Ma famille, rendered as cartoon caricatures and proudly displayed on my front door. They represent traditional Chinese couplets the wife decorates our entrance with annually, welcoming blessings into our home. Each panel bears the character "fu", meaning "fortune", and each family member wears a horse hat for the Horse Year ahead. CNY is still officially a few weeks ahead, but taobao has been expeditious with its deliveries so we're celebrating early.
*The title wordplays on "port", so literally, pardon my French. Credit: Google Translate.
Bonus! 2 YouTube videos featuring the current talk of the town. The popcorn buckets are out in full force as the nation observes slack-jawed as our once-incorruptible policy-makers on both sides of the House fall from grace. Let's call it 'looking for love in all the wrong places' (Johnny Lee).
The question of whom we can trust, if our leadership cannot set the example of propriety and adherence to a strong moral code that upholds the integrity of the family unit, now often comes up in local conversation. How will these scandals affect how in upcoming elections, voters evaluate the incumbents, and the party that we have given our collective Opposition trust to? But these questions are not my topic today. To me, it doesn't matter which party is being represented. The common factor in both cases is the human factor, nothing more.
If anything, these incidents are more of an indictment against the work culture we have here. Both illicit couples comprised pairs of people who worked closely together, probably spending long hours solving problems that really helped their constituents, and feeling elation at the completion of several jobs well done day after day. Many times, those days would have grown into nights, and this is true for most jobs here too, not just those of professional politicians. There's nothing more attractive than a strong, capable person, dedicated to their mission, who is obviously being thanked over and over again by grateful, otherwise helpless people. And if they go celebrating mutual successes together often enough, there's a trigger for biology to kick in.
The people we spend the most time with are the people we grow the strongest bonds with. So what is keeping us at the office, when the people we are meant to be closest to are at home? Perhaps we have a strong sense of mission, that the job always comes first. This idea could become an obsession when the job comes with an equally strong sense of accomplishment. You make people happy: you've saved their lives, their livelihoods, their children, their homes, their parents, their health, their sense of personal safety, whatever. It's these triumphs that keep us feeling like we're really making something of our lives, that keep us taking case after case, and we don't want to let anybody down. One last person in the queue? Let's not disappoint them. They need my help, and I've got nothing else to do. But you do. At home.
Work at home is a very different ball game. The tasks are menial and manual. They are recurring in that the same problem arises not long after you've dealt with it already. Nobody is grateful. They are jobs that simply need to be done. There are no awards, no recognition to be earned, and everyone just looks tired, sweaty and at their most unattractive when that last checkbox is finally ticked. Meantime, the children haven't stopped screaming. And sex is far from the mind, given that the risk of yet another banshee inadvertently popping out is still fairly high despite multiple layers of material or chemical prevention, like the last time.
Like it or not, we need to be with the ones we love at home if we want to avoid opportunities for scandals to evolve. It's not a failure of morals or values, but simply a matter of time, and whom we choose to spend it with. When I refer to 'work culture' I don't necessarily mean that our office requires our presence, but rather our sense of self-importance that keeps us there. The common mantra here is that we should never do tomorrow what we can do today. Our problem is that we do today what we could instead be doing tomorrow. No. When the clock reaches 5-5:30 p.m., shut down, go home. Superman/woman/person is needed there too.
The new Ecovacs Deebot X1 Omni is about to be unboxed. The maltipoo is asserting her dominance over the new addition to the family.
Accessories include twin sweeping brush heads sporting port and starboard colours, and two mop discs.
The robot will have its work cut out for it. Dog and cat fur everywhere, although these two aren't the worst culprits. Those will be the other two cats (not pictured). What we have here is the docking bay at which the cleaning unit will not only charge itself when inactive, but also collect clean water for its mopping function, and upload vacuumed dust, dirt, fur, etc. into a dust bag with capacity for 60 days, and dirty water gets uploaded into a separate reservoir.
The water reservoirs are shaped like jerry cans. Clean water goes into the right-hand reservoir, while the left hand one collects dirty water after mopping is done. Between them is the slot for housing the cleaning brush. Some manual maintenance is still required, after all.
A look at the cleaning unit which we have christened "Omnomnomni". Not only does it have eyes in front, but the coning tower houses another rotating camera for mapping. It sees all. Should I be scared?
At rest and charging. I can command it via an app, but it also responds to voice commands. For example, I can call it to my location to do some spot cleaning. I should read the rest of the manual for other voice-activated functions.
The first time I activated it was to map its boundaries, essentially defining for itself its scope of work. In the video (above) it's entered 'Housekeeping Mode', although I set it only to vacuum, not mop. It took just under three minutes to clean under the dining table while it navigated through this forest of chair legs. Next time, I'll stack the chairs to make the process less anxiety inducing. Elsewhere, it got hung up on a bathroom mat, so those need to be picked up off the floor too before it goes about its business. According to the app, it took just under an hour to clean about 45 sq m, which is the size of the cleaning area I allowed it.
Overall, it did a decent job getting fur, bits of shed cat claws, stray cat litter... and other assorted floor debris. Tomorrow, I'll try the vacuum/mop function and really see what it can do. I hope it'll be smart enough not to mop the carpet.
I turned down a good cause. A door-to-door representative from the Bone Marrow Donor Programme (BMDP) approached me and I flatly declined to donate either my time or money to the cause. Donating my bone marrow was out of the question. Was it worthy cause? Yes. Were they asking for much? No. Could I have been inclined to help out? Maybe. So why didn't I?
It was the sales pitch. The boy, bless him, was such an android doing everything he had been programmed to do. He started off by offering me some very unpalatable alternative ways to be a contributor. While he wasn't asking for my bone marrow, he suggested that I could be a volunteer like him, then he reminded me how busy I probably was and so I wouldn't be likely to consider contributing that way.
Next, he went on a heartbreaking spiel on how young some of the bone marrow recipients were -- "months... months old only" and how would I feel as a parent of such a child, separated from parental love being confined in a glass box and stuffed full of tubes? I happened to be holding on to the dog at the time, so it was hard to empathize.
He complimented me on my interior decor (seriously?), hoping to trigger a psychological reminder of how well-off I was, then offered me a suite of possible tax deductible donation plans and which demographic each plan was targeted at. He surmised that like so-and-so and so-and-so who signed up (ooh, neighbour envy), I might undertake the middle-income plan, at which point I had heard enough and closed the door on him with a "thank you for the information, sorry for wasting your time."
Understand that the boy did everything he was taught.He smiled at the right time, he picked up on the right cues, he asked for reasons for my concerns... he was trained well. And that's my problem. I turned him down because he was doing what he was told. While he may well have been personally motivated for whatever reason to volunteer for this worthy cause, his performance was perfect as a mouthpiece for whomever trained him and didn't sound sincere at all. Most of all, I hate being manipulated. This template-dialogue just made it so obvious.
Perhaps karma will bite me in the ass someday, but if and when I do donate to a good cause, I want to do so because I genuinely believe it is the right thing to do, and not because I couldn't say, "no", to someone groping around looking for the right buttons to push on me.
Every day I get a surprise piece of installation art from my resident artist, Tasha. Today, she has outdone herself by discovering and using new materials from the wardrobe which she has learned to open. Not that it's hard to learn -- it slides open at the gentlest push. In this masterpiece, she has also included tissue and whatever they call paper used for wrapping new clothes in, and also the hard copy of her blood test results for a macabre touch. AND a (thankfully) unused poo bag, all carefully shredded and distributed across the floor, presumably to protest against the use of mines in warfare.
One sleepy dog, slightly intoxicated with anaesthesia. Took the poor thing for sterilization today. At least she's not showing any inclination to lick of otherwise disturb her wound so we took the cone of shame off. It was hampering her distance estimation and made her bump into things a lot -- my heel, mostly. The timing, I believe, was exactly right. Yesterday she enthusiastically humped my forearm while I was watching TV. First time I've ever seen her do that, and probably the last time too.
And for once, a cat voluntarily climbed into the hammock of the huge cat tree that has until now been vacant of users. Hopefully, the others will follow his example else no one will ever miss the white elephant in the room.
After getting the fibre line installed in my house I never activated it. That's because at the same time, Starhub upgraded my service to 50 mbps and gave me a free cable modem to supply the bandwidth. That was just shy of two years ago. Now Starhub's offering me a fibre upgrade and I've accepted. In a simple procedure, the 'hub rep hooked up the fibre gateway and wireless router for me. I'm downloading YouTube videos at 100 mbps in HD, with no buffering time. This is not to say that they're good videos or anything; it's just a speed benchmark I can appreciate. For all this combined with my existing cable TV subscription, the monthly bill comes down a couple of bucks. Nice.
Pebbles, the devil cat, has come to stay again while May is in LA. This reaction is in response to Tasha who has grown a bit, she is no longer afraid of him but is instead challenging and taunting him -- from the safety of behind my legs.
May bought this cat tree at 50% off at the Pets Station warehouse sale. It's meant for Pebbles, but she delivered it to my place as there are more cats here to use it. Pebbles will play in it when he visits. The thing is so tall, it barely fits under the false ceiling. My worry is, the more you pay for a cat toy, the less likely a cat would ever play with it.
Fortunately, we have a taker. Someone appreciates the hemp for sharpening claws on. Not five minutes later, when I didn't have a camera on me, someone else voluntarily jumped to the next highest platform to have a look-see.
And just another view of claw-sharpening ecstasy. Mmm... yesss...!
I wonder if it's too early to say, but Tasha's exhibiting proper toilet habits. There have been appreciably fewer 'accidents' indoors, and she understands what 'going out' means for her to do. Good girl, Tasha!
Personality-wise, she's turning out to be rambunctious, energetic and attention-seeking, while at rest she prefers to be around people. All these traits are expected of dog behaviour.
I mention this only because her doggie behaviour is something the cats are not used to. So far, both Maui and Kaiser have taken swipes at her when she got too close. Certainly, these relationships bear watching. Hopefully, they'll adapt to each other quickly.
This post is a day late, but we have a dog to take to doggie events again! After being nameless for a day, she has finally got one we could both agree to: Tasha. Tasha is a cross-breed, fashionably referred to as a maltipoo (no prizes for guessing her parentage).
And so now with a new puppy in the house, we'll all be making a lot of adjustments while we adapt to a new personality in residence. For the moment, the cats are unhappy with this new addition and have gone off their food.
And for us, Tasha is no Q-tip replacement. Where Q-tip tended towards placidity, Tasha is a ball of energy and is quite demanding of attention. For a small pup, she has a sharp, high-pitched bark that can be quite startling. And the process of housetraining has to begin all over again.
Fortunately, this week begins Spring Break, so I can afford to spend a little more time at home to get this little fella acclimatized to our family, and us to her.
"Oh, baby, whisper sweet nothings into my ear...!" Ok, some context before you get the wrong idea: there's a thunderstorm going on outside and the two boys have gone into hiding. This here compromising situation is more a game of "sardines" than a surreptitious smooch under the radar. At least, that's what I prefer to think.
M-i-L brewed a chrysanthemum concoction that she swears will allieviate Maui's urinary problems. It's worked on her human 'patients' before, so it's got to work on cats too.
I can't help feeling a little skeptical of the claim. There is a superstitious association in that the colour of the brew happens to be the same colour as pee, hence input is equivalent to output. Secondly, the fact that people are imbibing larger-than-usual amounts of the brew is probably what is causing the increased outflow at the toilet.
That, of course, is my logical brain at work. The emotional part of me is grateful that more people are taking an interest in doing something to help the boy. And save our floor and furniture from the ghastly yellow peril that follows him wherever he goes. Ew.
First time I've seen all three gathered together in one frame around the kitty playground.
And now you know why: a sprinkling of catnip drives them a little nuts. I... I think Kaiser's becoming a junkie! But Maui remains unaffected somehow. Momo is no longer in the frame...
because she's rolling on the floor, spazzing out with a catnip filled sock. There's no hope for her.
The cats have a new playground! They haven't yet figured out how to climb up to the top shelf, but they don't seem to have any trouble climbing down after being manually placed up there. The squarish thing at bottom right in the last pix is a corner of the sofa bed we moved below the top shelf as a safety precaution in case it rains cats and dogs.
Today we also took a turn to look after the nephews for the afternoon and evening. We took them to Slava's Snowshow, a bizarre anthology of non-narrative spectacles involving artistry in clowning, mime, lighting effects and big giant balls. Oh, and masses of materials such as "snow", simulated spider webbing and water blanketing the audience from time to time.
Yep, the audience is definitely a part of the show. Two words to describe the experience: play and imagination. It was such fun to gather handfuls of "snow" from the floor and dump them over your seat mate's head. It was a blast reaching up to grab an ever-expanding sheet of webbing and pass it along to the person behind just to see if there was enough of the stuff to cover the entire stall area. There was, and some...
By the time they rolled the big balls into the audience, we were already on our feet, anticipating our turn to take a swipe or bat at one of these colourful spheres as we tossed them around the auditorium. A great reminder of what pointless, unstructured play used to be for us [older] folk. XD
Took the kids to watch Paranorman in the evening. This animated movie was strong in the use of horror elements, yet managed to keep a light, humorous touch to quite a dark tale. Early in the movie, I wondered if some scenes might have been too intense for the young 'uns, but since I heard more laughter than screams (of which there were none from them... though there was an audible gasp at one point from the grown man sitting beside me) I kinda' figured I didn't have to drag everyone home prematurely. Turned out the plot addressed the issue of bullying and the irrationality of hysteria, so the psychological perspectives were interesting; and it ended on a sweet, if sad note. Go watch it! It's good!
Interesting that my friends know what I lack. There's the issue of a cell phone I either keep on silent or I just don't carry around with me, which keeps me incommunicado most of the time. That is a source of irritation for some quarters -- which I apologize for -- but I was waiting until I could re-contract with my service provider without penalty for a premature handset upgrade.
The other thing I was waiting for was the unveiling of the iPhoney 5, but recent legal developments forced me to reconsider my potential ties with the Evil Empire.
And so, meet my newest mobile device, a Galaxy SIII in a slick pebble blue case. It boasts a big, beautiful, sharp (Super AMOLED) screen that my ageing eyes are so very grateful for; a fast camera that takes pretty decent pictures; and a whole bunch of other functions that could effectively take over from my current 7" tablet and still be able to fit in my trouser pocket comfortably 'cos it's surprisingly light for its relative size. My only problem with it after a day of use is that the smooth case is horrendously slippery. But that's nothing a silicone skin can't fix. Oh in case you're wondering what's propping up the SIII for the pix (above), that's Momo. Good girl, Momo.
In other news:
Pix from my SIII: the wife is embarking on a DIY home-improvement project. We're in Defu Lane to scrounge up some scrap planking, but wound up purchasing teak! A bit extravagant for what she's planning, I think, but if it turns out well maybe it'll be worth it.
And somewhere across the road, we pick up more supplies. Act like a DIY newbie and the vendors are sympathetic and offer a lot of advice. And I believe we still got away with paying reasonable prices for the stuff we got.
Hopefully, I'll be able to upload project details by next weekend when the work begins in earnest.
I wonder if Elgar Lee who wants his citizenship to "feel special" remembers what it really feels like to be at home?
Nobody "feels special" when they're at home. Parents yell at each other and at the kids. Elder siblings yell at younger siblings, then lock themselves up in their rooms to feel unloved and unwanted. Small children are always getting underfoot, grandparents always getting in the way. Home is where the chores are, where we wash our dishes and underwear alike, sometimes in the same sink. How glam is that? We pick up after ourselves if we want a clean, orderly environment to live in. At home we dress down, slouch, burp and f*rt in front of the TV (and each other). That's home: the one place in the world where we can be ourselves and NOT have to be special though the rest of the world demands it from us.
It's home because despite our differences, family is still family. We can fight each other all the time, but whomever else threatens one of us threatens all of us. It's home because without that piece of land or concrete or dirt to stand on, we have nothing else and we have nowhere else to go. In no way does the land need to be special, nor do we have to be special to stand on it. Like it or not, it just happens to be ours. Does Mr Lee have anywhere else to call home? No? Then home is here. How special does he feel now?
If Mr Lee takes issue with having to defend his home, then who else is going to defend it for him? It is sometimes said that because of National Service our boys feel like second-class citizens. O persons of impaired judgement! Only first-class citizens will defend their home because they have something to defend. Second-class citizens either have somewhere else to call "home", or defence doesn't matter to them one way or another because they have no home to begin with.
At home, traditionally, the only ones who should feel special are our visitors. Because they DON'T belong, we treat them with extra care to make them feel welcome. We pay special attention to their comfort, to see to their needs, and defer our needs to suit their convenience. We do what we can to make them leave with a good impression of us. That's basic hospitality, and it's especially important to be hospitable with friends, neighbours and even strangers, when we know we won't last long in a tough neighbourhood without their goodwill. And even if this wasn't the case, it's still how well-bred people treat one another.
But S'pore has come such a long way that we might just have forgotten the realities of home. We feel special now that we have a maid to boss around and do all the things we are supposed to be doing for ourselves at home. We feel special when we have someone at home calling us "Sir" or "Mam", and we can just put our feet on the coffee table and enjoy instant-home, where everything we need or want appears like magic (though we hardly give a toss about the human cost behind the magic). We feel special when our parents put us precious little darlings on a pedestal because they don't know how to keep us quiet otherwise love us so much.
We know we've had it too good for too long when we want to "feel special" in our own home.
Finally pulled myself out of the Stone-Age and shelled out for a Blu-Ray player. Can't believe how much prices have fallen. This thing I had girded myself to pay in excess of $2C for came in at less than $150. Yes, it's a simple model and apparently "smart" too. I thought that meant wi-fi "smart". It just turned out to be that it had a LAN port on the back. Eh, no wonder so cheap.
