Another long run (16.82 km) this friday and this time at a faster pace. Wain and I tried the Orchard road loop cos the park connector route on a late friday night can be too quiet and monotonous, sleep inducing when doing a long run. Not that I have anything against the peacefulness of the PCN but its tough doing a long run on a friday night after a week at work and already quite a feat to fight the urge to sleep and run instead.
Running long is such a great feeling
I wrote to a former student of mine who is on the way to India and wanted books on Gandhi. Off the cuff, I thought of these books that I have read. Including one on Tagore. The great bapuji and the sentinel were inextricably linked in India’s fight for independence.
1. His autobiography – this is free on the internet.http://d3vilsheaven.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/My-experiments-with-truth.pdf
2. A very comprehensive story about Gandhi and his political and spiritual life. http://www.amazon.com/Life-Mahatma-Gandhi-Louis-Fischer/dp/0006388876
3. The salt march was one of the most important event he organized that really got the colonialists shaking. England had a tax on salt and no one in India could make salt. So Gandhi organized a long walk to Dandi and took a handful of salt in his hand in his civil disobedience towards the British Empire http://www.amazon.com/On-Salt-March-Historiography-Gandhis/dp/8172232632/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330746006&sr=1-1
4. Once you start reading about Gandhi, you might also want to read Rabindranath Tagore. He was Asia’s first nobel laureate
http://www.amazon.com/Rabindranath-Tagore-An-Anthology/dp/031220079X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330746246&sr=1-1
Finally, I think you might want to buy these books when you are in India. Books in India are damn cheap… sometimes paper quality might be bad but you will find the bookshops have a better range that in Singapore.
This was the first long run I did for the year on Friday 3rd Feb. It comes up to about 25 km. I ran with a colleague who did the 100km Sundown. Of course I was out of my league but the pace was comfortable for me and we chatted for 3 plus hours non-stop as we ran. The pitstop and turnaround was Macdonalds at the East Coast Parkway. Iced latte, Gatorade and Cinnamon melts never tasted so good.
There were a few things I discovered and one of it was that I could use my old non-support Adi-zero which has a very thin sole. It must be my adapting to bare-foot running. JOY! And no ITB problems but just tightness in the knees. What was great was I was able to do a 15km 3 days later with no problems.
Why the long run? Its getting into the zone and what a joy it is to hit 15 km and feel good. Thanks to the barefoot running style I am confident I won’t bust my knees just yet.
After the run, I was really happy to be able to do a long run so comfortably so I downloaded a book into my kindlefire
Excellent stuff and the story about Matt Long really moved me.
A tough day today so decided to run…. was tempted not to stop but have some assignments to mark so decided to turn out from Kallang and loop back via Lavendar Street. Pity. But I could feel the strain from the 22 km run on Friday.
Tan Tock Seng Hospital Community Charity Fund. will be organising a Family & Friends Charity Ride in conjunction with the launch of a Park Connector in the Northeastern part of Singapore by the National Parks Board (NParks) on 25 February 2012. We invite Cycling In Singapore to partner us in this community cycling event to raise funds for needy sick elderly.
About the Event The event will be held on 25 Feb from 830 to 12noon.
Cyclists will ride along a 9 or 11km Park Connector to enjoy the beautiful green space and waterways. Deputy Prime Minister Mr Teo Chee Hean will be the Guest-of-Honour of the NParks event. There will also be a Carnival in the Park for the community to join in the celebration. More than just a fun outing or morning exercise in the park connector, the event also aims to raise at least $100,000 for our needy elderly patients who require long-term medication and treatment in TTSH. Individual registration fee is $50 and group of 4 and above need only to pay $30. All participants will receive a Tshirt, a goodie bag worth $50. More information is available on http://ttshcharityride.com.
How you can help We hope Cycling In Singapore can support our event in a few ways:
a. Publicity – we hope to recruit more than 500 cyclists for the event. We would be most grateful if you can help share the event on your website/facebook/blog.
b. Sign up together as a group and cycle together for fun and to make a difference. Group registration fee is $30 each and all participants will receive a Tshirt and goodie bag worth over $50.
This is a real short video I made of my kids playing around with their skateboards. They seemed to enjoy the sensation of rolling down the slope. I couldn’t resist making it into a video with iMovie with a song from Starfish Stories. Ivan thinks we should call the song “On the Longboard”.
The monsoon this December in Singapore has been quite pleasant and nicely marked the year’s passage. But I am sure some have suffered the relentless downpour on certain days that are described as monsoon surges.
The info below taken from the weather.gov.sg FAQ site
Singapore has two main seasons, the Northeast Monsoon (December to March) and the Southwest Monsoon season (May to September), separated by two relatively shorter inter-monsoon periods. Although there are no distinct wet or dry periods, the mean monthly rainfall shows drier weather conditions from May to July and wetter conditions in the months from November to January. . February is also a relatively dry month. The beginning and end of the monsoons are usually not very well-defined. Hence, from year to year, there could be slight delay in the beginning or end of a monsoon period. This probably accounts for the monthly rainfall anomaly experienced from year to year.
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Sumatras are line of thunderstorms which usually occur during the Southwest Monsoon season from May to October each year. These squalls develop at night over Sumatra or the Malacca Straits and move east towards Singapore and the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia during the pre-dawn and early morning. They are often characterised by sudden onset of strong gusty surface winds and heavy rain lasting from 1 to 2 hours as they move across the island. Maximum gusts of up to 50 knots have been recorded during the passage of a Sumatra squall.
This below is from the Monsoon update page from the weather.gov.sg
Northeast Monsoon
(Updated on 27 December 2011)
Northeast Monsoon conditions have set in over the region since mid-November 2011. The Northeast Monsoon season typically starts with a wet phase (December to January) followed by a dry phase (February to early March). During the wet phase, the Northeast Monsoon season is characterized by short duration thundery showers in the afternoon and early evening, and about two to four episodes of monsoon surges. Monsoon surges refer to the steady strengthening of northeasterly winds blowing from the South China Sea. These monsoon surges usually bring periods of prolonged widespread moderate to heavy rain lasting two to five days, occasionally windy conditions and cooler temperatures. During the dry phase, generally drier and windy conditions can be expected.
Based on long-term statistics from our climate station, December is the wettest month of the year (287.4 mm), followed by November (255.9 mm) and January (241.3 mm) respectively. The mean daily minimum temperature is lowest for January (23.3 deg Celsius), followed by December (23.5 deg Celsius) and February (23.6 deg Celsius).
The monsoon surge which has been affecting the region for the past several days has eased. Windy conditions and passing showers in the afternoon are forecast for the next two days. Short duration thundery showers in the afternoon can be expected for the rest of the week.
On Christmas day, while the children are still asleep, I am already up and dealing with the chicken, curry paste, coconut milk and eggs that I bought the day before. I like to buy the ingredients from the wet market and the one nearby has a shop run by an Indian lady who sells the curry powder mix, ground onions, garlic and ginger.
She told me to marinate the chicken by massaging the ginger and garlic paste into the thawed chicken for an hour or so.
Another important thing to do is the cook the curry paste in some oil in a wok to bring out the flavors of the spices. I also realize that if that is not done, then the rawness of the ginger, garlic and onions can still be picked out. Of course the caramelization of the onions will not occur as fully as it should.
So here it is – marinated chicken in the pot. What I had missed here is to fry the paste (portion that wasn’t used in the marinating). So I did that in a separate pan.
The outcome is this. Notice I also added in hard boiled eggs – a tradition handed down from my family. But I wonder where it originated from – lots of people are surprised when they scoop up an egg. Hey, what do you expect from a pot of chicken?
The recipe
Part I – Ingredients
Part II – method
For a more complete recipe from scratch, the page at rasamalaysia.com looks quite authentic. But I think the idea is perhaps to keep this simple and then vary it according to your taste. I remember meeting Otterman halfway up Gunung Belumut with a pack of curry powder and a packet of chicken so that he could cook chicken curry for his friends when they reached the summit and set up camp.
The curry chicken with hard boiled eggs is something of a memory vessel for me – my parents used to lug a huge pot of curry with hard boiled eggs, armed with several large baguettes (french loaves) and a long day of inspecting rock pools would end with some curry by the sea.
I cranked up the Mac and fired up Garageband ’11 and as I fiddled with guitar settings I was pleasantly surprised to see the pedal effects on the right. The new Garageband version 6.0.4 is really a vast improvement and importantly in its sound. The guitar sounds cleaner and the effects do what they are meant to (meaning they sound like the real thing). However, I am still a little disappointed with the Wah effects; its hard to replicate the Cry baby wah sound so when you add wah effect it sounds a bit too mild. While the interface for the pedals are pleasing, its really difficult to rotate the knobs using the mouse – perhaps a straight forward vertical or horizontal sliding level would suffice.
This almond cookie is easy to make and very very sinful. After I baked it, the food frenzy that ensued was a blur. I regret eating it, I think. One can only eat two of these at a time. We all had 3 or 4.
The recipe comes from this book called – The Cookie Book by Catherine Atkinson. This book has nice pictures of each of the recipes written; I don’t understand cooking books without pictures. The recipe can be found here in the blog: ” A year of cookies“. (Interestingly the person who blogged this did just that – bake cookies 365 days!). I can’t imaging doing that without getting sugar overload. The sugars in some cookies can make up close to a quarter or a third of the calories in the cookie. See how sugar cubes literally stack up in the calorie charts of different cookies here.
The dough is easy to make. It’s just sugar, flour, almond, an egg, vanilla extract and butter. It needs to rest for 2 hours in the fridge before you take it out and roll them into balls.
After you pop them into the oven to wait for 20 mins, you can melt the chocolate by double boiling, i.e., in a bowl over a pan of water that is being heated.
The cracks form on top of the cookies after 20 mins in the oven. The smell of roasted almonds permeating the kitchen is quite something.
The fun part is to spread the melted chocolate in-between the cookies to make a sandwich. This makes the cookie irresistible.
Freshly baked cookies are so distracting to kids who have to do homework.
I think I made them a bit bigger than its suppose to be but still I think the size is attractive.
This is one of the easiest cookies to make but looks like lots of effort been put in because the cookies sandwich the chocolate middle . Excellent recipe and great tasting cookie too. The almonds come through nicely and the smell highly delectable as the almonds get roasted. They are a bit too sweet for me to have more than 2 at a time so I would suggest using a chocolate that is semi or non-sweetened.
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