And I thought the Hungry Ghosts Festival was over ...

Fuyoo ... which starvation camp did all of you loyal Uncle Burger fans just got released from??

I had to really put pedal-to-da-metal and pull off the max-speed, 3-minutes-per-burger-served stunt again to serve all of you: Uncle Burger sold out within 1-and-a-half hours from opening.

Let it be known to all that Uncle Burger very darn near did NOT open tonight (well, technically last night) due to the pissy weather again - but am so glad I did :)

Thanks, guys!

It's Christmas-time!

Actually, I'd bought a really nice ropelight from KL - but it was just too fat (in diameter) to have anything hold it onto the kiosk.

So I had to settle with the standard festive twinkle lights. Which is still a bitch to install and dismantle every single night ...

What? Fix it permanently on the kiosk, you say? I wish I could do that: these parts ain't exactly safe for private property, ya know. Even permanent telephone cabling gets ripped off overnight from the shophouses around there.

But ... they don't look all too bad in the end, eh?

Eggs up ... so mayo goes up, too?

The cost of mayo went up literally overnight by almost 25%!

Well, for that particular premium brand, that is.

It was a real shocker for me, as the cost of my mayo had been - until today - stable. I was left pondering, "What to do?? What to dooooo ..." because mayo has always been the favorite condiment on my burgers and therefore is in the, "Uncle, extra please aaa ..." category.

So what did I do? I regret to say that, for the first time in Uncle Burger's history, I had to replace the preferred brand of mayo with another. It is a top-shelf brand, I assure you - just not as prominent in consumer marketing and advertising.

I will switch back to the preferred brand the moment they get their act together and stop squeezing its loyal consumers with already thin business margins and tight pockets ...

The church youth invasion

This bunch of gregarious youths from the Canning Garden Methodist Church decided to invade Uncle Burger with an order of 13 burgers between the EPL's Man U vs. Liverpool and Arsenal vs. Chelsea (was it Chelsea?) matches.

The young ladies, of course, had a totally different agenda that night - in which I forgot :p What were you up to then, girls? Surely not footie on the boob tube with the boys?

The tomatoes are going nuts again ...

If there's a single ingredient in an Uncle Burger creation that pisses me off no end ... it'd be the tomato.

Fresh tomatoes are expensive. Ok - sometimes it's dirt-cheap: but only when they harvest before it ripens and dump it on the market for RM1.50 or less, per kilo. You see those everywhere; especially in the hypermarkets - those orangey-yellow-green things. But the nice thing about tomatoes, is that they will ripen off the plant.

They had been selling for RM1.50/kilo or less for the past week, and I'd usually get several tonnes - ok maybe not tonnes, kilos perhaps - as stock. Yeah: them orangey-yellow-green things. I'd thought that the 1-week-running prices will continue for another week or so, but nooo ... imagine my horror when Tesco upped it to RM2.49/kilo!

I was banging my head on the shopping cart as I reluctantly made my way to get several kilos of the RM2.49/kilo, orangey-yellow-green things ... whut-to-doo ... The prices will definitely continue to creep up as the weather stays crappy and the year-end foodfest, aka holidays near.

Sicky, rainy days

It's always a big frustration when Uncle Burger doesn't get to open due to the pissy weather in the evenings lately. Like, it rained on-and-off pretty much from 7:30pm last night til past Uncle Burger's opening time of 9pm ... The intermittent showers are the most irritating.

And just as suddenly, I got the flu. Not a big deal; slight infection - but the deal-breaker was a horrible gastric attack - I think they call it gastritis - that folded me over with pain. Now, I honestly do not know what is gastritis - never suffered from it before - but this time, I knew for sure. I'd thought that I was having a heart attack or something ... only that the chest pains were lower down and concentrated around my lower rib cage and I guess, the stomach proper.

Man, it hurts.

And Uncle Burger is sorry folks yet again, for not opening last night. Trust me, I'm trying to find a way to open in the rain without worrying about falling sick the next day, or to grill your burgers without flooding the grill with rainwater (the latter happens more often than you'd think.)

Uncle Burger got a new phone

Not that it's a whizbang, latest-and-greatest kinda phone ... but I needed a simple (and cheap) phone which has a screen I can see from across the kiosk while grilling your burgers - and one that rings LOUD (you know the horrible "braaap-brap-brap" of the power generator.)

This one was literally given to me by my good phone dealer and friend. I had been buying countless phones for myself and friends, so when the time came for me to get a budget phone - this was what he came out with.

Uncle Burger is happy enough :-)