It’s the end of another week and this time of the year I miss Mumbai a lot. The Ganesh festival is currently ongoing and though it will be a very muted affair in my hometown this time, usually it is huge and celebrated with lots of pomp and pageantry. I was actually telling my helper R that it’s been 20 years now that I have been part of the celebrations and wanted to go perhaps this year since BB & GG are more or less independent now, but this didn’t happen this year, so hopefully I can make this happen in the near future.

Also, since my parents are getting old and are finding it increasingly hard to manage living alone, they are now seriously contemplating moving to a home for the eldery. This place is in the south and my mum’s sister has also recently moved there. She has another cousin who also has a place there and may shift there sooner or later. This means that once they move, I won’t be able to travel to Mumbai again since my main reason to go to India is to visit my parents. Anyway, there’s time for all this to happen, it will not happen instantaneously, so I am going to take it as it happens.

Anyway, things are slowly opening up more in Singapore with the government relaxing more rules and allowing passengers from certain countries to enter the country without having to undergo the mandatory fourteen day quarantine period. I am a bit hopeful that things will get better, but we have to continue to maintain our vigil to make sure that things don’t go down south again.

The children have started their exams and last week BB had an exam which started at 6:30 pm. He was only home around 9:30 after the exam ended around 8:30 pm! That day I realised that probably he is getting more and more independent and I have also loosened the strings to a very large extent. But as a parent, it is hard, something that I am trying to do.

This was our week’s update. Stay safe people and remember to mask up when you you are out of your safe space, which for most of us are our homes!

After months of having daily triple digit figures and some months of having low four digit figures, this week, we finally got days of two digit daily figures and one day was a mid double digit figure. We also had a day of no community transmission, the first since June!

The total number of cases in Singapore is around 55,500 and I read in the newspapers that complete testing of all foreign workers, including those in quarantine and isolation will end by the end of the month and hopefully, from then on, we can look forward to low, perhaps even single digit daily cases.

The United States continues to lead the world in positive cases with about 5.4 million cases reported in total, followed by Brazil with about 3.3 million cases and India coming in at number three with slightly more than 2.5 million cases.

The children are almost done with their first semester in school and exams are around the corner. They should finish up exams by the end of August, the beginning of September and then will have around six weeks of holiday before they start semester 2, hopefully with in-school lessons.

Life, for me, is going on as usual with work and writing. I have been in some sort of a funk the past few weeks, nothing serious, but I am working on getting over it and going back to my usual optimistic take on life, and I hope this happens soon.

That’s all from us this week, stay safe and healthy folks!

Happy 55^th Birthday Singapore!

Today Singapore celebrates its 55^th year of independence. Celebrations, which are usually very grand, are muted this year because of Covid and celebrations are actually split between the morning and evening so that there are fewer number of people involved at any point in time. And some of the celebrations will make their way to suburban Singapore or the heartlands as it is called here including the armed forces mobile columns and fireworks. There will be the mobile column passing close to my home later today and I may just go down to see it. Ufortunately, the fireworks will not be visible from my home and I don’t want to go down to see it because I am sure it will be super crowded and I am not going to risk my health for that.

After some days of low cases, the last ten odd days had many cases. I understand that this is because the government is pushing for completing testing of all the 300,000 foreign workers by the end of the month and then we should go back to single or low double digit numbers. We are at around 55,000 cases in total now and the country is now starting to look at moving cautiously to a new normal with more events and activities resuming and some borders reopening up.

My eyes are still not 100% cured though there have been significant improvements. I have been seeing the specialist about every two weeks now and there is still some infection in the cornea though the pressure in the infected eye has normalised to almost the normal range. Hopefully, this will also get better soon and I am back to my old schedule of just using the eye drops to counter my dry eyes.

BB & GG have almost completed their first semester in school without really going to school. They have been going more regularly these days since things are improving and they have project presentations to give and also take exmaninations to end the semester.

I also got a notification from WordPress earlier in the week saying it was my 10th anniversary in WordPress! I am stoked that I have been blooging on this site for 10 years now!

This is our news for the week! Happy birthday Singapore and may you grow from strength to strength. Stay safe and masked and most importantly, be healthy!

August has snuck up and things are pretty much the same. BB & GG are mostly doing home based learning and going to school only when needed. In fact last week, BB had one class at home and then had an hour to make it to school for his next class. He made it with minutes to spare. S could not drop him to school because he had a call at that exact same time.

Over the Hari Raya weekend, we went suit shopping for GG as she has a presentation this week. We ended up buying everything – a skirt, shirt, jacket and shoes so she can look the part when she goes for her presentation. The module actually some points for dressing and appearance so hopefully that is taken care of.

Singapore has about close to 53,000 cases as of now with about 47,000 of those having recovered. Worldwide, 17.5 million people have been infected with nearly 700,000 deaths and more than 10 million people having recovered from the virus. India is still at number three position with 1.6 million infected people with 1 million people who have recovered.

Of course being home for months together has impacted pretty much everyone. Work-Life balance has taken a complete hit and I can see this pretty much everywhere. Many people I know, including S, start working quite early, almost as soon as they wake up, and this goes on till the end of the day when they go to bed. Stuck at home, hunched over a laptop, it is easy to forget health. At times like this, we sit for far too long, eat at irregular intervals and eat a lot of junk food. Let’s not forget that interaction with anyone other than family members is via a screen, so that sense of interaction with friends and colleagues is also missing which is not really good for our mental health. So take care of your helath, there are some stories of individuals who have used this time to turn around their lives.

That’s all from us this week. Take care people and stay safe!

This week was like the last 16-20 weeks, in which we were all at home!

This week was quite busy in terms of work and when Friday rolled over, I was so relieved for the week to be done. BB will start school on a daily basis from tomorrow, but except for a few days in the week, it will be only for short periods of time. GG has still not heard back from her school if she has to go back. BB is quite glad to go back to school, but having to wear a mask for long periods of time is quite irritating according to him.

As for the coronavirus, I suspect Singapore has amped up testing because these days the daily numbers are higher than normal. Worldwide there has been a dramatic increase in the number of positive cases with more than 15.7 million cases reported as of yesterday. The United States leads the case list with about 4.2 million cases while Brazil follows with about 2.3 cases and India comes in at number three with 1.4 million cases. Singapore comes in at around number 42 with the number of cases touching 50 thousand.

Next week is end the end of July and we are looking to more months of staying at home. An article I read says that the earliest we can even think of travelling and life resuming to a sense of previous normalcy is sometime mid 2021. Though there have been some promising news about potential vaccines being formulated, but we should see the vaccines being available only sometime end of next year. However, the question will arise to who gets priority in getting these vaccines, but there’s still time to discuss all this later.

Anyway, stay safe people!