A new direction for my blog?

Suggestions for new names for my blog are very welcome! I feel that the name I have right now isn't completely representative of my whole blog since not even the majority of my blog posts focus on food. For example there are blog posts about bedtime stories, video game reviews, and cryptozoology. David suggested the name "Katrina Wong's All-Purpose Blog" but I don't want my blog to sound like a hardware store.

I have toyed with the idea of taking this blog in the direction of... fashion! Okay, so I don't work in anything to do with fashion (at the moment I work in a software company, you don't get much further away from the fashion industry as that!) and most of the clothes I buy are on sale (because I'm Azn, yo... and also a student). BUT maybe that's the whole point! Maybe I can introduce the world to the joys of buying cheap clothes, and haggling to the death in countries that permit such things.

As a side note: tips for people who are considering going to Malaysia for the wonderfully cheap clothing...

• Always aim to pay no more 50% of what the vendor asks for
• Buying in bulk seems to work pretty well, in terms of reducing the price for ya. For this reason I have lots of dresses that are the same but in different colours.
• If you can get away with it (i.e. if you appear Asian, even the tiniest bit so), ham up the accent to seem more like a local, you will get much better prices than you would if they knew that you were a tourist from a relatively wealthy Western country
• Lots of clothes are sold in outdoor markets, which don't have fitting rooms, so heaps of the dresses are one-size-fits-all! Amaze! It's just a matter of cleverly inserting elastic into things, really.

Ahh, another digression!

I've been surfing the net and browsing all manner of fashion blogs for inspiration, but one thing that they all seem to share is a penchant for expensive fashion (I'm talking paying more than AUD$20 for a dress, so really, I mean "pretty affordable fashion but expensive by my cheap-ass standards"). But you don't HAVE to spend $20 on a dress! There are lots of good ones out there for $10! Perhaps I buy the occasional dress at full price for $24.95, but that's when I *really* can't wait until it's on sale. (Seriously I am so cheap that I didn't even buy a new dress for my 21st, instead I recycled the one I wore to my 19th, and hoped nobody would remember).

Edit: I have a guilty confession to make... I actually bought a dress for $29.50 yesterday. I was in Melbourne and took the opportunity to indulge in some proper shopping. Also, everything happened to be on sale anyway and I got this particular dress at 50% off, reduced from $59! So it was a bargain.

However, as much as I would like to start a fashion blog, I also have several hurdles to overcome:

• My wardrobe isn't the *most* interesting or stylish you'll ever see... Basically it's just a collection of dresses. I don't wear trousers because I'm a shorty and can never find trousers that I won't trip over in, and I don't seem to feel the cold as much as the average person does, so there isn't even much diversity in my wardrobe in terms of seasonal clothing. My winter wardrobe is essentially my summer wardrobe, with the addition of cardigans and tights.
• I don't have a whole bunch of fancy looking jewellery or accessories to complement my clothes. Last year we were the victims of an unfortunate incident of theft whereby my jewellery box got stolen. But I found the silver lining! Now I am finally able to do that thing that all the magazines say, that's it's best to have a small collection of classic, timeless pieces that will go with everything. So my jewellery collection is small but pretty classic and timeless, and I am trying to restrain myself from getting too many pieces of costume-type jewellery that isn't as versatile.
• I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of taking photos of myself and posting them up all over the world wide web for all the world to see. There are creepy people out there, including people who get creepy when the whole concept of photos-of-an-Asian-girl is involved.
• Even if I did get more comfortable with the idea of my photos on the web, I don't have a camera so as to be able to take said photos.
• Even if I did have a camera, I don't know how to do that thing where you get photos off the camera and on to the computer. Something to do with USB cables? Or Bluetooth? Though I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who do know how to do this, who wouldn't mind explaining the process to me.

Anyway maybe these are all excuses... maybe the world needs a fashion blog about affordable clothes that your everyday-Jane type of person can wear, as opposed to clothes that only uber-stylish people wear.

If anyone has any suggestions for a new name or direction for this blog please comment and let me know :)

GIRL V. FOOD

There is a show on TLC which I love (I only just discovered today that TLC was actually called "Travel Channel", to me it had always been TLC... hey, what's the L for? Is it the L in "Travel"? Weird).

Anyway, this show that I love is called... MAN V. FOOD!!! Check out the website here: http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Man_V_Food

If you are unfamiliar with the premise of the show, it's pretty basic: some guy travels around the US and participates in eating challenges, you know those ones that restaurants have, where, if you win, you get your photo on the Wall of Fame. The challenges might be volume challenges (e.g. eat 4kg of pancakes) or heat challenges (e.g. eating ghost chillies and other incredibly spicy things).

Anyway now I've decided that I want to have my own show, which pretty much follows this exact same premise, except I'm a girl, and I'll probably confine my travels to Australia. The show will (unimaginatively) be called... GIRL V. FOOD!!!

I've already begun some basic training for my new show, which I am not going to pitch to TV stations until I have everything down pat. For my volume challenge training, I ate a whole 4kg watermelon, but could only really finish half of it, so I re-scaled the challenge down to eating a whole half-watermelon. You see, with volume challenges you might think that it's, well, the volume of food that will getcha. You'd be wrong! What I couldn't stand when I did my challenge was the fact that every single mouthful tasted exactly the same and there was no variety at all! After eating about a quarter of the watermelon I felt like I was going into sugar shock from all the sweetness, so I had to cut it with some salty popcorn.

Anyway, my next volume challenge training session will involve me eating a whole butternut pumpkin... I'll update my blog when I've accomplished this!

For my heat challenge training, I ate a whole birds eye chilli (chopped up and with other foods), and a whole larger chilli (that isn't so hot) just by itself! Just bit into it like it was an apple! My goal is to work my way up, chilli by chilli, until one day I can eat like 10 birds eye chillies in one meal, THEN will I pitch my show.

A lot of people who have noticed that, as part of my training, I'm trying to eat a chilli with like every single meal, have said "but how can you enjoy the food when your mouth is totally burning?" My answer is... "It's not about enjoying the food! It's about beating the challenge and proving that I'm a man!! (Because it's the 21st century, come on, girls can assert their masculinity these days too!)"

On being Asian and eating alone

I'm Chinese-Malaysian, which means that for as long as I can remember, the words "eating" and "socialising" have been pretty much synonymous. You're considered to be very strange indeed if you do one without doing the other! None of this "we'll meet up for a measly coffee" type thing that Western people tend to be into, no, Asian friends will meet at a restaurant to partake in a banquet, then spend 15 minutes arguing loudly about who gets to pay the bill (I've seen many of these fights during my childhood and they're pretty funny in a 'they-would-be-more-funny-if-I-wasn't-actually-sitting-on-the-same-table-as-these-people' kind of way).

Anyway, today (after my exam finished and I had a couple of hours to kill by myself at a shopping centre before my partner finished work) I realised that I had to have lunch. So I spent a few minutes indulging myself in my favourite past-time, which is imagining all the lovely things I would eat (much more fun than actually eating those things, because my physical stomach has a limit, but my mental stomach is bottomless!)

I could go for sushi? Or maybe Indian? Or eat at a fancy cafe? Or Noodle Hut? Or just get something cheap at the food court?

Then I realised that all this imagining was actually making me pretty sad. Because I'd be eating lovely things, sure, but I'd be eating them all alone, and I kept picturing myself as a lonesome figure at a table for one, just generally being lonely. But why shouldn't it be considered acceptable to eat alone? I gave a little thought to this then concluded; it's because eating is embarrassing, and when you're doing something embarrassing, you generally don't want to be the only one doing that embarrassing thing. And believe me, the way I eat is pretty embarrassing because it generally involves spilling a lot of food onto my clothes, and getting sauce all over my face and even sometimes in my hair.

But yes, in the end I ate alone. I finished Good Omens while nomming on a chicken wrap with spicy sauce, and it was generally an okay experience, except the wrap was pretty spicy indeed (once I ate a whole birds eye chilli, but that story doesn't belong here...). So I concluded that, contrary to popular belief and conventional wisdom and Asian sensibilities, it's cool to take up a whole table meant for four people with your little lonesome self.

Nintendogs review!

People who used to follow my blog back in 2009-2010 (I believe this is a grand total of three people, including my boyfriend, who only read my blog because I made him), would remember that I reviewed the Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts. (I would put in some cool hyperlink over the word "Scribblenauts" that would take you to the relevant blog post, but I'm frankly not tech-savvy enough for that kind of thing yet.)

Today I'm reviewing another Nintendo DS game... Nintendogs!

The version I have is "Labrador and Friends" and the breeds of puppy available include the Toy Poodle, Schnauzer, German Shepherd, Shiba Inu, Corgi, and some other breeds that I can't remember because I didn't find them particularly cute, at least not in pixelated version (in real life all puppies are cute). I've included an image of the game's cover to the right so you can have a look at other breeds available.

If you get lots of "trainer points" (for being nice to your puppy and remembering to feed it and take it on walks and enter it into competitions), the "kennel" will get in "new breeds of puppy". So far I have unlocked two new breeds, the Pug and the Shih Tzu. Both breeds are pretty cute.

I believe you can have a total of three puppies in your house at a time, and there is always the "Dog Hotel" you can send your puppies to if you find that they are too much to handle. See, Nintendogs operate in real-time, meaning that if you feed your puppy, turn off your DS, then don't play again until two days later, your puppy will be starving. This real-time aspect kind of turned me off at first; I had a bit of an "I don't have time to be playing this every day!" sort of attitude. But really, nothing too drastic happens if you leave your puppy alone for like months on end, as I have done. (It's not like the Tamagotchis we all had in primary school, which got banned from schools because if you left them alone for like six hours, they would die.)

The game advises you that if your puppy feels neglected they will run away, but this has not happened to me yet, so I suspect it's just an empty threat. Anyway the aforementioned "Dog Hotel" is a handy way of effectively 'freezing' your puppy's hunger and thirst statuses if you need to take a break from your DS for a long time.

I currently have three Nintendogs, and at the risk of sounding like a boring mother who won't talk about anything except her children, I'll give you a quick summary of my puppies:

• Henry is a tan coloured Shiba Inu (I actually want a Shiba Inu in real life!) who is very good at Agility Competitions, fairly good at Disc Competitions and pretty bad at Obedience Competitions because under all that agility he is actually a pretty naughty and hard to train puppy.
• Lucy is a white Toy Poodle who is pretty good at everything. She is also quite friendly.
• Batman is a black Pug who annoyed me from the very beginning because of his refusal to wear his ribbon as a bow tie. Ribbons are "Accessories" you can purchase to pimp up your puppy, and generally speaking, boy dogs wear their ribbons as a bow tie, and girl dogs wear their ribbons on their head. The whole point of purchasing Batman the pug was so that he could actually look like Batman the superhero (I had a vision that he would be entirely black, then wear this yellow bow tie, geddit?) But Batman the pug had other ideas in mind and preferred to wear his ribbons on his head. I have absolutely no problem with this subversion of puppy-gender roles, but, you know, he doesn't look like Batman the superhero.

None of my puppies are particularly good at Obedience because I find obedience training incredibly banal and boring because it's so repetitive! Even teaching the puppies their name is painful. Not to mention embarrassing, if you happen to be doing this in earshot of anyone.

Competing is the only real way of earning money in Nintendogs, which you need in order to buy puppy food, water, milk, treats, shampoo, brushes, and other puppy essentials. However if you're no good with the competitions there is another way to not-starve, and that is by taking your puppy on frequent walks (they can go on as many walks in a day as long as they take a 30 minute break between each one) and selling the items that puppy will find along the way. Preeeety cheap-ass.

Hmm, that's really all I have to say on Nintendogs, so I'll just end this game review with a bunch of random ratings of arbitrary salient points...

• "Gameplay" (not really sure what this means except perhaps the degree to which actually playing the game is fun and challenging) - 8/10
• "Visuals" - 7/10 (it's pretty pixelated and the competition commentators always look like Bill Gates)
• "Sound" - 5/10 (the music played in the competitions is pretty boring... until you get to the Championship level! Then it plays cowboy music. Other than that the constant yapping of the digitalised puppies gets a bit grating sometimes)
• "Plot" - 2/10 (there is no real plot to this game because it's meant to be a "slice of life" kind of storyline... just going through the daily motions of walking and feeding your puppy, bathing it, and entering it into competitions)
• "Replayability" (my gamer boyfriend tells me this refers to the ability to replay the game and still find it interesting after you've finished it the first time) - 10/10. Nintendogs does not really end because you can always start fresh with new puppies. Also, there are always new items and accessories to collect, and surprisingly, the other characters in the game have not yet run out of stock things to say to me when we meet whilst taking our respective puppies for walks.

In conclusion, Nintendogs is a very entertaining and even addictive game for anyone who likes basic gameplay and a proliferation of puppies. It's a tiny bit Tamagotchi but with the added bonus that your Nintendog cannot die. Highly recommend!

On allergies

Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. It has certainly been awhile since I've updated! I hope you have all had lovely New Year celebrations and are looking forward to 2011 as much as I am!

I have not been blogging for awhile, having mistakenly believed that my Blogger account had been inactivated because I signed up for it using my old work email address. However, something-or-other happened and it turns out that I can still use my blog! Perhaps my old self foresaw that one day I would leave my place of work and therefore not be able to use that email address anymore, and cleverly linked this blog to my personal address. Or perhaps the whole signing-up-for-this-blog-with-my-work-address memory was a false one and I'd used my personal email address all along. But I digress. Sorry to bore you with my computer-ineptitude!

The topic ripe for discussion today is allergies. Do you have any allergies? For the past 20 years of my life I had believed I was some kind of supergirl who had absolutely no allergies except for a slight intolerance to lactose (being Azn, yo). Allergies were just another thing I thought could happen to other people, but never to me, no! I am very thankful that I can eat peanuts and gluten and other things that I often take for granted but could make other people incredibly ill. (I do love cheese, but cheese, being a dairy food, does not love me back, stupid cheese, I hate you! No just kidding, srsly, I love cheese).

I think that if you are allergic or intolerant to something your body should automatically develop an aversion to it, but alas, that doesn't often seem to be the case. Life would be a tiny bit easier if I didn't love cheese so much. My partner's dog is allergic to chicken but loves to sneak a small piece. My father used to break out in hives every time he ate seafood but loved it anyway and kept eating it until the allergic reaction surfaced no more. But there are other allergies which actually worsen after repeated exposures; I've heard that allergies to bee stings get worse with each progressive one (and I am also very thankful that so far no bee has ever stung me).

Anyway in the short space of about a week I discovered that perhaps I have two allergies. Neither allergy has to do with foodstuffs, so that's good at least (I would hate to be allergic to blueberries, or tea!). I had always considered it normal for mosquito bites to flare up into huge blisters since that has always been my experience, but apparently that's not the case... Apparently mosquito bites are only supposed to be small lumps. Well, how about that. After having a lovely night in Leura last weekend, watching a professional production of Romeo and Juliet in the park at night, I emerged covered with mosquito bites which I suppose I deserved, having worn a dress and not bothered with mosquito repellent and all. And then it was suggested to me that perhaps I had an allergy. The things you learn.

On the same weekend as this mosquito attack, I somehow developed an inability to wear my earrings because my earlobe piercings were a bit painful and perhaps bleeding a little, despite the fact that I've had my ears pierced for about ten years now. They are in the habit of bleeding every now and again which I just considered normal, perhaps I wasn't disinfecting my earrings as carefully as I should be. But then my partner suggested to me that this was not normal and perhaps I was allergic to a certain metal in earrings? I recalled an incident from my childhood which involved my drinking from a can of Coke (I'm no longer in the habit of drinking soft drinks), and getting a rash all over my hand from where I was holding the Coke can. I recall that my father may have said something about having an allergy to aluminium.

But sometimes it's just easier to live in denial. Even though my ears are still painful and my mosquito bites still blistery, I'd still like to think of myself as allergy-free, at least until it's confirmed in a medical setting or something. And while there isn't much I can do about my love for cheese, perhaps I can express said love in a different way, for example, by participating in those races where you roll a wheel of cheese down a hill? That would probably cause fewer problems for me than if I actually ingested the cheese.

Anyway I will leave you all for today, with that final thought of cheese-wheel races.