Overindulged

With no comedy on a Sunday night, and no motorcycling until 2am tonight, we were at a bit of a loose end, so we got tickets to two films. Watching two films in one day always feels like a bit of an over-indulgence; it's not as strange as watching a film at lunchtime and then wandering out into sunshine, but it's close.

Singapore Summer

Today it was so cold in the office that when I left, a layer of cold air hung about me, and even as I walked down the street in the evening sun, I felt chilled to the bone.

Cresting over a fevered brow

Today the office seemed especially cold. To prevent the air conditioners blowing on their desks, people have been sellotaping sheets of paper over the vents to redirect the flow. Unfortunately for me, that has meant a constant deluge of icy cold air onto my head from every direction.

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.

Overworked

After spending all day in an air conditioned hotel, I took a taxi (lamentably unterrifying this time) back to the airport, checked through Immigration and hung around for two hours in an air conditioned building, before getting back on a plane and returning to Singapore. The only exotic part was the air conditioning on the plane on the way home, which managed to be even colder than the conference room yesterday. And there were all those scientists thinking you couldn't go below absolute zero. None of them work for Singapore Airlines, or in the Thai hospitality industry.

A foreign country is a foreign country

I woke from strange dreams about hiding in a garden shed to find myself alone in a windowless hotel room in Bangkok. For such a place, it was remarkably well decorated; not a concrete oubliette, but a palatial king-size lair for a business traveller who enjoyed paying for wifi access and continental breakfasts.

Basically...

Today I felt sluggish, after the hyperactive rush of the first two days of the New Year, when you're full of plans and optimism and hope. Plans and optimism and hope that keep your brain fizzing so you don't sleep for half the night, and plans and optimism and hope that then dissolve to nowt in the dark fug of sleeplessness. Basically, my New Year's Resolutions are a bit like an enormous Alka-Seltzer.

Broken again

Some time this afternoon, I moved my head wrong, or I sat awkwardly, or there was a malign alignment of the planets, but any which way a muscle in my shoulder has gone into spasm and now it's agony if I try to move my head.

Submarine

I'd like to punch Richard Ayoade in the face. I can't, but we won't go into that right now.

Wrapped up warm for Bangkok

Sometimes I go to another country and it feels really foreign, like Chiang Mai at Songkran when everyone has gone mad and throws water at you. Other times it feels like I've travelled to the 1970s (Australia, rural Japan). But I never felt like I've travelled to the Antarctic before I went to Bangkok.

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.

Air Conditioning Man, a possibly sordid tale of cold air and ... things

I went to the gym today, because I'd been perturbed to see that even though yesterday I'd spent all day dehydrating, I still weighed two pounds more than I had in the middle of the week. 646 calories dutifully burned off, I staggered to the towel desk to hand back my damp towels. The woman behind the desk smiled and stared at me, and then read "I've almost finished ... my screenplay" and beamed at me. I've decided as a result of this that the Wan Chai California Fitness is the best branch, because they have the happiest person in charge of towels. Unlike the lady in Causeway Bay who gets cross if you put the towel an inch to the left of where her sign says it should be, or the uncommunicative chap in Central, in Wan Chai they have a cheery woman who'll read out the front of your t-shirt, as long as it has an amusing logo. Thanks Gerald!

(Gerald was the chap who gave me ten useful bits of advice, many, many years ago. And the eponymous t-shirt, more recently.)

Children, air conditioning, inexplicable rage

It was another sunny day in Hong Kong, but I spent all but fifteen minutes of it in the office, wildly gesticulating at my screen, while my computer emulated a grumpy teenager, sullenly refusing to respond to any of my commands.

Perhaps that was the problem; commanding children is unlikely to be a successful parenting approach. Then again, my other normal methods for dealing with problems (leave it for six months and see if it gets better on its own, which works for damaged camera lens and ill-maintained dehumidifier units, and spray it with WD40 and stick it down the shed, which has varying success rates within the realm of bicycle maintenance) are unlikely to count as good childrearing either.