Sometimes, it’s the little things, or the little people in this case, that make the world seem like a nicer place.
Thanks Nate, even if you were quite bored with my fawning.
And thanks to the few of you who are holding my hand through this big unknown.
And with that one adjective uttered, I am once again thrown off balance and reminded just how life is uncertain and unpredictable.
I really, really hope this is not going to be something more serious. My family can’t take another blow. Really.
But if it is, then, God, please be gracious and give the strength. There isn’t much left on my end.
While at the old Sommerville house on the first day of Lunar New Year, I took notice of an old family portrait at the hallway. This picture has always been there, but nobody noticed it until I decided to take a picture-of-the-picture yesterday and my aunts all started giggling at how, well, young everyone was then when I zoomed in on the different faces in this photo. My mother is the little girl in the middle carrying an orange and has the shortest legs out of everyone in the first row. Her face, including the slight scowl, hasn’t really changed. Dua-Soh (Big Auntie) recalled how she had just sent my mother to the hairdressers for a perm and Ji-Soh (urm, Little Auntie?) had been pestered for many days to make that new dress my mother is wearing in the picture. Uncle David (to the left of my mother, with considerably more hair then) was wearing a long-sleeved silk shirt unlike the the rest in their starched cotton tops because his skin was extremely sensitive.
Originally, there were supposed to have been 10 of us to partake of this Vermonster consumption experience. Two fell sick, two decided to be healthy and one flew off to Bangkok, and so we were left with five.
We couldn’t even finish half of that mammoth tub before the amagalation of gooey melted ice-cream started to nauseate us, and before we knew it…there was uncontrollable giggling, fights over who gets the banana slices and chocolate fish being spit out. The other 4 non-consumers looked at us somewhat warily and definitely with disdain.
I felt my heart race after that from all that sugar. I really cannot/shouldn’t/musn’t do such things anymore.
And of course, today, my room is the chosen one to be showered blessings of twigs, dead leaves, soiled tissue and possibly birds’ wings (as speculated by suspicious colleague). No wasps, phew.
1. After months of finding the water cooler water funny-tasting, my suspicions were finally confirmed when a colleague from the science department ran some pH indicator tests and discovered we are officially drinking pH10 water i.e. hand soap. It is 1.5L bottles of Ice Mountain for me from now onwards.
2. The personalised offices have not been receiving air-con since um, the beginning. Today, when the vents finally cranked up, wasps and what looks like shreds of a bird’s nest came sputtering out of my neighbour’s office. It looked like a scene from some horror movie I watched when I was young where there were a lot of bees attacking some generic American city. Awful guttural noises could be heard, as if there is some huge build-up of wasp-colony-bird-nest stuck somewhere within the ventilation system. The maintenance people appear helpless. We are looking up nervously up our vent every few minutes now.
Please pray for safety and good health.
While I did e-whinge about the alienating effects of technology a few days ago, I have to admit that I find the doodle function on Windows Live Messenger rather entertaining and somewhat personalised.
