I’ll be the first to admit I can’t live without my nice strong cup of morning coffee. I’m getting tired of those 3-in-1’s. I only drink them because I’m too sleepy to brew up a real cup of coffee!

I’m sure you have coffee freak friends like me. Who doesn’t indeed?

Well, then the perfect gift for them this holiday season is the Shock Coffee gift set. Shock Coffee’s energy coffee blends come from 100% Arabica coffee beans.

The gift set contains ground coffee, canned latte and cappuccino, a travel mug, a ceramic mug, and a matching “Sleep is Overrated” t-shirt and hat. Pretty neat, huh!

It’s got a bit of everything that a coffee freak will definitely appreciate! They have whole beans and ground coffee in ‘energy’ and ‘organic’ blends, powdered instant cappuccino and something I find very interesting - chocolate-covered coffee beans.

From now thru December 31, 2008, use their Black Friday/Cyber Monday coupon code - 5OFFSHOCK - to get 5% off all Shock Coffee products and give your coffee lover friends a pleasant ’shock’ of a gift for Christmas.

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When my friend invited me to join her yoga class, I instantly agreed without a second thought. How was I to know it was not a real class, that it was a practice session organized by one of the ladies for her group of friends?

The moment the ladies started strolling in with their own personal yoga mats was the moment I realized I was the only noob in the room! Haiz! Good thing I don’t blush easily or I’d have turned into a tomato and rolled out of the room right that minute!

Okay, so I fell behind, wa-ay behind! and by that I mean I couldn’t get my limbs to bend over backwards for me, no matter how hard I tried. I would’ve thought since I’m such a gym freak that I would have no problem with the moves ! Uh-huh, yoga and gym are two different animals. There was just no way I could get my limbs or my butt to go anywhere !

I’ve since dropped out of the class. Didn’t want to make a fool of myself any more in front of that roomful of yoga guru types whose bodies are like rubber bands. That said, I definitely plan on taking it up again. I find the torturous routines very challenging and the after-effect makes me feel really great.

Next class I join, it’ll be the noob beginner’s class where they teach your limbs to obey and do as you say. Next class I join, I’m going to bring one of these, my own personal yoga mat so I won’t look like such a complete idiot .

Come to think of it, this would make a great gift for someone like me. Such nice colors and they’re non-slip too so I won’t go sailng across the room when I try to bend and flip over backwards. Duh!

If you have a yoga enthusiast on your gift list, you’ve found the perfect gift. YogaAccessories.com has a really good selection of high quality yoga accessories at unbeatable prices. You can save 10% off any order above $75 by using the Black Friday coupon code - SAVEAS10 - between November 26 thru 30, 2008.

Saturday morning, DH was off at 5:00am to line up for the Playstation 3. Even getting there that early, he was number 70+ in line. Some of the early birds had been camping there for days, wth!

I was happy to be fast asleep in a cozy bed rather than sitting out in the darkness on the cold, hard floor outside 1 Utama. Seems DH is the only one who’s excited about the Playstation 3. My three teens think “it’s lame and overrated”, in their words.

But the least we could do was to bring the man his long-awaited breakfast from McD. We didn’t hang around there very long. The place was smoky and there was nothing happening. I don’t have much patience for geeky events, I’d rather be shopping .

I can’t believe they make people pay the full price for something that’s two years old. That tiny discount is nothing after you factor in all the proprietary stuff the Playstation 3 needs in order to work.

I expect the man will play with it for two weeks tops, then it’ll end up in the storeroom with all the other white elephants *sigh*.

Yep, celebrate we must so we decided to go to KFC since the kids have been hounding me to go there like forever, and I’ve been telling them it’s too fattening heaty.

But we got there after 7pm by which time the place was brimming with the buka puasa crowd. We went to Peranakan Place and it was also packed.

So we wound up at Esquire Kitchen to eat the kids’ favorite wo tip (pot stickers). Plenty of tables there as the place was only half-full.

We didn’t stick around to do any window-shopping afterwards though I was tempted as usual. I’d already spent the whole morning grocery-shopping like a crazy woman.

Same story every weekend because I have to have enough food for homecooked meals as well as enough food in the fridge for the kids to raid all school week. Feeding 3 teens is like feeding 3 horses, I’m not kidding .

Thankfully I don’t have to go to the wet market. Either my aunt or my neighbor does that for me. I just have to get the stuff for my Western lunches like milk, bread, potatoes, pasta, deli meat… and biscuits or snacks for Skye’s recess.

Skye’s the only one who eats during recess now. Raine doesn’t any more and Steev practically never has in his entire school life. My kids don’t eat canteen food (never have, in fact), too many flies and it isn’t exactly very healthy or appetizing.

Since the kids were little, I’ve been lugging around one oversized tote bag after another simply because it’s big enough for the kids’ things as well as my own stuff.

When they were younger, I carried their milk formula, water bottles, toys and spare disposable diapers in my tote. I never carried a handbag. Too much hassle, already dizzy trying to juggle baby, toddlers, stroller, tote bag, shopping bags .

The one thing I always carried in my tote bag then, and yes, even now is my little bag of medical supplies. I use a freebie cosmetic pouch for my minyak angin (a cooling medicated oil which is great for headaches, insect bites), Panadols, Band-Aid plasters and mosquito repellent.

I feel much safer knowing I have these few things with me just in case. I should probably throw in a couple of safety pins as well. Just recently, I had a button pop off my shirt while we were out shopping.

I went into a few clothing shops to ask for a safety pin, just one safety pin and no one had any to spare me. Very sad! But I guess it made some guys happy to see this woman with an unbuttoned shirt .

It’s been a long while since I had a Sunday like today. I shopped from morning till night. It was something I used to do when I was still single.

In those days, nothing could stop a crazed shopaholic like me, not rain or hail or sleet or snow, not screaming feet, not aching calves!!

I was at Tesco yesterday but lost the mood to shop because it was too crowded. I didn’t manage to buy everything I wanted so I had to go again this morning.

I was there early. I shop much faster when I’m alone. Since I always buy multiples, I just grab and throw into my shopping cart.

Four packs of chicken nuggets, 6 packs of biscuits, 8 packs of crunchy snacks, 4 bags of groundnuts, 6 packs of fresh milk, 6 tins of tuna, 15 slices of bacon, just to give you an idea of how much 3 teens can whack . Sounds like I’m feeding an army, right? *sweats*

After dropping off the groceries, we went to Nando’s for lunch. Me and the kids gobbled up 1 and a quarter chickens, 2 servings of Mediterranean rice and potato wedges, plus french fries, coleslaw and salad. Don’t ask me how we did it but teens are such big eaters!! Good thing they’re all still average-sized !!

Later, I left the kids to walk around on their own while I went shopping on my own. It’s so good to be able to do that now that the kids are older. When they were younger, I never got a chance to buy anything for myself. I was always buying their stuff.

Happily I skipped off to buy my cosmetics and a pair of khaki pants at 70% off (not bad, eh!!). Since it’s a long weekend, the lines at the fitting rooms and at checkout were crazy!! I had to wait 1 hour for them to alter the length of my pants. Madness!

At the end of the day, we were all just happy to flop down and enjoy our dinner at Esquire Kitchen followed by 2 quarts of Baskin Robbins ice cream. Today’s the 31st, remember? So it’s 31% off their normal price if you survive the stress and heart attack of getting your order done right.

I had such fun I feel like going shopping again tomorrow. I saw some shorts and jeans that look nice but I didn’t get to try them on today. Steev says he’ll go with me. The girls say they had enough, haha, can’t keep up with their Mom!

And if you noticed, this post is all about numbers… just for fun .

BTW the sales are insane this weekend. Did you go shopping today or are you planning to go tomorrow?

I try to avoid Midvalley at all cost on the weekend. I don’t quite care to waste my precious weekend acting like some sort of hungry vulture circling the basement parking endlessly trying to swoop in on a vacant parking spot when clearly there are NO vacant parking spots to begin with.

My only excuse for going to Midvalley last weekend was that I had this darned Metrojaya voucher to use before it expires this week! I’ve been meaning to buy a handbag and there’s lots of handbags at Metrojaya so it shouldn’t be a problem, right? Wrong.

Turns out we went from the bags section to the ladies’ to the shoes and up to the men’s department, came back down to the bags section, then to the accessories to the ladies’, well, you get the picture and I just couldn’t make myself fall in love with any of the bags there.

It’s got to be love at first sight,  you know, or it’ll never work out. Well, love don’t come easy, like they say. Luckily we’d sent DH and Steev off to read magazines at MPH earlier. If they’d tagged along, it would’ve put even more pressure on us.

Anyways after 2 hours, I finally settled on a black Beverly Hills Polo Club shoulder bag with multiple pockets and “brass knuckles hanging from my neck and my chain” like that song by Good Charlotte.

I’m not really crazy about the design. But under the circumstances, I thought, better close one eye and just grab it since it’s at 80% off, though the sign said 50%.

The girls think the bag is cute. I think it’s ugly. But then I’m notorious for making fashion statements out of my ugly handbags .

When you get invited to a baby’s fullmoon party, do you usually give a present or an angpow (red packet containing cash)?

My first choice is to give a present. I only resort to angpows when I’m in a time crunch. It’s the perfect excuse for the girls and me to trawl the baby shops in search of something cute.

Of course, if I were a new mom, I’d rather stay home and shop online at some place like Lilaguide where I can also meet and chat with other parents.

But my girls are teens now and they get giggly and excited about which is the cutest thing to buy. It also gives me a chance to give them some quick peeks into motherhood so they’ll appreciate me more .

Like I say, sometimes you need a weekend to recover from a weekend. Well, this is exactly how I feel right now. But of course, this also means we had one blast of a weekend.

You know how we sometimes try to plan a truly family sort of weekend without someone getting uptight about impending school exams or having to sacrifice being somewhere else. Well, this weekend fell together just like a jigsaw puzzle.

First stop was the food court at Suria. This is one of the few food courts we actually like liked because it’s clean and the food is was pretty good. Well, it’s still clean but the standard of the food has dropped tremendously. Yes, even my camera lost its appetite, so no photos.

The nasi lemak lady was hostile and purposely chose the smallest pieces of chicken and omelette for us. The chicken was probably raised in a gym because it tasted like chewy muscles. DH had mushed up chee cheong fun (flat rice noodles) in curry. Raine had the beef ball noodle soup that had no taste of beef at all while Steev’s pizza was expensive but so small he finished it in a couple of mouthfuls. In fact, I never even saw his pizza. He was done by the time I came back with the nasi lemak.

Next stop, the PC Fair so the girls could buy their headphones. You know what a ridiculous sardine can of a place that is. You can’t see anything except for people’s heads and a few scantily-clad la-la girls shoving brochures in your face. Whoever thought of this grossly ineffective marketing gimmick is completely missing the point. The guys are more interested in getting their hands on the cheapest piece of computer equipment than that poor anorexic girl in the knee-high boots, brother!

After 2 hours in that stuffy place with hardly any air-con, I had developed a throbbing headache so Skye and I called it quits and headed for Suria to find a cool place to sit down.

We grabbed a cup of Kaffeefrosten and 3 bagels at Vienna Bagels. I took some photos of it with my new PDA phone but later discovered I’d had the video function turned on the whole time. Duh! So I have nothing to show for our little bagel escapade either. It sure wasn’t my day for photos.

I can’t believe mooncakes are already on sale. In July? Ow, gimme a break, they may as well sell it all year. At any rate, I had to go buy one for an 80-year-old relative who loves the stuff.

Obviously I’m the wrong person for the job. I don’t even eat mooncakes. So when the promoter started fussing around trying to get me to try the different flavors, I gave her the evil eye!

She was shocked and probably a little disgusted too by the looks of it. But then I’m not known as the fan guai lo (politely translated, it means banana or an unChinese Chinese) in the family for nothing.

When she couldn’t get me to sample it, she tried to convince me to buy a whole box of 4. I was like, no, just give me the lotus paste mooncake with the single egg yolk, thanks.

She gave me an exasperated look that I summed up to mean, but everybody buy mooncakes in boxes of 4!! I knew what she was thinking. At this point, I decided to repeat my order and flee the scene before she went into shock again!