October 17, 2008
Why it never cross my mind that I could video record Robin birds we have hand fed for the past two years is beyond me. Here is an execellent footage of a Robin fed by this guy with a plateful of meal worms. Oh I missed having Robins around our flat. Nevermind next year I’m pretty sure Robins will come nest in our neighbour’s garden again, which they have been for the past two years. In fact they nested in our backyard 3 years ago, when we have just moved in here and before we cleared up the unrully ivy’s. You can have a look here for the baby Robin which was fallen from his nest, created a lot of mess in my backyard, subsequently learnt the technique of flying and finally flew away.
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October 12, 2008
About a week ago, a mouse sneaked into our kitchen while I was cooking, having left the kitchen door opened. Thought I’ve chased the mouse away, as I could not see where else could it have gone, that same night W heard mouse crawling noise in our kitchen. We tried searching it out, but nothing was found. So I left a few small pieces of cheese on the floor overnight to see if there really is a mouse hiding in our flat. To our “relief”, the cheese were still on the floor when we woke up.
But that night, I myself heard noise in the kitchen when we were about to go to bed. After clearing up our kitchen for a bit, we still couldn’t find the little creature once again. Feeling challenged, I went to B&Q the next day to buy a live mouse trap. Now equipped with a mouse trap, I happily put in a piece of bread with some peanut butter as bait. After two days of waiting, nope, mouse was no where to be seen, and we did not hear anything too. So we concluded that the mouse must have left our flat. Then yesterday I found a small hole in the new bag of bird seeds I just bought! Some of the bird seeds were scattered on the bottom of the shelf where I keep the bird seeds, and some of them even found its way into my tool box!
Looks like my bait was no good. Seeing that the mouse seem to like my bird seeds, I put a good amount of the seeds into the trap, together with some ground nuts, and oh yes freshly roasted cashew nuts too 
I was quietly confident we will get the mouse this time, but W was still a bit sceptical on whether the mouse trap with such tiny entrance would work, and was considering buying some strong glue instead to encircle the bait. The use of so called “ox skin” glue to catch rats is common practice in Malaysia, with fried squid or salted fish being used as bait These baits give out such strong smell that even rats located miles away might also be just about attracted to the trap, let alone those in the house!
As expected, we heard the mouse wandering around in our kitchen again. But we let it have all the freedom it wants this time. The next morning, W woke up earlier than me. She heard something moving in the trap box. Yes, we got the mouse! It is tiny! It does not like a house mouse we have seen attacking our bird feeder in our backyard last year. It’s actually a wood mouse. So cute
Poor little wood mouse must have been feeling rather stressed inside the trap. I would love to release the mouse from the trap quickly, but I really don’t want it to sneak into my flat again. In fact we just found out that this naughty mouse has also put a hole in our bag of rice! How annoying. So I brought it to the woodlands in the university area, which is not too far away from where we live. That silly mouse initially wouldn’t come out from the trap after I opened it. Not until I started making some squeaky noise to attract its attention to look the other way towards the open woodlands area that it started half running and hoping away into the woodlands
Posted in General 1 Comment »
October 8, 2008
The stock market took another tumble despite the latest bank rescue plan announced by the UK government, and a coordinated 0.5% interest rate cut across the world, involving Americas, UK and European Union. Never have I seen these countries working together at the same time. Just goes on to tell you the scale of the financial problem we are now facing. Property bubble, subprime problem, inflation, bank liquidity problem, now leading to increasing unemployment. The economy is definitely heading for the worse. Has it turned the corner? Apparently not yet, as goverments are still coming up with rescue packages to try and help various sectors - property, bank, insurer, manufacturing etc.
Few days ago I thought the banking sector might have already reached the bottom. We started moving into the stock market, acquiring bank shares. That was before the US finally approved the $700 billion rescue plan to buy up toxic debts. Yet that did little to stabilise the market. Today’s announcement from the UK to part-nationalise banks I feel is welcoming, as it should help strengthen the banks, bring some sanity back to how bank should be remunerated, and get the bank to operate more sensibly. Unfortunately, investors are still uncertain and the stock market continue to slide.
To be honest, I still feel the banking shares are unbelievably low. If people have cash to spare, it is at this kind of turmoil that you start investing in the stock market, to maximise the return on the meagre sum of money we have got. Often people will question about the timing. Yes, we don’t know how low the market can go, and people always want to catch the absolute bottom. But can we always get the “best” deal?
Posted in Investment, Money matters, Wisdom No Comments »
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