this and that

london 7.03pm 21C cloudy easter monday 2019

its been a high of 25C but i have been indoors most of the time. only went out once to the tesco to see what they got reduced. got some veg, 3 for £1 and they were onions, and 2 heads of cauliflowers. at 33p each they are rather good value. 

cake 69p reduced price, i dont buy cake but got tempted by this one. yogurt 1kg £1

some of the things i bought. it is easter monday and yet all the supermarkets are open. and even on easter sunday when the big supermarkets are closed, all of them, the express branches are all open, and at their usual long hours of opening too from 7am to 10pm. that was how simon was able to buy the ingredients to make a seafood risotto on sunday. one of the nicest things of being in london, where the supermarket opens for our convenience. 

its been very nice and warm over these bank holiday easter, and i have been hearing from john who lives near bournemouth, about his going to the beach at studland bay. its a naked beach and i think the best nudist beach in uk. he said if the weather is this good all the time, he would not bother to go abroad. so he is very influenced by the hot temperature of abroad. i am not affected by hot weather, in fact if anything i dont chose where to holiday by the weather of that country …hot or not. that might explain why i like being in london and content to just enjoy whatever the weather is here. to me everyday is nice weather here, whether it is sun shining or rain. maybe i am not keen on the sun, that is why even this holiday period with its hot sunny days dont tempt me to go out and sit under the sun. in fact, i prefer if it is a cold day but sunny, then sitting out under the sun is very pleasant, whilst now it can get very uncomfortable if i sit out too long. 

i think how you view the sun or anything really seem to depand on your mind. if u think you need the sun to make you happy, than that is how it will be. the mind and how you think determines how you react to various situations.

jsut now i have an example of it. simon says there is no bread crumbs in the store for him to buy, he wanted to fry chicken, and wants to coat it in bread crumbs first, but since he cannot get it at the store, he said he will have to do without. i said, you can make bread crumbs from the bread we have. he said it is not the same, because the bread need to be stale. well, he is wrong of course, but i figured we dont have a lot of bread in the freezer, and i only just recently bought a loaf of seeded bread cheap because it expires today, so you could say it is stale bread.  but i dont want him to use it up, as i bought it to eat as bread and not as crumbs on chicken. haha. so i kept quiet and let him continue to believe in what he believes. 

cooking malaysian

london 6.21pm 23.6C sunny (high 27C) tuesday 2018

we are still having high temperatures, carrying over from the highs yesterday. i have been thinking what is memorable about these days , to make me remember them years from now. but really, even though we hit the highest recorded temperature for a mayday holiday weekend since records began, it is only about 27C.28C this is really nothing to shout about , in that we are not fainting en mass , or having a drought, or the grass is turning to hay. or people dying like flies from the heat. we dont even have a glut of tomatoes or fruits to make it memorable. its not even that humid like what we get in malaysia. so that for us used to malaysia temperatures this is really nothing to shout about. haha. 

what is nice today is me finding out that lidl is selling cauliflower for 59p… just when i am kind of wanting to eat cauliflower. i have been buying celery, and brocolli, because they are reduced, but am getting a bit bored with eating those two veg. though i love eating them. 

so cauliflower would be a nice change. haha. so i bought two balls of cauliflower with its green leaves attached, and am looking forward to various ways of cooking it. sweet and sour comes to mind, oyster sauce cauli is another dish i would like. curry cauliflower too , like how the indians do it. with tumeric.  and i got garlic from brixton today too. 59p for 4 bulbs. i know i have been saying i dont think the garlic is strong enough, but when cooked they do impart a distinctive taste and smell and flavour to cooking which gives it a kick that is very similar to how i remember malaysian cooking is like, and that reminds me of malaysia. i was reminded of it when i smelt simon cooking his stir fried noodles, and because he used so much garlic, the smell and taste of it really taste just like how the hawkers do it. so that i am now coming round to thinking garlic is quite essential to make dishes more authentically malaysian.

 

bargain offers

london 2.21pm 11.4C dark clouds gathering sunday 2017

today’s mail on sunday is offering me a free £5 amazon voucher, and no need to redeem any nectar points for it too. it seems i have completed 3 entries of those numbers printed at the back of the daily mail paper, and so i am eligible for it. well, since it is free, i click on it to get it. i am hoping it will be possible to use it for the kindle books. though i have been getting the books free up to now. haha. 

i got a lot of nectar points too. what with using the daily mail to collect it, as well as simon buying stuff from sainsburys and using my nectar card.

i now got 4000 nectar points, about £20 worth. its like christmas, i am deciding what i shall buy with it. 

its a quiet day as i take the bus to the paddington library, i was hoping to read the mail on sunday there, but someone has got it, and seem to be reading it slowly, because they are taking a long time to return it to the shelf for me to borrow. (i have noticed this among daily mail readers. there are some who just devour every word,and go through that paper with a fine toothcomb, reading every word, and lingering over every page. and then after they finish they go right back to the beginning and read all those words again, slowly…  they are some weird people.)

so i decided to cut short my stay and go shopping…  i wanted to go to the lidl’s in stockwell, south london to get their special reduced price cauliflower at 59p (i bought 2 ) and mushrooms. as well as the frozen prawns. (prawns are from outside the EU, so by rights should be only affected by the £ being weak… the others have been increasing its price… but not lidls. they are great in stir fries.

it was very busy in that lidl’s. i am quite surprised at how busy it was, long queues at the checkouts, with lots of people buying a lot of stuff. but thinking about it, i realise  i should not be surprised at it. people are waking up to the fact that lidls is cheaper than the other supermarkets. and their shelves are full of stuff too, unlike sainsburys or tesco, and waitrose too…  where nowadays i see lots of empty shelves in those supermarkets… i wonder why those others are not able to keep their shelves replenished. sometimes you can see their fresh veg trays are empty. suggesting that they cannot keep up with the demand.

yet lidls seem to be able to cope well… all the other supermarkets are selling cauliflowers for £1 , yet lidls can sell it reduced like this. it does make me wonder why those others cannot reduce their veg too…??? if not for lidls, they will keep the prices high and we will never suspect it, as there will be no one else reducing it.

and it cannot be due to brexit, can it? lidls can reduce their price and they must be operating under the same conditions as the others if you say brexit has increased the price, and yet lidls can reduce it. 

2.53pm 10.9C the storm clouds seem to be going away, because the sun has come out. 

 

storm doris dont seem to be affecting london that much.

london 5.46pm 10.8C (about 12C all day really ) strong gusts of wind. thursday 2017

storm doris seems to manifest itself in the area where i live in short strong blasts of wind. and not much rain, mainly dry here. the poor daffodils are tossed strongly,waving wildly for a bit of time, most of them survive the tossing, one or two got their stems broken. that seems to be about all the effect of this storm. i daresay other areas get it worst.

but i think the weather forecasts have made a lot of shop keepers of the stalls in brixton decide to take a day off. there were empty spaces where before u can see stalls with bowls of veg on them.i went about 12pm and the market seems emptier than i have seen it. 

the toilet in brixton market was not opened today. i saw workmen setting up turnstiles at the entrance, so it looks like they are finally going to install coin operated gates and it wont be free anymore. before , there were the gates without turnstiles, so can walk in free. 

i got ginger, 260mg for 50p. not as much as the usual amount, but then i guess it is winter and things are scarcer. though it is still cheaper than in the supermarkets.

on the way back i stop off at the lidl, in stockwell, and got two cauliflowers @59p each. now and then i do like to eat cauliflower , and these are the cheapest . they are part of the weekly reduced priced veg promotions by lidl.  and when they come up, i then get a chance to eat cauliflower. it works out well, as it is much tastier if u dont eat it all the time, which is true of most things. eat it all the time and you can get fed up of it. that is why variety is the spice of life.

hmm, that might be the secret of enjoying your life, inject variety into it. perhaps all those people we see doing and searching for new things to do, are the ones who are searching for variety to inject into their lives. but it is not necessary that u do a new thing every time… 

i take myself as an example. I do the same thing all the time and i enjoy it. the reason is because though  i do the same thing  all the time, the outcome need not be the same all the time.

for eg, i go to the library all the time, but i read different news, i borrow different newspapers, i go online and browse different things on the internet. sometimes, i even meet and talk to people, and different people too. oh, dont forget, i borrow different books.

 so you remember that old saying, which tries to tell people that if they want different results they must change and do things differently… ‘dont do the same thing and expect a different result’, may not be true  after all. it depands on what u relate to. you can do the same thing and get different results… i walk past the recycling bins all the time, and do that same thing every day, but what i find there changes all the time. never do i find the same things. so i wonder what saying covers that kind of situation. so far no one have coined a phrase to cover it.

 added. it looks like the trees falling onto the railway tracks are the cause of the biggest disruption to london. train travellers are the ones most affected with rail services suspended in practically all the major railway stations. that is if u want to believe the newspapers, showing pictures of crowds stranded at the railway stations. though interestingly enough, my friend took the train from victoria to bromley yesterday to visit a friend,  and stayed overnight. he came back today (friday 24.2.17) and he said there was no trouble with the trains at all.