of christmas and edible babies

Merry Christmas everyone! =)

Unfortunately christmas this year was a quiet event for me. We did have a lovely party yesterday evening though, hosted by our future Nigella Lawson aka. Irene!! *cue clapping from people* The starter was garlic bread with thick creamy mushroom soup, main course was turkey with roast potatoes, a side dish of ham and carrot&parsnips, and dessert was baked bananas with apricot puree and a topping of Viennetta. Yum! The food was excellent indeed.

Then I went over to Jeannette's for the faux-christmas countdown. Why faux? Because we were talking away too happily before we realised that it was past 12am! But nevermind. More food and drinks here, including the talented Chan Sing's alcohol mix. I had no idea what the drink was but it was the most delicious concoction tasting of fruit and custard and egg yolks! Yum again. And we welcomed Christmas in the most traditional way possible: watch a horror movie. And spent the rest of the night seeing monsters burst out of people's stomachs and people eating other people. Merry Christmas indeed, huh.

Fast forward to today.

I spent my morning in the dullest way possible, ie revising for my PP3 resit exam. How pathetic. But what needs to be done, has to be done. Then the bestie decided to make gingerbread men in the afternoon, so Sinwee and I became her assistants. And watched movies on her laptop along the way.

I'll be (trying to) sleep early tonight so I'll be able to wake up at 6am in time for the boxing day sales. Hope I can drag my sorry self out of bed tomorrow morning before the good stuff gets snapped up. I need to get myself a knitted hat for our cold cold London trip, and I'm hoping the headband I've been eyeing since forever is on sale tomorrow. Fingers crossed.

Merry christmas, indeed.

when people from the tropics meet the first snow of glasgow

....they scream, shout, take pictures and throw snowballs at each other!

me and xinyi looking excited over the big blob of snow, and the rain of snow!

I didn't realise it when the snow started falling. I was sitting comfortable in front of my laptop, going through my usual daily routine of trawling blogs and websites, when I heard friends' voices from below...sounding very excited indeed! And I threw open the window, and lo and behold! White snow billowing down from the heavens, and covering the ground. Yay!

in front of TCC...us excited people seeing snow for the first time.

brendan and I posing with the snow lol.

snow fight!

by the little river in front of SIPBS building

footsteps in the snow

The only downside of snow is that it complicates travelling and moving around, especially when it comes to flying. Many flights to and from London have been delayed, and even some Eurostar services have been stopped. Now I am a little worried that these will cause some hiccups to our upcoming London trip. Getting there probably won't be a problem as we will be taking the train, but I'm crossing my fingers that we will be able to fly back to Glasgow safely, and on time. Anyway I'll be packing some extra clothings just in case our holiday plans go awry.....but of course, hopefully not!

And of course, the awful weather. I really don't know exactly how much I should layer up so as to avoid becoming a human popsicle. A whole day out in a giant freezer isn't really a recipe for fun! Glasgow is still tolerable for now, but I'm not so sure about London. And I'm still debating on whether to stock up groceries and foodstuffs just in case Glasgow gets hit by an extraordinarily bad blizzard or covered in a foot of snow. Lets hope it doesn't.

xoxo

life is good. I'm not dead. Yet.

It's been exactly one and a half month since my last post.

I am officially a lousy and lazy blogger.

Life has been good those days my presence was missed. (yeah right!)

The weather in Glasgow has turned to be a gigantic natural freezer, in which putting anything in the COLD air will turn meat (ie. our fingers and toes and anything else exposed) into frozen meat, which is what you would expect when you put meat into YOUR freezer at home.

We're just starting our first winter, and so far the coldest we had was -3 degrees. On average the temperature here ranges from 3-8 degrees, for now. It was said that there would be snow on thursday (tomorrow!) so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. But Siobhan (my workshop buddy) said it had to get colder than this for snow to happen, so that may not be now. But snow in Glasgow is a relatively mild event for those who have pictures in their mind of fluffy white thick snow on the ground, so typical of movies. Apparently the average winter in Glasgow sees only a light dusting of snow on the ground, and the stuff doesn't stay around for long.

These are actually pictures of my campus taken in the autumn. I don't have any winter ones yet because there isn't any snow that will give the winter-ish look and the trees are not quite botak yet. But the weather is winter all right!

So, moving on to what I've been up to.

November was a busy month. We had our research introduction, pharm care presentation, as well as a Drug delivery test to fill our time. But those are boring stuff, I shall not tell you more.

Then we chipped in for Jane's birthday (a grand event, as you would expect) by making cupcakes!

100% handmade, mind you! We spent a whole afternoon labouring away at the intricate designs and copying (and failing, somewhat) the cupcake designs we found online. Alas there is only so much a bunch of cupcake beginners can do, huh.

The three in the middle are MY handiwork! Unfortunately one was proclaimed 'jiang chou de??' and another was said to be pimples on a mountain or something like that. Le sigh.

The colourful toppings were moulded from an icing mixed with food colourings. It was like playing with Playdoh, like the olden days of yonder. Though I never really was a fan of playdoh. But it was a great afternoon of moulding and shaping, and girly chit-chatting. It was a lot of fun, to say the least. In the end everyone was so proud and protective of THEIR cupcakes that it became sort of a competition to see which cupcake would become the birthday girl's favourite. (and this is where mine was said to be 'jiang chou de', sigh....=PPPP )

Just kidding, little J. You know I love you. =)

And then, the parents came!!!

They dropped by Glasgow for 3 days. Unfortunately their visit coincided with the worst weather ever, with angry torrents of pelting rain and gales of wind that will blow you off your feet if your body weight is under 40kg. (another reason to eat more, eh?)

the 2 ladies on the front left are headmistresses. the couple on the front right are my parents. hahaha.

Brought them to Lauders for a taste of the local food and beer, and they loved it! But they're not so crazy about the weather though.

Oh, and once they left Glasgow for Paris, the weather here turned all sunny and happy again. Talk about bad timing!

Then.....

Before sending the besties off for their trip, we celebrated winter solstice early this year!

Yes, that's right! Tang yuan in angmoh-land!!

We made the paste from mixing rice flour with hot water, kneaded and adding more flour until it turned the correct consistency. And then we quarreled on MAJOR stuff like whether or not to get red food colouring for the rice balls and whether to make them big (normal sized, actually) or small (like the 'pearls' in 珍珠奶茶.)

(We compromised in the end: first batch to boil = large balls, second batch = small ones. Both were equally delicious.)

And we lived happily ever after. The end.