Chinese New Year Goodies

Pineapple tarts, love letters, kueh bangkit, kueh lapis, kok chai, and all sort of cookies – these are the usual CNY goodies you buy to eat and serve your guests. Imagine eating these at every place you visit and then at home and at the office – enough is enough even though this is just a yearly affair.

I started to buy less and less of these goodies each year because I don’t want to end up having so much of them left. I remembered one year I have four different types of pineapple tarts and three different types of love letters – some were bought by me whilst the others were given to me. It is usual for relatives and friends to give each other these goodies. When you visit each other you see the same kind of goodies and chances are you won’t be eating them as you have them at home or you are expecting more of these at other places you will be visiting.

Two years ago I decided to serve my guests non-traditional Chinese New Year goodies instead. Now I serve them chocolates, cakes and ice cream.


This year I have baton marechaux, raspberry snowball, and varieties of chocolates. I had bought different ice creams the last two years. This year I made orange sorbet and served them.

It is a challenge to come up with very good, a bit not so common and appropriate cake to serve each year. Appropriate because you don’t want the cake to be too heavy as your guests probably already had a fair share of the usual goodies and may be expecting more at the next home.

Hopefully this will make visiting my place less of a routine and more of expectation.

Where to cut my hair?

Like most people, I prefer to go to my regular doctor, dentist, hairstylist and even grocer simply because they know my needs.

So when my regular hairstylist suffered a near-death incident, took almost half a year to recover and now decided to work on a free-lance basis operating from the late afternoon onwards, I had to find an alternative.

I decided to try those around my neighbourhood. Went into one salon and had a not bad haircut. And it only cost $12 (without wash and blow dry). More importantly I saved a lot of time – no need to travel to Orchard and stick to any appointed time. But unfortunately this salon stopped operating after my second haircut there. That meant I had to look for another salon. Fortunately, the new operator who took over the salon, opened within a week and the haircut was even better and cost only $8. This compared to the $22 to a high of $69, for just haircut, wash and blow dry, I had paid in Orchard area.

Now that I have so much less hair to cut, there is no need for layering and texturing and what-have-you, just a simple neat haircut will do. On my way home from work, I will pass by the salon. At that non-peak hour, if I see there is no one or just one person in the salon, I will drop in for my haircut. Really save a lot of time and convenience besides money.

The hairstylist recently asked me whether I wanted to colour my hair for the new lunar year. I don’t need to and furthermore I think I still have prejudice against neighbourhood salons not to entrust them with putting so much chemicals (must check what they are using) on whatever little hair that is left on me.

Now my mum goes there too.

Just hope there won’t be any change in operator or hairstylists.

Interesting Fact about February 2010

An interesting fact about February 2010 is that it has exactly:

4 Mondays,
4 Tuesdays,
4 Wednesdays,
4 Thursdays,
4 Fridays,
4 Saturdays, and
4 Sundays.

This happens only once every 11 years. The last time was in 2001 and the next will be in 2021.