I was out at the back of the house and found the strangest thing. There is a coconut (I think that is what it is) sitting on the water drain grill.
What is weird is that there are no palm trees or trees with this kind of nut anywhere around the area. No trees up on my neighbor's property where it might just fall down on to mine. And what else is strange is the odd location it has been neatly placed. R and I figure someone or something (an animal?) must have brought the coconut here. 
Truth be told, I always wanted a greenhouse. One of those fancy greenhouses that they have in the UK... where they are separate buildings or attached to the house. Well, I now kind of realized that dream with my makeshift greenhouse.
I have planted some seeds and some are starting to sprout. I've also taken some cuttings and have them in water bottles some have started to root as well. My thought on that is everything here in Malaysia grows so fast, so some of these plants should root. The greenhouse is more of an experiment to see what I can grow from seed and cuttings. For example, I took some cuttings from the hedge around the front of the house as I'd like to fill it in with some more plants. But I don't think those are going to root. If not, oh well. I've also taken cuttings from the passion fruit vine and some other orange plant vine which grows on my neighbors property. I've got Thai basil attempting to root as well as some Christmas palm seeds, the bunga kantan experiments, chili peppers and peacock tree seeds. There's more I'm forgetting too. I'd like to have an herb garden around this space with herbs I can't get in the stores easily here like tomatillo which I have never seen. Also grow herbs we use a lot of like Thai basil. But it will all be very slow to start.
The Bathroom mirror is up in the Office Bathroom! We didn't have B make a wood framed one as we didn't want to add another element in there. After looking at all the mirror places we could find in Seremban, where they make mirrors and also windows and window frames, we found one place that would put up a mirror without the standard gold or silver tacky poster frame that all the companies suggested. The compromise is that it has 4 silver round top screws on the outside of the mirror. No one is doing this anymore for large mirror, but well, in Seremban it's all we could find and it looks ok. I'm just concerned the screws will rust over time as everything here does.
We also had the company install a round bevel mirror we bought at Ikea in what is now our Master Bathroom. You can see that there are two doors in the bathroom. One connects to our Master Bedroom and the other to what used to be a slightly smaller bedroom that we are now using as a big walk-in closet (will eventually have B make custom wood closet shelves around the whole room...). Anyway, the bathroom wall tiles are ok in beige. The special tiles are greyish green tint and have a bit of elegant design (or try to be) of course we would have gone plainer, but here we are. The floor tiles are a green color. So what I thought we would do would be try to go a bit more elegant here. You can see that the counter is pretty big for only one sink. I would have put two, but then again when both doors are open (they open into the bathroom), the one sink in the center looks good. The ikea mirror is kind of elegant and I found a small pendant light with little crystal chandelier pieces dangling in it, somehow glamorous but still minimal and modern that we will have put up when we get a few more light fixtures for around the house. That and add an orchid plant on the side of the countertop and some nice spa towels and we should be done. 
Not sure we want to add glass around the shower, but might do someday. For now, I was thinking about buying some of that teakwood flooring (something like this) and put it in there with some asian pebbles around the outer parts of it all inside the existing edged parts of the tile floor. Just some thoughts, but not sure yet.
At the back of the house this herb? which is flowering is starting to grow over the back wall from my neighbors yard. I saw their maid picking some and then cleaning it in their wet kitchen. At first I thought it was basil from a ways away, but now I'm not so sure looking at the photo. Does anyone know what this herb might be? I wonder if it is something used in Malaysian cooking. Please let me know if you have any ideas so I can pick some and try it out.
There are two electric boxes in the house, one in the entryway and one on the second floor off on the side of the family room. Both locations are out in the open. The entryway is especially problematic because it hangs directly above where we plan to put a big entry mirror. So how to hide these ugly boxes in a way that we can still easily get at them (because with lots of storms the surge protectors go off once in awhile).
When were were living in the rental apartment the electric box was covered in a white laminate box which didn't look as bad as the boxes in our place. The painters told us they couldn't be painted so we will have B build simple white boxes around them with doors (no handles). It's the only thing we can think of to make them less noticeable.
Remember that Mystery Vine growing in my backyard here that blog readers helped determine was a Passion Fruit Vine? Well, above was my first ever sampling of passion fruit. Apparently we have the darker fruit growing in the backyard opposed to the yellow fruit because the fruits continued getting darker on the vine for quite some time.
I've wrote about our favorite Thai Restaurant On Sweet Thai Cuisine before here. But I didn't post photos. Well, here are a few shots. This place is always good. We've had different things, but our favorite is the Phat Instant Noodle (Maggie) with Chicken and cooked extra spicy.
Oh, and I love that they serve me my noodles in the pretty plastic floral plate and R merely gets a yellow one.
So after we finished painting the Entryway, my mind immediately started thinking about the useless space under the stairway (okay I was thinking about this before painting too). I don't know who designed this house, but they could have done a better job with the layout in places. The entryway near the stairs is a good example. The space is totally wasted. You can't really put furniture in there because of the angle or hang art. You wouldn't want to close it up as a closet either. So what to do?
So I get my box of unused pebbles leftover from the landscape design stage (the pebbles I placed in the photo above are not the same darker blueish grey we used outside the house. These are a lighter grey). But after putting them down, R thinks that the pebbles look too small and I think they look too much like the pebbles we have outside the house. I'm going to go to the Rock Garden in Seremban sometime soon and see what else they have. I'd like to get the entryway moving along.
I spotted, actually T spotted, a bird making a nest in the small Mango Tree at the back of the house. Everyday T has been glued to the window closest to the tree watching the activity.
Often the sunset makes the entire sky pink, but this photo doesn't capture just how pink and beautiful it really is.
One of the best things about living in Malaysia is Air Asia. The flights are cheap and I recently purchased some tickets for travel in the fall. Well, I always see on the Air Asia website these amazing deals, but when I key in the dates and destinations of my travel the prices are never as cheap as the promotion. Although they are cheap enough. 
I found my mom's recipe for Popovers in my recipes and decided to give them a try as they are very easy to make. My mom's recipe is the easiest one I've encountered and usually is failure-proof unlike other fussy popover recipes.
My Bunga Kantan plant behind the carpark continues to thrive. I initially wrote about it here. Another Malaysian blogger Autumn Belle, who has a fantastic gardening blog called My Nice Garden, wrote me that from the photos on my blog she can see that my plant is generating seeds which is apparently uncommon. I do see the Malaysian Little Spider Hunter Bird hovering around the plant alot (see my post here) and so I think that is how the plant is being pollinated. 
I sent Autumn Belle some of the dried brown seeds like above and a few fresher larger green and pinkish pods. She sent me some items in return which I will write about later! Anyway, she just posted a very good informative post on Bunga Kantan here asking her large readership if they have any experience with germinating Bunga Kantan from seeds. I hope that they can give us some advice or if anyone reading here has any advice please post it! 
In the meantime, I planted two pots of Bunga Kantan seeds as a test. 4 seeds on April 24 and 4 more on April 29. You can see from the photo that nothing has sprouted yet in the Bunga Kantan pots. The other pot is a mango seedling that I pulled from the grass in the front yard. I want to see how that does, but I'm not sure I need anymore Mango tress on the property because I already have four and they grow pretty big.
I decided to try and make a vlita salad yesterday after putting up the Bayam Merah Post. So I searched online and found a couple recipes which I adapted slightly. The salad tasted pretty good, the fresh lemon juice was nice. I happened to have a couple lemons on hand, usually we use more limes. Here's the recipe:
I bought a huge bunch of Bayam Merah a vegetable leaf that you can find out more about in the Wikipedia article on Amaranth. The first time I bought it here in Malaysia someone called it Chinese Red Spinach. So I have been preparing it as a spinach of sorts. Looking at the Amaranth article though, I see that many countries use this leaf in cooking. I'm going to check out how to make the Greece salad dish using this leaf called vlita or vleeta. What is best about it is that, unlike green spinach, when cooked the red of the leaf bleeds so when you mix the cooked Bayam Merah on say rice, the rice takes on a red color similar to the color of beet juice which makes for a colorful meal. Price of the bunch above 1.44 RM from Tesco.
The store also had this foot stool as well. I would remove the fake leather cushion and find another or leave it without one.
Since living here our favorite Noodles have become these brownish hard noodles which are called different names and similar to Chinese Noodles. Both brands above are produced in Selangor, Malaysia the yellow bag is called "Megah Mee Clay Pot Ee Mee" and the White and Red bag is called "EE KEE" (2.60RM per bag). Although the brand name states "clay pot" the instructions on the back show the noodles can be used for soups or fried noodles as well. We like them as fried noodles and below is how we make them.
One of the simplest meals we make are vegetables and these noodles. We use whatever vegetables we have on hand and some chili peppers. First we cook the vegetables in a bit of oil in the wok and set them aside. While we are cooking the vegetables we add two of those round noodle disks to boiling water and cook the noodles for about two minutes. They should get softer, but not mushy. We drain the noodles and then add them to the wok and fry the noodles. Stirring them a lot so that the noodles don't get stuck on the bottom of the wok.
When the noodles start to stick, we add some light and dark soy sauce to loosen them from the bottom of the pan. Then we add the vegetables back in and toss the mixture.
Lastly, we add some of this Thai sos sauce (here a popular brand called Maggi) to make the noodles a bit spicer and to give the noodles a bit of a sauce base. I think that these noodles made in the hawker stands in Malaysia are made with soy sauce only. But we like the extra taste. The noodles are brownish, but I think that the dark soy sauce is what makes the noodles look darker too.
The painting and clean up of the upstairs 'Family Room' (as they call it around here), Stairs and Entry way is finally complete! I think it looks great and is ready for some furniture, now if we could only find the right items. The Ikea mattress cushions that I saw with the grey covering turned out to not be a good idea. The grey part was not a permanent fabric but kind of a temporary cheap fabric cover that would get ruined pretty quick. So for now we have to find other cushions that will work or resort to sofas/chairs. The search is on....
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