A day of running in and out of the house waving at the same neighbour so many times he must have thought we were mad. June’s busy preparing New Year cookies, starting with her highly anticipated pineapple tarts. After breakfast at the coffee shop, we bought 15 pineapples that the fruit shop shelled for us. While waiting, I brought Q-tip back upstairs then ran down again to meet June at NTUC. June was already at the cashier paying for her flour, Planta margarine and peanut oil when I rejoined her. We went back to collect our pineapples, then in our lift lobby we saw a little ginger-ash coloured kitten looking very lost and miaoing very loudly. So we rushed upstairs to dump our shopping, grab a can of sardines and back down again to feed the little thing. Her left eye had been glued shut with a messy eye discharge but thankfully after we cleaned her face up with tissue the eye popped open again and it looked healthy. After she ate we put her up on the top of the mailboxes where she would be safe (no one looks up there) and left her there. We had to look for cinnamon sticks, brown sugar, icing sugar and sea-salt. None to be found in our neighbourhood provision shops, so we went back upstairs to fetch our Transit-Link cards, and came back down again to catch the bus into Central. Before catching the bus, as June was also lacking finely crushed peanuts and didn’t know where to look for them, she had a brainwave and made an arrangement to buy 1kg worth from the peanut pancake auntie when new supplies arrive next week. We got most of everything we wanted from Central, except sea-salt which seems to have disappeared off shelves everywhere. Fine, we can make-do without it for a while. When we finally got home again, June got busy grinding up the pineapples then putting the pulp into the wok to cook over the next week or so. She put cloves into the mixture and she will be adding in the brown sugar and the cinnamon soon.

And sometime in the late afternoon, I test drove a Hyundai Getz. It’s been so long since I drove that I was a bit of an embarrassment to Eric, the nice salesguy. It’s fair to say I had more of a crawl rather than a spin around the block, and my reverse parking was so bad I’m pretty sure Eric really wanted to grab the steering wheel away from me and park it himself. But he kept his cool and eventually talked me through the entire procedure. Walking back to his office, I noticed that he didn’t press me to sign any contracts. Bah!