Enough already

Biting my tongue and not responding to what's trending on my Facebook and news feeds for 48 hours hasn't cut it. So I haven't posted anything hasty and peppered with typos, but I'm fed up still.

Angelina Jolie is pissing me off.

Admittedly, she had high probabilities to weigh and hard choices to make. But everything else is PR machinery for a boob job. And I'll give top marks for her PR agent for getting her on The New York Times. And sweeping the Australian Budget off their newspaper websites on the same day. Even the British Guardian, which could usually be relied on for acerbic observations, was gushing like a fan girl.

I didn't see that badge of courage pinned on Sharon Osbourne when she had a double mastectomy, and after actually fighting cancer. What, your boobs don't matter when you're middle aged and you're not Lara Croft?

The whole crux of the matter, to me, isn't so much the preventive mastectomy, but making the US$3,000 gene test that she had affordable and accessible to all women. When we all have the resources that she has, only then it's worth gushing over what she's done.

OK, my personal context is that the news of her preventive double mastectomy came two days after news of a friend who had to have a mastectomy emerged with nerve damage from the operation and now cannot move an arm. There is a flip side. There is always a flip side. But nobody is talking about that.

L has the best last words: Let's see if Brad Pitt cuts his balls off. That could prevent a whole lot of things too.

In case of emergency

Last weekend, I ran out of chocolate. So in the course of this week, L helped me to build up a stash. I'm hoping it's a crescendo to Mother's Day.

Out shopping

An oldish guy is gingerly clutching a pretty posy of yellow mums as if they would disintegrate at any moment, while checking out a rack of greeting cards. Clearly, he doesn't buy flowers very often.

Equally clearly, someone in his life is having a birthday. 

Lucky lady.

Healthy eats

Brunch today was fruit and yogurt.
There was too much feasting over the weekend on stuff baked with blocks of cheese and butter. 

Good eats

A long weekend means there's time to muck about in the kitchen. :) 

All this was done over a couple of days. I'm so not a daily cook.

Beef bourguignon over egg pasta (just because I found a packet of pasta in the store cupboard, otherwise I would have steamed rice). Drank with dinner the other half of the bottle of cab sav that the beef wasn't stewed in.

No-knead cheesy beer bread. It was gone overnight.

Easy Nutella cookie, with maple ice cream on top.

Crustless salmon and spinach quiche.
Did a conventional one, that's a wodge of it on the left.
And used a muffin tray for the rest of the batter. I think the mini sized ones are nicer because the cheese crips up better
-- you want a crispy edge to them since there isn't a crust. 

Long weekend

There's nothing like starting the weekend on Thursday. It's just rewards for working on Wednesday, which was a public holiday. I kept thinking yesterday was Sunday, because I was working on a day when most people were off. As it so happened, I wasn't the only one. Some colleagues were also thinking that way because they were expecting a Sunday night lineup, and when it didn't materialise, we had to keep kicking ourselves in the head that it was mid-week.

How work befuddles us!

The darling buds of (almost) May

Spring isn't a clearly defined season here since everything stays in bloom all year round but buds are always welcome, all the same. This is the flowering tree downstairs, the one with the leaves just outside our living room window.

Neighbourhood watch

The family on the ground floor have taken in a few semi-feral cats and kittens. That is, they set down food, water and a cat bed on the corridor outside their flat. Of late, they've taken the cat bed indoors, and now the cats are free to wander in and out of their flat.

What the cats don't realise is that the invitation isn't extended to every house. Just a few days ago, I saw a ginger unceremoniously booted out by their next door neighbour. Now, he's tied mesh netting to his gate to block the cats from getting in.

So what's an adventurous cat to do? It climbs up the stairs one floor. Our front door is always shut so that the dogs don't become a nuisance and bark every time someone walks past. But most people here leave their front doors open (though the gates are usually closed) for better ventilation.

So Mr Cat strolls into the flat across the landing, leaps up on the sofa and makes himself at home. The wide-eyed five-year-old ran to the kitchen to report to his mother, "Cat watching TV!" to her bewilderment. The two-year-old thought it was a stuffed toy with batteries included and tried to scoop it up. Mum however, would have none of it.

So now our dogs have been seconded to cat sentry duty. Our front door is propped open, and they're encouraged to bark loudly at anyone who walks past, especially if the passer-by is feline.

New guy

We have a "new" vet. He's been in the practice more than 10 years and leads the team of vets, but I last saw him two dogs ago. When Queeni developed a string of medical issues, the practice owner and senior vet took us over, and we saw him exclusively. Now, he's retired to tend his fruit trees and relax with his koi (and I'm pretty sure we paid for all that), he handed us back to the next most senior guy. He won't even do referral consultations anymore, he won't start what he can't follow up. We said goodbye to him sorrowfully last year, and made an appointment with the highly recommended "new" one for Queeni's vaccination today.

We're going to get along with the "new" vet just fine. HRH didn't growl at him, and that's the benchmark. Previously, the senior vet was the only one she didn't try to bite; he had a Doolittle way about him, one of the junior vets said to us.

New guy is nice and chatty, which is what you'd want. Not someone who pokes a needle in and "see you next year". He looked at the dynamics between Queeni and Rupert, and told us how about his two dogs, one smart and one not really -- "some dogs, you know they're not altogether there", looking at Rupert. Sweetest dog ever, just without the smarts. Yup, he's got Rupert down pat and won Queeni over.

We're all going to get along.

Monday breakfast

Again, nowhere near morning. Coffee and toast is all I can manage before I crawl in to work.

(MGW, you're turning me into a food diarist.)

Sunday dinner

We did a full fledged Sunday roast last week (which drove the dogs crazy as the chicken was roasting) so we thought we'd do an easy-peasy hamburger today. Not your greasy spoon fast food though, this one came with roast vegetables -- and yes, that's broccoli on the plate. A healthy burger!

Breakfast at tea time

This post is for MGW in KCMO. This is a picture of the chwee kuay that I wrote about a while back. It really isn't much to look at, it's quite simple fare really. The brown bits are the salted preserved radish. It adds flavour to what would otherwise be tasteless rice flour cakes.

This unassuming chwee kuay is comfort food to me. It brings me back to my childhood. When I was very young, my mother would buy some back from the market on Saturday mornings after she had done her weekly food shopping. Years later, when I was a teenager, we moved, and the market where she then did her shopping had a McDonald's next to it. Saturday breakfasts then became burgers and milkshakes. Funny thing is, a Big Mac will never bring me back to childhood breakfasts the way chwee kuay does.

Now, it is the husband who buys home the chwee kuay after he's gone for a morning power walk. I'm still being spoilt.  :)

And then I had a slice of toast after the chwee kuay. That's definitely breakfasty.

Saturday night

11pm and we were lugging groceries home when we ran into a young man from the next block who used to come by to play with our dogs, and has a couple of his own. He and his mates were catching the last train downtown, "we're going to go drinking", he laughed, running up to catch up with his friends after pausing to chat with us for a bit.

That would have been us heading downtown at this time on a Saturday night a few years ago. Tonight, we put away the groceries, walked the dogs, and went to bed. We're old, old, old.

Well, OK, I could say I went to bed with Jeremy Clarkson. Although technically, I was reading in bed a book by Jeremy Clarkson.

Perfectly ordinary

I had an ordinary week. Had massive coffees, walked the dogs, groomed and fed them, went to work, had dinner, worked some more, and came home. Perfectly ordinary. 

Oh, and I had a birthday. I found a nice cider that tastes of toffee apples. And the owner of our favourite chilli dog place by the sea gave me a birthday glass of wine. Perfectly ordinary day too, though I didn't have to work that day. Given this time last year, ordinary is good.

Late breakfast

Breakfast is the most important meal of the day -- but is it still breakfast when the first meal of the day was at 4.30pm? I got out of bed at 3pm today. The dogs stayed in bed and would have stayed there until I made the bed and tossed them out of it. Looks like I'm not the only one in for a long, lazy weekend.

Mixed bag

I had just recharged my iPod so when I plugged in today as I settled down on my train ride to work, the playlist reverted to the "All Songs" library on a shuffle setting. On came Alfie Boe, followed by Guns 'n' Roses, then Vivaldi, Village People, INXS, and a Bollywood song I'd forgotten was even there (years ago I attended a Bollywood dance class, and I must have downloaded it when I was trying to familiarise myself with the music as I memorised the choreography). After that, it pretty much degenerated into 80s rock -- which just about shows you what era I'm stuck in. Still, musical schizophrenia ain't no bad thing. :)

Random things of niceness

Going to work is never a nice thing, however much I like my job. So I try and make the commute nice by taking different routes to work. Sometimes the train, sometimes the bus, sometimes a combination of both.

The bus is the nicest, because it takes me down a road that has old liana-lined trees growing along the road divider. Dappled sunshine filtering through flame trees. Nice.

Lately, double-decker buses have been added to ply the route, which means that the view from an additional few feet up now includes peering over people's garden walls and catching glimpses of sleeping dogs. Nice, too.

Yesterday, as the bus approached a bus-stop, I happened to be looking out of the window while a girl waiting there happened to be looking in my direction as the bus pulled up. Our gazes met, and she smiled a shy half-smile. I smiled back. And then, both suddenly discomfitted that we were smiling at strangers, we broke eye contact. In any case, the bus pulled away. And suddenly, my workday was already getting better.

Ups and downs

I'm getting a sort of PTSD from logging onto Facebook. FB was how I found out a few months ago that a friend had a cardiac arrest and flatlined before an emergency room defibrillator brought him back. He survived and has recovered. FB was how I found out last week an Internet friend in the US died suddenly. And FB this morning was how I found out a Tokyo friend has been hooked up on a ventilator in ICU over the weekend -- he couldn't breathe, the cold that took so long to shake off was pneumonia.

And all this time, FB was also where other friends, proud parents, posted pictures of their children -- a pair of twins turning one; a boy scoring for his team at a hockey match; another boy getting his taekwondo black belt; and an only child at his kindergarten graduation.

I had no idea while researching (OK, googling) the half-forgotten Kahlil Gibran quote for yesterday's entry that FB had more ironies to throw at me.

What will tomorrow bring?

The circle of life

This time last week, a friend posted an entry entitled 'The week begins' on his blog. He blogged everyday, and this was about the start of his work week. By the end of the week, we had news of his sudden death from a medical complication. We're still in shock.

This time last year, another friend fighting cancer thought she would be lucky if she made it to Christmas. As the year panned out, I didn't dare to express to her my sorrow -- she had more to bear -- as we reached the last New Year; the last birthday; the last Valentine's Day; the last spring; the last dog. But by the end of the year, she was cancer free. She cancelled her hospice booking and went home. It wasn't straight-going as that, in between there were falls and broken bones and scares. But she's alive, and life is good, she will tell you.

This time last year, I was facing my birthday alone, with L in hospital. And it was my Chinese astrological year at that. But now, L is shoving something up his sleeve for the day. Far more meaningful to me is that this year, it falls on Easter Sunday. If ever there was a symbol of renewal.

"Joy and sorrow are inseparable ... together they come and when one sits alone with you ... remember that the other is asleep upon your bed."

- Kahlil Gibran

Goodbye, friend

At some point, the kindness of a stranger makes him a friend.

And so it was with Bill. 

Oh, I've got cyberfriends -- cyberfamily, we call each other now -- people I've met on the Net through dog groups, who've walked me and my dogs through sorrow and through joy; people whose dogs I mourned when they passed on, dogs that I've never petted, never scritched behind the ears. A cyber bond isn't virtual, it's real, it's strong.

Bill wasn't one of doggy people. I never thought I'd become friends with a tax accountant on the other side of the world. Even if he seemed to like dogs. He wrote a blog about caregiving for an elderly parent, and that was what we had in common. Geriatric medication. Not the sort of stuff that you'd think a friendship would be based on.

I came across his blog as a link from someone else's. I hung around and read. And later, I posted on his comments page. All the other comments were from people who obviously knew him in some way or another. Nobody knew me. But they all made me welcome and were very helpful when I asked questions about elderly care. Bill was the leader in that circle of kindess. It must be true then, that the actions of a man's friends reflect on him. 

Later, we took our friendship onto Facebook. I still read his blog now and then, but didn't comment much. Most of the interaction now shifted to FB. There, he posted jokes and interesting vignettes. Recent entries were old photos and newspaper clippings of his parents when they were younger, businesses that they had owned, homes where they had lived. Judging from his friends' responses, the group on FB were old school friends and people he grew up with, and lived among. Family friends and relatives. No place for me there, I thought, and I never posted much more than an occasional "like" or haha-type comment at his wisecracks. But still I was made welcome, he responded to every comment.

I stopped posting much on the blog. I didn't think it was right to keep whining about the stress of caregiving. Would Bill really want to know that dad's feeding tube had clogged up again, that he had peed on the floor in a pique again. Though I knew Bill would offer encouragement enough to help me shoulder on. But I didn't want to bother him with the mundane blahs. Exchanging jokes on and sharing funny pictures on FB seemed a more positive thing to do.

Sometimes, I'd see a travel or food programme on Portland, Oregon on cable TV. There's a famous hot dog stand or something. I'd mentally file it away as something to ask Bill about. Or something to check if I ever go there. What a hoot it would be, I thought, if we ever finally met up. I'd have to go there, he told me, he didn't fly, he had a fear of flying. And went on to "like" all the vacation pix I posted on FB. Well, going to Portland would be something to do, sometime. Always sometime, some other time.

This morning, when I woke up, in that haze between sleep and wakefulness, where your minds speaks to you of what it knows is ahead, in that line between consciousness and unconsciousness, in that inner voice that is sadly shaken off when wakefulness takes over -- I knew I was going to light a candle today. I thought it was for Evelyn, one of the cyberdogs. John in Texas (I always thought of them as so-and-so in such-a-state, they're scattered all over the US, and at first when everyone was new, it helped me to remember who was where. I wonder if they think of me as that One in Singapore.) had posted a few days ago that her time had come, and I knew he was grieving.

It was for Bill. One of the friends from his blog, who became a friend in her own right, emailed me with news that he had died suddenly. There was a medical complication, I found out later, on his blog and FB page.

The man that I'd always imagined to be at the other end of the globe, sitting at his PC and uploading uplifting tales on his blog and FB page suddenly wasn't there anymore.

And suddenly, there is a hole in my life. A virtual cyber friend, but an actual acute hole.

Thank you for your friendship, Bill. RIP.

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PS - I only realised when I hit the "post" button, that this is my 1,000th blog entry. Somehow, kinda apt. A key number for a key person. Bill would have appreciated it. I had to squelch a natural impulse to send him a post or a poke to let him know. I shall miss that he isn't on the other reading end of the blog.