things the cat is afraid of, part I

Say, what is that thing you're holding there, Dee? Little rectangular thing... not really sure... pointing it at me... blinking light thingy...

ARGH ARGH ARGH MY EYES ARGH!!1!!!@!

So here is a photo of Nemo on one of the rare occasions where he isn't hiding under the bed. The journey from Boston was rough on the cat, it was tough on all of us, but at least we had, like, free will, not being from some sort of Calvinist school of thought, so were nominally in charge of our own destinies and had the consolation of having made the choice to move. To Nemo it was all just so much I Am Totally NOT At Home On My Sunny Windowsill, How Much Longer Do I Have To Spend In This Freakin Crate, OMG DARK IN CARGO HOLD OF AIRPLANE HELP HELP, and 30 days in quarantine.

And then, of course, we were in uni temp housing for a month and then we had to move AGAIN and now, right when all should be peace, and things settling down again, we realize that we are in Singapore, Land of Tiny Yapping Dogs.

So, things the cat is afraid of:

• tiny yapping dogs. Specifically, the corgis next door. Meanwhile, a corgi is 6 inches tall, right? And REALLY CUTE. It's Ein, am I right?? And at 18 pounds the cat is actually BIGGER than the dogs. True, they outnumber him 2 to 1... still. (Let me just digress a sec and tell you about the sound of 2 tiny, excited corgis freak-barking at 7am in the corridor of our apartment building which has this amazing acoustic ECHO Echo echo reverb going on so that after a few nanoseconds it sounds like an army of Defcon Frenzy corgis are percussing straight into your skull with the sheer irresistible power of their acoustic Yap Beam, earth-quaking you out of a sound sleep and making one eyelid twitch Inspector Clouseau's boss-like all day long... well, it's better than an alarm clock, I can tell you.)

• things falling down the trash chute (I love the trash chute, you just pitch your trash... down the chute! And listen for the satisfying CRASH of an empty bottle of pinot greeze hitting the ground from 14 floors up, yay!)

• the wind. Up so high, the wind whips through the open door and windows and exits through the windows on the other side of the apartment thus keeping us alive at average temps of 33C. But it also blows things off the tables and whatnot and startles the cat.

• people walking down the corridor outside (fortunately not many people do this as we're almost at the end of the block)

• the mosquito truck (also the street sweeper. And the guy with the leaf blower. Do street sounds get louder as they disperse upward??)

• the camera flash (now)

It's tough being a little animal with only 2 functioning brain cells with which to understand your environment. I think it's getting better, though, gradually.

Deeeeeee bulleted list catch-up

Oi, 10 days since last update. I catch you up with a bulleted list! All about MEEEEE1!1!11!@

• the boat came with our stuff! we unpacked it all and left it lying in tottering piles all over the condo!! We have spoons!

• we put up screens for the cat. Well, we're ALLLmost done with that. Sharply perceptive Dee, with eyes of the eagle, spots an alternative to the screenMan at the DIY store (upstairs from Jen Jelita Cold Storage, which, I LOVE that store, it's small but the inventory is as refined and whole as a perfect pearl and you can find everything you need, really, and the Amazing Iron Man is there on weekends too! Demonstrating his AMAZING STEAM IRON *SKISSSSSH SKISSSSH* which I should write a post about later....) Anyway, the nice screenman who came and gave us an estimate of $1,800 for screens for all the windows and I was like *@#&(@^! WHUT CANNOT DO (even though he was a very nice guy and I'm sure the price was fair, it was just too much right now on top of everything else). So what we have done to keep the cat on THIS floor and not hurtling down 14 stories at terminal velocity is cable-stay plastic netting to the window grill. Which works great and is a billion times cheaper. By Grabthor's Hammer, what a savings! More money to spend on laksa, yay...

• let's see, I went to many meetings on campus for the new job last week. I like the people at NUS, I like being on campus, it feels like home. We almost got killed taking a shortcut over the ridge jungle back from the food court after lunch though. That's okay, I know the climate is just doing its job and it's nothing personal that it wants me to suffer heatstroke and die. My computer's on order and should arrive within thenext couple of weeks.

• we just finished Nightschool chapter 15 marathon!! Time for 2nd half of Odd Thomas toning marathon, yay!!

• I updated my portfolio site at jdeedupuy.com. Well, I haven't finished the about part yet but who cares. I did it in preparation for the con, which, I spent about an hour there on Sunday. But! there were comics! Lots of comics! It wasn't like Anime Boston, for example-- table after table of pinup fan art, bleah-- there was some fanart there too, but there were books! Lots of them. Sequentials! Very happy. I bought a big pile and chatted a bit with creators but was in too much of a hurry to get back to work to stop too long, loooking forward to actually sitting down and reading my pile soon...

• we went out to hotpot with Cynthia!!! It was awesome!! That deserves a separate post with pics...

. . . durrrr.... I'm sure there was more stuff... well, I can only think of stupid stuff like when I woke up day before yesterday after not too much sleep with a powerful misty image in my mind of a beautiful new moon hanging in a powerfully deeeeep blue-black sky accompanied by a brilliant shimmering star. ... and then, after a cup of coffee, realized that I hadn't dreamed this after all but had woken up and actually seen it out by bedroom window, which I confirmed by checking out Sky & Telescope then had to look up Castor and Pollux on wikipedia so here's your cheesecake for the day, hubba hubba!

my bag!!1!1!!!!!@!@@!!

Okay! I can't believe I haven't showed you guys this yet. My Singapore rig!
This is the CaseLogic bag I found down at Funan. My previous awesome bag, set up for Boston proved woefully inadequate for S'pore. It was way too small to accommodate all the new necessities. And I was beginning to despair finding something suitable, here in the Land of Conspicuous Consumption Designer Handbags, when lo!!! in Funan we found an entire store of nothing but Case Logic products!! *geek gasm!!!!*

This bag is actually a mini laptop bag, but works brilliantly as a daysack. It's even a great color since I am forbidden to buy any more black things >.>;;;;

The little orange bag carabinered to the outside is another caselogic bag, padded, with a drawstring close, perfect for rapid deployment of the camera!

Behold, the kit!
Okay! Clock-wise, starting upper left with the bag:
-Daruma charm (very important!)
-foldy out purse hanger (you put the flat metal part on the table and hang your bag strap off the hooky, useful for keeping your bag off the very public floors of the hawker centers),
-hankerchief I got from Porter Square in Cambridge, useful! need to get more,
-pen,
-keys (2 for the front door, 1 for the gate and THREE keycards :D;;;)
-sunglasses, glasses,
-folding fan ($2 at Daiso!!),
-passport, checkbook,
-portable toothwipes, bandaids (new shoes T____T), oil absorbing papers for face (essential in s'pore)
-travel sunscreen (2),
-zazzle business cards, burt's bees chapstick (lipbalm not really needed here, it turns out),
-hand sanitzer, moist wipes and tough-ply tissues (all of which you need at hawker centers since no one gives you napkins, ever, and there are rarely places to wash hands after wrestling chili crab to the ground),
-umbrella (more useful as sunshade than for sudden squalls. You're gonna get drenched if you get caught out in one of those, umbrella or not),
-Kiva bag (more on that in a sec),
-change + lucky Sacagawea dollar given to me by Linda a million years ago!
-phone, wallet, and ezpass for MRT

Oh, and in the middle, the ever present list of things we have to get for the house. :/

Keychain Kiva stuff-sack bag was a present from Al's relatives. Most excellent bit of gear! Compresses to almost nothing, light parachute material, uncompreses into indestructable little bag PERFECT for carrying groceries. Seriously, you can load it up with like 12 pounds of stuff - the straps are just big enough to get over your shoulder so it's supporting all the weight. This little bag has made the walk back from the grocerystore doable.

Nothing like a well stocked daysack to make you feel adapted to your environment.

you can make pancakes in a wok

No problemo.

And you can get maple syrup down at Cold Storage too. It comes from Canada and costs eleven million dollars.

Someday soon I'm going to go buy some plates. The plastic ones are a nice color, tho.

fried fish soup, delayed yum

Tonight's dinner at HV, a milk soup with rice noodle-- succulent fried, firm, white fish and "local spinach", Thai chili in fish sauce on the side to add-in, delish! Musical ambiance this evening = Miami Vice, an emo 80s mix tape.

This hawker center is not THE hawker center in HV, btw, but the one on the corner, across from the windmill. And ...whoever puts together the music for this center, is, like... A SISTER TO ME. Two weeks ago, the succulent carby-goodness of prata and dippage from the PrataMan combined with the Michael Jackson mix was, seriously, JUST what I needed to prevent slitting my wrists from homesickness. YOU SAVED MY LIFE, MIXTAPE LADY. I LOVE YOU, MAHN.

So here I am, tonight, contemplating my soup, which is far too hot to eat right away, sitting back in my chair, the big fans in the open air dining area oscillating gently, a cold mug of Tiger beer in my hand and the hubbub of contented voices all around me and I think to myself, 'This is me, Dee, watching an episode of Miami Vice in 1982 in metro Rocksonville, Floriduh. I am sitting in my mother's living room, and what's his face with the white linen suit is driving in his car, a warm night, just like here, with an 80s song blaring and the wind whipping thru his brush-back bangs. And in a moment of perfect clarity I look up, and see before me the timeline of my life laid out like a highway, punctuated with bright lights, a sensation of speed and the wind in my hair, just like the image on tv. I hurl down the road in the old Delta 88 I used to have, through this and thru that till I am looking down at a bowl of soup, cooling by degrees before me at an open cafe in Singapore. Slave to Love is playing. I watch a bead of condensation roll down my beer mug and pool on the table before I come back and start thinking mundane thoughts again, over in an instant, the spell created by the mixtape lady.

Here's the thing about this fish soup. 'Poo poo', said I, dipping a spoon in right when the gentlemn brought it out. It tastes raw and unsophisticated-- of milk and nothing else, where's its depth? But as I ate-- slowly, because of the heat, and waiting for the soup to cool-- the fried onions, the fried fish, the fish sauce and chilies (which I dumped in, of course!) slowly suffused throughout the soup, with the green vegetables. And slowly, as I chopsticked in the rice noodles, and ate the big chunks of fish, the soup transformed. From something hasty and simple, to somethign complex. Till after all the fish was gone, and the noodles eaten, it had become something sublime and savvory, something complex and wonderful. The soup at the end of the meal was entirely different from the soup at the beginning.

There's, like, some soup-y zen koan there or something, probably. YO I AM CLAPPING WITH ONE HAND CAUSE I'M EATING MY FISH SOUP WITH THE OTHER ONE WHAT SOUND AM I MAKING, GRASSHOPPER??!@!!

how the bubble tea lady in holland v almost killed me

Singapore is roughly 100 kilometers (about 65 miles) from the equator. FROM THE FREAKIN' EQUATOR. You forget that occasionally, or I do, it seems so incredible, like saying you live an hour's drive away from the north pole or maybe half a day's swim from the bottom of the ocean. But the sun will soon teach you to respect it, oh yes! here at the equator, where the surface of the earth bulges out like the spare tire on an aging geek, closest to the sun!! You say, oh, well, Starhub came to hook up the internet at noon and now they're gone and there's no food in the house, let's just walk down the street, 20 minutes, no problem, to HV for lunch. Forgetting that it's 12:20 at... The Equator. So your quick jaunt turns into a death march and by the time you get to HV you are actually on the verge of heatstroke...

AND the bubble tea lady, for whom you made a bee-line once you made it at last, knowing she had ICE, that magical substance that might-- possibly-- just save you from collapse, AND whom the Singaporean Toursim Board would have you believe speaks english, like all of the friendly nation here at the gateway to the east, does not actually speak english but Singlish, and finds your American accent completely incomprehensible besides...

in an effort to serve you well dutifully presents you with query after query trying to understand your order, blended/not blended, boba? jelly? juice? etc. (completely incomprehensible at the time) until you are literally swaying under the baking heat of the awning knowing that your face is beet red, your vision narrowing...

till you finally shove money over the counter, the amount you know not what, neglecting your change, taking the beverage from her hands as politely as possible considering your NEAR DEATH STATE and press the plastic freezie, I am not kidding, against the side of your neck where your carotid artery pumps blood to your brain that is several handfuls of degrees higher than it should be.

Two seconds from passing out you are saved. The bubble tea lady has a very poor opinion of you. But it's a small price to pay for your life.

I write 'I will show more respect to my environment' on the board one hundred million times.

the awesomeness that is Daiso...

the original 100yen store where EVERYthing therein is 2 SingDollars IS A SUCKING BLACK HOLE OF AWESOMENESS FROM WHICH EVEN LIGHT CANNOT ESCAPE MUCH LESS DEE ECLIPSED BY AWESOMENESS!!1@#!!1!
... I bought a folding fan. >.> Which I actually use, which causes people to look at me funny but they do that anyway so no worries. I'm totally going back to Daiso soon, though, to buy several thousand 2 dollar Japanese ceramic dishes for the house. All of which will be different. And cute.

the most violently crimson food ever made

... Anthony Bourdain-esque mutton marrow bones!!
Zoom in! Zoom in on the redness!
Aiiiieeee! My eyes!!

Al actually ordered this by mistake. Often in S'pore, if you're not from here, when you order in a hawker center you have to resort to pointing at photographs of the food on the header of the stall. The photo for this dish had obviously faded in the sun cause it looked nothing like the beautiful crimson dreamdish that eventually came out. (I wouldn't have recognized it either if I hadn't seen the Singapore edition of No Reservations...)

Aren't the colors amazing? This is how beautiful Singapore is.

culinary edge-bleeding at ion orchard!

Here is what you can find in the food court at Orchard Road's newest mall, Ion Orchard, down down down in the basement (B4):
All the rage now, Gindaco's takoyaki, observe the technique!Very awesome fast food, expertly made!

The food court at Ion is incredible, but quite busy and crowded. They should have installed it upstairs and let the vast and echoing, empty wasteland of shops selling yet more diamonds and rubies and designer handbags and gold bricks and luxury yachts and whatnot inhabit the basement instead.

singapore's comic con

SDCC's just over in the states, you can see people recovering all over the internets. But in S'pore what looks like the year's biggest comic con is upcoming: the Singapore Toy, Games & Comic Convention. Looking over the website, it seems disappointing-- boyzone-y capes & tights with zero info online about the artists alley-- but it's free admission so have hopes to find some trace of the local indy comic scene there!

the new apartment!

Okay! I found my camera cable! And the strength to compose bounteous posts because I also located my bag of 3-in-1s and had TWO, yay! Here are some pics of the new apartment! It's partially furnished, which is why there are couches and dining room table, etc.

Here is Al at the bar in the kitchen. The kitchen is what sold us on this place, which is not exactly conveniently placed. The apartment complex is old by S'pore standards but has been well cared for, restored and remodeled, so quite nice, modern and spacious!
Here is my bedroom--
and my wardrobes/closets. Very cool! I need to buy more clothes!
Here is the living room, we're on the 14th floor so an awesome view...
And the dining room as viewed from the living room
Here you can see the living room through the big glass window from the porch. I can't wait to get some plants!
Here is the view from the porch.
The apartment block across the way has very cool ornamentation on the top floor. I keep wandering over there to look for Gozer the Traveler who will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. YO, GOZER I AM THE KEYMASTER! And when I find him many shuvs and zuuls will know what it is to be roasted in the depths of Slor on that day, I can tell you!

We're missing a lot of furniture but what the heck, we have internet so all is well.

There's an awesome cross-breeze through the place if you open up all the windows and the doors (which is considered fine here, I'm told. There are actually metal grill doors which you can lock and keep your door open all the time, I should get a pic of that...). But we turn on the aircon at night because I'm worried about the cat jumping up on the windows, miscalculating and falling 14 floors. 0_o Hardly anyone has window screens in S'pore though most people have window grills (as you can see in pics). A friend has recommended a company that specializes in installing screens, we've made an appointment for them to come out and do an estimate.

S'pore is really noisy which takes a bit of getting used to, even moreso than Boston. The country is always making more of itself so there are jackhammers and construction noises all through the day. People here are dog-lovers so there's a constant highpitched yip/yap of apartment dogs being walked past townhouse dogs out in the yard, morning and evening. Then there's the streetsweeper truck which comes by approximately every 16 minutes to continue the WAR ON LEAVES which you see being conducted everywhere!! In S'pore trees are good but leaves on the ground must be vacumned or swept up by Leaf Commandos immediately!!!

we haz moved

... and now we're in that awkward period of waiting for the stuff on the boat to show up, which should happen end of next week. In the meantime, finding out the quirks of the new apartment and getting serious about work. Totally behind on pics and posts, the mac is set up on the dining room table (still working on getting a computer desk, kinda miss the one back home in the attic...), more soon as I locate the transfer cable for the camera...