The butterfly mystery

Last Sunday, I saw a butterfly in the house. It was perched rather high up a wall, and refused to budge for the whole day.

The next day, it had flown to one of my lamps. It stayed there the whole day, and at the end of the day, I noticed some whitish liquid drops on the chair beneath the lamp. I wondered whether they were from the butterfly (was it pooping?!), and wiped them away.

The next morning, the butterfly was still there, and there were one or two fresh drops. Yes, it's from the butterfly! But what was it? I have no idea...

 

(I was also a little worried that it might have pooped on my floor elsewhere, but that the drops were camouflaged by the colour of my floor...)

 

After that, the butterfly disappeared for a while, and I thought it had left. But on Wednesday, I saw it again, near the front door.

The long patch below the butterfly is NOT a stain on the wall! It was something hanging from the butterfly. On Tuesday, I had already seen this "thing" hanging from the butterfly, when it flew away from my lamp to perch on the ceiling nearby.

After I saw it on that wall, the butterfly disappeared again for some time, and then that night (still on Wednesday), I saw it on the floor. I thought it was dead, and blew on it a bit to check, but it fluttered off. It was still near the front door, and this time it managed to go out. It landed on my car roof, and stayed there.

I didn't want to deal with it (wanted to go to sleep), so I just shut the door and hoped it would be gone by morning.

It wasn't gone.

 

Instead, it was really dead the next morning.

The two photos were taken from the same angle. But the wind happened to blow it over, so I got both angles of its (dead) body. If you look carefully, you can see the stringy ball at the end of its body.

I still wonder why it died, what was that dripping liquid, and what the hanging thread on its bottom was. So many mysteries...

(By the way, I didn't clear the butterfly away. I just drove my car, and let physics take care of it. :P )

Edit: A friend told me that it is a moth, again! I repeat: There seems to be a lot of moths around lately.

New interface

How to give your customers a new user interface, whether they want one or not:

1. "We are bringing you an awesome new interface! We designed it with you in mind!" --> Read: What we want is what you want. You cannot want anything else.

2. "We are phasing out the old interface soon." --> Read: We don't want the old interface hanging around. We don't care if you do.

3. "You can switch to the new interface now, or you will be switched to it automatically when we remove the old interface." --> Read: You can be our guinea pig, or only switch over when our guinea pigs are satisfied (aka no longer give us any constructive feedback).

Recently Facebook, Google, and Blogger have made changes in their interface. Not much chance of staying in the old one. Some interfaces seem to have been around longer than others... Google Chat has been around for a long time, but we were using Hangout in the office until they decided to phase it out recently.

The Gmail app was updated. I can't remember whether we had an option to switch, or whether it was done automatically. Same for the Facebook webpage.

Blogger gave us the option to switch now or later. I opted for the former, hence my rant in the previous post. To be fair, they did move the "new post" button back to the top of the left sidebar (where we have most of the menu items), instead of a lone button hovering on the bottom-right, not long after I gave my feedback on it. Maybe others had given similar feedback too.

Possibly the worst "upgrade" process

I am seriously annoyed at Blogger. They changed the layout of their editor not long ago, making some things hard to find. More recently, they updated the behaviour of pressing "Enter": they insert a paragraph instead of a line break. Previously, I pressed "Enter" twice to get a new paragraph, but suddenly that had changed and I needed to press "Shift+Enter" to get a normal line break instead.

And then today I suddenly noticed an option in the editor's toolbar that said "Paragraph". I clicked on it, and discovered options like headings, and most importantly, "Normal". Selecting "Normal" gave me back my normal editing behaviour.

 

This is how the toolbar looks like:

I hate how everything is an icon, and I have to figure out what each one means (the icons are not super-intuitive). And also, I previously had default settings for the photos that I add (medium size, centered, as you see in most of my posts). But now I have to re-customize each one!

They should just keep our options when they "upgrade" us to the new Blogger interface. -_-

Another thing: Previously, when I wanted to add a link, I could immediately press "Ctrl+V" to paste my link in the dialog box. Now I need an extra step of clicking on the dialog box, where I want to paste my link. Grrr.....you should be improving things, not making them worse...

The scone dough experiment

In my previous post, I wrote about my chocolate chip scones.

This was the first round of scones that I baked:

I kept two more portions of the same dough, one in the fridge and one in the freezer. Both were wrapped in cling wrap.

The one in the fridge was baked the next morning:

Instead of brushing the top with milk (I had finished up the milk the first day), I brushed it with condensed milk. I think that is what made the scones darker...maybe because of the higher sugar content in condensed milk?

The scones didn't rise as much, so they were less fluffy. I was rather disappointed at that...

When I was cutting the scones, I already saw that the cut edges seemed to be stuck together (no "holes" as in the first round of fresh scones). I am guessing that it was why the scones didn't rise as much.

Then today I baked the scones from the freezer. When cutting them, I saw that they had more "holes" on the edges (less than the fresh ones, but more than the refrigerated ones). On two of the pieces, I additionally poked several cuts with my knife, hoping that it would contribute to the rising.

The cuts didn't seem to help much (the two scones at the back were the ones with extra cuts); all of them looked about the same. If anything, the cut ones seemed to have risen slightly less?

This time, the colour was not as dark, because I diluted the condensed milk with a bit of water before brushing the scones with it.

Overall, I think the frozen dough worked better than the refrigerated one. I had thawed it in the fridge overnight though...I'm not sure whether I want to try baking directly from the freezer, because the bottom of the scones are already too dark and I don't want them to burn more (they say that scones from the freezer need longer baking time).

I still haven't tried making the dough at night and baking it the next morning. My fresh scones above had 20-30 minutes of chilling time, and the second one had almost 24 hours. So if I refrigerate the scones overnight, I am not sure whether they will resemble the first or second photo more!

Chocolate chip scones

I previously posted about making scones.

Today I made scones again, with chocolate chips this time. Previously I had always made plain scones, sometimes with orange zest for flavour.

The scones turned out ugly, but yummy (chocolate always helps!). :P But even though the shape was ugly, the colour was nice and golden.

It would seem that apart from making ugly omelettes, I will also be making ugly scones in future!

Sorely beaten by Samyang

Some time ago, I decided to buy some Samyang hot chicken ramen to try. There were a number of flavours, so I bought four packs of different flavours. If I especially like one of them, then I could buy a pack-of-5 in future. 

I did some research online to find out which flavours were more popular, and decided on these four: original, curry, jjajang (aka black bean paste), and sutah. The first three are all variants of the hot chicken ramen (dry stir-fried type), while the last one is a soupy ramen, with chewy noodles in a beef broth.

I had even checked the Scoville units online before deciding to try the spicy ramen. The rating for our nasi lemak and nasi kandar were close to this, so I felt that it would be very spicy, but still manageable.

But when I tried my first packet (original hot chicken ramen), I felt that I had made a mistake... I had to drink milk to clear the heat in my mouth, and towards the end, I gave up altogether and diluted my ramen with hot water (at the end, the sauce residue on the plate made it even spicier).

I feel that those nasi lemak and nasi kandar Scoville ratings may have been only for the sambal or curry sauce...and we eat them with white rice!

Then I tried the curry version. This one is less spicy (I already knew that from my research), but to actually enjoy the taste, I still needed to "wash" it a bit with hot water. And at the end, I again diluted the residue so that I wouldn't scrape all the sauce off the plate.

This is the curry-flavoured hot chicken ramen:

I think I didn't take a photo of the first one because the colours didn't look that nice (can't remember what add-ons I put in, but they weren't the same as this time). But the noodles look similar... the original flavour was redder (no curry to dilute the original spices), and the topping was seaweed flakes and sesame. This one (curry flavour) had toppings of dried bok choy, carrot, and fried onion (I read it off the packet).

I placed the add-ons on the edge of the plate so that I could pour the noodles in and take a photo, but in the end, that was also a good idea because those "untainted" pieces helped me balance out the spiciness of the dish.

Despite the spiciness (or because of it?), the noodles really tasted good. Even the first packet was delicious...it was just too spicy to be fully enjoyed! Putting less sauce or simply diluting it more might be better for me.

If I remember correctly, the jjajang flavour should be less spicy than the curry version, and the sutah noodles even less so. So I expect that I will be able to handle those, since the curry version is already in an acceptable range.

Market adventures

This morning I bought some yao mak at the market. When I got home, I was shocked (and slightly horrified) to find that the vegetable seller had given me more than twice the amount of yao mak that I had selected.

Then I recalled that he had been weighing yao mak from a basket with only that vegetable, and then continued with my basket. He probably forgot about the other basket and thought that all the yao mak came from mine! (as in, I doubt I got the extra ones for free :P )

Why was I horrified? Because it looks like I will need to eat a lot more yao mak than expected this week...

Anyway, today seems to be a day where people at the market give me what I didn't want... I bought curry mee, telling them that I didn't want blood. But my packet still came with blood...

It could be because they gave my packet away to someone else, and by the time I finished buying my veggies and went back to get the noodles, they only had that left. In that case, it's a pity for the person who got my packet too!

About the curry mee, this is the second time in a row that they gave me a packet with blood even after I had said I didn't want blood. I miss my curry mee aunty...she has stopped selling since earlier this year (even before MCO started), so I am now settling for second-best.

This year has been a bad year for Relau hawker food. First my yong tau foo stall stopped selling, then the curry mee stopped selling. :( And neither of them happened because of the MCO!

The pied piper of Korean drama

I just finished watching Pied Piper. I am highly satisfied. Never a dull moment!

In this case, compared to Black, I am not as impressed with the plot twists. But the plot was still very interesting, and they took care of the details better.

However, there were still some tiny details that I am not that happy with...I would call them forced theatrics.

For example, someone has a bomb strapped to her, and another person is planning to push the detonator. But the bad guy has already walked away, so there is no way for her or her rescuer to know that the guy is going to push the detonator. But somehow, at the moment where the switch is about to be flipped, the rescuer grabs her in a hug as if they know the time is up. *What?*

Another time (*BIG SPOILER AHEAD*) is when they have a plane that is going to crash, and they are debating whether to shoot it down so that it won't crash on the city. But as they debate, the plane is only 5 minutes away from crashing, and people in the city are already seeing the plane fly above their heads! Wouldn't shooting it down be pointless at that point? Again, I feel this was just to drag the suspense out. If they really needed to shoot down the plane, they would have had to do it much earlier! But then I guess they would have lost the dramatic shots of the plane casting a shadow over people in the city, or of the plane almost crashing into a building... :P

Some other plot points were not fully explained... as in, there was one incident, and then nothing for a year, before all the other happenings in the drama. So why that one-year break? It wasn't really explained... though I guess we could say that no opportunities arose to create incidents? I feel that the one-year delay was not really necessary though... they could have made the hiatus shorter.

The bad guy also decided to kill some people but only ruin the lives of others. Why? That part is still a mystery to me... At one time he does say that it is the ones who continue living who suffer. Does that mean that he only killed those who were less "guilty"? However, the one he killed was at the beginning...so in a way, we could assume that after a year, he had refined his plans to not kill.

Another thing that didn't make sense was that the bad guy's sidekick let loose a comment about how he never liked the way the Pied Piper looked at the lead female character. That was to leave us a red herring about the origin of the Pied Piper, as in he would have been in her neighbourhood during her childhood. But when the truth was revealed, that comment didn't seem right after all...because if it wasn't during their younger years, when would the sidekick have seen the Pied Piper look at her?

However, despite those small stuff, the whole drama is really interesting and enjoyable. I would seriously recommend it!

An unexpected murder weapon

Recently my kitchen blinds were broken, so I changed to roller blinds. The vendor said that roller blinds would last longer than the Venetian blinds that I had before.

We did have a concern that the kitchen would be darker with roller blinds, but we decided that it was something we could accept.

However, there is an unexpected side-effect that makes me regret the roller blinds a bit...there have already been three deaths since the installation of the roller blinds! (only 3 weeks ago) The first one was a baby lizard ironed flat (the ickiest one to remove). Then there were two flat spiders (at least I think both were spiders). After the first incident, I had been slapping the blinds before rolling them up, but that method doesn’t seem to be working too well, since the spiders have still gotten caught inside. I would welcome tips on how to not get creatures squashed into my blinds!

Oven-baked dinner and dessert

Tonight I baked my dinner, followed by dessert (well, I wasn't really planning for dessert, but since I was already using my oven, I decided to continue baking my cookies)

For dinner I had garlic butter salmon with broccoli.

The broccoli was overdone :( Or maybe it was simply because I left the tiny tiny ends intact instead of chopping them off. Those thin ends are the ones that got charred.

I actually left space in the middle of the tray for my salmon, because it was to be added later. I baked the salmon for only 10 minutes, and was glad it was cooked just right. But unfortunately the skin stuck to the foil, and I could only scrape some parts of it off to eat. I had buttered the skin side before adding it to the pan, but maybe it wasn't enough?

On the plate, the salmon had already lost its skin. :P

I think I put too much garlic... Since the broccoli was also baked with garlic, my whole mouth feels garlicky after dinner.

As for the cookies, I made oat cookies because my oats were expiring. The cookies were chewy inside. I'm not sure how they are supposed to be, but the photo from the recipe showed thinner cookies, so I expected them to be crispy.

In any case, I think I would prefer the cookies to be crispy. Maybe next time I'll slice them thinner. I still have half (a bit less than half, to be exact) of my dough left, so I can just slice them and bake next time.

By the way, these oat cookies are filling! I guess it's not surprising because the main ingredient is oats. But what I mean is, it's not so much something that we can take as a snack; instead it would be more appropriate for breakfast. I guess I can make my own oat breakfast cookies now, instead of buying stuff like Oat Krunch? :P