Monthly Archives: March 2016

In My Hands Today…

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A Season For The Dead – David Hewson

In a hushed Vatican Reading Room, the scene is shocking: a crazed professor shot dead after brandishing evidence of a grisly crime. Moments later, two bodies are found in a nearby church, each with a gruesome calling card from their killer.

Detective Nic Costa is one of the first on the scene. A cop who barely looks his twenty-seven years, Nic soon meets a woman who will dominate both his thoughts—and his investigation. A cool, beautiful professor of early Christianity, Sara Farnese was in the Vatican Library on that fateful day, a witness to her colleague’s outburst and grotesque death.

And as more bodies are found, her role becomes even more baffling…because each victim had intimately known Sara, a woman whose history becomes more lurid and unfathomable with each revelation. Until the case takes a sudden, strange turn—and the secrets of a woman, a killer, and a city begin to unravel…with devastating consequences….

Instagram Interludes

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A couple of nights back, when iOS released it’s latest update, I could not download it initially. The reason was my phone didn’t have enough memory and this is a 65 GB memory phone! Photos, some back as far as 2011 were the biggest space hogs and so I started going through old photos to see if I could delete some. In the process, came across many photos which I will probably spam over the next few weeks!

The photos below are all throwbacks to our Chiang Mai holiday in end 2014 and are all plants and flowers. I’ll try and theme photos together and see if I can put together another couple of such posts….

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In My Hands Today…

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In the Convent of Little Flowers – Indu Sundaresan

A young woman who was adopted by an American family in Seattle receives a letter from Sister Mary Theresa, nun at the Convent of Little Flowers in Chennai where she stayed as a child. Unbeknownst to her, the nun is her biological mother’s sister. The grandmother of an Indian journalist begs him to intervene with her husband — his grandfather — to prevent a young widow from being burned alive. A child born out of wedlock to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a peon on an engineering college campus throws the entire family into turmoil.

With the lush prose, vividly rendered settings, complex and appealing characters, and compelling narratives, the stories that comprise In the Convent of Little Flowers illuminate the lives of Indians at home and abroad today, where modernity offers them opportunities that their grandmothers only dreamed of, while others experience just as much oppression as ever.

Colouring for Adults: Have you tried it?

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There’s something so soothing mindlessly colouring, the only thing worrying you being whether you should be using red or carmine for this particular spot!

When GG & BB were younger, I used to print loads and loads of colouring pages for them, based on their favourite character of the day. In the process I also used to print some for me or used to sneak out some from their stash!

Even before adult colouring books became so popular, I loved colouring. But, and a big rider to this is that I only like to colour specific things. I love geometric shapes and mandalas and last week when I was cleaning out a cupboard, I came across a fat file full of mandala print-outs all ready to colour.

These days, these colouring books for adults are all the rage, the book which started this craze is Secret Garden which I hear has sold over 2 million copies since it was released in 2013. We see loads of such books in book stores, some even specifically themed. GG & I saw a Harry Potter coloring book and GG wanted me to purchase it for her! These books are quite expensive, retailing over SGD 35 per book and each time I see them and am tempted to buy, the price always puts me off!

But what is the lure of these books? Some people believe that the repetitive motion and confined space in which you have to colour triggers some kind of mental nirvana and gives you the peace of mind that digital devices distractions are forever chasing away. These help you to unwind and kick off the stress of the daily grind. I’ve since discovered that Carl Jung, the pioneering analytical psychologist often used colouring therapy as a means to get his patients to relax way back in the early 1900s and himself used to draw and colour mandalas every morning.

Colouring also trains our minds to focus, so that we do not go out of the line and live in the moment, which is getting to be critical life skill in our lives. It’s a given that colouring helps with fine motor skills because it requires both hemispheres of the brain to communicate and this activity improves fine motor skills and vision.

When I realized I could not get myself to buy the colouring books, especially since there were not many books which catered to what I like to colour, I discovered colouring apps! I can’t remember now where exactly I heard of them, but once I did, there was no stopping me. Most of these apps are free to use with in-app purchases. I’ve yet to pay for any, so keep reusing the same free prints that are available.

I downloaded a bunch of colouring apps and then deleted some of them almost immediately. Like I mentioned before, I prefer to colour geometric shapes and mandalas and those that didn’t have a good selection of those, didn’t make the cut and were deleted.

Colorfy is one where I where I mostly use the blank geometric patterns and make my own. This one has around 2 free palettes and a free daily palette which is usually shades of a single colour.

Another good one is Adult Colouring which seems to have a good mix of pages or books as they call it. Their free colour selections are also the most extensive, but sometimes the colours tend to overlap in palettes and it gets confusing after a while.

ColorTherapy is the last one I frequent. Again a good mix of themes to colour and this one also has a lot of festival-centric pages. Free colour selections are limited though!

All the apps above are from the Apple App Store. I do not know if they are available on Android phones and are free/with in-app purchases.

In My Hands Today…

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A Nail Through the Heart – Timothy Hallinan

Travel writer Poke Rafferty was good at looking for trouble–so good that he made a little money writing a few offbeat travel guides for the young and terminally bored. But that was before Bangkok stole his heart. Now the expat American is happily playing family with Rose, the former go-go dancer he wants to marry, and with Miaow, the wary street child he wants to adopt. Yet just when everything is beginning to work out, trouble comes looking for Poke in the guise of good intentions. First he takes in Miaow’s friend, a troubled and terrifying street urchin named Superman. Then he agrees to find a distraught Aussie woman’s missing uncle–and accept an old woman’s generous payment to find a blackmailing theif. Soon, these three seemingly disparate events begin to overlap, pulling Poke deeper into dark, unfamiliar terrain. Gradually he realizes that he’s been gliding across the surface of a culture he really doesn’t understand–and that what he doesn’t know is about to hurt him and everyone he loves.