Month: October 2005

Karen, my college roommate, called me today! Out of the blue!

I was so surprised and happy to hear from her. I don’t think we’ve spoken to each other since 1994. She is living and working in the financial district in NYC and the next time I go home, we made plans to have drinks together. I’ve been letting Vince answer the phones because he gets so pissed when I answer the phone first and now he’s usually pretty good about not hanging up on people… So it’s was funny to hear Karen’s reaction to Vince’s voice on the phone picking up and saying hello. Vince seemed pretty excited to visit Karen in New York as well.

We are all exhausted. Edda is just not sleeping well. She isn’t ill, the only thing we can come up with is that her last set of molars are coming in and they are bothering her. So tonight, we gave her a dose of Tylenol and hopefully, that will help.

The prize of Power Ball will be $340M this coming Saterday. I bought 5 tickets. Daddy would like to buy only one dollar. But I think I am willing to loss $5.00. Daddy said that if we won the prize, he will quit job right way. I think I will finish this job then quit.

We bought a bottle of red wine with rating 92 other day. It was good, So we bought few bottles more today. The saleman sold daddy another bottle of wine with rating of 92.

MingMing and Wing invited us to have Hawaii cruise berfore Xmas time. His parents (Mr. and Mrs. Wang) are coming too. We will stop at LA few day after cruise. Then we will go to FL to see thier $1.7M house next to sea shore. That should be fun. Hope my job will be done at that time.

So today Vince, Edda and I went over the Julia and Mathilda’s house. It was a casual hang-out kind of day, we went to KFC for lunch (Vince and Mathilda couldn’t agree on where to sit for lunch, so we sat at 2 different tables… What’s up with that?) and then over to their house for hanging out at the pool and playing with puzzles. Vince and Mathilda had a nice time together, they are so sweet. They do argue, but not more than expected. I’m glad they have each other here in Singapore. Then we headed home and Vince was drinking a can of Milo that Julia had bought him at the pool. We were walking along the street and he emptied his can of Milo and, of course, he needed to pee. I was about 8 minutes away from Julia’s house and 10 minutes away from the mall… So where to pee? Should we pee in the bushes and risk being busted by the Singapore police? Should we try to run back to the Tristans? No I had a brilliant idea! We’ll just pee back into the soda can… Vince pulled down his pants and returned the Milo back into the can and I told him sternly not to drink it and at the next trash can, he threw it away.

Edda is killing us. For the past week or two, she’s been waking up earlier and earlier – first 6 am, then 5:30, then 5 and a few days 4 am. Finally last night, she got up at 1 am, demanded a banana and a new diaper and wanted to play for 2 hours.

Somehow, these days, I get really frustrated trying to put Edda to bed. I nurse and nurse and I can’t get her to go to sleep. So, Jeremy’s been putting her to bed. So we are all underslept.

Vince’s favorite group is Hi-5. He LOVES LOVES LOVES it and Edda HATES HATES HATES it. So he’s been listening to it on headphones on the iPod so Edda can’t hear it. Guess what happened today? He dropped it on the stone kitchen floor. Oh well, so much for that, the screen is broken and hopefully we can get just that replaced.

To day is the organizing day. Doing luandry and grocery shopping. Daddy is doing his paper wroks to file all receipts and reports. So he is not in good mood. I cooked scramble eggs for him this morning.

We went to God of Garden yesterday. It was fist day of national week or so. There was a big cerabration from local indians. It was very nice. Over there, we saw many artists doing painting nice fall senaries. They belong a artists group. We also went to see another mational park nearby. There are lots of sequoia fassiles. It is not like those in AZ. Weather was very nice.

Jeremy’s company will sent magazines though their interoffice mail from Texas to Singapore, so we subscribed to a bunch of magazines, mainly cooking magazines… Jeremy’s made a hunter’s chicken from Cook’s Illustrated. Here he is trying to light the alcohol on fire, but it didn’t work.

Of course almost immediately after I wrote about my wonderful progress on my sock, I realized that I spent a whole row knitting my purl stitches and purling my knit stitches! Arg! So I spent a great deal of time undoing the row and trying to pick up these tiny, tiny loop and all this resulted in dropped stitches and twisted stitches, so I had to learn how to fix dropped stitches and how to knit and purl though the back of the stitch and fix it all. Now it’s fine and I’m happily knitting away again. This weekend was a weekend of cooking and eating. Yesterday, we didn’t go anywhere, we just went to our mall and got some simple groceries. Today we took the subway and the bus to a fancy, expat suburb called Holland Village and found the fancy, expat grocery store and since it wasn’t in downtown the isles were wide and it wasn’t very crowded. We bought all the ingredients for a few night’s dinner. Edda fell asleep on the taxi ride home.

Posting this for my mom and also for my secret pal.. I’m making slow but steady progress on my sock, I’m excited to see the striping from the yarn and now I’ve knitted enough to know that the ribbing will stretch enough to accomodate my ankle. Woo hoo, I’m pretty excited!

I want to be in NY now – not because Vince loved his school there and Jeremy’s parents were close by and I had a car and knew where to find all the ingredients to any recipe I’d like to cook – but I miss it at this moment because I’m missing the apple season there. (Twenty different kinds of apples at a roadside stand.) They only sell Fuji apples here. Only one kind of freaking apple! I guess I should switch to durian, ugh! I’m also missing this famous, famous, wool festival in Rhinebeck this weekend. I’ve known about it the whole time I lived right around the corner, but I wasn’t knitting then, only now. Oh well, I guess it will still be there whenever I get the chance to go back.

On Thursday, Mathilda and Julia came over for lunch. I made a smashing chef salad for the adults in the party – with blue cheese, ham, eggs and ranch dressing. Then we headed over to the Choa Chu Kang pool and had a good time there despite the occasional rain shower. The pool was pretty empty except for a group of school children. Then the kids came back to our place and we ordered pizza for dinner and everyone had a good time until we had to go to bed.

Today we went to Kate’s house and saw all the cool stuff for the baby. A changing table, a crib and scads of beautiful girl baby clothes! Vince ate all her potato chips. When we left, it was pouring, pouring rain and we all got soaked. We met Jeremy at Causeway Point and had dinner at the Crystal Jade and I headed home, I am wiped out from these past two days and Jeremy and Vince went to pick up Vince’s computer.

I broke fast yesterday by going over to Arif’s house and eating a nice meal cooked by his wife, Tahera. We had a pretty simple meal – spicy daal, kabob meat, salad and pita bread. It’s funny watching Arif and Tahera together. Arif’s become very very domesticated. He was actaully like cleaning! What a change!

Oh yeah, btw, so I got them the milkshake maker, the one you guys vetoed. Sorry but Arif wouldn’t have appreciated the handheld mixer. He told me as much too. He wants your guys address so he can send you a thank you note. 😛

Choon and his parents came by around 9. Choon and Pei-Sun gave them a nice stainless steel coffee maker to go along with the stainless steel milkshake maker. so pretty much Arif is commit to the stainless steel motif.

I have to say that having a Mac rocks in certain applications.. I’ve been involved with Choon’s wedding slideshow in iMovie and now, I’m transferring his video into iDVD and burning that also. It’s great. works well. easy to use. His video was about 4 minutes too long for the DVD. I had to cut some things out, but by the look of it. it’s going to take at least 3-4 hours to render onto the DVD. sigh.

Things at work are picking up. We’ve got to stress test our storage system by the end of the month, and I just swtiched onto this part of the project. We haven’t done any real tests yet…. so uh. we need to get started. We’re supposed to give the yea or nay on this particular storage solution by then. yeah right. 😛

I’m starting to play tennis some more. It’s been a long time. I really need some new shorts now that I think about it. My pants keep falling off.. sigh.