escapades of the elusive kat

Was my bestie's birthday last week. The usual trio of us went out for dinner. This friend, C, is the youngest of the group. So last year, she had her sister write on the cake message plate that I was "Noch Nicht Vierzig" because before my birthday last year, my dad was talking on Skype with his brother and said I was going to have my 40th birthday. I understood that much and retorted with that haha. She heard me and wrote that on the message plate.

This year, they didn't do anything funny with the message plate for me, but I had some fun with her. The cake shop I ordered the cake from did not do Japanese writing (I thought they had a Japanese chef though?) so again I had to ask this friend's sister to write the message plate. アラフォー組にようこそ "Welcome to the around-40 group" LOL her reply was, if it's "around 40" then we should have gotten that message at our 37th birthdays.


The white buns on the side is a type of typical Chinese birthday buns 壽桃包 Longetivity Peach Buns, which, incidentally, I've always just simply called them 壽包 "Longetivity Buns" thinking that this was "for short" but I later found out it's two absolutely different things. 壽桃包 Longetivity Peach Buns are like... birthday cakes (birthday buns), shaped like a peach, and inside it's usually lotus paste (think moon cakes) but some restaurants may make red bean or peanut or sesame filling. Some people make fun that it looks like a baby butt and they will try to squeeze the past stuffing out from the crease and then say "look it's pooping"... crass jokes abound in all cultures!

壽包 Longetivity  Buns on the other hand, are served during funerals or like, apparently. It's usually just a round bun with the word 福 Blessing or good fortune (for the afterlife I suppose).


So here we are all アラフォー here LOL.


I saw this genius piece of philosopy and have decided I'll try to adopt it.

"It's none of my business."
Can solve 50% of the world's problems.
The remaining 50% though,
It's none of your business.


I happened to snap a photo of the rare combination of Menina the dachshund mix with Harley the whitey.

My family, or in my home, it's very rare that we host dinners. Yes, we host the yearly Christmas thing for the family, but friends and family coming over? Not really.

Well, for some weird reason, we are hosting dinner tonight for 2 of my friends. We went to a Portuguese restaurant a few weeks ago and ordered Portugese Baked Duck Rice, and it was awful. So my friends, jokingly, asked if my Dad would cook his Duck rice for them.

Spoke to my Dad and voila, we are hosting dinner.

I thought it would be a casual affair, no frills. But heck, my Mom is going on overdrive. No wonder we rarely host dinners.

Cleaning. The apartment has to be spotlessly clean. And then the plates and chinaware, we need a full set of 6. OMG, the nice one we only have 4! Look in the cupboards to find a complete set of 6!

Dad is going to pair the Portuguese Duck Rice with an Austrian Pancake Beef-stock Soup (Frittatensuppe). And oh no, none of the bowls we have, have 6 pieces.

Then dessert. Mom is worrying about dessert. I said I can just ask one of the girls to bring one of her cakes (the one with a cake shop just down the street by us) and Mom flipped, saying I invited them for dinner, why am I asking them to bring dessert. *rolls eyes* fine. I really was hoping for this to be a casual thing.

Dessert will be... McDonald's soft ice cream with Styrian (Austria) Pumpkin Seed Oil and a piece of brownie crunchie (which I will go pick up later today). But then Mom is screaming again as we do not have enough ice cream bowls of the same set.

Dad, laughing, says we have enough crystal dessert bowls though, and Mom flips again saying THOSE ARE CRYSTAL!

I don't know. I kind of am regretting it LOL.

Enticing preparation photo..... yum yum!

It's the last day of the Lunar Year today. As I've mentioned, most companies, if they can afford it, will just let their staff leave either earlier, or even just give a half day off.

This is when people will say 收爐！Literally, it means to extinguish the furnace. It means to close up/pack up for the holidays (imagine a factory has to close up and so extinguishes the furnace), as to the Chinese, the Chinese New Year is a big thing and they'd usually get a week to 10 days of holidays (or even more), and go back home to visit family. Here in Macau, officially we get 3 days of public holidays (the first 3 days). However, this year the government advises people not to travel back to China (or anywhere). I heard one of the big shopping malls actually forbids their staff to leave Macau. How they intend to track that, is anyone's guess.

My friend J is coming all over from her working location (far far away, almost from Coloane Island) to meet me for lunch. I guess she's 20% trying to make up for a booboo she did LOL.

I mentioned about having plans to go to a Vegan buffet the other day? So, it's become a no-go. What happened was, after J asked me and a couple other friends, I was the only one to answer her. She said OK, so I thought she would make appropriate arrangements for that. I didn't hear from her since. Then, I booked myself to get the vaccine and sort of forgot the dinner appointment, I booked it for the same day. So when I input the vaccine booking into my calendar and saw my entry for the dinner, I asked her if it's all confirmed. Coz, if dinner is confirmed, I might push up the vaccine time, as I later find out, after you take the vaccine, you are required to sit at the waiting area for half an hour to see if you get any adverse reaction.

Actually I have to applaud myself to ask her if it's confirmed or not, as... I do know her pretty well. (Read: it's not uncommon that she would stand anyone up, LOL!)

Her excuse this time was, it was a web-promotion, and the website asked for her MPay (an electronic payment platform we have) payment right when she wanted to book it. She was worried it was a scam, and didn't proceed. And didn't inform me about it either. You know, I don't really mind her standing me up (it's sort of half expected) and plans falling apart because of her (not an uncommon thing), but I would appreciate being told about it? She's also somewhat of a lazy texter, she would use the least words (typing) required and sometimes just leave questions unanswered.

The one lazy texting that gets me the most is "29". I don't recall exactly when, but one time I was re-confirming some arrangements, so I asked something like "so when are you going to do it?" It was the 26th or 27th, when I asked on that day, and she answered "29". So I was assuming it meant a couple days later. Then later she calls and asks why I'm not there. So I answered, you said Twenty-Ninth (29). She got miffed and said "I said To-Night (forced similar pronunciation to two-nine with a Cantonese tone)". WTF. I was so mad. But that was the past. I've adopted some Buddhism/Gung-ho mentality and will just go with the flow with this friend. No use getting riled up.

This turned out to be a rant, but she is a friend LOL.

Anyway, the plan for lunch is to go to a new(ish) restaurant, I heard it's opened by a Taiwanese guy, but selling Japanese Unadon (Unagi-don, or Japanese eel on rice). So, I'm going to check it out. I love a good Unadon and since it's impossible to go to Japan now, I'll try this and see if it's any good! (It's still 11:00am here so I'm not posting this at the end of the day) (And since this means the lunch didn't happen yet, it also means that J can certainly stand me up anytime between now and 1pm.) (But I've decided that even if she does cancel on me, I can just go there anyway, coz, it's just along the way going home.)

I made a quick trip to Hong Kong of Saturday just to visit the Book Fair (something I do every year), however, due to my parents being out in Europe, I can't spend the whole day in Hong Kong. So I tend to go really early in the morning and then have to come back on an early ferry.

This year, my pals J and R joined me.

This year, I didn't buy much :-/

But what I got for myself, it's hilarious. So I got myself this Cantonese, explained book. It's even got pictures!


This explains some common idioms in Cantonese that would otherwise make no sense (idioms, of course), if you translate it through Google translate. I thought this was a good book to have handy. It's really fun to read this. I LOLed already so much.

Then I got another book, but not for myself. I remember seeig on Facebook about a new "girls' book" but not about pricesses, instead about power figures and such. I saw this book there and posted on Facebook saying I found it. I had one friend immediately ask for it (she just had a daughter some months ago). However, when I came back to Macau, and late into the evening, another friend asked for it too. I hope there will be no hard feelings, but I only bought one book. Both friends are not in my super-closed knit group of friends. Anyway, I promised the second friend to keep a lookout for this book around town here. It's just that, it's really hard to find specific books in Macau.


Apart from that, we didn't do much in Hong Kong. We had to hurry back due to... my friends buying a lot of books at the Book Fair and it was getting heavy for them, and I had 4.30pm tickets to get back. So all other plans to go elsewhere for some other shopping, cancelled. We had a glorious lunch, then did some supermarket shopping. Yeah. I got myself some rocket lettuce and baby spinach. In Hong Kong. Extravagant? You don't find that kind of stuff in Macau.