Itchy feet but can't travel to anywhere I want to go! I want to go snowboarding again! August, September!
Have to make do with Genting in the coming week instead. Road trip again. A friend initially wanted to book a room for me with excess points (the account had over 90 points, while the cheapest rooms tend to cost 10-15 per night for me) after getting a free room, but somehow the online system refused to finish the reservation process despite using both Chrome and Firefox, so we gave up and I booked a standard room at First World for 60MYR per night.
My friend's account could have booked any night for free even without points, according to the rates calendar online, but I guess they don't allow multiple simultaneous bookings.
Anyway, this time I'm going to test out the theory that the number of points we earn is not based on how much we spend, but how long we spend on a table or machine. What I'm going to do is to stick my membership card in a slot machine and sit there all day long watching movies and playing games on my phone, preferably next to my friend so that we can take washroom breaks while leaving our cards in the machines.
This theory isn't stated anywhere on the RWGenting website, but it makes more sense given how little points we earned during our last few trips despite spending a couple thousand ringgits in total (excluding our wins).
Well, fuck. Apparently coffee contains enough of this carcinogenic substance acrylamide that coffee sellers in California have to label a warning on their coffees. It's none of my business that they have to go through the trouble of scaring customers away, but doesn't that make coffee on par with cigarettes?
Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle said Wednesday that Starbucks and other companies failed to show that benefits from drinking coffee outweighed any risks. He ruled in an earlier phase of trial that companies hadn’t shown the threat from the chemical was insignificant.
I'm going to have to drink less coffee. Er... hello, Red Bull. JK, Red Bull tastes like shyt.
15 April 2018
You know, what if all the talk that palm oil is the cause of all the deforestation in various countries like Indonesia, and it's a major factor that leads to the haze that visits Singapore every once in a while, it's like we should be weaning ourselves off palm oil, right?
I mean, they're everywhere, in every food product and oil blends that says "vegetable oil" anywhere on the packaging. It's so widespread it's easy to see why the Indonesians are slashing and burning land as fast as they can to grow more oil palms!
But here's the thing: so what if we stop using palm oil? Our demand for cooking oil is the direct cause of this, and stopping the use of palm oil only leads to using a replacement.
There is a reason why palm oil is the most commonly used oil: it's efficient in its use of fertilizers and whatever chemicals they spray on all of them. In other words, they require the least amount of fertilizers and chemicals per unit volume of oil. That's what I would assume given the fact that palm oil is the cheapest edible oil out there.
In other words, the production of each unit volume of palm oil affects the environment the least already. If we were to use any other oil in this proportion, the effects would be much greater. Again, this is derived from an assumption.
So to reduce the environmental impacts of palm oil, what we really should do is to reduce our need for edible oil. Now that's a totally different ball game.
27 April 2018
Settling legal stuff, the final bits of stuff I've been neglecting among the estate business of my parents. Supposed to be simple but it's just a lot of waiting.
Went to Genting twice this month, once with 60RM rooms via a road trip, once on free rooms via AirAsia and Grab.
Didn't win anything.
Cheap holidays to beat the hot humid weather here, that's all.
But I've been doing some research on our goal of an Antarctica cruise and although she is still at the stage of deciding between Seabourn and Silversea, I've long set my mind on the latter, so it's just about when and which ship to me.
So Jan is the best time to visit the continent as far as I'm concerned, because the whales are out and so are the penguin chicks, while the temperature is relatively warm, and less popular.
In terms of ships, I'm less inclined towards the most luxurious and biggest because the extra level of luxury in an Antarctica cruise for another US$7-10k seems way too excessive to me, and fewer people on board would make it easier for everyone to get to know one another, so the Silversea Explorer is my choice right now.
The 18-day cruise in Jan 2020 will cost US$17k, or S$23k, per person, so that means we both will have to set aside S$30k each for the airfare to Ushuaia, hotels and etc, and probably the optional shore excursions.
No more big trips exceeding $5k per pax until then.
30 Apr 2018
So Genting, we have strong evidence that among the machine games like slots or electronic gaming, we score points by the number of games we play. On the other hand, the tables calculate our scores by how long we're there. It was nice to make about 5-7 points by investing just a hundred ringgits at the roulette table.
Probably no expensive trips at all this year. The only trip exceeding a week this year in consideration is a road trip in Malaysia.Van can't afford anymore serious holidays so I won't be doing much either.
Cockroaches have been spotted repeatedly in our home for the last several months. Though they have been spotted once in a blue moon in the kitchen over the years, they have never gone past the kitchen door... until now.
Since there is no sign of a cockroach infestation (no faeces other than those of the house lizards and our terrapins, no random dead cockroach until I started spreading over 20 baits and several pandan plants in my room, no egg casing, no cockroach smell), I am 80% sure one or more of our neighbours has/have a cockroach infestation problem. In the past, it might have been the occasional ones that crawl from the rubbish chute in our home that is to be expected, but now, there have been 5 in 12 months.
The first was in our bedroom probably over half a year ago and was caught. The second, if I remember correctly, was in our toilet months ago and was also caught. The third and fourth were spotted when I turned on the light in the bedroom a few nights ago, with one caught. A dead cockroach was found outside the kitchen door after the aforementioned baits were set, though there's no way to confirm that was the fourth one despite my hope that it was. A fifth was spotted in the living room yesterday and definitely got covered in Baygon but disappeared under the TV shelf. I now have 6 traps spread around the house outside my room which still has the baits and pandan leaves.
If the dead cockroach was the fourth one that vanished while I was focused on the third one, then the pandan leaves did work as a repellent.
