Sun 22 Mar

I had service as usual, but today I decided to give my boys a treat, since the performance bonus had come in. I brought them to Canton Kitchen at Eastpoint, which I recalled had quite good food, and I thought it would be nice to eat something different, so I ordered a 6-course meal which had sharks' fin and cereal soft shell crab. The bill was higher than I initially projected, but since this year's end of year bonus should drop to negligible portions, I figured this was likely the only big treat this year.

Times are really bad when civil servants also get their pay cut.

Mon 23 Mar

My wife and I drove out to have a late lunch after lessons at Hong Kong Street Restaurant off Bedok Camp (can't remember the name of the building). Since she hadn't eaten there before, I let her try their signature dish, the san lao hor fun. It's light-coloured hor fun with fish and bean sprouts, and it was as good as I last remember it. My wife then decided to bring her family here for a dinner treat. We had ice cream at Ice Cream Gallery just a few shops down, but we both didn't like the ice cream taste as much as Scoops at Parkway Parade.

After that, my wife dropped me off at the Kaki Bukit driving centre. I needed to apply for PDL and book an advanced theory test date. I originally planned to take the advanced theory in June, but apparently, the slots available for choice were just within a month away, so I had to choose late April. Sigh. I don't foresee having much time to read this one either.

Tue 24 Mar

I took a day of Paternity Leave to rest, since most of my one-week break was robbed from me. In the morning, the part-time cleaner came over to help clean the house. I think despite the fact that my wife and I do the chores, we don't have the luxury of time to do a thorough job. Most of the time, just doing laundry and baby-related cleaning up take up quite some time already.

Wed 25 Mar

It was a long day in school today. I went back home first to drop off some stuff, and on the way out, I went to White Sands to buy a few things, and stopped by POSB to replace my ATM card. I'm not sure if the problem is unique to me, or I shouldn't keep too many cards in my wallet, but regularly the cards in my wallet get warped/bent/cracked.

Thu 26 Mar

Another long day again, made a little less dreary by lunch, which a group of us went to Old Airport Road to eat. I had intended to eat two things for lunch again, but one colleague ordered kway chap for everyone to share, so after the prawn noodles and the kway chap, I was sufficiently satisfied to not want more. Except dessert.

Fri 27 Mar

I think my stomach must have expanded back in size again because lately I keep wanting to eat double portions, even though I already took a full breakfast. Today's gluttony included the Hill Street char kway teow (and I was the first customer of the day) and one bowl of laksa from the adjacent stall.

Jadon was particularly cute today. He was talking (baby-talk gibberish, of course) non-stop and very excitedly so. I think my wife will probably upload the video to her account one of these days.

Sat 28 Mar

My sister-in-law's computer suddenly died before I went to reservist, so this was the only day I had to try to get it fixed. My initial diagnosis suggests that the power unit had died, and after going to Sim Lim Square, that was verified. While I was there with my wife, we went walking around. I bought a casing for my ipod nano (the one I got in a lucky draw), and some other stuff. I was very much tempted to buy a Kohjinsha touchscreen mini laptop when I saw it, but I resisted the temptation. Maybe next year's LDS can be used for this, provided the policy is not scrapped due to financial crisis.

Sun 29 Mar

I had a combined cell with Collin's boys today at Burger King. Service today was quite powerful, and Ps Khong gave us an impossible challenge - to grow 8 times in number essentially. For altar call, he summoned all the cell leaders forward to be prayed for, and God spoke to me certain things that I shared with the boys, hoping to inspire them. This will be an exciting year ahead for the church, if this were the direction.

After some consideration, I decided to go and buy the DVD box set of the currently-showing she diao ying xiong zhuan. I think the series is quite well-done, even though some special effects are quite sucky, especially backdrops, but at least the ones for the martial arts are not bad. Anyway, I've always preferred the story of she diao to shen diao. Originally I didn't want to spend money, and I was contented with watching it only on the weekends, but the issue was with the timing, not the frequency. As it is, if I wanted to watch it, I either have to watch it at my in-laws' place till it ends before heading home (quite late) or go home very early to watch it (can't spend time with Jadon around). Furthermore, although I tried watching it on tudou, the bandwidth was so slow it was painful. So I thought the money for this case was not worth saving.

Mon 30 Mar

This was originally my short day, but this week was when the cohort was doing SPA skill B, so in my college, we always deploy a second assessor for fairness' sake to supervise more accurately a smaller group of students. Therefore, on average, we each had 6 extra hours of lessons added to us this week.

Man, that was tiring. Especially since the job came with smelling the organic compounds.

Tue 31 Mar

Today was made dreadfully long because there was a meeting in the afternoon that I had to attend, which dragged on till 6+ pm. Argh. It was a little irritating to note that technically, the last hour of the meeting did not actually need my presence there.

Wed 1 Apr

My colleagues wanted to eat something different today, and were willing to drive out, though not too far, so I recommended them to try out Hong Kong Street Restaurant. They loved the food there, so my reputation of having good food recommendations is still maintained.

In the afternoon, I had yet another meeting that lasted till evening time again. This week turned out a lot more draining than I would have imagined.

Thu 2 Apr

I met my vice-principal in the morning and he tasked me to do up a set of powerpoint slides for us in roadshows to secondary schools by the following Monday. Considering the many things going on in this month, I am seriously, seriously stretched in terms of time. I only barely managed to start on it a little bit today while waiting for my wife to end lessons.

Fri 3 Apr

For lunch, some colleagues wanted to drive out to eat, so I suggested going to Block 216 market (at Bedok Central) for lunch. I was struck by a bout of gluttony again, so I had a bowl of ban mian and a plate of Ipoh hor fun, concluded with sugarcane juice with lemon. That was satisfying.

We were back in time for the annual Track and Field meet. As usual, I was based at the AV booth, but this time round, considering that I would be there for many hours, I brought my laptop there to work on the roadshow slides. After three hours of work, I got it 75% done by the time the meet ended. Hehe.

Sat 4 Apr

My wife and I went down to the Honda service centre at Kaki Bukit to get our car checked. It was the first official servicing after clocking 1000 km! It felt so recent that I acquired the car. Anyway, the service centre was pretty cool. Other than the seats and tables available for people to rest, there was an auntie there serving free hot drinks and there was a counter with free biscuits. It was a thoughtful, customer-centric design, since some appointments were set early in the morning like mine.

We drove down to Bedok for lunch, and I ended up at 216 market once again. Today I decided to try out the nasi lemak from Hon Ni, which my wife said was featured on TV recently. The queue was disgustingly long, but I decided to try anyway. What I didn't count on was that most of the people in the queue were packing 3 to 4 packets! So the queue moved very, very slowly. When it was my turn, I ordered the chicken wing, luncheon meat, fish cake and ikan bilis to test their frying skills. To be fair, all the fried stuff were really crispy, tasty and well-prepared. What I didn't like about the nasi lemak though was the rice and chilli. The rice had too little coconut milk taste, but at least they were the small-grained kind. The chilli had so many chilli padi seeds and didn't taste like what I expect of nasi lemak chilli, but this is a contestable point. In any case, the food is cheap. Considering what I ordered (3 things + 1 chicken wing), it was a mere $2.50. So for that price and the fried stuff, I'm willing to relent on the rice and try it again some other time.

Sun 5 Apr

Early in the morning before my wife and I headed off to church, I was playing with Jadon, and he managed to sit up on his own! He was not too stable yet, so he remained sitting up for maybe ten seconds, but it was still progress. Anyway, even though we woke up by 7.45 am, by the time we got ready, settled Jadon down and sent him to my in-laws' place, we were still late for the 10 am service. We parked at Simei as usual, but we missed the last shuttle bus. So we took a cab to church, which was somewhat ironic considering that we have a car.

After service, my boys and I had lunch at Eastpoint's food court, and we headed over to some void deck nearby to have combined cell group with Collin's boys. I was shocked and angry that no one remembered the points I said the previous week and told them to pray over, so I went into disciplining mode. Sigh.

Mon 6 Apr

My short day today ended up dreadfully long because of a training session for the Content Management System that the vendor designed for the school to manage the school website. The people from the company were really interesting to chat with, and the training session went well in itself, but unearthed some sentiments that I had to handle, since I was in charge of the website revamp project. Yep, the 'secret' big project that ate up my Dec holidays that I was grumbling about.

Tue 7 Apr

I managed to spend some time chatting with some colleagues in the midst of my busyness, and the only reason why I could do that was that I completed the roadshow slides on time as of yesterday evening. Heh. In the evening, my wife and I went down to the wake of blood brudder Zhenxing's grandmother. I could tell that he was quite close to his paternal grandmother because he looked quite affected.

Anyway, the shock of the evening came when he was telling me the cost of the wake. Although the whole setup, coffin and etc costed a whopping 20+ grand, the scary part was the monk hired to perform the rites. He charged a whopping $40k!!!! So for those people out of there who can't find a job, maybe it's not a bad idea to join a temple/monastery. Looking at this staggering sum (for three days of service), I wonder why the New Creation pastor received that much flak on Straits Times for the amount of money he earned.