Animals Anecdotes 14 : Kittens on the street

[caption id="attachment_1221" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="4 little kittens, about a week or two weeks old"][/caption]

Last week, when we were overwhelmed by the addition of 4 little puppies to babysit at home, about a couple of days after we left the puppies for adoption at the vet, we found another set of 4 animals left in a box, motherless as always. This time around it was 4 little kittens. There were nicely placed inside a box, layered on the inside with that blue cloth you see in the picture above. The box is left by the corridor of the shop. I suppose the shop owner is somewhat taking care of them four or probably their mother is still nursing them and is just roaming around for food before coming back for feeding time.

It was kind of weird to encounter an exact number (in this case exactly four) of little baby animals (from puppies to kittens) all in the same week. So what is next to come? We shall see then.

Very Important Post : I'm changing my feed address!

Dear readers,

I've been thinking a lot on changing my feed address name into something  'meaningful' , well at least it will be meaningful enough for me. =). In that case, if you have previously subscribed to my feed on your Google Reader or any reader for that matter, please make a tiny change on your reader subscription NOW to continue reading on my future posts.

The new feed address is as follows:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yaszamzah

To change the feed address for this blog, you can either :

Click the link above and follow the subscription steps

or

You can either copy the above link and paste it into your Add a Subscription form in your reader

I hope you will make this very important change A.S.A.P or else you will really miss out on my next posts and so on.  Also, if you have been a constant commenter and/reader to this blog, I thank you very much for reading ! =)

Until more posts to come,

Yasz

Giving Gunung Ledang a pass!

My mountaineering groupie has planned a trip up Gunung Ledang or Mount Ophir somewhere in November this year. However, due to the timing, I am going  or have to give it a pass. Despite that, I'm still going to share a little quickie about Gunung Ledang to you readers:

From the top of my head, I know these things about Gunung Ledang (not the most accurate fact that you should believe on...haha):

- It is located roughly at Tangkak. Yes, it's roughly there although a bit more further inwards. If you are driving from KL using the highway, make an exit towards Tangkak and I suppose the signage for Gunung Ledang is quite visible at the junction right after you come out from the toll booth. I roughly know this fact because I passed through Tangkak once last year not for hiking at Ledang but to eat at some restaurant. Haha. The drive from KL - Tangkak will take about 2 hours + depending on the traffic and also on how fast you actually drive. =)

- When it boils down to the difficulty level of trekking up Gunung Ledang, most obviously I can't give you an answer for that. However difficult or easy it is, if you are a competently fit person and if you have some experience on trekking before, difficulty level of a mountain shouldn't really be an issue for you. Isn't all hiking or trekking up a mountain activity suppose to be challenging and adventurous? If you are thinking to go for something easy like a walk in a park, probably you should do just that - walk in a park! Haha.

- I've done a little of Googling about Gunung Ledang and I found some people reaching the peak after 5-6 hours and coming down around the same time while I've also found another who went 3 hours up and another 3 hours down the mountain. So it is pretty safe to notify here that the approximate time to hike the mountain is somewhere between 3-6 hours (one way).

- Of course, if you are a Malaysian or someone who loves History, you would have known about the legend of Puteri Gunung Ledang ( Mount Ledang Princess). The legend was made into an epic movie which was a big thing going on in Malaysia a couple of years ago. You can check out the Puteri Gunung Ledang trailer here.

- I also found out that there are a couple of routes you can use to trek up the mountain. You can also choose to trek and camp on the mountain or simply go for a day trip on the mountain.

- There are a couple of fees that you need to pay up during registration and also, you need to have a compulsory guide to follow around with you which means there will be some extra fees included for your hike.

If you are going to Gunung Ledang sometime soon, do take note of the current weather right now in Malaysia. We are constantly getting rain and thunderstorms because I think it is already the Monsoon season. So do pack up with your proper attires to embrace this rainy weather during your hike and of course, happy and safe hiking!

Girlfriends and babies

During my schooling days, I went to an all-girls' school. Basically that would mean I have more girlfriends than guy friends.  And since most of my friends parents reside at the same hometown, my girlfriends and I have been friends for a little more than two decades now. Oh wow that has really been a long time. What I enjoy most especially since a year ago is when most of my girlfriends got married and begin to have their first kid. Yay!

I remembered visiting two of my girlfriends last year - one has about a week old baby boy and the other girl has a couple months old baby girl. And just a couple of days ago, I met again with both girls along with their babies and what great joy it was.

Both little kids are just so adorable and they warm up to me pretty easily too. Hence that add ups to more fun on my side when little toddlers actually response to you and enjoy interacting although they can't really speak. Despite one kid actually bitten my middle finger and wouldn't really want to let go, haha, I can say that perhaps I can get along very well with little babies and also kids.

I remember also, a bunch of 12 year old kids (a couple of years back) coming up to me trying to strike a conversation which I thought was kinda weird then. Anyhow, I do feel probably I should work more with kids because they are just so much fun to be around with due to the fact they are inquisitive, simple, straightforward and are like a little sponge eager to learn and grasp things as much as possible. On another thought, I think those characteristics I just mentioned are just so  ME! Haha.

Anyways, for my girlfriends - those married and unmarried and along with your cute little babies, may we all remain the best of friends forever. =)

Animals Anecdotes 13 : Baby sitting is a tedious, dirty job

If you have been following on my Animals Anecdotes series, I'd mentioned about the newborn puppies - four tiny 2 weeks old puppies. It turned out that Silver, the mum of these puppies past away about a week after her litters were born. Silver was suspected to be bitten by a venomous snake because the evening before her body was found under the cabin, the pack of dogs went on a crazy rampage of killing and ripping apart a pretty big snake. The very next day, Silver didn't make it to care after her little ones.

Out of great sympathy, we began bottle feeding the four puppies and later on, we brought them home since they need to be fed rather constantly, somewhere about 4-5 times a day. I was never good with taking care after animals because I guess it's just not my forte. The worse part about baby sitting be it for animals or humans alike is when it comes to them pooping and peeing. At one point of baby sitting, one of the puppies went on a little diarrhea and the poop was watery. Since he is white in color, the poor little thing looked yellow from the top of the head to the neck area, immensely drenched in his own discharge. Thank God for baby wipes but only after a good scrubbing with warm cloth later, the puppy looked slightly back to his own skin color. If I had to keep them much longer, each one of them would have gone some thorough bathing.

[caption id="attachment_1200" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="We didn't want to name them because we didn't want to get attached to them."][/caption]

Since it was rather inconvenient for us to keep up with four puppies and we don't really have the time and space for them not forgetting that at that moment, we couldn't find anyone who wanted to adopt them, we resorted to send them to the vet and see what the vet may suggests to do with them. Thankfully, the vet has a big heart and offered to keep them for a while and will ask around from his friends if they will be interested to take those puppies. That is really good news for everyone and also the puppies are said to be in a healthy condition. All we could hope for now is that the four of them will grow up happy and healthy.

Three months plus to go

It is right now getting close to three months to go before the year ends and it is also the time where I sit down and look back on how much I have come to accomplished up until now. It scares me a little that I may be a bit behind scheduled. However come to think of it, if I am to work all out on this few months, nothing is impossible. If I can literally climb mountain this year, I'm pretty sure I can possibly accomplish yet another great feat before the year ends.

I don't know about you guys but I must admit that I can be lazy and have a short attention span on things. So just in case you are experiencing the same 'lazy and short attention span' behaviour like I do, I figured the best remedy for that is to work on things as quickly as possible and always time and plan on your tasks for the day. It is of course much easier said than done and usually when I'm like really in my super lazy mode, I literally will talk to myself in my head as a second person to talk myself into doing those daily tasks. It works most time especially when I am constantly reminded on where am I right now and realizing that I'm still miles away from being successful.

Although things seem to be far away now but if I am to reflect on things I've learned since last year and taking a super risky plunge into something totally new, I must say, I'm pretty happy with myself. I've never been happier and I'm close to living my dreams and that's what matters. I'm taking action to make a change in my life because that's what I really I wanted to do. I guess all those job hopping for the past few years, really wasn't bad at all. It happened all for the good reason and I'm glad I'd learned a lot from all my jobs.

When I'm lazy and not really productive, I suppose I should begin writing more posts like this. Haha. But actually, when I'm lazy, I enjoy reading especially reading posts from motivational bloggers or writers. I read an awesome post from Yaro today about How you can change the world and although it's a pretty lengthy post, I'm glad I took the time reading it. It's just the right amount of motivational boost that I need to keep going. You'll sure need a lot of self-motivation when you are working on your own you know. =)

Animals Anecdotes 12 : Newborn puppies

All living things are made in pairs and with pairs there will be great probabilities for them to produce newer generations. Thus on that note, Joe the alpha male had successfully impregnated the two bitches ( Maggie and Silver). Both Maggie and Silver gave birth to three little puppies each.

However, animals being animals, the three little puppies of Maggie's 'disappeared' into thin air probably less than 2 days after they were born. After much speculations, we have come to the conclusion that one of the bitches had eaten up the puppies and left to zero traces of any newborns at all. A couple of days later, Silver delivered three puppies of her own too and by far, the chances of those puppies to be alive are unknown.

It is not uncommon to see female animals like dogs, cats, lions, tigers and etc to eat up on their own newborn 'babies'. There are many reasons to why the mothers to this and whatever the reason it may be, I'm pretty sure it happens for all the good reasons only.

Animals Anecdotes 11: Joe - the Alpha Male

On the previous Animals Anecdotes when I mentioned about the Alpha Dog, I was thinking that perhaps the one and only male dog in the pack should appropriately be named as Alpha but nah, it never happened. Someone got the idea to call him Joe instead. So Joe it is, the name of the Alpha Male. =)

Less outdoorsy, a bit more spiritual

I ran a quick check on the list of my August's Archive and I was surprised (hmm...not really) with the measly 6 posts I had churned out last month. By far, August went by slightly slow on this blog ( because I got my mind on something else). Also, I would say the lack of posts was probably a result of me being less outdoorsy due to Ramadhan and since I would like to focus on writing about the outdoors/sports/travel in this blog - I kinda like ran out of idea on what to write, hopefully only for throughout this holy month.

Nevertheless, I'm happy that I'm getting in touch with the spiritual side of me and learning plus discovering a lot about my religion and learning on how to continue living as a better person in this life. Alrighty then, I'm not going to go all preachy about things because I don't see myself fit or knowledgeable enough for such thing and until then, hoping for better posts to come.