bigger, and this is the one that I am going to be posting screenshots of.

I don’t play this every day, because I have found that it takes longer than the other games that I play daily (Wordle, Waffle, and the NYT Mini, in case you’re wondering). I play it only when I have some extra time to spare. Especially the classics; I have found that they take quite a lot of time sometimes!

Which is why I feel I can make it part of my regular posts (if I happen to play it that weekend). The screenshots look better than the Minesweeper ones for sure! Just take a look:

The puzzles grow gradually harder from Monday to Sunday. I have been taking screenshots of my completed classics on weekends because they took so much effort, especially at the beginning! Once I even got a hint that didn’t help at all, because I basically did not know the word in question.

Here are the other screenshots that I have, simply for the purpose of saving them here:

Sometimes there is more than one possible solution...in this one, you can see that I entered "scat" at the top left, but their original solution was with "acts". In this case, they would say that we found an alternate solution (in the game summary at the bottom)

You can see that the Sunday puzzles are bigger, i.e. more crowded than the Saturday ones!

I started playing this game on my phone, but once I saw the classic, I knew that I couldn't do that...it is too much strain on the eyes when playing on a small screen! So I switched to my iPad instead.

This is not to say that I will stop posting the monthly Minesweeper scores…no harm in posting them since I intend to keep on playing anyway. But, we’ll see…who knows I might get lazy, and those are pretty pointless.

Yummy discoveries at a new food court

Some time ago we went to try out the new Eight Heng food court, which is replacing Kuta Bali.

A very nice discovery is the clam soup (the stall is called "sad clams" :P ). We tried the one with wine, and it was very flavourful.

We had the option to add noodles, but we didn’t.

some of the ingredients inside are needle mushrooms, kelp (see the long dark strip?), and thin slices of potato (which we thought were ginger at first!)

Then there was Ho Ping lor bak. Very nice. After having it there, the next time I went to Food Bayana near my office, I realized that the same lor bak was there as well...

This next photo is specially to show the interior of the lor bak (no minced meat!), and the prawn roll on the left.

Kulim grilled fish (there were two grilled fish stalls), which was pretty good, but not exceptional (I still like Pisa Corner's!)

Bak kee, not good at all.

And then another star of the day, Chinese dumplings.

I was so impressed, I needed to take a photo to show the thin skin and the meaty filling.

And also a photo of the stall, because there were a few stalls selling dumplings, and we need to know which stall this was from!

The other day I happened to be in Georgetown, and I suddenly noticed this stall's original shop as we were driving along Lebuh Noordin (second road from Jalan Magazine)

This food court (and also Bayana that I mentioned earlier) are both new food courts that invite already-established vendors to open branches there. I guess this helps the food court to start off with guaranteed good food. But I wonder what happens to people who want to do a new start-up...do they have no chance at all?

The accident

This morning I made myself soft-boiled eggs for breakfast.

After preparing the eggs, I started making a cup of chocolate malt (a regular part of my breakfast). As I was scooping the milk powder, I dumped a scoop onto my eggs, instead of into the cup beside it. :O

I slightly panicked and started scraping out what I could from the top of the “heap”…but trying not to touch the eggs at first, because I was putting the “unpolluted” part back into my chocolate.

Then I stopped and thought, it’s edible anyway, why not just eat it with the eggs and see how it is?

So I stirred it in… and had a creamy bowl of soft-boiled eggs.

I’m not sure it enhances the eggs though… It seemed to take the “edge” off the taste of the eggs, and of the soy sauce (I had already added pepper and soy sauce when the accident happened :P ). I won’t be doing it on purpose in future...

true story
(This is after I had tried salvaging some of the milk powder)

July's scores

The last game is the one that is cut off....it couldn't fit into the stats window without scrolling down. (there is a bug in ViennaSweeper; the stats window can be resized, but the area that shows the scores stay the same size :P )

Where is my mango?

I tried the belacan fried rice from a Thai stall at Pisa Corner.

Overall, I am satisfied.

Pro: The belacan taste is really good.
Con: They don’t give sambal.
Pro: They give cut red chilli (cili padi, which you can see peeking out from under the long beans)
Con: Where is the mango?

I was surprised that the meat given was chicken and not pork. It came from the thigh/drumstick part, so I’m pleased with it... It was just unexpected.

The mystery of the sleeping kitty

Two years back (my photo was from Dec 2022), my brother received this weird sleeping kitty as a free gift when buying something online.

(Pen is placed there for size comparison)

It’s soft and squishy, and I wondered a lot about what it was.

After some online research, I found that it was a squishy stress relief toy.

Adding a picture here in case that link stops working later:

Anyway, I put it in a display cupboard and forgot about it.

Then yesterday, I happened to look at it and...

This is what it looked like!

What happened?!?!

It looks like it has melted...is the weather too hot?!?!

It is still soft and squishy...but more sticky now. Into the dustbin it goes... bye-bye kitty...