Various uses of household products

Its amazing what our everyday household products could do, which are not only cheap and efficient but also environmentally friendly but yet many of us may or may not know of. Recently while browsing on Yahoo!'s news homepage, I read about the many uses of salt and am very impressed by such a humble ingredient that I so often taken for granted. The blog disclaimed that the infos are sourced from the Salt Institute and some from his personal experience and I personally find it a good and beneficial read. A brief surprising use for salt are as follow and for a full range use, please refer to the SALT INSTITUTE:

Washing mouth - Mix equal parts of salt and baking soda as a mouth wash that sweetens the breath (I'm doing this now. Hopefully it helps with the breath)
Peeling eggs - Boiling eggs in salted water will make eggs peel easily. (As I made egg mayo sandwiches very often, I will be doing this in future)
Poaching eggs - Poaching eggs over salted water helps set the egg whites. (Has been doing it without realising so)

The Graceful Chow Chow named Grace

We have a guest in the house! My sister's boss has gone on a vacation together with their whole family and left Grace with us. Grace is a one year old Chow Chow and as her name suggests, she is graceful. Quiet, poised, gentle and graceful :).

Something is wrong, isn't it?

As usual, I would reached home to be greeted with a bark or two and sometimes only a very cute stare from Bon Bon. It sure is a blissful things to have him receive me home everyday and I am sure he's glad to see me home too. As I stepped into my house today greeted by his usual oh-so-cute stare, I have not realised something amiss with him yet. Just to let you have afew preview...

Right

Grooming

Its been long since the last post about Bon Bon as the going is pretty much the same. This time round however, there is something new. I have been reading a bit on Pomeranians lately and chanced upon a pretty interesting site at http://www.pomkins.com/index.html regarding the Pomkins. It has a guide on personal dog grooming so I tried on Bon Bon :p. Hopefully his coat becomes thicker so that the next time I tried grooming on him, it will looked fuller.

Wanna upload two photos of Bon Bon but don't know why my "Post" page's attach-photo function is gone. Anyone can help me with this?? Otherwise, this post will forever b without the intended photos.

At last, I could upload some photos, and here goes. :D

Tanjong Beach, Sentosa Island

Well, it is nice once in a while to head to the beach and this time round we had an appointment with Brian and guys to bring our furkids to Tanjong Beach Sentosa for a swim and chill out session! The weather is great on that day! Brian picked us up to head to Sentosa together but wonder what went wrong, he thought we are heading to East Coast instead of Sentosa despite Lynn (Faith ma) called to ask where in Tanjong Beach are we all meeting...

Picnic in ECP

30th May 2009

Dana and I was planning for a BBQ on the East Coast Park on this date so that we could have a get together with friends and loved ones. The initial idea was to set up camp and have Barbies at the same time but I am reluctant to spent the $$$ to buy the tent, which may be costly and that being said, something we don't use as often. So it is really not worth the investment. I managed to convince Dana so we will just have BBQ. So off I go to book the BBQ Pit (You have to book the BBQ pit or get the permit for BYOPS in Singapore!) at the AXS machine at Toa Payoh Central. Oh the horror! It is school holiday period and it is not easy to locate any pit on any dates! It was full house! Dismayed, I called my with and told her that I could not booked a pit at all even changing location to Pasir Ris or Changi Park does not helped... So I quickly suggested "Why don't we just have a picnic?" (Eureka! I am a genius!).

On the 29th night, we went to NTUC Extra in Ang Mo Kio hub to get the ingredients we needed for the picnic i.e. bread, hams, greens, cheese and the likes. I especially enjoyed doing groceries. I love seeing the merchandise on display and the fact that all these are available within my grasp. These are also the little things that brought joy and colors to life. The total amount of the groceries came up to around S$60+ and I told one of the picnikers, Jeannie, that it will be a "subway" standard sandwich.

First Family Outing in ECP

23 May 2009

This will be the very first time our family (Dana, Bon Bon and I) had a family outing together and the venue we have chosen is East Coast Park. The idea was really a last minute conjuration as Dana has been lamenting that weekends are boring and yada yada yada. We kinda explored what we could do and stuffs E.g. a short trip to Bintan/Batam or maybe a 3D2N island trip and the likes. After checking the internet for lodgins and all, we realised that it is too time consuming to go places that are far and also costly (we have a trip to East Malaysia around the corner i.e. 24-26th May 2009 and nother trip from 20-23 June to Phuket).

We did called Dana's cousin, Brian (DogLover) and asked what is his plan for Saturday. He mentioned something about bringing his furkids DoMo for swimming but disclaimed that it might be early in the morning and further counter-disclaimed that the plan might not happened as he is tired and likely not to be able to wake up early... Can you make up your mind already? So I just told Dana to not count on that and added "Why don't we just settle for East Coast Park and at the same time can bring Bon Bon for a swim?". Dana seemed to like the idea, so ECP is the place on saturday! [Come to think of it, I have never brought my wife to East Coast Park to Pak Toh before :p]

The Coat and All

Bon Bon, like all Pomeranians, has double layer of coat. One is the long, straight, glistening and harsh outer coat which is easily visible when one sets his/her eyes on a Pom. The other is the under coat which is the short coat that kept the Poms warm as well as functioning as a layer of protection from liquid penetrating their body. These under coats are abundant on the shoulder and chest area, giving the Poms manes. Well, these info will come handy in the later part of this posting. ;-)

Having Bon Bon back 3 days after the break-away was truly a heart-warming period but it also beckons us to make some adjustments and actions. I have just set up a physical barrier on the front door yesterday to prevent Bon Bon from trying to sneak out of the house again, but this of course will cause all of us the inconvenience of having to remember to step across the barrier every time we needed to go out and my instinct told me that within the next few days, someone would tripped and break the barrier which also means that I have to re-build the barrier as much as it might inconvenient us.

Amazing grace

8th May 2009. The advertisement of Bon Bon came out on the Straits Times newspaper today. Both Betty and I hope for the best although we have come to term with the possibility of not having Bon Bon back despite all the efforts we have placed in. So this is like the last straw.

I could not concentrate on my work. MY mind was occupied with flashes of the memory with Bon Bon in the house and every little thing that he would do like waiting eagerly for me to come home and when I did reached home, he would follow me to my room and wait for me to take of my socks (He loves socks!).I usually toss him my socks in the shape of a ball. It is month end accounts closing for April 2009 and I could not concentrate. I have prepared all the neccesary accounting journals for one of the holdings company under my portfolio and it only has less than 10 entries. The journal report is correctly prepared and it has to be entered into the SAP system. I entered the wrong account although I have the right journal entry stated right there on the journal report! MY superior is very kind by not giving me the hair-dryer treatment although she has not ever been known for her temper.

Bon Bon, where are you?

It seems like I have never blogged about my cute furkid, Bon Bon before and it is with deep regrets and sorrow that I will have to blog about my precious furkid today in plenty of tears and anguish in my heart. Not having focus and blogging on him as much as I should per "Marley and Me", this is one of the LTs that I have so taken for granted.

How Bon Bon came into Betty and my life is quite incidental albeit life changing. I have had plenty of dogs in my previous 30 years of my life with the first being a mongrel by the name of "Yue Han" (John in chinese) verbatim from the name of the dog in a cartoon serial "Robinson Crusoe's and family" and the irony is that, John is really a bitch. My second dog or rather dogs are the fruit of my persistent tantrum or rather persuasion power. They are Spitz and the first generation are "Xiao Bing" (Lil Ice) and "Xiao Bai" (Lil White) as well as three other generation of offspring with "Fat Fat" being the most impressionable. Lets move on shall we?