Locked out

It wasn't so hard to get to my friend's house: a 70 dollar taxi ride with a driver who kept nodding off, but a beautiful sunrise and the sight of the Olympics partially shrouded by mist was compensation enough. I got out of the taxi, took my bags up the stairs, and then spent ten minutes trying to figure out where the keys were, without any success. Finally, I admitted defeat and texted my friend, who called me back with the (fairly obvious) location, and I was in.

Final approach

The sky turned the dark grey of disappointment shortly before I left the flat today, and before I'd got to the ground floor the rain was falling. Singapore has relatively short showers, but the rain comes down with great force, so that an umbrella becomes superfluous. If it hasn't been snatched away by the wind, it still only provides shelter against the rain as it falls down; the rain bounces hard enough on the ground to soak your calves anyway.

Cold Comfort Air Conditioning

Today I walked to the office, my laptop and a heavy zoom lens in my backpack, and although it is no more than 10 minutes door to door, by the time I arrived at my workplace my shirt was transparent with sweat. I'd got up early because I had a phone call with Seattle at 8am, so it wasn't as if I'd been horsing about in the noonday sun. Singapore is just a bit hotter than perhaps my standard operating temperature range allows for.

Zoo

We went to the zoo today. It poured with rain, which seems to happen whenever we visit anything in Singapore to do with wildlife. Luckily, we still had our rain ponchos from the time we went to the bird park. Unluckily, we'd left my wife's poncho at home.

Defeated

I woke this morning from ten hours of gloriously uninterrupted sleep, dehydrated and my mouth befouled with the taste of last night's dinner. Still, my headache had vanished and the whites of my eyes were once again white, rather than fully bloodshot. I slowly winched myself out of bed, showered and then heading out into the sunshine, ready to see Tokyo.

Sneezy

Today was an eventful day. It was packed full of things, partly because my wife and I both woke up at 1 this morning and then couldn't go back to sleep.

Cycling in Peaslake

After getting lost and driving around Gomshall and Shere in ever decreasing circles, I finally found the carpark at Peaslake, half an hour late.

The wrong kind of snow

Another day passes, and Seattle inches closer to Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, or Holofrost, or some other world-ending event with a chilly theme.

Raining in Bellevue

It's been chucking it down all day, but sadly unlike the well-tempered rain of Singapore, Bellevue's precipitation doesn't cease at a sensible time in the late afternoon.

Lessons from the rain

Today started hot and humid, the sort of damp embrace where no sooner have you finished showering than you start to sweat. I packed a t-shirt to change into and headed off to the station. The rain was spitting, but it was no worse than a dripping air conditioner, so I paid it no mind.

However, the HKO's prediction of a proper rainstorm was accurate, and with the water coming down like cats and dogs outside, and the building manager having set the controls for the air con to Colder Than Charlton Heston's Hands As You Pry His Rifle Out Of Them, I soon regretted my wardrobe choice. Here we are in a sub tropical environment and the office is utterly baltic.

Chilling out

I had comedy this evening, and instead of going home beforehand, I made the cardinal error of staying in Central. Well, that wouldn't be so bad, except I chose to take a load off my feet in the Pacific Coffee on Lyndhurst Terrace, and now I can't feel my feet.

Of cats, and the cold

Another uphill day today - it's not good for a man of my age to go for a drink on a Tuesday. Even if that drink is really in the singular, and last night I was mixing beer and wine. Or wine with beer. Now, which one makes you feel fine, and which way round doesn't?

Looking down on Vancouver

Canadians are very mellow people, but they all love rubbishy hip-hop from two decades ago, which is why they named one of the mountains overlooking the North Shore after Cypress Hill.  People said they were insane in the brain to do so, but there was nothing stopping them.

Awake in a foreign country

It snowed in the night here in Dartmouth, and then it started raining about five o'clock. Why, if it wasn't for the place names all sounding so foreign, I'd think that I was in England.

Twang

Although the electricity might have been off last night, this morning it was back on, the flat a paradise of warmth and fully operational consumer gadgetry.

And then I woke from my blissful slumber to discover the power was still out, which meant no hot water for a shower and a long walk down the stairs to the chilly world outside.

Christmas Party

The second office Christmas party was tonight: for the first two hours it was largely silence punctuated with the occasional outburst when another dish was delivered to the table. The awkwardness was accentuated by the noise from the rest of the restaurant of people enjoying themselves noisily. I swigged Con Osur wine and tried to keep my head down.

I don't wanna miss a thing

There are times when I feel totally ashamed of myself.  There are other times, when I feel a kind of meta-shame - a nagging feeling that I should be filled with shame, yet I'm incapable of doing so.  Or I'm actually proud of what I'm doing.  Perhaps this actually evinces proof of growing maturity - that I can be pleased with what I do without worrying about what other people think of me, or of conforming to notions of proper behaviour should be.

But it's hard to hold to that view when the thing you should be ashamed of is listening to 'Don't Want To Miss A Thing' by Aerosmith.  Or rather, an American Idol cover version of that song.  On Youtube.  Played through the tinny speakers of my msi Wind netbook.  Which, coincidentally, provides the perfect sonic simulation of a crappy transistor radio, which is somehow the perfect way to enjoy this over-the-top, middle-of-the-road, straight-down-the-line guff.  Music it's hardly worth mixing cliches over, let alone metaphors.

But it's hardly my fault.  Before you criticise me, you read The Corner, and then tell me I don't need cheering up with the highest saturated fat comfort food for the soul that Steven Tyler could devise.

Sore point

I woke up feeling like death today; a proper stinker of a hangover, and I didn't touch a drop of booze last night. Perhaps it's the cold weather, or my poor diet, or the dehydration caused by having the heater spurting out hot, dry air all night.