wow. I can’t believe 5 weeks have flown by just like that. I feel like I got a phenomenal amount of work done, although there’s still so much more to do. I’ve been working extremely hard the past few days (well by my standards, at least). I mean, I still clock my usual 8 hours of sleep cos if you know me, you’d know that I can’t function at all without my sleep. So sleeping to me is a necessity and not a luxury (as most people regard it).

My daily regime is wake and wash up and then hole myself up in my room for about 2 hours. Actually this is so I can stay in my sleeping clothes for a longer period of time and also avoid being eaten alive by Sam the first thing in the morning. By about 10 I’d be hungry and I’d go down and get myself some breakfast and coffee. I usually have lunch around 1pm and watch a bit of TV with it. Lately it’s been the Tour de France. The closest thing I’m getting to exercise these days is watching other people do it. (When I get back to Singapore I’ll have to be hard on myself and start a strict regime again, after I hand in my thesis).

Then it’s work work work until my shower time or dinner time. Shower time would be early if it’s nice and warm during the day and it’d be later if it’s cold and miserable cos Neil will turn the heating on and the bathroom will be nice and toasty. We usually have dinner at about 9pm so after dinner sometimes I stay and chat with Ruth and Neil and other time I head upstairs to continue work. It depends on where I left off with work, if it were in the middle of something exciting, I’d rush back up to continue and then sleep at about half past midnight. In between work I usually have cups of coffee to break the monotony and also going downstairs for coffee is an excuse to play with Sam or the cat.

So that’s it. I guess when you are sitting in one spot and just typing away time really does fly and now I really wish I had more time. Time is now such a precious commodity! While I think my past 5 weeks here have been extremely productive considering I’ve maxxed out my waking hours by working and not being distracted by loads of other things. Back home just commuting from home to school takes up a considerable amount of time. Then there’s lunch which not only takes time but also quite a bit of brain power deciding what to eat. Although, in the weeks leading up to my departure I had it solved by bringing my lunch in to school.

Then there’s the extra bits of time here and there wasted chit chatting with people (people I meet in the corridor, on msn, at home etc). Not that I don’t enjoy talking with people, I realise that being a recluse for the past 5 weeks I’ve not had a bad-mood day at all! I could actually live my entire life as a recluse methinks. Well occasionally I’d have to send an email or two to keep in touch with the outside world, but in general I don’t feel there’s a need to talk much to people!

Or I guess it could just be the weight of the thesis is just sitting too heavily on my shoulders that I’m just not able to deal with much else at this moment. It’s time the beast it slain!

Anyway, like I was saying… I still have much to do. I’m still working on this blasted behaviour chapter which is feels like the bane of my existence. I feel like I have some pretty good data yet I feel like I’m not doing it justice. I think there’s so much more I can do with this data but I just don’t have the time to go through every single page of it at this point in time. It seems like what I’m including in my thesis right now is just the bare minimum required for a dissertation. I’m not even sure if it’s enough for a PhD.

John and Julia (Davenport) both think that I’ve done alot of work and I’m sure John has done his fair share of examining PhD students. But I’m really not so confident of my own work. Ruth also expressed some concern over whether or not it’s good enough for a definite straight pass and I find that very worrying. Sigh. I’m just going to do as much as I can and see what both my supervisors say. If I need more time and if they both agree to it I will do take an extension and beef it up. Ideally I would just get it out of the way asap, but part of me feels that it would be a horribly unsatisfying piece of work if i did that.

Ok, enough ranting for now. I should get back to work on that behaviour chapter. I’m already few days behind the date I told prof I’d have it ready by and I hope to finish it tomorrow.

Never drink use soya bean milk as a substitute for milk in coffee.

The third chick had to be helped out of the shell by Neil. It had remained inside the egg up until lunch time even though it was the first to break a bit of its shell off. Neil gently peeled some of the egg shell off because he was afraid the exposed membrane had gotten too tough for the chick to break through on its own. Then he returned the chick to the incubator to come out of the shell completely on its own just in case it still had some blood vessels still attached to the membranes.

This chick was only dry and vaguely enough to join his siblings in the tank upstairs about 2 hours ago.

Ruth and Neil named the first chick Cheep and the second one Cheep Cheep and the last one Eggy, cos of its strong attachment to his egg.

We assumed none of the rest were going to hatch since they would have hatched in the same day and none of the others had even started pipping. So we went outside and started cracking open the eggs. We cracked the eggs from under hen first since she got the ones that were less likely to hatch (if you remember the coldest 10 were left for the guinea fowl, the next coldest 10 were given to hen and the warmest 10 were put in the incubator). The first 5 or so that Neil cracked were rotten and we didn’t even bother to crack them fully open to see what stage of development the embryos were at. After one particularly foul (no pun intended) one spurted rotten egg juice at Neil and he started gagging, I took over.

I was egg-stremely curious to know if the embryos were developed inside so I peeled it upon completely in spite of the foul (again, no pun intended) odour and there was indeed a developing chick inside. When I peeled open the membranes, we could see that it had developed feathers and feet and a beak. But it had clearly been dead for sometime. Could have been when the hen got off the eggs for a few hours and they got cold. If only she had stayed on a few egg-stra days
Then we started cracking the eggs which were inside the incubator all along. The first one was not rotten at all (no bad smell, although our nasal passages were probably already immune to it by this time) and before I had even opened it completely, Neil had rushed back inside to replace the rest of the eggs in the incubator. While he was inside, I continued to peel the shell of this egg open and there was a tiny heart beating! I could see it pulsating although it didn’t occur to me at that time that it was weird that I could actually see the heart.

I totally freaked out and jumped backwards in sheer horror that I had cracked open a living embryo. I felt like a murderer. I watched the poor helpless creature mortified at the thought that it had been exposed to the cruel world in my hands, days before its timed arrival.

When Neil came back out I was frozen in my position squatting over the egg. I quickly passed it to him saying “It’s alive! Kill it!!!!!” Ruth was sitting nearby with Bafut and she was also like, “kill it!”. Neil used the shears and cut it at its neck. It was only then did we realise that the chick was severely deformed. Not only were its organs on the outside of its body, it also was lacking an upper beak and its cranium was extremely protruding like the aliens from Mars Attack (the movie).

I guess we had put it out of its misery then…

Now we’re still not quite sure what to expect from the other eggs that are back in the incubator. Neil says we’re going to give it a few more days just in case. Anyway, none of us were up for more trauma.

So in all, it was a terribly egg-citing day (I’m cracking myself up here. geddit geddit?) not only cos of the hatching eggs, but also I have just finished my chapter on reproduction!!

(yes, yes, I have been writing about eggs ALL day and ALL week long, so you can tell why I’m going all loco right now)

Tomorrow we are going to some market in another town to buy plants and I will finally get to come out of my shell!

Ruth poked her head into the kitchen and whispered, there’s a chick!

And there was! A bright-eyed and fluffy chick sitting in the incubator. It was sitting beside another egg which had a bit of the egg shell cracked. Maybe it was encouraging his brother or sister to break free of the egg.

Anyway, Neil transferred the little chick to the tank upstairs and we were all comforted by seeing it promptly poo and move to rest under the heat lamp.

I came back down again and there was another chick trying to break out of its shell. Call me suaku but I’ve never seen anything hatch out of an egg before. So it was a very new experience for me. The chick had already gotten a bit of its shell off and I watched as the little egg trembled with every “cheep” that came out of it. A few times I heard egg shell cracking and sometimes I could see the egg pulsating. Almost like the chick took a deep breath in and expanded a little. So once every 30 seconds or so, the chick would make an effort to bust out of the egg and finally after about half an hour, i could see a bit of blackish feathers through a crack in the egg shell. Then suddenly the egg gave way and the head of chick slid out onto the bottom of the incubator and it just lay there for a while.

It wasn’t quite as dramatic as I imagined it to be. I mean, I sort of had the image of the egg splitting into half and there standing in the centre, would be a fluffy chick. Well, obviously it’s not true. This chick was a slimy mess from all the fluids inside the egg and chicks only fluff up when their feathers dry up a bit.

So anyway, our chick just lay there for the longest time, probably exhausted from breaking out of the shell. It looked amazingly huge even with its feathers all shrivelled up. I wondered how it could have ever fit into the egg. No wonder it was in a hurry to get out. After struggling to get its body out of the other half of the egg, it crawled into a corner and lay there. It’s probably still lying in the corner until it dries up a bit and gets enough strength to stand on its feet.

Neil says at this stage they’re probably still absorbing their yolk sac so there’s no need to feed them just yet. In any case, they’ve got some food ready.

I was saying it’s such a pity the hen came off the eggs just a few days ago. She could have had the joys of having the eggs hatch under her care and then having little chickies follow her around. How cute would that have been!

The guinea fowl eggs have started hatching!

There are 3 out of 20 in the incubator that have little cracks on the shells. I held one up to my ear and I could hear it pipping (tapping the surface trying to break through). Neil says it’ll take a few hours at least for them to break through so maybe by tomorrow morning there will be chickies! They’ve prepared a little cage in their bedroom for the chicks already!

Cat sat outside on the window sill watching us eat dinner today. I felt really bad for her cos it was raining. I went outside to give her a cuddle (which she seemed to appreciate) but it was far too cold so I had to come back in, without the cat of course. She sat there throughout dinner and even after, mostly staring at the TV but occasionally looking at us too. I think she likes Nick Cave.

The broody hen finally came off the eggs and walked around the garden. I’ve been here for almost a month and this is the first time I’ve seen her up and about. The bad news is, the guinea fowl eggs under her had to go into the incubator since it seems that she’s gotten sick of sitting on them.

She looks like a mess, with a big ball of poo (which is incidentally, the size of an egg) hanging off her behind. She looks huge and clumsy and Neil, the cat and I just stood there watching her walk around for a good 5 minutes. Neil is busy in the shed now, taking the opportunity to throw out the old straw and replacing it with fresh straw. He said he’d wait for Ruth to get home to get her to remove the poo from the hen’s behind.

I’m not sure what’s going to happen when or if the eggs hatch. Hen’s unlikely to take care of them and the guinea fowl are even less likely. If all 20 eggs in the incubator hatch, which is almost impossible, Ruth and Neil are going to have 20 chicks in their bedroom I think. I heard something about putting a cage in their room cos it’s the only place that the chicks will be safe from foxes and cats.

There was another hedgehog sighting the other night when Porrig came for dinner and we had nonya food. It was about 2300hrs when we walked Porrig out to his car because for some reason, he hadn’t opened the gate and driven in but parked just outside the gate instead.

So we walked outside and Neil brought a torch so that we could see where we were walking and right after Porrig left, Neil turned around and shined his torch against the wall (I suppose it was just a random motion) and guess what, there was a hedgehog there! Like along the edge of the wall, on the road.

Ruth quickly called Amy, her student who is working on hedgehog, who happened to be nearby searching for hedgehogs in a golf course. Poor Amy hadn’t seen a live hedgehog since she started her PhD project 5 months ago. She meant to mark hedgehogs to see what their range of movement is, particularly males, who often travel long distances in search of mates. Amy had come to the house in the week that I first arrived in an attempt to search for hedgehogs at night (remember I mentioned I saw a hedgehog in the garden on the first night that I was here?). But she didn’t see any even though she was out every half an hour until it was past 2am!

The only sign of hedgehogs she gets on a fairly regular basis are hedgehog roadkill sightings and/or carcasses. In fact, Ruth and Neil picked on up for her just the day after the hedgehog was found outside the gate. I suppose dead hedgehogs are better than no hedgehogs because at least you know they’re around and it’s at least some sort of data collected. But the tragic thing is that Amy is a vegetarian who is extremely soft about animals. She was telling Neil and me that she feels really bad about freezing mealworms to kill them (she uses them as bait for her hedgehog traps which aren’t working as yet). Neil and I just gave her weird looks. heh heh.

Anyway, I hope there are more hedgehog sightings to come. Amy had tagged the hedgehog by putting coloured tubings on selected patches of hedgehog spines as well as implanted a passive integrated transponder its leg so each hedgehog has a unique identity. Neil said he spotted the same (blue-yellow-blue) hedgehog scurrying across the driveway 2 nights later!

In other news, Ruth cut some pretty roses for me from the garden. See flickr for photos (of the rose and the hedgehog). It’s so wonderful having a garden. They have redcurrant, blackcurrant and raspberry bushes, many many pots of lettuce (fresh salad!!) herbs and even a limau perut plant! Of course there are also many trees/shrubs that have really beautiful flowers. When I have time and when the weather is nice I’ll go take some photos of the pretty flowers. But for now I am just admiring my rose.

Don’t I sound utterly deprived?

What other dishes can you cooking with tofu and minced pork?

HOTPLATE BEANCURD!

Yeah, that’s what Neil requested from me today and I said I’d try… I was quite nervous when it came to 7pm because, as you might have guessed, I’ve never cooked hotplate beancurd before in my life. I’ve always sort of regarded it as a dish that’s too complicated to make at home, together with things like hokkien mee and oyster omelette. But come to think of it, I’ve had home-made hokkien mee and oyster omelette before so why not hotplate beancurd right?

Anyway, when you reverse engineer the dish, it’s actually very easy. All you need is some stirfried beancurd with whatever meat and condiments you like (I had sliced chillis, minced pork and spring onion) and make it gravy-ish with some light soya sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil, water and some corn starch. Let it thicken and add some dark soya sauce for colour. Then you need a hotplate (we used a saucepan) heated till very hot. Mix some eggs, pepper and soya sauce in a bowl while waiting for the oil to get very hot and add eggs. Watch it sizzle and bubble, pour the tofu gravy thing on top and VOILA! hotplate beancurd!

I also made some sambal kang kong which I didn’t think it tasted very good. But I guess it was authentic enough. At least we had some big red chillis for a decent sambal. No buah keras but I used some brazil nuts instead. The aunts in Singapore would not approve!

Neil cooked fried rice with shrimp and stir fried some beansprout with salted fish. All in all, it was a very Singaporean food night. It was exactly what I might eat at a coffeeshop back home! I was very glad that they liked my cooking and to tell you the truth, I was quite surprised myself that it turned out half decent. Haha… All the food tonight was finished (except some fried rice cos Neil cooked sooo much).

I had a tiny bit of Neil’s “special cake” which according to Ruth, he only let’s his favourite people eat. It was a very very sweet and rich pecan and nut cake which can only be found in America. I think they bought it like half a year ago but it still tastes ok. I found it extremely sweet but nice still.

Well dinner was an interesting and much needed break from my computer. I was literally staring at the computer the entire day doing work. I couldn’t believe how fast the day went by. While I am pleased with myself for being so hardworking today, I am quite disappointed at how much time it actually takes to write a bit of stuff. Sigh. Now I am quite worried that I’m not going to be able to finish on time. Suddenly the long days here seem very short. Tomorrow I am determined to be done with this chapter 2 and be finished with chapter 4 by the end of the weekend. Then on Monday, with chapters 2 and 4 out of the way, I am going to focus solely on chapter 5 and hope to have a first draft by Wed night (currently the analysis is done but the writing part isn’t).

I wonder if I can pull this off. The plan for the next few days is extremely ambitious by any standard, so can you imagine for me… the one who serially cannot keep to deadlines? Sigh…

I guess I should stop typing this blog post now and get back to work.

I cooked some peranakan dishes for Ruth and Neil and their friend Porrig last night and I was extremely apprehensive about how it was going to be received. The idea came about when I was I looking through Ruth’s “A taste of the far east” by Madhur Jeffrey and I saw chicken tempra in it (it was called “Nonya Chicken”). The recipe didn’t really look like what what I was used to having but I suddenly felt like having it and since it was relatively easy to prepare I said I might cook that to go with Neil’s mapo tofu. I offered to make ladyfingers with dried shrimp sambal too since that’s pretty easy and idiot proof.

It felt like a great idea at that time, but throughout the day (I was in college) I started doubting if they would like the weird spicy-sour-sweet taste of the tempra. And they did give me funny looks when I said I need some potatoes to go with the chicken… Then when we went to the chinese supermarket, we couldn’t find big red chillis, so I used small green chillis instead (they don’t taste quite the same). I had to use a red capsicum and some small red chillis for the ladyfingers (okra) sambal also but it tasted quite alright in the end.

So, to cut a long story very short, they liked the two dishes very much. They said the tempra would be a hit in Ireland cos the Irish like their spuds and chicken with spuds in the same dish would be a revelation. I wasn’t really satisfied with the taste of the tempra, mainly cos I couldn’t get the proportion of light/dark soya sauce + sugar right. It might also have tasted weird cos of the lack of big red chillis and possibly cos I used a lemon instead of lime.

I might be cooking again some day soon cos Ruth bought some kang kong so I might make sambal kang kong if I can get my hands on some candlenut/macadamias/cashews. We have tofu and minced pork in the fridge and I thought of making pong tau hu soup but I think Ruth isn’t too keen on soups so maybe Neil can whip up some other dishes instead.

I don’t know if I mentioned this before but I was told that Bafut often gets bullied by the cats in the vicinity. I had seen the white cat a few times before but I always thought it looked pretty harmless.

Today after breakfast, I decided to wear a fresh white t-shirt since we were going into town to do some grocery shopping and it’s nice and sunny. Up till now I’ve been wearing the same grubby dull-coloured clothes (black, dark blue and grey) because I know it’s just going to get dirty. I save fresh and light coloured clothes for special days. So anyway I put on the white t-shirt and was just checking if I looked alright in the mirror (I just got a slightly bigger mirror in my room cos they brought one back from france, previously I could only see my whole face if I tiptoed in front of the mirror) when I heard cats shrieking just below my window. I looked out and saw the white cat and Bafut locked in a tussle. I rushed out of my room, past Ruth who was still in her sleeping clothes, and heard Neil already out of the door. I followed him out and saw Bafut beside the door. The white cat was no where to be found.

Bafut ran into my arms and I picked her up for a cuddle and also to check if she’s alright. She seemed pretty ok, no wincing or squirming. But when I put her down, there was a patch of fresh blood on my shirt. My fresh white t-shirt. Sigh. Thankfully, on closer inspection, it was a scratch on her leg and she wasn’t limping or anything so we think she’s going to be alright.

Now I am back in a black t-shirt.