MCO Day 41 ~ 27 April 2020 (Monday)

I skipped my MCO-style morning workout today to complete the remaining articles for my 'boss'.  I thought that I'd have the time to do a short 20-minute workout on my yoga mat in the evening but instead, I spent that 20 minutes cleaning after Cass' mess!  The rascal dropped a bowl from the dish basket when she was carrying it into the dining area and broke it into a million  pieces. The sharp glasses scattered everywhere in the dining area, living room and under her piano!  I guess cleaning up is just as good a workout since I had to do multiple squats and hundreds of movements with my hands and legs as I mop our floor using cloth and not with a mop -- reason being I hate washing bulky mops. Cleaning cloths can be easily washed in the washer, after a good hand wash. I am OCD when it comes to mops.

Lunch of fried vermicelli with big onions, coriander, carrots and fish cakes.



Our baking queen baked a small batch of healthy sugar-reduced cookies with her own concocted recipe, using such ingredients as organic oats, chopped almonds and pistachios, Lakanto sugar, butter,  eggs, chocolate chips and flour.






Dinner: ABC soup, fried pomfret fish with tomato onion sauce, stir-fried siew yoke, steamed egg with minced pork and stir-fried choy sum.


Hubs had a friend who was going to Mid Valley Megamall to get food and he got these for us from Nyonya Colors:



By the time hubs got home from his shop, it was already late in the evening, so the kuihs will be kept for breakfast tomorrow!




Dishes waiting for Cass to dry and keep.



We have rotation of jobs in our house.  This week is Alycia's duty to wash the dishes while Sherilyn's duty is to bring the garbage to the refuse chamber and wipe the dining table.  And I noticed something.  Alycia would sing happily each time she's at the wet kitchen washing dishes, which  reminds me of Cinderella who would sing each time she's forced to do house work by her evil stepmother. 😆  I have a feeling that Alycia actually likes washing the dishes just as how some of my friends who find it therapeutic washing dirty dishes!!  Errrr, washing dishes will never be therapeutic for me! How can such a chore that chaps your hands be even near therapeutic?!

I had to help Alycia snap these pictures of her working out, which is supposed to be her PE lesson. It's a requirement by her school, with compulsory photos taken and submitted online.


Cloudy skies at 7 a.m. today:



Stunning snapshot of a distant thunderstorm, taken at 7-ish p.m. today:

MCO Day 39 ~ Saturday, 25 April 2020

Hubs has packed food for delivery again today. This means packed food for the family too. And the stalking horse has a good reason to get out of the house too, to his shop and to the nearby supermarket 😁

I almost got a heart attack when my car almost couldn't start... again!  I think the car has to be driven regularly, else the idling battery will act up. I just hope that my car would not be stalled somewhere when I am out to buy essential items!

First stop at hubby's kitchen, then segued a few shop lots away to the supermarket to get essential stuff.



Hubby's good friend who was at the shop to collect his Nasi Lemak bought 3 cups of Tealive for us girls! Swooooooon 💓  It's been months since our last sip of Tealive,



Dinner tonight: beef noodles from the famous Lai Foong coffee shop @ Petaling Street (from the same friend who got us girls the Tealive), oven-grilled Saba fish (marinated with turmeric powder and salt), leftover Ayam Goreng Berempah from hubby's chef and stir-fried 'gai choy' (Chinese mustard) with dried shrimps


How has everyone been sheltering at home? I've been busy writing paid articles till I feel like puking! But no complaints. Money comes by hard these days. So hubs and I have to work like buffaloes everyday.  Who says lives can be easy during a war?  Right? 😂

MCO Day 35 ~ 21 April 2020 (Tuesday)

Today I went to our neighborhood supermarket to get groceries.  The last time I got out of my condo was a week ago when I took Alycia to the dentist. Hubs is normally the one who shops for stuff but he's been busy at his office and kitchen. He's going to roll out food boxes for delivery. It's going to be the first time in his 20+ years in the catering business that he's doing food box delivery. Thank you La Corona! Because of you, my hubs now has an alternative income even when the MCO is lifted and  he can resume his catering business again.  😇💪

Somehow, going to the supermarket doesn't feel normal anymore. I feel more stressed out than happy to be out of the house because buying things and bringing them into the house involves a lot of work from disinfecting them, to cleaning the floor, table, kitchen, showering from head to toe and putting my clothes into the washer!



And because of La Corona, we now have wholesome home-cooked meals 2-3 times a day, almost daily.  MIL cooked fried 'hor fun' again today.



And she always pairs fried noodles with a sweet soup dessert ('tong sui'). Today we had orange and purple sweet potatoes 'tong sui' boiled in ginger and pandan water.




Dinner:  salmon + lady's fingers cooked in Assam paste with kafir lime leaves.



Shallow fried thinly sliced pork belly with curry leaves and shallots, blanched broccoli, old cucumber soup and stir-fried organic baby French beans with dried shrimps.


Today hubby's good friend gifted us something that I've been dying to have - delicious Nyonya kuih and Assam laksa from Nyonya Colors @ Mid Valley Megamall.  He also got the girls Yomie's Purple Rice Yogurt - 3 cups, each in a different flavor.  Bless his heart for the generosity.








My SIL once asked me why I needed a make-up mirror at my work desk. Nope, not for vanity sake.  But this is how I watch what the littlest brat is doing behind my back! I have a mirror on my printer, in front of me to spy on her whenever she's on the laptop or phone, supposedly doing her homework or attending online classes 😂

MCO Day 33 ~ 19 April 2020 (Sunday)

These days hubs doesn't prep breakfast for us anymore as he prefers to exercise in the morning. His pot belly has grown even bigger after a month of MCO with no chance of playing basketball (he's a basketball nut), workout at the gym or attend boot camp classes during the MCO and now it's time to deflate the belly to at least half the size. 😆  We walk the stairs in the morning (not together though) followed with jogging at the corridor outside our unit and sweat buckets.

Today our baking queen's baking mode is switched on!  She prepped breakfast of  spam + cheese French toast for everyone.



Also fried wallet eggs.


Later she handmade an assortment of pastas.




Baking to this girl is akin to playing 'masak-masak' and playing with play dough.  She spent the entire afternoon in the hot sauna-like kitchen blithely experimenting with shaping the different types of pasta.



Her maiden batch of handmade pasta. She's a very happy camper!



This is supposedly spaghetti but it tasted more like 'pan mee' 😁



It's alright. We still ate it with beef bolognese (not me as I'm not a fan of starchy noodles), which I cooked a big pot, to be used for spaghetti, lasagna, tortilla and anything that goes with it.












MIL boiled lotus root soup as hubs is a soup guzzler.



After craving for kuih for almost a month, hubs finally ordered a kuih platter online from Baba Beng to satisfy my craving.  I am over the moon!  What you see here is just half the platter. Hubs gave the other half portion to his chef.


And threw in a big bonus for me - my favorite 'rough' type kaya, which I heart 💓



Hubs finally satiated his own craving of KFC as well! We've not eaten KFC for aeons. I only ate half a piece. Call me sensitive or a hypochondriac, but each time I indulge in KFC, I'll succumb to sore throat.  I discovered that if I eat KFC sans the oily fatty skin, I'll be A-OK. And so all the greasy skin went to hubs 😂


That's our Sunday cheat day, cheating on all things unhealthy before resuming another week of eating home-cooked wholesome food for the next 5-6 days 😄

MCO Day 31 ~ 17 April 2020 (Friday)

My MCO workout achievement today from stairs climbing (5th floor to 18th floor to ground floor back to 5th floor), star jumps, strength training and jogging outside our unit corridor, tracked by my trusted old FitBit:

Duration: 30 minutes
Number of steps: 5,035
Number of stairs: 28
Calories burnt: 969
Distance: 3.61km

Pathetic but better than just sitting at home and having my butt glued to my massage chair all day long. This is half of what I normally achieve on pre-MCO days.



My almost daily MCO Whatsapp conversations with the hubs be like this:










When hubs was out groceries shopping today, he got so excited when he saw a large consignment of toilet papers that had just arrived at our neighborhood sundry shop; he quickly snapped a photo and Whatsapped the photo to me 😆  And yes, he bought a bundle of 3 rolls 😁


The lady boss of our favorite tai chow restaurant saw hubs at the sundry shop, signaled for him to walk over to her restaurant and gifted him half a roast chicken, citing that she's about to close shop for the day and that's her leftover chicken. That just warmed the cockles of my heart 💓

That's the reason why I miss all these vendors and restaurant owners, who have become our good friends over the years. The char koay teow lady boss and us have been friends for over 20 years at this neighborhood, as with the kuih seller, whom we have not seen for over a month. I always wonder how they are coping with no income 😰  When the MCO is lifted, we're not going to cook lunch anymore!  We're going to eat at all our friends' stalls for brunch everyday to help them restart their businesses.




Dinner of stir-fried assorted vegetables with fish cakes, blanched lady's fingers, sweet corn soup, steamed egg with minced pork, stir-fried baby spinach and takeout chicken curry to help our neighborhood restaurant who's just re-opened her restaurant for takeaways.


Post dinner and cooking aftermath scene at our wet kitchen:
This is just 1/3 of what has to be washed (bigger cooking utensils, pots and pans are not in the photo), every single day.  Three times a day.  I am so so so sick of washing and cleaning.



Fortunately I have this girl to help me with the dishes. Most nights hubs will help to wash the bigger and messier utensils and equipment, leaving the easier ones for Sherilyn or Alycia to wash. I'll have to clean up the greasy stove, walls, floor and sinks and just about everything else in the house.



Hubs now has a MCO haircut combo of #2 and #5. The bald patch is behind, which I think he inadvertently chopped off a gob of hair and the front bangs are almost similar to style #5 😆  No way am I going to cut his hair, lest I bugger up his head and get blamed for a hilarious haircut, knowing how persnickety he is.



Which MCO hair styles do the men and boys in your house have?

MCO Day 28 & 29 (14 & 15 April 2020)

As the MCO progresses to almost a month, I tend to lose track of what MCO day that we're in. And I lost track of what day yesterday and today are because everyday feels the same! I have taken to writing down the MCO day numbers on my desktop calendar for ease of reference each time I update my blogs. 😑

MCO Day 28 (Tuesday, 14 April 2020)
After sitting in front on my PC for an hour and feeling sick of reading the same negative news, I forced myself to my bedroom to do something that I have been procrastinating because wiping the blinds and window grills is something that I detest doing. And it's not important to me. But these are not wiped for over a month and God knows when Maria our beloved part-time helper can start coming to our house again.  Each time there's heavy wind and rain, the dusty blinds get wet and the blackish water drips down the walls and onto the floor as if telling me how awfully dirty they are.  So whether I like it or not, I have to clean those dang blinds, which are a pain to wipe, panel by panel from top to bottom.  My sole motivation is I get to burn more calories since it's impossible to hit 10,000 steps a day now.







Our dinner: pan fried crispy 'sook yue' (salted ikan kembong) with a tantalizing tangy dipping sauce composed of garlic + chili + lemon juice, 'pak choy' vegetable + chicken soup, braised pork ribs with tomatoes and onions and blanched kailan and lady's fingers.



MCO Day 29 (Wednesday, 15 April 2020)
I told myself that I should catch up on my sleep throughout this once in a lifetime MCO period but at 5:45 a.m. today, I stared at the glow-in-the-dark numbers on my alarm clock and couldn't get back to sleep. My internal alarm clock had woken me up.  I had no reason to wake up so early as I don't have to prep the girls for school, no church to go to and no need to do my pre-dawn exercise. I shut my eyes tight but dang it, I just couldn't get back to sleep, so what the heck. I got up and did the usual stuff in the morning, enjoying the sheer quietude in the house. Yes I do enjoy and crave for total placidity everyday but if I wake up late, I will be missing it.  Sometimes I wonder if I am an anti-social and  loner since I like to be alone and not talk to anyone!

Today's sun rise is magnificent and I just had to snap a photo of the pretty colors in the sky for record.



Brunch of fried 'loh si fun' (rat noodles. Yup what a name for noodles!) and red bean tong sui.


Today the Education Minister announced that the UPSR and PT3 exams scheduled for this year will be cancelled! Woohoo, Sherilyn and Cass are 'lucky'! But they may have to sit for another form of assessment test, which will be announced later. Schools will not be reopened so soon and when the situation is safe and La Corona is no longer a fast and fury deadly threat, the fifth and sixth formers will resume school first. The SPM exam will be postponed to the first quarter of 2021, which means Alycia will have more time to prep for the exam.  And poor hubs will have to fork out an additional of 3 to 4 months of fees to Alycia's high school! Fees are to be paid in FULL throughout the MCO period.  Thank you La Corona!  And because of La Corona, students who are due to sit for their UPSR, PT3, SPM and STPM in 2020 are now mockingly named on social media as the "Corona batch" 😈





Dinner of steamed cod fish, fish paste and pork noodles, braised chicken feet (not my kind of dish but the kind organic chicken seller gave us a big bag of chicken feet), sauteed vegetables and chicken curry using the frozen curry paste that the mil made last year.