2017 Week 34 Update

This week was a relatively short week with the long weekend as Singapore celebrated the feast of sacrifice or Hari Raya Haji as it is called here. We are now in September and counting down to the last few months of the year!

This weekend, we went out together as a family after a long time. I needed to buy a jacket for work and so decided to make an evening out of it. We went and shopped and then had dinner. It was an enjoyable evening.

I am looking to buy a fitness tracker and am quite confused about what to buy. I looked at the Fitbit Alta and the Flex but also like the Charge. Also, I want something which is discrete, by which I mean I don’t want to advertise the fact that I am using a fitness tracker. I used to have a Fitbit Pebble (is that the right name?) and used to clip it to my clothes or even into my pockets and nobody knew I had one. Is there one like that in the market now? Anyone with more information, please comment below so I can decide soon. My current fitness tracker is my phone and I am using the Argus app to track steps, water, movement etc. The only downside to this is that I have to make sure I am carrying my phone in my hand or in a pocket all the time and sometimes that becomes cumbersome, which is why I am looking for a new tracker.

Work-wise, I am reaching my three-month mark here and this should end the probation period. I still haven’t had any one-on-one with my manager, in spite to asking multiple times, so this is something I probably will have to give up on. Maybe when the time comes to do your annual goals, my manager will finally find time for me.

Something happened this week and I realised that this organisation was willing to spend hundreds of thousands on an event, even provide tickets which are worth thousands free of cost just to fill up seats, but would not spend a few few hundreds to allow staff to take taxis home after a 15-hour work day, because the time would not yet be 9 pm at that point (which is the official policy to  allow taxi claims)! So all the posturing about staff welfare, including having staff fun clubs is just that – posturing. They don’t put their money where their mouth is.

The other thing I am excited about is my parents coming to Singapore. I  just applied for their visa over the weekend and think it should be approved sometime this week. I have also sent my list of items to buy from Mumbai and am waiting for the goodies next month!

Have a wonderful September and an awesome week!

 

Secondary 2 Week 34 Update

This is the school holiday week for the children and with just two full days of school, there’s not much to actually update!

On Wednesday, which was celebrated as Teachers Day in Singapore, BB & GG went back to their primary school for homecoming! This is something they did last year too and GG says she will do it all the time. I think it will be till familiar teachers are still in school and when it reaches a point where they don’t know most teachers, they will stop going to homecoming!

GG also got her report card for the term back and it was filled with mostly A grades. She is continuing to do well in school, but I would love her to push herself a bit more. She is hovering at the top, yet not yet there, and I want her to breach that dam and try for top honours.

Today marks the end of the long weekend for us, but the children will continue with their term break. BB has to go back to school one day, but I think GG will be home all days, except for the days she needs to go for tuition!

 

In My Hands Today…

The Holder of the World – Bharati Mukherjee

764308This is the remarkable story of Hannah Easton, a unique woman born in the American colonies in 1670, “a person undreamed of in Puritan society.” Inquisitive, vital and awake to her own possibilities, Hannah travels to Mughal, India, with her husband, and English trader. There, she sets her own course, “translating” herself into the Salem Bibi, the white lover of a Hindu raja.

It is also the story of Beigh Masters, born in New England in the mid-twentieth century, an “asset hunter” who stumbles on the scattered record of her distant relative’s life while tracking a legendary diamond. As Beigh pieces together details of Hannah’s journeys, she finds herself drawn into the most intimate and spellbinding fabric of that remote life, confirming her belief that with “sufficient passion and intelligence, we can decontrsuct the barriers of time and geography….”

Poetry: The Weekend

Today is the start of a long weekend in Singapore due to the Hari Raya Haji or Bakri Eid as its known in the sub continent. This poem was written towards the end of the day yesterday and is full of anticipation of the weekend!

The Weekend

The ticking clock tells me to hurry
The weekend’s a-coming, don’t be so bluey

You have a page full of plans to complete
Your weekend’s set, full and neat

You want to clean the house, you want to do your chores
You want to shop, you want to clean the floors

You spend the first day sleeping in
Then hurry like a dervish to finish cleaning

Sunday then beckons you to do some more
All the plans made all for naught

Before you know it, it’s Sunday night,
The night before you go back to work,

You look at the page of your unfinished plans
And know that’s the what you need to do next few weekends

Another weekend is just five days away,
You start planning with joy; the pleasure that would be next Friday!

 

 

In My Hands Today…

Empress Orchid – Anchee Min

139254To rescue her family from poverty and avoid marrying her slope-shouldered cousin, seventeen-year-old Orchid competes to be one of the Emperor’s wives. When she is chosen as a lower-ranking concubine she enters the erotically charged and ritualised Forbidden City. But beneath its immaculate façade lie whispers of murders and ghosts, and the thousands of concubines will stoop to any lengths to bear the Emperor’s son.

Orchid trains herself in the art of pleasuring a man, bribes her way into the royal bed, and seduces the monarch, drawing the attention of dangerous foes. Little does she know that China will collapse around her and that she will be its last Empress.