It’s now 12:30 am. I’m at Pedas Springs, a spa in Genting Highlands.

My friends are inside having massages while I’m blogging at the cafe outside. My work is really 24/7 around the clock, around the world!

We planned this trip a couple of months ago. It’s a sort of coming-of-age trip for Nanny Wen cos the last time we came to Genting, she was too young to visit the casino. Now she’s old enough! *sniff*

Actually, I’m really sleepy now so I’m just going to do a pictorial caption thing. It’s not like you people read my words, anyway!

So. First photo in the car!

Our rented car (a seven-seater but we only have six people):

We stopped at Segambut for lunch.

Unker Kell tries to avoid having a photo taken with Morte:

No one wants to take photos with notorious Morte. Haha.

The girls:

Seafood noodles!

Clear:

Curry:

Tom yam:

We tried the tom yam for the first time today. It was awesome. Thick and sour.

We continued our journey to Genting after lunch.

Back seat passengers:

Staying at First World Hotel on the first night. It’s a cheapass no-frills hotel but the lobby looks really grand:

Mine and Nanny Wen’s room:

Outside our rooms:

Everyone making use of free wireless at Starbucks! lol.

The mist in Genting (around 6 pm):

Cold!:

In the mall/amusement area:

Whee! That’s the lot of it! We had dinner at KFC, lol. And, obviously, we can’t take photos in the casino. So, that’s all!

It’s now 2 am. The guys are not done with their massages yet. Zzzz.

I don’t know how I’m going to be able to wake up for breakfast tomorrow!

I was planning to write about this but Nanny Wen just wrote such a great post about it that I’ve decided to link it.

The gist of it is that her dog Scruffy went missing.

After four worrying days of searching, both physically and through social media, Scruffy was finally found. And Twitter was the primary tool that helped.

Read the full story here.

I take a personal interest in this because Scruffy used to be the Goonfather’s dog. He then became my dog by default when I got together with the Goonfather.

A few years back, we moved to a landed home near Nanny Wen and she would come hang out with us a lot. She would bring him home and take care of him during the times we were away. Or just for fun.

That was how she got her nick, Nanny Wen, by the way.

We realised that Scruffy was a lot happier with her. What happened was that Scruffy was miserable in our new home. We had a new parental rule dictating that he had to stay outside the house, in the garden, at all times.

Being an attention-seeking dog, he needs to be around people 24/7. Every night, from our bedroom, the Goonfather and I could hear Scruffy howling mournfully and my heart would break.

So we decided to let Scruffy stay with Nanny Wen for good. Her family also loved Scruffy, so it was a great solution. And since we lived so nearby, we could see him any time we wanted.

And then we moved house again but Scruffy stayed, so he officially became Nanny Wen’s dog and they lived happily ever after!

I’m so glad he’s found.

For the past week or so, each time I had the intention to sit down and write this review, my limbs would feel a magnetic pull towards my Xbox 360 controller, instead.

I would auto-pilotly power up my Xbox 360 and TV before realising what I’m doing.

Indeed, why would any sane person want to write a review when they can be playing a game?

So, I’m probably nuts.

In any case, I find CSI: Deadly Intent a lot of fun, bearing in mind that I’ve never watched a single episode of the TV series, nor have I played any of the previous CSI games.

I’m a CSI virgin, to put it crudely.

You’re probably not one, if you’re bothering to read this. So forgive me if I wax lyrical over how fun it is to collect evidence, analyse them at the lab and terrorise question witnesses and suspects.

Granted, the graphics is a bit retarded — blocky humans with unnaturally lolling eyeballs. But in games like this, it’s always the content that counts. They can give me stick figures and I’d be happy.

Okay, maybe not. It might be a little hard to detect fingerprints on stick figures.

In CSI: Deadly Intent, you get five delicious cases written by CSI writers, cool technologies for processing evidence, and celebrities to look at (Laurence Fishburne, Lauren Lee Smith), albeit blocky versions of them. Winning formula!

You get to feel like a real detective, although on a simplified scale. Like, if you cursor-over something important, it will turn “active” so you know that’s an important piece of evidence for solving the mystery. Obviously you won’t get that kind of convenient hand-holding in real life.

But the game is still challenging enough. You’ll need to know what to do with each piece of discovery. Brush for fingerprints? Collect a sample for processing? Make a mould of an imprint? Compare under a microscope?

Once you have some evidence, it’s straight to the lab. What would you do there? Analyse DNA? Compare fingerprints? Process audio clips?

After that, it’s piecing things together to decide on your next course of action. Interrogate people? Examine a corpse at the morgue? You’ll shuffle back and forth between crime scenes, the morgue, the lab and the interrogation room throughout the case.

The first game is almost like a tutorial because it’s pretty easy and straightforward, but each case after that gets progressively trickier and takes a longer time to solve.

Because the game is pretty linear, you won’t be able to progress the plot if you miss out an important piece of evidence or discovery. But you get hints in the game and you can specify how much you want to be hand-held.

I’m quite impressed with the plot twists. Not that I expected any less since there must be a reason the CSI series has been such a success. But it’s a real joy to unravel something that leads to a new shocking discovery.

The game will probably make many people feel really smart for being able to solve tough cases. There will be some people who think they can be detectives after playing this game because they fail to realise that it’s a lot easier to solve mysteries in games than in real life.

But I think the game does give a good insight on what it feels like to be a crime investigator.

I’m playing the Xbox 360 version but I think playing on the PC will be a lot easier. This is the kind of game where you have to move your cursor on every inch of the screen to find an elusive piece of evidence. A controller lacks precision for that kind of task so it gets annoying.

Sometimes, the area of activation is, like, one pixel. Can you imagine how hard it is to land a console cursor on one specific pixel?

The good news, though, is that it’s ridiculously easy to get Xbox LIVE achievement points on this game, so I have no regrets, really.

I think the DS version (titled CSI: Deadly Intent – The Hidden Cases) has different stories because it’s rated Teen while the other three are rated Mature. I shall have to try it!

After playing this game, I’ve decided that I want to watch the TV series. Oh no. More time sinks!

One day, the Goonfather brought two cookies home for me. He had gotten them from his Filipino colleague.

Goldilocks Polvoron! They tasted of milk powder and I was about to die of happiness eating them.

So, at first, the Goonfather said he would get his colleague to buy more for us the next time he returns to the Philippines.

And then he said, “Actually, let’s make it ourselves! It’s very easy to make!”

That was how we ended up at Minou’s place on Saturday to make polvoron.

Ironically, the Goonfather wasn’t involved. He was outside the whole day fixing Makkuro (our car) and my new PC.

It’s very easy to make. No baking involved! And the only ingredients needed are flour, milk powder, sugar and butter. I think vanilla essence is optional. We used the recipe from this website.

You do need to cook the flour a little in a pan.

Our first batch of batter was a failure. We learnt that flour gets burnt very easily, and cookies taste disgusting with burnt flour.

So we made up another batch and Minou brought out the electric mixer because, using manual mixing, the first batch didn’t turn out fine enough.

Minou also had lots of cute moulds we could use to shape our polvoron.

The non-burnt batter had a nicer colour.

After the batter was done, all we had to do was press the powder into little shapes, then refrigerate them for 30 minutes and they would be ready to eat!

The batter was very crumbly and quite hard to press. First failure:

First success!

But as you can see, it’s so crumbly it’s hard to make it perfect. Kind of like trying to build a sand castle using too-dry sand.

Whole plate!

Stitch was hard to make because his ears didn’t have much surface area to stick to the rest of the head, so they broke off easily.

Here’s a plate after refrigeration and ready to eat. Not much difference, lol.

It wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t entirely like the one I ate. Ours tasted like condensed milk for some reason. Too sweet! Maybe because Nespray milk powder is already sweet to begin with.

Still, eating Hello Kitty polvoron is happiness!