Life @ NCP

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I made some muffins for people in the office, and some asked me for the recipe, so I thought as an ice breaker for a new post in this year (yes I have been really really slack) here it is.

Ingredients:

90g cream cheese
1.5 tblsp Baileys Irish Cream (yumm!)
1 egg
0.75 cup milk
0.33 cup water
50g butter, melted
100g chocolate, grated
1.5 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
0.5 tsp salt
3 tablsp cocoa
0.5 cup sugar

How to make the goodies:

1. Beat cream cheese until smooth, add Baileys and beat again
2. In separate bowl whisk egg, milk, water and butter, then add chocolate
3. Sift remaining dry ingredients into egg mixture and stir until just combined
4. One-third fill well-greased muffin pans with muffin mixture, make a hollow in the centre, and fill with 1 teaspoon cream cheese mixture
5. Top up to three-quarters full with remaining muffin mixture
6. Bake at 190 degrees C for 20 minutes

If you have loads of self-raising flour, you can use that instead. 1.5 cup of self-raising flour will take care of the salt and baking powder. Enjoy!

I would like to know how you go, so please leave a comment after you try it out thanks! 🙂

Birds or human – aren’t they similar?

I’ve recently just moved place. I used to live next to uni until last Friday, but the plan to go overseas next month means we (me, and two other housemates) would have to pay empty rent for a couple of months if we stayed on. Plus to our surprise, the rent for next year also went up by $140, that’s around 25% increase from the current rent! My theory is that because of the financial crisis, people couldn’t buy properties, and can only rent instead. This also goes with people who lost their estates recently. Where are they going? Well, that’s obvious.

We started the process around Sunday. We scheduled the removalist to come on Wednesday morning, thinking that we should be finished packing by then. The plan was to move the stuff to a rented garage. Cleaners were scheduled on Friday morning, and we left Thursday to be empty so that in case we have anything we need to do before we move completely i.e. got more stuff to move, we can still do it then. We’ve got mail redirection set, and so we should be set, were we?

No way! The week was filled with sleepless nights. Monday was the eye opener – decluttering wasn’t easy especially if you have a time frame of two days. My estimation of “I think we’ll finish in a day or less” was wrong, so wrong that everytime I opened an unexplored section of the wardrobe that I sighed in despair. I didn’t realise how much stuff I have accumulated in the mere period of 10 months. Probably I’m a horder, it runs in the genes it seems.

So yes, as expected, Tuesday night was a long night/morning, ended with a visit to McDonald’s at 6 am. The breakkie didn’t symbolise completion of packing, but just enough packing for the removalists to move the big things like sofa, beds, dining table, etc. The removalists came early at 7 pm, but instead of two bulky guys, we’ve got the opposite. Not too bad with handling the boxes, but after moving the mattress and the sofa bed, they were pretty much exhausted. The move took 4.5 hours which comes with a substantial price tag, but I guess there is no way we could’ve done it ourselves. We did some more cleaning and managed to produce more boxes by Thursday, so we move more stuff to the garage >.<

Friday morning we carried a table top and shoe racks to the garage via bus. Because the goods took a fair bit of space, I hit several people in the process but thankfully they all can do with some ‘sorries’. Cleaners came on time and we were too tired, all three of us sat down and dozed off on the corridor outside the apartment. Passerby would have found it weird, but we couldn’t care less. Not at that time anyway.

After we gathered some energy, we found chucking things out wasn’t an easy job either. Vinnies didn’t accept mattress and any electronics, therefore we have to carry it to the Salvos which was about a block away. The electronics were finally left on the side of the road in front of the apartment. This was all done using a Coles trolley which we pushed along from Randwick. It took a while to get the trolley from the supermarket to our place, but it was definitely worth the trouble.

I wondered about all those properties I’ve seen on inspection day. My apartment now looked like them. Bare with no personalities, no soul, like a head without face. The previous inhabitants must have gone through a lot of trouble to do the defacing. Amazed at the frequency of people moving in and out and how much suffering it might have caused them.

I left all windows ajar, I made sure no fire and no lights were on. I said goodbye to the place I used to call home. I shed some tears and I tried to move on. It was a nice place with lots of memories in it, four years to be exact (Minch has lived there all the way). I got the feeling again – the same feeling that I always get at the end of the year, just that this time it’s a little too early. Feeling of my life’s changing again and the hopelessness to resist it. Do you get that? I wish I get better at it, and be a stronger marty. More change is coming as I will graduate at the end of this year.

Migration finished around 6 pm on Friday. I hope this doesn’t become an annual event. Now to sore back and muscle pain.

Yeh I know what ya think: the title is lame right? It’s on GMM: Google Maps Mobile ((was very shiny around Jan 2008))

For some reason it never occured to me to open google maps through my mobile when I was looking for direction until just recently. Probably since my luck was generally pretty good, I trusted it with the answer to where I should be going.

Well not anymore! I’ll be using this GMM from now on because it is so great! Not only that it presents you the map you need, it can also calculate the path from point A to point B. You can then go through each important point in the path such as intersection or roundabout, just like how a GPS would direct you to do. The interface is of course much simpler than a fully animated picture with a lady talking with soft, hushed voice, but nonetheless it satisfies me in terms of its ease-of-use.

If you want to have a look at a preview of it, this youtube video is not a bad place to start.

The world is full of people looking for spectacular happiness while they snub contentment. ~Doug Larson ****

I’ve been thinking about this word for a while. Just like how the universe wouldn’t get formed if even just one of the physics constant was a little bit different, it always makes me wonder what other life I can have if it didn’t turn up the way it did. Would I be happier now? would I be happier later? or is there even any difference?

Do you often wonder about this?

Happiness of course is whatever you want to define it as. To me … it is a state of which I am satisfied with myself. People keep on saying that happiness is a journey, not a state. But to me it is a state, so be it. I am talking about happiness that is more to just being content. It is not a state when you were happy when you eat your favorite ayam goreng, or when you get pooed by a bird (it’s a lucky sign according to the popular chinese belief), or when you manage to get a decent job. Once you are happy, you will be happy for a while because it is an accumulation of joyful events in your life. That kind of happy. I know I’m not being as clear, but my mind is currently clouded anyway.

It’s easy to define what was happiness in the prehistoric era. The challenges for those times were to avoid being eaten by other animals, and to feed the stomachs. Therefore the moment of living itself brought happiness to The Flintstones. Challenges correlated with happiness. Once culture and civilisation played a part in human’s life, suddenly filling our stomaches required us to get a job. So, we of course had to get a job. We did that, and then we were happy, again. A typical life of someone who lived 1000 years ago would be: born -> got a job -> (maybe procreated because that also made us happy :p) -> held the job for the lifetime -> died. Simple.

Happiness is a need for all of us. The prehistoric people were at the bottom of the pyramid, and Maslow said it is a normal progression to crave for more satisfaction in life when all the lower satisfactions have been reached. At the top of the pyramid, there are self-actualised people. Most of us fall into this category – people who are working toward fulfilling our potential, toward becoming all that we are capable of becoming. But here is the thing: what is it that each one of us are capable of becoming?

I am graduating this year. I have yet to come to terms with it. I won’t have ‘student’ as my occupation anymore very very soon. I won’t be able to pay concession fee anymore (damn), and there are few more tidbits that come with it. The end of uni opens up a big hole about what can I become? Decisions have to be made at the end of the day, regardless of how much I wonder what it would be like if I decide otherwise ((it reminds me of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost)). Ignorance is bliss and I wish I won’t spend more time thinking about it. Hobos sleeping on the road only worry about whether they can get food and a place to sleep for the night. Why the hell do I need to worry more?

Well I hope I will be able to find my happiness, sometime even in the faraway future, and I hope everyone who have to make similar decisions as what they are capable of will be, because thinking about it too much will make life less enjoyable.

ps. Gargh my last post was two months ago! &#@%#*! Work, recruitment and thesis are really stealing my time away…