Author: Doris

Well, in the quest of more music, I’m trying out this CD trading service that allows people to trade their CDs for other people’s CDs. I think it’s a great idea since, well, I’m looking for lossless music that I can only rip from CDs and it’s cheap – only $1 per trade. The only problem I have is giving up my own CDs that I really love to other people. I mean, There’s a reason that I bought them. But I figure if I can let go of this concept of a CD being mine, then I’ll get a whole lot more out of this service.

It’s interesting psychologically to see if people are willing to give up their possessions.

Look at this picture. I look at it and think, hey, that’s pretty good for a weekday breakfast – I guess I usually think that pancakes are too much trouble for Monday-Friday, but I don’t know why – they really aren’t any more trouble than scrambled eggs which I can whip out in 30 seconds. Pancakes just seem like a Sunday
morning thing to me and I also think that syrup is was too messy for
a weekday morning. All that stickiness makes me uncomfortable.
Breakfast for me is usually cereal or toast or even just a glass of
juice while I get a load of laundry in the washer or while I check to
see if anyone sent me email (nope!). Vince and Edda both get hot
breakfasts, Edda gets oatmeal and Vince’s selection changes everyday,
but lately it has centered around pancakes. Today, while I was still
asleep with Edda, he asked for three pancakes. Earlier this week, he
requested two pancakes and I thought he would only eat one, so I made
2 really small pancakes, equivalent to 1 regular pancake and he was
so pissed at me, breakfast was very unpleasant, but both pancakes
were eaten eventually. So today, Jeremy made two beautiful
(full-sized) pancakes, because he knew no way was Vince going to eat
three, and placed them in front of Vince. He was not happy and and he
protested very loudly and I awoke to wails and tears and unhappy
Vince who apparently really, really wanted three pancakes,
just like the picture on the package (but now that I look at the box,
I see that there are actually 4 pancakes…) He wailed for a good 15
minutes before deciding to eat half of Edda’s oatmeal. The pancakes
remained untouched.

Look, unhappy pancake boy.

I have always believed that Ruby loves to live with us, that she
would not prefer to live anywhere else. She loved living with us in
Austin where we took her to the swimming hole every weekend. She
loved living with us in New York, where her corgi pal Trudi lived
with my in-laws and we would go and see her at least once a week and
where there was snow and big fields to run around in and lots of
family around. She loved the kids even though sometimes they bit her.
She just loved being our dog daughter, even when we made her heel
or sit or wait for her food, even when we put her on a diet, even
when we made her ride 6 hours in the foot well of a Honda Accord to
drive to my parents’ house in Maryland. I saw how much she loved
being with us every time we left her with a sitter or kennel or
walker because when we returned from our trip, she would run up to us
and lick us and jump on us and say please don’t leave me ever again,
ever again, I missed you sooooo much. But now I don’t believe
that Ruby would not prefer to live anywhere else. I have to say that
Singapore has been tough on Ruby. A lot of people here are afraid of
big dogs, so when we take her on a walk, a lot of people go out of
their way to avoid her, there are a lot of screams of terror as
little children run away from Ruby and I know she’s a bit discouraged
by all this. The poor girl – she has never before experienced this
sort of reaction from people. Also, since we don’t have a car, we
can’t take her anywhere she can run off leash, so she’s stuck with the
same neighborhood park where we walk her held tightly next to us. No other doggies,
no new sights. While we were back in the States, she stayed in Singapore with
Elaine, our dog sitter (who is amazing, kind and exceedingly
competent) and when we got back, I got the distinct feeling that Ruby
did not want to stay with us, she wanted to stay with Elaine (who has
a car and a corgi – Tosh). I have to say, that with all of
Edda’s issues this year, I haven’t been devoting that much time to
Ruby and I know she is depressed about being so isolated from other
people and dogs. This morning during the 2 vs 3 pancake fiasco, my suspicious were confirmed when Jeremy
pulled out the traveling crate that we use in cars and was most
recently used to go to Elaine’s house and Ruby immediately went to
pick up the squeaky toy that Elaine gave her and ran to stand patiently by
the door with tail wagging and more eager than I’ve seen her in a long time as if to say – I’m ready to go to Elaine’s, you guys go have
your fun, don’t rush back or anything, I’m going to be just fine.

  

  

  

  

  

  

OK, can you stand another post about driving? I mentioned that our
car is a daily-rent-a-car which means every day, Jeremy goes on line
and reserves it for a day and every night he comes home and asks, “Do
you need the car tomorrow?” Ummm, yes! So then he books another
day at an outrageously high rental rate because we are renting this
car from a car-share, basically for people who need a car for an
afternoon once-in-a-while while we are negotiating a year-long
rental. But it takes time and I need to drive 60 km a day –
but I keep telling myself that tomorrow I’ll give up the car and take
taxis again until we have our long term rental, but I’m addicted. So
we’ve rented for 4 days in a row when we promised ourselves only 2
days – just to try it out… Yeah, right, like you can only
eat one Dorito. Tonight, I told Jeremy that I’d like the car again
tomorrow, but tonight we went on line and found out someone else
rented the car! Grrr. So we returned the car today. What am I going
to do?
Driving one’s own car in Singapore is extremely expensive. If you
think that driving in the US costs and arm and a leg, in Singapore,
it’s basically 10 arms and legs. I’m going to have to chop off
everyone’s appendages (including Ruby’s) to pay for this. So even
though I’m shelling out all this money for my car (my beautiful, very
desired car), I still love to save money and I have a game I play
everyday in the car to save moolah. (You know, when you save money by
spending money… right…) My idea is to save money on parking! You
pretty much have to pay for parking everywhere in Singapore. I’m
lucky I don’t have to pay for parking it in the basement of my
apartment building, but I do have to pay for parking to drop off and
pickup Vincent at his preschool which is a bummer. But I have
discovered that if I do the pickup and drop off in less than 10
minutes, it’s free! Free! Free! It’s tricky because I have to take
the elevator from the basement to the 4th floor, which
doesn’t seem like much, but the elevators are aggravatingly slow and
stop on every floor and then you have to make small talk with the
teachers/parents and then you gotta wait for the teachers to take
Vince’s temperature to make sure he isn’t suffering from
Hand/Foot/Mouth disease and then crappy…
It’s not free.
Also, my parking nightmare is coming into focus. At Edda’s school,
the parking is free, (Free! Free!), but the space is tiny and there
are buses and parents dropping kids off, so there are a million
people/vehicles coming and going and I have to do the butt-in parking
in 3 seconds with everyone waiting and watching. Talk about nervous
and performing under pressure. Today, I actually had to get a (very
nice) teacher to park the car for me. (Maybe he’ll do it everyday for
me?) He was very competent and did a fantastic job (maybe he teaches
driver’s ed?) and then as soon as we were in a space, another mom
promptly blocked me in. So while I waited for the other (Mercedes
minivan!) mom to move her car, I watched some construction workers
tear a building down across the street. Vince would have loved that.
Oh, the best thing yet, I went to a gas station for the first time
in a year, I put some gas in the car. It was a nice full service
Mobil station, where a very cheerful teenager filled my tank up and I
went inside to a the convenience store and I ogled the snacks, they
had very nice snacks – much better than the ones in the US. I
had no idea what I was missing. I did not purchase any –
sometimes those kiwi pandan rolls can taste weird.

I have put over 300 kilometers on our daily rent-a-car in 3 days. How did I go from a practically non-driving person to someone who drives over 100 kilometers a day? I really didn’t think the island of Singapore was that big. It doesn’t look that big on a map, it looks like a speck of a place and it looks like you could drive from one end of the island to the other in 30 minutes. Wait, you really can drive from one end of the island to the other in 30 minutes! I’ve just been driving around in circles. Dropping the kids off, picking the kids up, and what else? Oh yes, dropping the kids off and picking the kids up. I’m having a tough time with the names of the freeways here. I’m really good a remembering numbers – I love Interstate 95 on the Eastern seaboard, 270 in Maryland, 280 in the SF bay area, 35 running through Austin, Route 9 in upstate New York. And I love numbers, there are only 9 of them (whoops, there are 10. My bad. I forgot zero.) and they have such easy to remember tendencies to look for…Even? Odd? Prime? Pi? Interesting pattern on a phone? Birthdays? But the freeways here don’t have numbers, they are acronyms of which I don’t know the meaning of, but I suspect are the initials of very wealthy people. The PIE, SLE, KJE, BKE and something else I can’t remember. Anyways, these names are all the same to me! All the same! Where are my numbers? I want my numbers! The driving is easy here, everything is labeled very well and every drifts in and out of their lanes without signaling, but without the insane need that some Americans have of cutting off other drivers in a quick and aggressive manner which makes me all jittery and nervous. But the drifting is very casual and slow and everyone drifts with everyone else, so really, there is no need to check in one’s blind spot ever. Ha ha, just kidding – don’t freak – I check my blind spot every time.. Um, yeah! That’s right! But the parking, that is a whole ‘nuther problem. I love parking in suburban US. Big parking lots, lots of room to swing doors open and get ornery kids in and out of bulky car seats. The only time I have ever parallel parked in my life was my first driving test when I turned 16 in 1988! I haven’t parallel parked in over 18 years! Here, the spaces are tiny and everyone backs their butt into the parking spaces, which I have never done in the years 1972 – 2006. Today I parked (head in) at Edda’s school and I sat there for a while wondering how I was going to open the doors because we were 4 inches from the cars next to us. Ummm, so I sat there and sat there and I decided that I was going to do my best not to ding the car next to me and I slithered both me and Edda out of a 4 inch door opening while sacrificing my hand to use as a wedge between the two cars so no paint would be chipped from the Mercedes minivan parked next to me. Yikes. Don’t you get the impression that Mercedes owners care more about their paint than a person driving a sub-compact Toyota? Don’t want to mess with those Mercedes drivers and their paint jobs. It could get ugly.