Pickles n' Tickles by JJ

THANK you for the well wishes! I'm doing pretty good and having a speedy recovery. Hope I haven't spoken too soon but for someone with shingles, I've very little blisters. Still have all those random shooting pains in the head, and weird phenomenon like my arm feeling icy cool sensations still exists but it's a big relief to be moving around and doing stuff. Not too bad.  Just woke up to news alerts on a woman shot dead at South African Olympian Oscar Pistorius'( right ) home. Media speculations suggest that the arrested 26-year-old is Pistorius and the woman in question was his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Now this peels my attention away from the rogue Los Angeles Police Department   ex-cop Christopher Jordan Dorner  (He  has my sympathies in some ways though). Currently  perched in front of the TV watching CNN, I can't imagine what led to this awful news alert but to speculate like the rest of the world, although by speculating, I'm allowing myself ...

THIS time when I told the front desk lady at the hospital that I was suspecting chicken pox, she was really surprised. Not sure why. But   I wasn't going to take any chances with the few blisters which had magically popped up around my neck.  Dr. R was nice. Checked me throughly and concluded that it was shingles (it's from the same virus that causes chicken pox) and further confirmed it when I told him about the one-sided neck ache. He put me on anti-viral Acyclovir which I've to take five times a day for six days, together with some tablets for itchiness and pain. PAIN . He kept stressing it though. Which got me really worried.  "You can take this for the pain . It should be okay but if you can't stand the  pain then you go on this,". I smiled a nervous smile. Shingles, one of my greatest fears, is here. I've read and heard about it. It's far worse than chicken pox on the pain scale.  "How much pain can I expect, doctor? It sou...

"HOW   prominent is your fever?" Seriously? Prominent? Can't you see that I'm prominently dying here. Idiot .  "I don't know. Why don't you check."  My temperature read 38.1 degrees. Every joint in my body ached as if there were little men with tiny hammers, going about hammering on my bones unrhythmically. The left side of head and face hurt especially more and the ears felt pressured. My eye balls were individually hurting in their sockets. With great effort,  I rolled my eyes away from the doctor who didn't quite know what she was dealing with and eyed the husband with a sense of irritation. What the hell is she doing ??? Urrrgggghhhh.   " How long have you been feeling this way?" Didn't I just tell you like a second ago? Talking hurts my entire E.N.T network! " Three days. The left side pain has been intense and I've been on Advil the whole time". By then, I think I'd told her about th...

I GUESS you can't really tell how you'd deal with skin ageing until you're living it...which momentarily brings me back to a conversation I had with Martin a few years ago.  "What would you do when your glory days are over?" Martin asked.  He had just laid out my possible initial reactions to future dealings with skin ageing with the focal point being my spotless, velvet-smooth face. Our conversations usually have random pit stops like that. If I could graph them by topic and time, you'd see a rather erratic pattern, much like the current USD/JPY Forex charts.  "You know what I think, Martin? Youth is temporary and when it's time to let go of this perfect skin, I'd surrender gracefully," I said with a saint's conviction, not doubting one second that it'd only take a wrinkle to break a saint. I mean who has a dry T-Zone ? Most google searches would only give you useful references on  oily T-Zones anyway.  Now that the halo i...

LET'S just say that I wasn't very fond of her. Mrs N was a woman with an apple-shaped figure, always dressed in matching tailored maxi skirts and blouses. Her well oiled black hair was combed back and tied in a low ponytail which sat snuggly at the back of her rather short neck. She had a face round as the moon and her forehead was always dotted with a huge, red third eye ( pottu). She spoke with an old-school authority and at that time, most teachers did so and that didn't bother us one bit.  Mrs N taught my class Bahasa Melayu (the Malay language). It's a compulsory subject for a few reasons. First, it's the national language and second, all subjects are taught in the Malay language under the Malaysian education system. Science, Math, Geography are all taught in Malay and the text books also come in Malay (although I never saw a logic to it). So it's important for a student to grasp the language very well. Unfortunately, Malay wasn't my first language,...

THERE'S  no cure for stupidity. The DNA would always project what it's heavily made of and I suppose no education or medicine could change that. I mean what's up with the bible burning fest planned for this Sunday in Penang (Malaysia)? An event to burn bibles in the Malay language simply because they contain the Arabic word Allah . I wish the leader of the group knew how freely the word is being used in Christian churches here in the middle-east. It's not a word exclusive to only Muslims like how his shallow mind imagines it to be. I suppose you could call it one of the desperate sentiments leading up to the nearing general election but still...I shudder to imagine the very notion of it. I'm thinking ... what happened to the very basic respect for other religions, beliefs and way of life especially in a multi-cultural soceity such as ours? It's not cool. Not at all.  I hope the cops are on this like how they would be if the roles were reversed. Not that it wo...

SO the Totally Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies were baked with much pleasure. A fool proof recipe for anyone to follow really. I didn't sieve the flour and used a different variant of sugar and even reduced the call for chocolate morsels. Yet it did not compromise the yum factor one bit ( although I did switch the dark chocolate to full milk chocolate chips! ) Seriously, there is only so much chocolate you could stuff into these cookies before it actually becomes chocolate itself. These cookies have more solid chocolate than you could imagine and baking them was a challenge as I couldn't tell if they were browned and baked enough! Therefore it's important to watch over while baking so as not to burn them. Due to its richness, one probably can't consume more than a cookie at one time but with greed and determination, nothing is impossible of course. I like eating them cold out of the fridge with a glass of warm milk. Bliss!  Here you go. Click here for the recipe...