妻は今日本の大阪にいます。僕は羨ます！

As of this writing, Mabel is currently in Osaka, Japan, enjoying herself together with the rest of her colleagues. Me? I'm rotting at home and messing the place up, with the remote controllers all over the place, and dishes waiting to be washed. Fear not! She's coming back on Sunday and I have more than enough time to mess up even more before I get busy on Sunday trying to get everything back in place before she comes back and murders me.
Last week, after Mabel's success in making banana cakes, she finally gave a shot at Japanese cuisine. She made me curry rice, and it tasted great. There were some improvements to be made though, such as the gravy being a little too watery. She made the curry from the instant packages brought from Japanese supermarkets, and the miso soup from those instant packets. To be honest, it was much better than I had expected, and it gets 2 thumbs up from me. Naturally, I will support her as this means I get to taste more good stuff from her...

Mabel felt that she could do better too, and thus we decided to invite some of our friends over during the weekend, and to see how much they like it. So, we're off to get more ingredients to get ready for the weekend. It was at this very moment that I realised that I had been used as a guinea pig. Well, not that I'm complaining too much anyway.... at least I'm getting well fed.

Now that Mabel's getting all armed up for more trials in the kitchen, she's ready to buy more recipes and to get more tips from friends such as Jojo and Mabel.P. I'm also in the midst of my research in getting more Japanese cuisine recipes. Thus, Mabel would either be making Oyako-don or western styled chicken chop/cutlet in the near future. Some trivial point here: Oyakon-don, or 親子丼, gets it's name from its ingredients of chicken and egg. There's where the oya (parent) and ko (child) comes in. Get it?

And very soon, the weekend was here and our friends were gathered in our humble apartment for dinner. As we didn't have a really big dining table, we had to take turns to dine in, and naturally my priority was a little lower than the rest. But it was appropriate, as we had to make our guests feel at home. In fact, we only got our new dining chairs earlier that morning at Ikea, and even had to have William and Huiming bring over a spanner to help fix them up.

Wee Lee & Kelly, whom also got their condo lately and is barely 5 mins drive away from us. They brought along 2 DVDs, but left earlier as Kelly needed to rest. We were going to watch the premiership clash between Liverpool and Arsenal though. Kelly's also in Japan with Mabel right now, and I believe they're having a blast of a time together.

The rest of the gang also gave some rave reviews for her cooking, which made Mabel really happy that her cooking was being appreciated, even though it was only her second time making rice from the rice maker. The girls spent the rest of the time discussing about an upcoming Bintan trip, as well as helping Cheryl and Adrian select their wedding photohgraphs.

I've tasked Mabel to help me get this particular base ball jersey in Japan. It's a Rakuten Eagles jersey, a baseball team in the Japanese Baseball league. While I'm not really a big fan of the game, I've come to like the team alot, because the Morning Musume girls, and GAM (Matsuura Aya and Fujimoto Miki) are the official supporters of the team. Def Diva and GAM also sang 2 official songs for the club, which are great for the fans to cheer along before their matches. Hopefully she's able to find it for me, but I'm not counting too much as it's quite hard to find especially in Osaka. Well, I've already registered an account under the official Rakuten Eagles site, so the other option would be to order online.... hehe. Here is the official PV of GAM's song for Rakuten Eagles, called Daisuki Rakuten Eagles:

Although Singapore's MediaCorp has been promoting and bragging their rights to the Spider-man 3 movie, and even promising an exclusive premiere of the film's trailer, fans like me have already seen it 2 weeks ago, in full HD glory. And as expected, the trailer is awesome and really sets up more anticipation for the show. Just under a month to go before it hits our shores. I'd want to get an advanced booking if possible, and to catch it on its opening day. Just to avoid spoilers, but actually I've already seen more than enough footage to consider myself spoiler free. Still, images and videos of actual Venom footage is still rare, and I would want to see the amazing aerial fights between Symbiote Spidey and the new Goblin. Also, there's talk that Tobey Maguire is considering accepting the role for the 4th movie, contrary to what he had expressed earlier. I sincerely hope that this is true, and that it won't be long before talks of a new movie is in place. So many Super hero shows are coming up I can't hold my excitement.... there's the Fantastic Four sequel, the Batman sequel, the new Hulk movie, the Ironman movie, etc. Give me more!! And here is the final movie trailer should you have missed it:

2 new Transformer movie TV clips have been released this week. I've linked one here, which I thought was better as it shows Bumble bee and Star Scream transforming. I'm beginning to get warmed up to the new designs, but I'm still a little skeptical about the whole movie because I'm still a G1 kinda guy. But the Starscream and Bone Crusher scenes were really well done, and the animation from ILM is nothing short of amazing. 3 more months to go!

A Singapore made commercial has been shown on TV recently promoting a new local Chinese website. It's based on this Japanese clip which is shown on YouTube.

However, the Singapore-made one is obviously staged. Too bad for the overseas guys I can't get to show you here on my blog as it's not available online. But I get very irritated whenever I see this commercial, as I feel they have ripped off the idea from the Japanese. It's a direct copy job, and what's worse is that there is no new innovation and the whole thing being stage really ruins the original idea. What a lack of any creativity and originality. This commercial gets a big thumbs down and a big "BOoooo" from me. I just wanna find a place to rant that's all.



To conclude this week's post, I've uploaded a clip on YouTube from Kamen Rider Den-O. It's a comedy series with some good plot twists and interesting characters thrown in. While the suits are slowly warming up to me, I kinda enjoy the seeing bad luck that main character Ryotara always gets entangled with. Do check out this clip. And yeah, I've been trying to get more pictures of me and Mabel in, as the results of the poll shows most of you guys want that the most. Well, the next posts will have Osaka pics! Till next week, ja!