Before my housemates left for Singapore, they delegated me three tasks:
Pay rent on time
Pay bills on time
Clear out the refrigerator
The first two are pretty much commonsense. I don’t want to get kicked out nor do I want to live in an apartment without any electricity or water.
As for clearing out the refrigerator, it was a simple request. They didn’t want their food to go rotten so they gave me the enviable task of finishing it up.
And I did, within three days. But my choices were pretty limited since one was vegetarian and the other was a semi-vegetarian. For some reasons, they both had one large jar of Neapolitan sauce each, so I spent three days eating pasta for lunch and dinner. I did try to spice it up by adding herbs but when you have pasta overflowing from every orifice, you feel like puking at the sight of any kind of pasta.
I supplemented my pasta mania with a breakfast of chips. The vegetarian housemate, for some reasons, had three large bags of different chips: chilli-flavoured chips (my favourite), natural spinach chips (the only healthy chips) and honey-flavoured chips (some Korean snack). Of course, I was tasked to finish them up.
I tried to spread out my pasta and chips ration by cooking up a batch of egg fried rice. That lasted me one breakfast, two lunches and one dinner.
When the pasta, fried rice and chips ran out, I started hunting around the kitchen but only managed to find one packet of ramen. Now I was left with a nearly depleted refrigerator and kitchen. The only food left was vegetables, but those were for my rats. I couldn’t be bothered to stock up the refrigerator, so I walked to the MacDonald’s opposite my building and bought a large Big Mac value meal (with Sprite).
Sometimes, I couldn’t be bothered to even walk to MacDonald’s that I would just head to the convenience stores below my building and buy more chips.
So from last Wednesday afternoon till Sunday, I subsisted on a diet of chips, fried rice and pasta.
On Sunday morning, I came to the conclusion that if I didn’t want to put my health at risk, I needed to start having proper meals again. The other reason for changing my meal plan was that with so much free time on my hands (damned job hunting is not working out as well as I thought it would be), I decided to start cooking again. So on Sunday afternoon, I went out and loaded up on groceries.
The same night, I started prepping for my dessert.
Lemon cheesecake with a dusting of nutmeg.
It was from a recipe that I got from my mother. The thing about this lemon cheesecake (if we could even call it a cake) is that it requires no baking. All you need to do is to prepare the ingredients, combine them, pour everything into a pie plate and let it set overnight in the refrigerator. The result is this:
I tried my lemon cheesecake on Monday night after my hike from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach with a couple of friends. The cake tasted okay, although I felt that there was not enough lemon zest to complement the sweet cheese cream (Mental note: add more lemon juice). The nutmeg dusting was great though; it did added a little “oomph” to the cake.
This was my third time making the cake and it was much easier than before. Not because the cake is hard to make (anyone can make it), but because my two housemates are such baking fanatics that they have almost every baking equipment. When I found an electric mixer, I was overjoyed because I no longer had to use muscle power to beat the mixture with a fork. The result was obvious; the lemon cheesecake mixture came out much, much smoother.
I gave some cake to Pan and Bentley and it seems that they really like it.
Pan testing out the cheesecake.
Bentley testing out the cheesecake
Bentley rushing for the last piece
Sustaining an injury for the cheesecake was well worth it:
I accidentally grated my thumb while grating the lemon rinds
On Tuesday, I had cheesecake and goat milk for breakfast. I had no meals for lunch and dinner because I was feeling a bit sick.
After almost 24 hours on starvation mode and feeling sufficiently better, I was feeling decidedly famished, so I cooked up a meal of scrambled eggs (garnished with chives) and toasts with olive oil spread. Drink of the meal was a glass of full cream cow milk.
The scrambled eggs didn’t come out to my liking. It was slightly too salty and the milky taste was a bit overpowering. It was still delicious but it wasn’t the creamy scrambled eggs that I was after. Perhaps next time I’ll add cream instead of full cream milk.
Unfortunately, I forgot to buy bacon.
It was a very fulfilling breakfast though, much better than potato chips.
I skipped lunch since breakfast was quite a large meal and I was able to hold off until dinner, which consisted of mashed potatoes (garnished with Italian parsley), medium rare rump steak seasoned with black peppercorn and salt, and fried veggies. Drink of the meal was James Squire Amber Ale.
The steak turned out okay. It was juicy but a bit tough. Should have tenderized the steak before pan-frying it. The mashed potatoes, however, came out fantastic. I was actually expecting lumpy, starchy mashed potatoes since I didn’t have any potato masher or rice miller (a lot of recipes call for either one). I just mashed the potatoes using a wooden pallet (again, I have no idea why my housemates have one) and they turned out surprisingly creamy. Of course, adding warm butter and hot milk certainly helped with the texture.
I had to struggle to finish dinner as I overestimated the portion. At least it was better than struggling to finish a plain Neapolitan pasta.
This appeared on my blog’s dashboard yesterday. That person who was searching for Making Live Mice Explosives For Dummies must be severely disappointed upon finding that my blog does not contain any manual for explosives.
When I saw that search term, this image came to mind:
How I Learned to Hate the Bomb Again.
They are fast, small, and able to reproduce rapidly. Millions of mice would make a deadly explosive force.
We’re screwed.
DISCLAIMER: I do not condone any attempts to turn any animals into suicide bombers. The fact that humans are doing this to our own species is already fucked up.
I have two pet rats. I got them about two months ago from a pet shop.
Why rats?
That was my Dad’s question when I told him I was going to get rats.
I got rats for a couple of reasons:
I live in an apartment. Dogs and cats are out of the questions. Besides, I dislike cats.
Dogs and cats are expensive.
I hate hamsters. Some of these tiny fuckers are aggressive.
Chinchilla are expensive pets. They are expensive to maintain since they come from the Andes and require a cool room (i.e. 24 hours air-conditioned room).
One of my housemate dislikes guinea pigs.
The squirrels at the parks are rather hard to capture.
Mice are too small. I’m afraid of crushing them in my big hands and they are constantly jumpy and uptight.
Going through my list of requirements, rats were perfect. They’re clean (they’re compulsive groomers), intelligent, don’t make too much noise, can be kept in a cage, big enough to be handled and best of all, easy to feed. Rats are omnivores like humans and eat damn near almost everything and anything, including chocolates. That’s right, chocolates. Kryptonite to dogs, solar power to rats (but not too much, best in small doses).
Most people know that rats eat anything or how else would rats be such fantastic chefs? Like this guy:
It’s not advisable to piss off the chef. (Taken from Cookie In Hand).
But rats are nasty, dirty little critters! Remy might be an exception because he was a genius (being a rat makes him much more incredible), a supertaster and spent 10,000 hours slaving away at the stove to create haute French cuisine. But other rats? No way.
Well, yes way. Rats are naturally neat creatures.
But Zareth, rats live in sewers, underground train tunnels and cargo ships and sometimes they come out from toilet bowls!
True that, but those are wild rats. They live in the wild and therefore, are subjected to the environment.
But rats carry fleas and have rabies!
Erm… dogs can get fleas and rabies too.
The point is, pet rats live in the house. Your house is clean, right? You do clean it, right? Unless you’re a pack rat, then… you need to see a psychiatrist.
Furthermore, rats are fucking adorable:
Two lazy rats.
Look at those two big fluffballs. Women love them. Seriously, most of my housemates’ friends find them cute though there are some that are afraid of rats. But they do attract a lot of female attention.
Meet Bentley and Pan (short for Pantalaimon). They are litter brothers and are about seven to eight months old. Rats are social animals and live in groups so it’s best to get two rats minimum. If you get one rat, you’re just torturing the poor fellow. So don’t get one rat, get two, minimum. Two rats will not be any more expensive and two rats provide much more fun.
The downside about rats is that their maximum lifespan is 3 years although there are some rats that lived up to six years. But all animals do get sick and rats are no exception.
You see, Bentley have been suffering from respiratory infection since I got him. At first, I thought it was something minor (first-time rat owner) and attributed it to the stress of moving into a new place. Besides, Pan was sneezing slightly too.
Two weeks passed. Pan was doing great but Bentley sneezing got worse. Due to rat’s high metabolism rate, it was easy for rats to develop secondary infections rapidly, so at the advice of my housemate, I booked an appointment with the vet. I was busy with exams and essays at that time, so my housemate, being free, brought my rats to the vet and since the rats were under my name, she decided to pretend to be me.
I asked her why couldn’t she give her real name.
“It’ll be too confusing and complicated.”
“Complicated? But you just have to say that you’re my housemate. They’re going to be more confused the next time I go back there!”
“I didn’t want to. Besides, I know enough about you to pretend to be you.”
And scarily enough, she does. Now the vet sends me mails to my address under Miss Zareth Lim.
Fuck.
That aside, the vet put both Bentley and Pan on a two weeks antibiotic course. Feeding them was pretty easy, all I did was to mix the antibiotics with strawberry yogurt on a spoon and give it to them. They both lick it like it’s the last strawberry yogurt in the universe.
Their infections cleared up and both seem well. In fact, Pan gained weight.
But a week or so, Bentley began sneezing again. At first, I attributed it to the weather since Sydney was going through a crazy phrase. Sunny one moment, thunderstorm the next.
But then I realized it was the weather because Pan was doing fine. Bentley was sneezing with increasing frequency and his breathing sounded congested, not a very good sign.
So I brought Bentley to the vet, along with Pan since I was concerned that Bentley might have infected him.
True enough, the vet looked confused.
“Did you come the other time?”
“Well, that was actually my housemate.”
“Ah, okay.”
Fuck, now he thinks my housemate is the owner.
Anyway, Pan was fine. Bentley had to go back onto antibiotics again. This time, the vet upped the dosage and increased the duration to three weeks.
So I left the vet, feeling relieved (that Pan was fine and Bentley wasn’t going to die anytime soon). Oh, and I forgot to pay the vet and collect the antibiotics but that’s another story.
I did the same method as before. Mixed the antibiotics with strawberry yogurt and fed it to Bentley.
But this time, he didn’t want it. He did take a few licks before running away. This was normal, sometimes he get distracted by a smell or sound and would go off exploring. All I had to do was to put the spoon in his face and he would go right back to licking the yogurt.
But not this time. He took another sniff, then turned tail, as if he was offended by what I was feeding him.
I didn’t think much about it and just thought it was one of those days where he had no appetite.
But the same thing happened over next few days and I knew it wasn’t his appetite because he was still gobbling up his dinner and when I gave with strawberry yogurt without the medicine, he ate it.
So the medicine was the culprit or more specifically, one medicine: Baytril.
You see, Bentley has two antibiotics: Baytril and Doxycycline. Baytril is the primary antibiotic used to treat his respiratory infection while Doxy is the secondary one used to treat and prevent secondary infections.
Baytril is a clear, sticky liquid. It’s also one of the most bitter-tasting medicines ever. I know, I tried it and almost gagged. Imagine the fruit bitter gourd (or bitter melon). In Chinese culture, this bitter fruit is used in herbal medicine to improve health and stimulate digestion. My mom used to make me bitter gourd soup and forced me to drink it. Now imagine that bitter soup, but distilled to extract every drop of bitterness. That’s how Baytril taste like.
If you don’t know what bitter gourd is, then imagine a horrible, piss-tasting beer. Now multiple the bitterness by a million. There you go. Guess which one the vet upped the dosage. That’s right, Baytril.
One drop of Baytril was enough to send me gagging. Imagine how bitter this is for the rat.
On the other hand, Doxy is a sticky brown paste and it tastes fine. To some people, it tastes like raspberries. For me, it tastes like chocolate cream with a hint of hazelnut. Why does Doxy tastes okay? Because it’s used to treat humans. So it sure as hell better taste fine.
No I’m serious, here’s the wiki showing the uses of Doxy.
Now that I identified the problem, I decided to use strawberry jam instead of yogurt. It worked at first, but a day or two later, Bentley caught onto my trick and outright refused to have anything to do with the jam.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
So I did this:
Use spoon to extract a tiny dollop of jam.
Use empty syringe to extract 0.1ml of Baytril from bottle.
Squeeze Baytril onto spoon with jam.
Squeeze 0.01ml of Doxy onto spoon with jam and Baytril.
You’ll get this:
It’s a spoon, not a sperm with four tails.
Now, using the empty syringe from before, mix everything up on the spoon.
Extract mixture from spoon using syringe.
Syringe with the mixture
That’s right, I’m going to force feed Bentley. I did it a few times to Pan and Bentley when they first started out on antibiotics. But it was a highly distressing time for both rats and I. The rats hated having something being forced down their mouths and I kept getting my arms shredded by their claws during their attempts to escape. So I stuck to spoon-feeding them their meds.
But with the increased dosage of Baytril, spoon-feeding was not working anymore. Furthermore, Bentley was still sneezing and I needed to get the meds into him at all course. This was the only option left.
So yesterday morning, I prepared the meds, went to the cage and woke Bentley up. Now I had a grumpy rat to deal with.
I sat down on the coffee table in the living room, syringe in my right hand and Bentley in my left.
“Good boy. Are you a good boy, Bentley?” I spoke to him in a soothing voice as I stroke his head. Bentley was on my lap grooming.
I shifted, making myself comfortable. By now, Bentley was scampering off my lap and sniffing around the coffee table.
I scooped my Bentley with my left index finger hooked gently behind his neck. Bending forward so that Bentley’s back was against my chest, I trapped him in a warm cocoon of human flesh and synthetic cloth.
Bentley wasn’t happy and began struggling. With my face inches from his, I stuck the syringe into the corner of his mouth and squirted a small amount. The mixture didn’t go in completely, some of it was stuck to the corner of his mouth.
Bentley managed to free his front paws and pushed the syringe away. At the same time, he wiggled out from my hand and jumped down to the coffee table.
Fuck, there was still a lot of mixture in the syringe. I needed to stick the syringe deeper into his mouth.
Picking Bentley up, I repeated the procedure again, but this time, I tried to move the syringe deeper into this mouth. It didn’t work. He refused to open his mouth and another small amount was stuck to his nose. Bentley was clawing my left arm so brutally that red welts rose.
Damn, people will be thinking I’m a depressed person with suicidal tendencies.
I watched Bentley as he stood on the coffee table, licking the jam off his face. When he was done, I scooped him up again while talking to him in a soothing voice.
I stuck the syringe further in. This time, it worked. Bentley opened his mouth and swallowed as I released the mixture down his throat. All was going well, Bentley was eating his meds and the mixture was diminishing slowly.
Then the smell hit me.
I looked up and sniffed around. It smelled like someone ate broccoli for one week before releasing a massive dump in the toilet bowl. But I was alone. Both my housemates were back in Singapore. Maybe there was a ghost taking a dump in my toilet.
But the smell got stronger and it seemed to be coming from my lap. What the… did I somehow unconsciously relax my sphincter muscles?
I took out the syringe from Bentley’s mouth and moved my arms. Bentley scampered out of my hand and landed on my lap.
My shit-filled lap to be exact.
I didn’t move for ten seconds. I just stared at my lap as Bentley proceeded to have an explosive diarrhea all over me. Shit was on my t-shirt, my shorts, my legs, my arms and even on Bentley as he ran around trying to look for an escape.
More shit came out as Bentley ran around. Great, now there’s shit on the coffee table.
In hindsight, Bentley was probably so stressed out by having a syringe stuck in his mouth that he lost control of his bowels. You would too if a Godzilla picked you up and stuck a syringe down your throat.
But at that time, I was pissed off. Really, really pissed off. I had scratches on my arm and there was shit everywhere. There was still some mixture left in the syringe, so I grabbed Bentley, shoved the syringe in his mouth and squirted the rest of the mixture down his throat.
“Finish your medicine, you little shit!”
It was not my finest moment.
After it was done, I left Bentley on the coffee table while I waddled over to the toilet to clean up. The stench was overwhelming. Once I managed to get rid of the shit on me, I went over to clean the coffee table before giving Bentley a quick bath. Bentley hated baths and I got more scratches on my arms again but thankfully he didn’t shit. I guess he must have completely emptied his bowels on me while having his medicine.
The day passed and I gave Bentley the next round of antibiotics at night. He did struggle but it was a marked improvement from the morning routine.
I did feel a bit guilty about the morning incident, so I treated him and Pan to some chocolates and hand wrestled with them on the couch.
And how did Bentley thank me for the chocolates?
By sticking his snout into my nostrils.
P.S. Rats can swim up toilet bowls. But only under certain conditions.
Birthday Boy, another guy and I were having this conversation on beer, university life and life in general.
But more specifically on beer.
Birthday Boy was talking about how the bar at his university has a deal with Grolsch Brewery since the brewery was in his university town. Birthday Boy said that when he was there, beer cost 0.70 euros and when he left, the price was raised 0.75 euros.
0.70 euros
0.70 euros
That’s about AUS$1.00 or S$1.20.
AUS$1.00 for a pint of beer!
It’s stuff like this that makes me want to fly to the Netherlands. Ironically, Birthday Boy is doing the exact opposite, he doesn’t want to go back.
Anyway, back to beer. As I was pulling my lower jaw from the floor, Birthday Boy was talking about how he drank the beer throughout his university life and how all the the university students kept buying round after round because it was so cheap. Then the conversation slowly moved onto the topic of girls.
Birthday Boy: “The thing about having cheap beer is that the girls drink a lot too. And the more they drink, they become more…” (stretches out his hands across his body).
I saw his gesture and nodded knowingly. “Ah, they become more open.”
Birthday Boy: (Grimaces) “Well… I don’t actually mean that. They become more….” (stretches out his hands further).
At this point, I was wondering what exactly did he meant. Then, everything fell into place. “Oh… you mean… damn… the calories….”
Birthday Boy: “Yeah.”
No wonder the poor guy wants to escape the Netherlands.
My cousin gave birth to her first child two nights ago. Congrats to both parents and child! Looking forward to see my first cousin once removed in person.
I realized now that I’m sort of a distant uncle. Wow, this feels weird, and it makes me feel older too. And every time when I feel older, I get nostalgic and start thinking about those days when I was a kid.
Talking about those kiddy days, I was browsing Reddit (a HIGHLY ADDICTIVE news aggregator site that I frequent almost 24/7) when I came across a thread submitted by a redditor. He posted a thread talking about this old game called Rodent’s Revenge. What’s that, you ask. Well, just see the picture below:
I used to play that game Every. Single. Time. I remember once when I was playing this game and my Dad passed by and saw me playing it. He watched for a while before asking me what exactly was I playing:
Dad: “What are you playing?”
7-year-old Me: “A mouse killing cats.”
Dad: “So… how do you do that?”
7-year-old Me: “You push the blocks around to form a square around the cats to trap them and then you push some more until they become cheese then you push again and you get the cheese!”
Now that I think about it, my explanation sounded a bit… odd. But still, it was an awesome, awesome game. My brother and I killed hours just by sitting in front of it and figuring how to kill the cats. The game looks deceptively simple but as you go to the next level, it gets harder and more complicated and you need to use more brainpower to play.
So when I saw this game again, I went to the link and downloaded the game and started reliving the old days. My housemate saw me playing it and I had the same conversation with her as I did with my Dad.
Here’s the wiki linkexplaining the game and for those who remembers the game, here’s thelinkto download the game.
Playing this game triggered some memories and I started reminiscing about the old PC games I used to play. So with the help of Google and Reddit, I hunted down those games. Below are a list of my favourite old PC games:
Essentially a puzzle game, the aim of the game is to collect chips and advance to the next level.Wikipediadescribes it better than I do. Another game where my brother and I spent hours and hours on it.
I like the boots in the game too. The boots are some cool stuff. Fire Boots, Sticky Boots, Ice Boots. Yep, cool shit, man.
Anyone born in the 80s or early 90s has got to play this game before. I mean, come on, this game is classic. You might have played a few of its many variations and it was available on Gameboy too (I know, I have the Gameboy version).
My brother and I were obsessed with this game for three reasons. 1) It kicked ass. 2) It seriously, seriously kicked ass. 3) When we discovered there were a two players option, its ass-kicking ability increased exponentially.
Besides that, my brother and I found out that we could actually make a Lode Runner game from scratch. All we needed to do was to use the materials provided (something like the Sims but way better in ass-kicking capabilities) and build a level ground up. We would plant golds and weapons for our gold hunters to collect, crazy monks to provide some comic relief and challenges and we would also build some incredible looking mazes. When we were really bored, we would create multiple levels with increasing difficulty. I won’t say that playing this game taught us game design and computer programming but shit, at least we learned something new.
One of our favourite past-time was to create a level filled with bombs. Basically we would plant bombs EVERYWHERE. The thing about Lode Runner is that when you ignite a bomb and it explodes, other bombs in its near explosive vicinity will be ignited and explode too, so thus creating a chain reaction. So basing our experience on that, we’ll create a bomb-infested level and start the bomb chain-reaction. Our aim was to see who survive the holocaust. Of course, we made it more fun by putting in the crazy monks and random booby traps and weapons (like the dizzy gas).
Another time-killer. The aim of the game is the contain the balls in very small space and cover up at least 75% of the space. Wikipediaexplains it better.
My brother and I loved this game. I get a sense of adrenaline rush when I see the green goo slowly slicking out and I DON’T HAVE THE RIGHT PIPE!!!!! WHERE IS MY PIPE? WHERE IS MY PIPE??
Although not one of my best favourites (was never the little Engineer), I enjoyed this game cause I get to build stupid and incredible stuffs, as long as it still complete the objective of the game. I can’t remember the objective of the game, I think it was to move a basketball.
This game was THE BEST! (Capitalized, highlighted bold, italics, exclamation mark). Our very first immersive game, my brother and I spent literally hours on the computer to the point where we do marathon gaming from Friday evening to Sunday morning (stopping for meals, baths, sleep and all-the-things-little-kids-have-to-do-because-of-parents).
Our parents didn’t mind us playing this game because, seriously, this game required you to THINK. You had to find the clues, use them and try to finish the story. The fact that every action you do have some sort of consequences on the plot also intrigued my brother and I. While we were free to explore the amazing fantasy world of King’s Quest VI (sort of), we were also driven to finish the game and see the end of the story.
The thing is that, it took us 7 years.
Yep, 7 years to finish the damn game. We started when we were around 7 or 8. And we didn’t finish it till we were 14. There were reasons why we took so long.
First, the game was complex. Well, sort of. Even with the guidebook that came with the CD-ROM, we still could not crack some of the riddles. Furthermore, the guidebook doesn’t tell everything but rather, provide hints and useful information.
Second, short attention span (kids).
Third, we were young and probably didn’t really know exactly how we were suppose to play the game. And no, our parents did not help us. They are not interested in computer games.
So for 7 long years, we tried umpteen times doing the same thing: get stuck in the middle of the game and end up restarting the game just to try some ‘theories’ of ours and see if we could complete the game and the story.
It didn’t work.
In the end, we gave up and there was a 2 year long hiatus (and also partly because we got sidetracked by Half-Life and Half-Life: Opposing Force, Civilization, Red Alert 2: Yuri’s Revenge and Age of the Empires 2).
One day, I chance upon the King’s Quest CD and thought to myself: “I got to finish the game!” So I went onto the Internet, did a search for a King’s Quest VI walkthrough, printed it out, loaded the game and…. finished it within 3 hours.
Well, fuck, I felt incredibly relieved and stupid at the same time. My brother was also shell-shocked, we spent 7 years of our life figuring how to crack the game and we finally finished it in 3 hours. Okay, so we cheated, but what the hell can you do when you slave 7 years on something that was not showing any results?
But would I do it again? You bet I would. This game fucking rocks.
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