2018 Week 35 Update

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August is done and dusted and it’s time for my favourite month of the year – September. I have huge hopes for this month and only this month will tell if this happens.

This week was a busy week for me as I had to go twice for my freelance work. The people I am working with are a bunch of wonderful women and I love interacting with them. I only don’t find a lot of solace in the kind of job I am doing (I feel I am coming across as someone spoilt and dissatisfied, but that’s not the case, really) because the work I am doing is not really cerebral and intellectual. I do hope this freelance business of mine takes off and I can then do work I really enjoy!

This week I got a call from a scammer but I couldn’t scam them back. When I picked it up, there was a recorded message with a non Singapore accent saying “This call is from the Singapore High Court about a pending summons against you. Press 9 to continue”. And then the same message perhaps in Chinese. I pressed 9 and a lady started to speak to me in Chinese. I told her to please speak in English and she cut the call. My chance to scam a scammer was foiled! I wanted to engage with the scammer and ask some questions, but since I spoke in English, they knew they couldn’t engage with me and cut the call!

Happy September folks!

2018 Secondary 3 Week 35 Update

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This was the last week before the September school holidays and so was a fairly quiet week. This was also a short school week since the Friday before the September holidays is designated as Teachers Day in Singapore. This is so both Teachers and students get an additional day of the holidays (just kidding, I am sure there’s a good reason behind this, I just need to find it out)

On Thursday which was the Teachers Day celebrations in school, I was at BB’s school. The parent support group in his school make DIY presents for the teachers each year and this year we made marbled mugs which looked so pretty! We also hosted all the teachers and non teaching staff for a buffet lunch and provided a cake for the Teachers to cut before they reaffirmed their pledge they took when they first entered the teaching profession. It was a fun day and I was exhausted by it!

BB also goes for his OBS camp tomorrow (finally) and We spent the weekend packing. I hope he has a great time there and makes new friends and learns something new.

Tomorrow GG and I are going to meet a Friend of my Cousin who is a history professor at a local university. GG is Super excited about this.

Have a great weekend everyone!

In My Hands Today…

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Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Voyage Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam – Andrew X. Pham

4370Catfish and Mandala is the story of an American odyssey—a solo bicycle voyage around the Pacific Rim to Vietnam—made by a young Vietnamese-American man in pursuit of both his adopted homeland and his forsaken fatherland.

Andrew X. Pham was born in Vietnam and raised in California. His father had been a POW of the Vietcong; his family came to America as “boat people.” Following the suicide of his sister, Pham quit his job, sold all of his possessions, and embarked on a year-long bicycle journey that took him through the Mexican desert, around a thousand-mile loop from Narita to Kyoto in Japan; and, after five months and 2,357 miles, to Saigon, where he finds “nothing familiar in the bombed-out darkness.” In Vietnam, he’s taken for Japanese or Korean by his countrymen, except, of course, by his relatives, who doubt that as a Vietnamese he has the stamina to complete his journey (“Only Westerners can do it”); and in the United States, he’s considered anything but American. A vibrant, picaresque memoir written with narrative flair and an eye-opening sense of adventure, Catfish and Mandala is an unforgettable search for cultural identity.

In My Hands Today…

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Silent on the Moor – Deanna Raybourn

4728979In Grimsgrave Hall, enigmatic Nicholas Brisbane has inherited a ruined estate, replete with uncanny tenants and one unwanted houseguest: Lady Julia Grey. Despite his admonitions to stay away, Lady Julia arrives in Yorkshire to find Brisbane as remote and maddeningly attractive as ever. Cloistered together, they share the mouldering house with the proud but impoverished remnants of an ancient family: the sort that keeps their bloodline pure and their secrets close. Lady Allenby and her daughters, dependent upon Brisbane and devastated by their fall in society, seem adrift on the moor winds, powerless to change their fortunes. But poison does not discriminate between classes…. A mystery unfolds from the rotten heart of Grimsgrave, one Lady Julia may have to solve alone, as Brisbane appears inextricably tangled in its heinous twists and turns. But blood will out, and before spring touches the craggy northern landscape, Lady Julia will have uncovered a Gypsy witch, a dark rider, and a long-buried legacy of malevolence and evil. Deanna Raybourn spins a gripping tale of loyalty and lust, set against the wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors.