Sun 15 Feb

My wife and I somehow made it to service in time, eating breakfast on the go. A new boy joined me today, and it looks like it's a permanent arrangement. So now my boys number a grand total of five. After service, we had a brief cell at the coffee shop at Simei. Interestingly enough, after the opening of Piccolo, which serves decent pasta, the coffee shop has yet another addition, which is Ogenki. It's a Japanese food stall that sells omu rice, amongst other fare. I ordered a set (I vaguely recall it's some cheese katsu thing), adding miso soup and chawanmushi, setting me back by $11 thereabouts. Expensive, considering that I was eating at a coffee shop. The food was above average, but not fantastic enough to warrant another splurge.

Mon 16 Feb

I had a short day today, so I headed over early to check on Jadon. I realized that I did not have spare home clothes over at my in-laws' place, so I decided to buy a few cheap enough ones to dump there. This is for two reasons: the first is that working clothes is uncomfortable, so it is good to change out of, and the second is that Jadon has puked milk on my clothes often enough that a spare change of clothes may be necessary. I ended up picking up three t-shirts from Hang Ten for $25, which were decent looking - a bit too streetwear to leave as spare clothes. I also found two t-shirts off this nameless shop for $5 a piece. That in itself is nothing much, except that one of the t-shirts has exactly the same print as one of Jadon's rompers! Hehe, time for some father-and-son coordinated fashion. Bwahaha.

Tue 17 Feb

Since I had paid $159 to replace my Xbox 360, I made a grudging trip down to Funan Centre after my lessons were over. I waited a short while at the service hub, and picked up my new console, which I suspect could be a repaired version of somebody else's dead Xbox 360. I guess I'll never know. I also picked up a couple of DVDs from Laser Flair there, which is amazingly well-stocked. I found an old title I was looking for, but fully aware that it is altogether possible I won't be watching any of the dozen new titles I have simply due to lack of time. Ah well.

When I brought the Xbox 360 back and plugged it in, it gave me the red ring of death again! After fiddling with it for a while, it recovered to normal again. I hope I don't see that red ring till 2 years and 364 days later so that I can exchange one for one under their warranty policy (3 red rings is covered for 3 years instead of the usual 1 year).

Wed 18 Feb

I had a long day at work, settling a fair bit of administrative chores, and had several meetings. Blood brudder Zhongming informed the gang quite last minute about his flight to Australia today, and since we already knew that his disappearance to Down Under will be for three whole years, we all made effort to be there.

The problem was that he was shockingly late, even though we had wanted to meet for dinner. I ended up with Shaofeng at terminal 3's Yakun having a late tea while waiting for the rest to arrive, and in the meantime, was dispensing relationship advice. Hmm, haven't done that seriously for years. We managed to catch Zhongming just before the flight to say our two minutes of cheesy farewells, encouraging him to land himself some hot blonde babe over there or something before coming back. After that, we went for a proper dinner at the food court at T3. We all had this porridge thing from a stall there, and I must say, the porridge is quite tasty. I ordered the abalone porridge, and it was good. However, I still prefer the texture of the porridge from Crystal Jade.

Thu 19 Feb

It was a late day for my wife and me. I had meetings spread out through the day. We wanted to go home and do some household chores instead of seeing Jadon today, so we made a small detour to Downtown East to have dinner at Mr Chicken Rice, which is still as fabulous as before, and ended it with dessert at Gelare, because I had a voucher expiring tomorrow. Nowadays, by the time we get home, we are typically doing laundry into the late night (or is it early morning?). Sigh.

Fri 20 Feb

I thought I would have a quiet day today, but many things cropped up at the last moment, and I ended up having lunch with a vendor. Strange turn of events. Anyway, my wife had to attend to some event till 5+ pm, so I waited for her before going over to see Jadon.

Sat 21 Feb

Much as I would like to play mahjong, lately there are no sessions materializing. Anyway, for today it was for the better, as my wife and I wanted to bring Jadon out to Marina Square to shop around. My wife reserved a pair of Crocs, and it was due for collection. We went to check out the Ministry of Food there, and had our lunch there. The dessert was still spectacular of course, but for the cooked food, I think Bugis still ranks the best (in terms of quality of hot stone rice especially), but the Marina outlet seemed to have better food than the Suntec outlet. At the very least it is less smoky than the latter.

I tried to shop around, but I couldn't spot any clothes that I liked. In the end, we bought a big playmat for Jadon from Mini Toons, which incidentally was having a 40% storewide moving-out sale. For dinner, we went to eat at the Imperial Treasures La Mian and Xiao Long Bao. When I flipped the menu, I must say, I had to flip it back to the front cover to verify that I didn't go into Crystal Jade La Mian and Xiao Long Bao, because most of the items on the menu were identical. And not just that the dishes were named identically, the pictures in the menu looked too much alike. I had the la mian with chicken soup, which was really good, but it completely dehydrated me thereafter, and I can't be sure if it was MSG or plain saltiness.

Sun 22 Feb

My wife and I went to service as usual, and I brought my boys to the coffee shop again, because two of them wanted to try the Piccolo pasta. I headed over to my in-laws' place first, and detoured to Sportslink to buy a pair of sports shorts, again as a spare change of clothes. I was going to work on my sister-in-law's computer when for no reason, the error messages that I had been seeing on her computer irked me so much that I decided to do something about it. However, my attempt to rectify the problem by tampering with the registry caused an error with Windows. Interestingly enough, my sister-in-law maintained her cool, and I only found out later from her that before she came home, she had actually prayed to God for more time to study and to not be distracted by her computer, specifically Facebook games. Ironically, my blotched attempt seemed to be an answered prayer.

Mon 23 Feb

After lessons were over, my wife and I headed down to Honda showroom to finally settle the downpayment for the car, which was due to arrive on Saturday. It still felt extremely surreal, considering that I had never wanted a car for a good 30 years of my life, because I thought it an unnecessary luxury. Now that I have a kid, I see it as a luxurious necessity.

Ouch.

I had signed the line that plunged me back into loan again, and I'm not talking about housing loan which most Singaporeans get stuck with anyway.

Tue 24 Feb

I had managed to fix my sister-in-law's computer late last night. Okay, more formatted-the-hard-disk-and-reinstalled-windows than fix. Which was certainly for the better, considering how loaded with viruses that computer already was. I headed over to my in-laws' place for dinner and then shuttled back home to take the computer and brought it over to return it. Again, ironically, the computer was up and running, but somehow the ethernet controller had something wrong. Maybe it really was an answered prayer for my sister-in-law. Hahaha.