BB & GG have both started their holidays and I have made it my mission to start them on some exercise regime. Before we know it, BB will be called up for his national service commitments and I want him to be as fit as possible before he enlists. Let’s see how much I can push him to improve his health.

Singapore’s COVID cases have been dipping and slightly increasing, but so far, touch wood, our total daily cases have been below 100, with most days the count being below 50 and our daily community cases being single digits. I also know that Singapore’s active cases are now less than 1000, which is good news for us as a nation. This essentially means that less than a thousand cases are either still in hospital or still being treated.

India, on the other hand, has an exploding crisis in their hands. I am reading the reports almost daily and seeing the daily number of cases increase every day is really frightening. As of yesterday, India had reported more than 4 million cases with more than 125 thousand deaths, about 850 thousand active cases and slightly over 3 million recovered cases. This shows that as of yesterday, about a quarter of confirmed cases have recovered.

But I have also heard anecdotely about how hospitals and COVID specific clinics are fleecing patients and inflating cases. So I am a bit in a bind whether to actually believe these numbers or no. What I have heard is that if testing centres get about 10 swabs to test, they make sure that they confirm at least 7-8 swabs to be positive cases so that they can earn money from the treatment of these seven odd cases purely for profit. Again, this is all completely anecdotal and has been gathered when speaking and texting with family and friends in India and from forwards sent from WhatsApp university.

The rest of our week was the usual, with everyone in front of their laptops, working and playing. On one hand, I am loving this work and study from home as this is probably the first time I am getting so much one on one time with S and the children, but at the same time, because of this enforced closeness, we sometimes get on each other’s nerves. Oh well, c’est la vie!

This was what we did this week, hopefully everyone is safe and is practising safe and social distancing as well as masking themselves when they are out of their homes. See you all next week and enjoy your weekend.

Is it just me or do any of you think the way I do? I have been feeling like life has been speeding up since we are all locked up at home. It just felt like it was a Monday and now we are back to Sunday!

I had mentioned about my parents moving out of Bombay last week and something happened this week that pretty much consolidated this idea. Around mid-morning when my mum was cleaning the kitchen, a section of the ceiling collapsed and fell down. Lucklily she was nowhere near that area and was saved and since it was in the middle of the kitchen, the counter and her cabinets were also saved. The only casualty seems to be the ceiling fan in the kitchen where one arm was twisted. So now once things get better, they will go and stay with my aunt who is already there and perhaps rent an apartment for a few months and experience living there in a senior retirement community and if they like it, will start the paperwork to purchase an apartment of their own and then return back to Bombay to start the moving process.

The children are either having their exams like BB or will have the exams next week. Once the exams are done, they will be ona break till mid-October when they will hopefully, go back to school, for physical lessons. As of now nothing about this is yet known, but one can hope.

Life is on-going ontherwise, I have no real complaints. But I am now starting to get stir-crazy a bit after being cooped up at home more or less all the time. I avoid leaving the house unless necessary because of my pre-existing condition and the fact that I don’t really feel comfortable wearing the mandatory mask we have to put on each time we get out.

September is here and it looks like this will be our new normal for the rest of the year. So take care people and stay safe, stay masked and above all, maintain social distancing!

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!