Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Menu

These days, I don't have too much blogging time, so I am just sharing lunch menu of my hospital restaurant for the week (24th August 2009). Foods are rather cheap, but reasonably good.

Monday Lunch Menu
Starter
Home Made Celery Soup
Main Course
Roast Pork & Apple Sauce
Steak and Mushroom Pies with a Rich Gravy and Puff Pastry Topping
Breast of Chicken with a Wild Mushroom & Madeira Sauce

Vegetarian Option
Cauliflower Cheese

Dessert
Chocolate Sponge with White Chocolate Sauce
Rice Pudding
Selection of Cold Sweets

Tuesday Lunch Menu
Starter
Home Made Vegetable Soup
Main Course
Grilled Gammon with Pineapple
Chicken Curry with Rice / Chips
Beef Lasange

Vegetarian Option
Vegetable Pasta Bake - Fresh Vegetables and Pasta topped with
Breadcrumbs and Cheese

Dessert
Fruit Crumble with Custard
Rice Pudding
Selection of Cold Sweets

Wednesday Lunch Menu
Starter
Home Made Cauliflower & Broccoli Soup
Main Course
Roast Chicken and Seasoning
Beef Wellington with a Red Wine Sauce
Pasta Carbanara - Ribbons of Tagliatelli with a Mushroom and
Smoked Ham Cream Sauce

Vegetarian Option
Homemade Forest Mushroom Quiche

Dessert
Apple and Sultana Sponge with Custard
Rice Pudding
Selection of Cold Sweets

Thursday Lunch Menu
Starter
Home Made Watercress Soup
Main Course
Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding
Chicken Korma - a Spicy but not hot Curry in a Creamy Sauce
with Almonds, served with Rice / Chips
Fried Cod in a Home Made Batter with Lemon Wedges

Vegetarian Option
Mushroom and Spinach Lasagne - Layers of Pasta, Button Mushrooms
and Spinach in a White Wine Cream Sauce

Dessert
Fruit Crumble with Custard
Milk Pudding
Selection of Cold Sweets

Friday Lunch Menu
Starter
Home Made Tomato Soup
Main Course
Shepherds Pie
Faggots in Gravy with Mushy Peas
Braised Steak with Mushrooms. Shallots in a Red Wine Gravy

Vegetarian Option
Mushroom & Red Pepper Stroganoff

Dessert
Apple Pie with Custard
Rice Pudding
Selection of Cold Sweets



Updated (26/08/2009) 20:30





Restaurant



My food and others eating


Lunch (Vegetable pasta with chips and pea ) not my main meal


Updated 27/08/09 -09:30

Night off break fast: my fav British breakfast with eggs, bacon, sausage, baked beans, mushrooms and pudding ( Ma KOM တို႕စားတဲ့ ထမင္းနဲ႕ပဲျပဳတ္ေတာ့ မလြမ္းေသးဘူး။ ဘယ္တုန္းကမွလဲ မၾကိဳက္ခဲ့ဘူး။ .)

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Emotional intelligence

When I was young, I still remember that people emphasised the importance of IQ (Intelligence Quotient), assuming that it was one of the key predictors of academic and financial success. But these days, people have more talked about Emotional Intelligence (EQ). So I just did a quick research about EQ. The followings are the results.

What is Emotional intelligence

Emotional Intelligence (EI) describes the ability, capacity, skill or, in the case of the trait EI model, a self-perceived ability, to identify, assess, and manage the emotions of one's self, of others, and of groups. (Source)

Emotional intelligence is the unique repertoire of emotional skills that a person uses to navigate the everyday challenges of life.(Source)

Emotional Intelligence is the ability to identify, use, understand and manage emotions. (source)

Research suggests that a person's emotional intelligence (EQ) might be a greater predictor of success than his or her intellectual intelligence (IQ), despite an assumption that people with high IQs will naturally accomplish more in life. (Source)

Goleman identified the five 'domains' of EQ as:
1. Knowing your emotions.
2. Managing your own emotions.
3. Motivating yourself.
4. Recognising and understanding other people's emotions.
5. Managing relationships, ie., managing the emotions of others. (Source)

Two aspects
• Understanding yourself, your goals, intentions, responses, behaviour and all.
• Understanding others, and their feelings. (Source)

For decades, a lot of emphasis has been put on certain aspects of intelligence such as logical reasoning, math skills, spatial skills, understanding analogies, verbal skills etc. Researchers were puzzled by the fact that while IQ could predict to a significant degree academic performance and, to some degree, professional and personal success, there was something missing in the equation. Some of those with fabulous IQ scores were doing poorly in life; one could say that they were wasting their potential by thinking, behaving and communicating in a way that hindered their chances to succeed.

One of the major missing parts in the success equation is emotional intelligence, a concept made popular by the groundbreaking book by Daniel Goleman, which is based on years of research by numerous scientists such as Peter Salovey, John Meyer, Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg and Jack Block, just to name a few. For various reasons and thanks to a wide range of abilities, people with high emotional intelligence tend to be more successful in life than those with lower EIQ even if their classical IQ is average. (Source)

Emotional Intelligence Test (click here)

After a brief reading about EI, what I understand is that it is a skill someone needs to develop or improve the personal ability to control newly emerging (own or others) emotions triggered by external stimuli, without reducing normal thinking power , while brain is working well in its maximum speed for further plans. To be honest, I must say I still need to learn more about this social science topic.

Thank you

Thursday, August 13, 2009

For the time being ခုတေလာ......

I just imitate what some bloggers did lately. Here is the result.

ခုတေလာ......

ခုတေလာ ေတြးေနမိတာက
£ rate getting better?

ကိုယ့္ကိုယ္ကို ျပန္ဆင္ျခင္မိတာက
Too much whisky

က်န္းမာေရး
Neck ache because of KOM's cbox

ဖတ္ျဖစ္တဲ့စာအုပ္ေတြက
Dirty, sick, X-rated & Politically incorrect Jokes (Uncensored!)
The Mammoth Book of Insults

ေရးေနမိတာက
Complaint letter to the National Rail

ေရာက္ေနျဖစ္တာက
Evening walks around cemetery

နားေထာင္ျဖစ္ေနတာက
Fifty Cent: Massacre

ရြတ္ေနမိတဲ့ကဗ်ာက
My Gun Go Off (Curtis, 50 Cent)

ျဖစ္ခ်င္ေနတာက
Jet pot winner

စားျဖစ္ေနတာက
Roast Duck and Red wine

သနားေနမိတာက
Single moms

လြမ္းေနမိတာက
Amsterdam

ေမ့ေလ်ာ့ပစ္ေနမိတာက
Dying people from work

ခါးသက္ေနမိတာက
My medical doctor life

တမ္းတေနမိတာက
My missing Lamy pen

ၾကိတ္ၿပီးခ်ီးက်ဴးေနမိတာက
Bill Clinton (affair with Monica Lewinsky and recent successful attempt to get 2 journalists free from N. Korea)

ၾကိတ္ၿပီးအထင္ေသးေနမိတာက
Fish paste eaters
(လူမုန္းမ်ားေအာင္လို႕ ေသခ်ာေျပာသည္)

ဆႏၵမရွိတဲ့ေနရာ
Ex-capital Yangon

ဆႏၵရွိေနတဲ့ကိစၥ
Boat trip

မုန္းတီးေနမိတာက
Motor cars and Windows Vista

ခ်စ္ေနတာက
M..

စိတ္ပ်က္ေနမိတာက
Labour government and Prime Minister Gordon Brown

စြဲလန္းေနမိတာက
Gangster movies

သေဘာက်ေနမိတာက
My new 100% organic shirt

လိုအပ္ေနတာက
New BMW

ေတာင္းေနမိတဲ့ဆု
to become a Tycoon, instead of a rubbish doctor

ထပ္ျပန္တလဲလဲေအာ္ဟစ္ေနမိတာက
F...............

ဝန္ခံခ်င္တာက
Lying myself

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

My shopping basket

Someone's shopping basket may show his or her eating style while reflecting the social status, belief and place of origin to some extent. In many occasions, we can also learn the hobby and interest of a particular person .




If you check the items I bought from Tesco today, you can see easily I am an average person who keeps cat at home. Lentils and beans mean I am something related to Indian sub-continent or Mexico. You may notice eggs at about centre. Of course, I normally buy free-range eggs as I do not support the way caged eggs are produced.








On the other hand, free range egg production is really nice in my eyes. This is the picture from North Creek Farm.

Sunday, August 09, 2009

Plagiarism Mania

What is Plagiarism?

According to the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, to "plagiarize" means to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source.

Plagiarism is a serious fraud. Some journalists have ended their career as they stole someone else’s work. There were many students who had to leave university after submitting an essay with missing reference. Most schools have been using plagiarism detector software.

It was an earthquake in the journalism world. 27-year-old Jayson Blair, who had been one of only two African-American editors in the history of the University of Maryland's Diamondback newspaper, and had been hired as a full reporter at the New York Times at an impressively young age, resigned only 6 days after first being accused of copying a story from another newspaper.(source)

Later, it was discovered that he had a bipolar disorder which is a serious mental problem.

Above article I came across for some reason made me remind a Burmese blogger and her scandal. Apparently, she(he) was bitterly criticised by a lobby of people who found out her copy works. Personally, I like her blog posts which are pretty entertaining. At the same time, I tried to help her out. At this point, my thought was that if there is any strong relation between plagiarism and some mental or personality disorder.

Basically, psychiatry is an interesting speciality, explaining a variety of mental and personal disorders, although, I believe, there are many areas the psychiatrists have not explored yet. (Click here for Who classification of mental and behavioural disorders). (Easy view on Wiki)

In my attempt to establish “the repeated plagiarism” as a psychological condition, unfortunately I could not find any relevant publication or paper available on free Internet sources while waiting for a reply email from my friend, who is a psychiatrist. I think it can be added under that heading of Habit and impulse disorders, together with

Can we call this condition as Plagiarmania or Plagiamania or Plagiarism mania?

Probably, the treatment option would include cognitive and behaviour therapy, rather than criticising and shouting in an uneducated manner. Own GP would be helpful this point.

Basically, no body is perfect in the world while some proportion of healthy looking persons may have a mild form of personality deviation. Who knows?

By the way, if someone wants to check own personality disorder privately, click here.

Thank you

All the best

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Speed boat trip in Cardiff

Wales, which had 2.9 million population in 2001 census, is one of the countries in the United Kingdom. Cardiff is its capital city. When I got there, I felt I was in a foreign country. I think the Welsh people look slightly different from English with more rounded face. The Welsh language is what I can't predict what it means. But we can still use English. Basically Wales is a really nice place to me.


Welsh flag


An example of Welsh



We are on 5240 feet long Severn bridge . on M4 motor way to Wales


Here are some photos of Cardiff Bay


A swan diving for fish or what I never know.

This speed boat attracted me to buy a ticket for next trip

ready to take a ride, nice


We were just boarding


We're just leaving the harbour.

In a couple of minutes, the boat got faster with a loud music. I thought it was flying over the surface of water. Sometime it jumped. Many occasions, it turned suddenly. We all screamed.

At the end of the trip, I had to wait for a few minutes my hearing and balance to come back. But I was really a nice experience.

For those interested in some Wales photos.

Anyway, I can tell Wales is not my country.

Sunday, July 19, 2009

Clay, Pool, Hardy and A Harbour

This morning, I was doing a minute research about clay as an attempt to find out the history of the Blue Pool encouraged me to do so.

Ball clays are kaolinitic sedimentary clays, that commonly consist of 20-80% kaolinite, 10-25% mica, 6-65% quartz. They are fine-grained and plastic in nature. They are mined in Devon and Dorset in England. They are commonly used in the construction of many ceramic articles.

The ceramic use of ball clays in Britain dates back to at least the Roman era. More recent trade began when clay was needed to construct tobacco pipes in the 16th and 17th century.

The name "ball clay" is believed to derive from the time when the clay was mined by hand. It was cut into 15 to 17-kilogram cubes and during transport the corners of the cubes became rounded off leaving "balls".

It can be said that the Blue Pool is one of the historic places of past time clay business.
The Blue Pool is a lake in the Furzebrook Estate, a 25 acres (100,000 m2) park of heath woodland and gorse near Furzebrook in Dorset, England.

The pool is a flooded, disused clay pit where Purbeck Ball Clay was dug from the 1600s to the early 1900s to make smoking pipes and tea pots.

I must say the place was amazing. Well maintained. At the same time, it looked natural. Tall pine trees were growing well, beautifully guarding the blue lake. Birds were singing. It is claimed that there are wild animals inhabited , such as rabbits, badgers, squirrels, deer and sand lizards. It was drizzling. So I did not have a full range of chance to explore the area.


A request for the wood ant. British people are kind enough to save ants and their work.

An ant nest (British wood ants there)
The color of water ,which is varying from green to blue, is due to clay particles.
Pine trees

You can see the Blue Pool photos I took yesterday.

Well, I went to Hardy's home before going to Blue Pool. To be honest, I did not know Thomas Hardy until a friend of mine from Bath mentioned about his name and novels last month.

Thomas Hardy(2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.

This is what he was described in wikipedia.

According to the Thomas Hardy society founded in 1968, he was born at Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester. During his lifetime he composed nearly a thousand published poems and wrote fourteen publised novels including ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’ and ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. He died in Dorchester on 11 January 1928. Much of Thomas Hardy's work is based on Wessex, the South and West of England.

Unfortunately, when I got to Hardy's cottage, where he was born and raised, now under the management of the National Trust, it was found out that the small museum was not open for the public. For some reason, opening days are from Monday to Thursdays and Sunday only, what I leaned later. Why not on Saturday? Still misery. Anyway, I had a chance to walk around nice and quiet surrounding woodland area. I saw some families with their dogs enjoying the place like me.

Hardy's cottage

cute tiny wild fruits, close-up view (ရႊန္းမီအတြက္လက္ေဆာင္)

Here are some more photos of Thomas Hardy's birthplace.

After visiting above two places, I headed to Poole harbour to take boat photos. As it has been 6 PM, all deep sea boat services had already finished.




Reference:
http://www.bluepooltearooms.co.uk/index.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy
http://www.hardysociety.org/

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Evening walk

Walking under the sun with temperature well over 35C was the hell. When I was teens, my parents managed me to walk to school on foot for many reasons. I did not have a choice. It was a pain. It may be a funny thing. But it is true that one of the reasons I moved to England was that I really hated tropical sunshine. I have been traumatised by sun in Burma, not by military government.

In England, I do not need to walk in that way. Really nice. I am still not keen to walk. I may run. I may swim. I may ride a bike. But I did not go out for walking at all.

This evening is different. I did take 30 minute walk around my house, exploring surrounding area. Here are some photos.


Wild rose


Roadside flower


Name?


White flower ( I dont know its name)


A cottage


a farm


a stream passing under the mill


phone booth "Coin not accepted"


a pub


church entrance


Only church in this village. It is constructed from flint and stone and has a Norman chancel arch with a 16th century nave.





an old organ for Sunday service


Graveyard with recent funeral service. It looks congested. Maybe not enough fund. Personally I would like to lie in a decent space of land.


An old graveyard


church lane

Carpeting and Sunbathing

Since last spring, I had decided not to go abroad this summer after I was fed up with flight schedules, hotel deals and unexpected expenses that I experienced in my last trip. During my this short break, I just stayed at home. I did enjoyed lots of barbecue and wines. It was really nice until yesterday.

When I got up at 8, I was shocked to find out that the whole downstairs was flooded. The whole kitchen, the whole living room. The carpets and rugs had been underwater. I had to try to calm down myself first. The leak was from the connection point at washing machine. After securing it, I had to start very tiring carpet replacement. I removed all wet carpets. And I rushed to nearby Allied carpet. Fortunately, the one I like was on 30% off although it was still not so cheap for me as £7.45 per square meter. I finished carpeting this morning, gaining a new experience, but leaving me with some ache and pain as I had to moved all furnitures.

My house has already been equipped with smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector. After this incident, I was thinking to get anti-flood alarm if available at market :)


new carpet in kitchen


kitchen


Living room carpet.


view from rear garden while sunbathing.


a pigeon watching at me


under the blue sky I was doing sunbathing (I miss you darling)


Wild fruits


Next door neighbours trying to make friendship with me

Monday, July 13, 2009

Nearby beach

Summer time means more people going out. Beaches, holiday camps and caravan sites have been busy places. At the same time, there is a noise pollution with rescue helicopters flying over my area.

For me, I don't have too much chance to enjoy sunshine due to my work and education commitments. My organizer shows that most weekends have got full of appointments, on-call duties and "to do tasks". But last weekend, I was able to manage to go to nearby beach, where I spend one hour time. Here are some photos sharing.


Jurassic coast


A sea gull


I deliberately avoided people in my photos .




Dogs also enjoyed summer


ရႊန္းမိ ေမးဘူးလို႕ လမ္းေဘးကပန္းပံုတင္လိုက္တယ္။ Englandက ဒီအခ်ိန္ဆိုေနရာတိုင္း မွာပန္းေတြေတြ႕ႏိုင္တယ္။ ေပါက္ တို႕ ေမျမိဳ႕လိုေပါ့



feeding myself in that evening


fed a bird as well