Just a quick update now cos I’ve been busy and I’m leaving England for Singapore tomorrow!

Actually, that’s all I need to say but since I’m already here, I suppose I could say a few more things.

It’s Valentine’s Day today. I’ve never really been partial to the commercialism of the whole event, not because I think it’s a scam (which it kind of is) but because I think it makes people lazy in relationships, thinking that they’ve got this one day to excessively shower their loved ones with love, and then the rest of the year they can take it easy, take the relationship for granted.

Regardless, I am not above appreciating some Valentine’s Day flowers.

Piers got me tulips instead of roses because he said he couldn’t find roses in colours that I like (white and champagne pink) and he wasn’t overly sure of the exact shade of pink I like, anyway, cos to him, all pinks look the same.

Which is fine because I actually prefer tulips to roses.

Flowers are relatively cheap in England and we can get pretty tulips all year round so Piers was happy to buy me a bunch every week to pretty up our apartment at the beginning of our relationship.

Eventually, though, I told him to stop because I got tired of maintaining them, having to replenish or change the water every so often. I started leaving them to wilt for weeks before I could be arsed to dump them and give the mouldy vase a good clean.

You just can’t please a girl.

But, seriously, since I’m leaving tomorrow, it means Piers has to take care of these tulips and dispose of them when they die, so that’s perfect for me. I am very pleased!

A few days ago, I baked this fresh cream chocolate cake because I felt like eating cake.

It was a bit of a disaster.

It started off being an 8-inch cake and ended up being a 5.5-inch one because I left it in the oven too long and the sides got rock hard so I had to cut them off. Because of that, the sides looked ugly so I decided to cover everything with fresh cream, only I didn’t have enough cream so everything just looked uneven.

If you look on the inside, you can see a hole in the middle filled up with cream:

That was me gouging a hole in the middle of the cake to check if the middle was edible.

It was barely edible, tasting like stale cake because it was so overcooked.

Piers was excited when he saw it, coming home from work. He thought it was his Valentine’s Day cake because of the heart on the top. But that was just me trying to make the cake look less ugly but even then I didn’t do a great job of it.

We each had a small slice for tea and he said, “Wow, that is really delicious!”

And then he said, “Hang on, I need to have a sip of tea. It’s stuck in my throat, need to wash it down with a drink.”

On the bright side, the cream was quite tasty.

Well, I can’t wait to be back in Singapore where I can buy anything I want to eat, without having to try and make it myself, and poisoning my boyfriend in the bargain.

And now I’m off to spend Valentine’s Day with the boyfriend sans poison. We are eating out today.

Happy Valentine’s Day to you all. Hope you have or had a great one, depending on when you read this.

It seems like Piers really appreciates the smoothness of my skin, seeing as he tries to compliment it every so often.

I happen to disagree with his assessment of my epidermic qualities but that is not the point of this story.

Piers, in fact, has once again one upped himself in the compliments department. (Also read the pumpkin story).

One night, as we lazed on the sofa together watching television, he gently stroked my arm and said, “Your skin is so smooth, like our new frying pan.”

I’m not sure how many of you girls out there would have wanted to wallop your boyfriends on the head with the frying pan he just tried to compare you to.

“A frying pan?” I said dangerously.

“What?” he said, looking quite innocent. “It IS very smooth,” then quickly added, “Which is why we bought it,” as if that was supposed to cement his argument.

I said, “You don’t compare girls to frying pans!”

“Why not?” he said.

“Because frying pans are… frying pans!!” I said

“And the good ones are really smooth!” he said.

It went on like this for a while. I decided to save my strength to prepare myself for being compared to a washing machine or lamp shade or whatever next.

That is not to say that Piers is not a good boyfriend, notwithstanding his penchant for comparing his girlfriend to household items.

Piers is as useful as a rowboat. Because rowboats take people places and Piers does that too, like taking me to the movies. And he does it very well.

Actually, I wish to amend my former statement. Piers is more useful than a rowboat because rowboats don’t buy you popcorn and soft drinks, too.

And that’s how we compliment boyfriends, right?

Since I am blogging again and since I hardly do anything more exciting these days than play video games featuring tentacled monsters, you will be obliged to read about my cooking escapades, that is, after I’m done talking about my gaming escapades.

I believe I mentioned before that I started experimenting with cooking out of necessity. Missing the food in Singapore was propelling me towards a permanent hunger strike that led me to realising that I had to do something about it or starve to death.

The solution was to cook things that I never would in a million years have thought to cook had I still been in Singapore. Things like bak kwa, curry puffs and chicken rice. It baffles me why anyone in Singapore would make these things themselves when they can buy them really cheap and good, but they do. People just do.

I, on the other hand, have no choice but to make them because I would stop eating altogether, otherwise.

I made spicy tuna puffs once because I was tired of spending hours frying little potato cubes, but potato ones taste infinitely better.

I really miss being able to walk out to buy something good to eat, whether a snack or a full meal, and be back home within 15 minutes with something good. You can’t really get anything like that in England unless you don’t mind having McDonald’s and KFC every day.

Even if there were, it takes five minutes to dress warm enough just to pop out for 10 minutes. And then another five minutes to undress when you’re back home, the thought of which makes staying home and starving the more appealing choice.

The food in England is quite bland compared to Singapore fare, which is actually a good thing if you’re health conscious. People do seem to be quite health conscious here. While doing job placements at nurseries, I noticed that my co-workers always had salad for lunch, and they don’t do Thousand Island dressings or anything calorific like that. It’s usually oil and vinegar or plain. Seriously, I would rather starve, and I mean that very literally.

As a side note, I make a rather good balsamic vinaigrette so I do like salads but not as meals by themselves and never for lunch! I miss my Raffles Place lunching days of curry chicken noodles and nasi lemaks and bak chor mees.

And this, I don’t even remember what this is called anymore:

I did enjoy eating in England the first year I was here but the novelty has worn thin and the blandness has quite effectively killed my appetite. Now, I would rather cook than go to a restaurant, even if money were no issue. This is a complete turnaround from when I was in Singapore, when I practically ate out every day and loved doing so.

The wonderful thing about cooking is that you can make your food taste exactly the way you want it. Include more ingredients you love and none of those you hate.

The not so wonderful thing is that sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way you envision it. I enjoy making up my own recipes (based on current cravings plus inspiration from online recipes plus available inventory) so it takes a bit of trial and error to get the proportions just right. And then I never get it perfect because I tend to dole out sauces and seasonings by feel rather than measuring them out scientifically, so I can never remember how much to use the next time to make it perfect.

This is my chicken steak with garlic butter mushroom sauce, with courgettes and spaghetti to make it a balanced meal.

Piers likes having balanced meals; otherwise he feels guilty. Yes, the whole country is like that. It makes me feel like a gluttonous evil alien when, like, I have KFC and skip the coleslaw.

On the healthy side, I have recently become addicted to Brussels sprouts after discovering that they make a very tasty side dish.

I roast them with olive oil and balsamic vinegar with a very generous sprinkling of coarse ground black pepper. It has to be really good quality olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I have experimented with many different brands in the last two years and realised that the quality totally changes the taste in food.

Also, baby Brussels sprouts taste a lot better than “adult” ones. The baby ones are hardly bitter and taste more buttery and nutty.

On the not so healthy side, I am as klutzy as usual and always run into mishaps in the kitchen, such as dropping eggs on the floor or dropping the whole salt shaker into my cooking pot.

My most recent catastrophic incident involved me being violently attacked by an open cupboard door on my way out of the kitchen, resulting in a bruised knee and ego.

I know it is quite evil of me to bully your senses with such an unpalatable picture after all that food porn, but your choice of being a blog reader obliges you to endure any and all visual hazards rampant on the Internet, therefore it is okay for me to do it.

The good thing about living in England is that I hardly ever have to show my legs since it’s always too cold to, even during the summer, so my bruises are safe from public viewing (except on the Internet but you have been warned, albeit rather too late).

I actually have another bruise on the other knee but that one is quite unremarkable and undeserving of narcissism so you won’t see it. Also because I don’t even know how it got there.

Piers denies all responsibility.

And I am making no comment on that.

That kind of reminds me of a new American drama series we are watching called The Following, starring Kevin Bacon. It’s about a serial killer who fucks the mind of an ex-FBI agent by committing kills by proxy while being a death row prisoner.

It’s as exciting as 24 but Kevin Bacon is no Keifer Sutherland so it is a bit disappointing in that regard and Piers keeps telling me to stop being mean to Kevin Bacon (even though he did agree with me that KB looks like a weasel) but what can I say except again that he is not Keifer Sutherland.

Still it is worth watching and I have gone off the point, so I had better give it a rest and bid you adieu.

And so I shall.

Adieu, and be wary of sneaky cupboard doors, as always.

I wasn’t going to blog today, the reason being that I bought an Xbox arcade game last night and subsequently planned to be very busy for the rest of the week.

But then I reconsidered.

Gaming is a poor reason for not blogging, I thought. I cannot let my readers down, my poor deluded mind said, for they patiently await the next installment of What Did Sheylara Eat/Do/See/Drop on the Floor This Time? and would be very disappointed if they didn’t get to read about how I had a tasty ham sandwich for lunch.

Mind you, my decision to blog has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I feel rather dizzy after two hours of playing Space Channel 5: Part 2, and need to look at something else for a moment.

Yes. Updating my blog today was a purely altruistic decision. That’s the kind of person I am.

The game is about 11 years old so I am not going to do a review. I first played Part 1 on the Dreamcast in 2001, shortly after which I broke up with the boyfriend who owned the Dreamcast. And then shortly after that, Dreamcast went kaput so I thought that was the end of the game for me, pity, cos I really enjoyed it.

It’s a music and rhythm game, involving jitterbugging space aliens who go, “Chu, chu, chu, hey, chu!”

Piers was very, very disturbed by the game. He said it was a crazy, crazy game. But he could be forgiven for thinking that because he only watched two minutes of it and those two minutes just happened to occur at a stage where my avatar was captured by a space alien monster flower with tentacles, one of which seemed all too ready to probe me for secrets.

And I had to try to shoot at the monster and dodge deadly flying petals while bound spreadeagle by tentacles.

And while all that was happening, the alien was going, “Left, right, left, right, chu, chu, chu!”

Sure, I can see how that might have looked slightly oddball to someone who hadn’t seen the beginning of the game and understood how important it was to save the planet from aliens, not all of whom had tentacles, it was just that flower monster, mind you.

Earlier this afternoon, Piers thought it prudent to dispense some more boyfriendly wisdom. We were chatting on MSN when he said, “Your stupid new game finished yet?”

I said, “What are you talking about? I just bought it last night. And it’s not stupid!”

“It will f*** up your mind,” he said.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“You fight strange creatures,” was his conclusion.

That was very fine for him to say. I didn’t say a word when, two years ago, he was obssessed with catapulting funny-shaped birds at hapless green pigs.

Anyway, I discovered last night that Space Channel 5: Part 2 was available on Xbox LIVE Arcade so I bought it immediately. While I was playing my new game on his Xbox, Piers was busy playing a fighter jet simulation game on my PC so he wasn’t free to look at my game.

Nevertheless, I said to him, “Hey, we can play co-op on this game. Would you like to play with me?”

His eyes still glued on the PC screen, he said, “Okay, honey, in a minute.” (Meaning: Okay, right after I’m done with pretending to be a fighter pilot, which could be any time between four hours and four years.)

But he did say okay, didn’t he?

Still, his first experience of my game was the tentacles, so I’m suspecting that he has maybe changed his mind since. I can’t imagine why, though. Most guys I know get excited when they see tentacles. I didn’t get a chance to persuade him anymore last night to play my game because we had to watch South Park.

We’ll have to see, tonight. And, for the record, my mind is still very sane and intact, thank you.

Congratulations for encountering this rare spawn on Sheylara.com. You have found a new blog post!

You are now reading yet another possibly futile attempt by me to jump start my blog again after yet another long period of unexplained disappearance.

To somewhat explain things, in the last 12 months, I’ve had to write a total of 33,408 words worth of essays for my Montessori course. And that’s not counting the 20,000 words that got written and deleted in edits.

My brain thought it best not to churn out any more words than was absolutely necessary. Hence the blog freeze while the essays took precedence.

But it’s now 2013. My course is over and I have lived a life of leisure for a whole month. I have watched four seasons of The Big Bang Theory, tried to read about 10 books all at once on my Kindle, and played numerous inconsequential games on the iPad and Facebook.

And now my stupid fickle-minded brain wants me to stop being a lump of clay and get writing again so here we are.

I thought I might start with a graphical update because I’m aware that some of my readers are not Facebook addicts, therefore have not seen my latest attempt to annoy Piers.

Here’s a photo taken in July 2012:

And here’s one from October 2012:

To my annoyance, the attempt to annoy Piers did not succeed.

Before I had my hair cut, Piers was, like:

“Noooooo nooooooooo do not get a fringe. I like your hair all long!”

After the hair cut:

“Oh, you look quite nice.”

Since then, I have experimented with different ways to wear my fringe.

25 December 2012:

5 January 2013:

12 January 2013:

You can see that I have since Christmas acquired the hobby of taking pixelated photos in front of random light sources. It is because this is totally random and there is no reason other than happenstance.

And, actually, the side-swept bangs are more the result of laziness at trimming my fast-growing hair than the aforementioned stab at experimentation. It’s a bit like sweeping all the dirt under the carpet and pretending it doesn’t exist.

You see what I mean? I sweep my bangs to the side to prevent them from poking my eyes out.

You might be interested to know that, after decades of hating my hair, I still hate my hair.

But that’s old news, so I won’t go into it. Otherwise, get me started and I can’t stop.

In other news, there is no other news. My course is over, I am a lady of leisure, I hate my hair. That about covers it all.

So, then, until the next time! Which, if things go according to plan, will happen within the decade. I promise.