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No one can quite figure out what’s wrong with the weather. We’ve only gone slightly past the mid-mark of summer, but I’ve been freezing my tush off in 13-degree mornings and running in the cold is not fun at all. Double poo.
Image taken from here.
…when your colleague rocks up to you on a Monday morning with lapis sagu and tau sar piah.
And you have kueh lapis and pineapple tarts coming on an Emirates flight.
I can tell this is gonna be a great week already.
[pronounced mûr'fēz law]
“an adage in Western culture that broadly states that things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance.” ~ Wikipedia
See also:
- Going for spin class 3 times a week in the hope of losing weight, only to find out that it actually builds muscle
- Your newfound running partner migrates…to Singapore.
- Changing your bedsheets at 1am to find that you only have 1 fitted sheet, and that’s now in the wash
- The apple, plum & rhubarb crumble turned out…not much of a crumble.
Image taken from here.
5 hours. That’s how long it took me to do the housework tonight. I turned the whole house upside down, scrubbed the kitchen, washed the dishes, Jiffed the stove, vacuumed and mopped the floors, scoured the bathroom, wiped the oven and dishwasher doors, changed the sheets and ironed/folded 3 weeks worth of laundry.
The only mistake I made was to start my chores only at 8 this evening; it’s 1am now and I’ve just finished my week’s chores. There’s usually a lot of inertia in getting the house in order, but once I’ve started, there’s no stopping me! I was like Superwoman on a mission to disinfect every corner of the house. Wipe off every speck of dust. Scrub off every bit of grime in sight.
I’m totally bushed now but the 5 hours of scrubbing was sheer therapy* for me. And now to wait for my laundry to finish its cycle before I can put it out to dry tonight, then sleep.
*Disclaimer: only applies to cleaning own home. Will not take any offers to clean yours.
All grandmothers it seems have this innate ability to whip up the most amazing dishes ever so effortlessly. Throw in some pork here, a few glugs of soy there, add some Chinese wine, and voila! – dinner is served.
I’m every bit a Cantonese girl (despite failing miserably at speaking the dialect) who loves her soups, and rightly so because my grandmother’s soups are perhaps the most legendary I’ve ever tasted. No one makes soups as tasty and nutritious as she does, and every Sunday when we visit her for dinner, there’s always a bowl of Cantonese soup, or dun tong on the table without fail. My favourite, no, make that our favourite soup has got to be her watercress and pork rib soup, what we call sai yong choy tong. Sis and I would often relish every single drop of it, almost to the extent of licking the bowls if it weren’t imbued in us to observe our table manners, and Dad would sing of Grandma’s praises to the high heavens.
While shopping at Prahran Market yesterday for my week’s groceries, I stumbled across a shopfront that had baskets of vegetables laid out, all looking rather ordinary (read: boring), except for one that contained a small pile of watercress. It’s easy to miss it if you just glanced over the area, but somehow it stood out to me. I’ve never seen it here before (after all everyone here only ever has cream of watercress soup – yuck -, and so instinctively bought myself a bunch while dreaming about Grandma’s watercress soup.
Fast forward to this afternoon. Some pork bones, red dates, honey dates, watercress and an afternoon run later, I’m in Chinese soup paradise.
This is what happens when the boyfriend, a PhD candidate researching information categorization, semantics and knowledge management, brings work home (and in particular to the kitchen). As it is, my pantry has already been sorted and I’m wondering where he’d be heading next – how about my wardrobe darling?
Chelsea Beach, 02feb08
I looked at myself in the mirror this morning and found a (strangely) familiar silhouette of a distant memory staring back at me – myself, tanned.
