Mint san is growing into a monster - its leaves are huge!

Peppermint (?) and spearmint, rooted for 2 weeks and potted 1 week ago. They look so green and gorgeous!!!! The peppermint cuttings were kindly donated by a fb member and the spearmint from a mojito i was drinking. Please please please grow well! ♡♡♡

The day that i start a med that does not allow me so much alcohol... I'm into the second round of drinks.

I'm officially back on meds again. Let's hope for some improvement soon.

The Mysterious Beautiful Sky Last Evening

The flowering of tomato san

And our resident is looking as smug as ever :D

Stirfried homegrown organic brinjal with thai basil and chilli padi. Yummy! It's so much hard work and hours just for this dish for 2.

Our dear brinjal just a minute before it had been harvested.

And so these have been what I've been occupied with... it's honestly really hard work to care for and maintain the plants, getting rid of pests, making sure the soil/fertiliser/sun/water are in right dosages, cleaning up the place, etc. 

But it's nice to see little friends turn up occasionally. Like this fella who is a resident at the chye sim pot but roams around to enjoy the brinjal and thai basil leaves. He has grown at least 4 times in size since I first saw him.

Tis the season to be...

Random shots of the greens

A little ladybug came to visit :D

The flowers on the carrot plant are so pretty.

Rosemary is growing well, presumably with a bit of shade and lesser watering.

And my chilli padi plants continue to grow bigger and bigger. They've been through a rough patch with the mealybug attack but the neem oil solution has kept the pests well under control. The rainy weeks and now the hot sun is bringing about a bloom of flowers and chillies.

From 4 tomato plants, I've managed to reduce to just 1, just to give it more space. No flowers yet but i can wait.

A brown tussock moth caterpillar visited. Very cute and furry, walking round and round on the rim of the pot of pandan plants.

At night, we have visitors munching on the leaves of the chilli padi. Shenanigans.

Haven't felt so depressed in a long while... :( 

Been having some vivid dreams the last 4 nights.  Right now, i can't really remember what happened.

It's kind of miserable and sickening to be surrounded by people (media, friends, etc) who keep talking about losing weight or being fat.  i've only started to feel this today (although i'm probably one of those who also say that they need to lose weight, but i really should.)  But the onslaught of this is just making me miserable and making it so hard to accept myself.

On a brighter note, we transplanted the brinjal and tomato plants to bigger pots last Sunday and they are looking good now.  The chilli plants have some unwanted white aphid residents on them and we went on a little excursion to pick up cigarette butts to put on the soil.  Looks slightly better today but we shall see.

Our Little Garden

Ginseng Ficus is growing very well - in fact too fast for me to control it as a bonsai.

Bok Choy grown from seeds

Our Bok Choy doesn't look like this anymore coz we harvested about 3 portions and there's only about 1-2 portions left now.  Took around 5-6 weeks to grow from seeds.  Lots of sun and water, easy to plant.  Yummy!

Our Chilli Padi plants grew crazily.  Biggie's original chilli plant died and the chillies harvested were sitting in the fridge for too long until they were becoming wrinkled.  i decided to plants the seeds from these chillies and BOOM!  Too many now.  Gave some to my mum.  Don't really know what to do with the rest of them, so will keep them around for a while. :D  We see many, many flowers and chillies now.

Bok Choy on the left, Cuban Oregano on the right.  We haven't found a use for the Cuban Oregano and it's also growing like free.  It used to take up just a small portion of this rectangle pot and now it's happily taking up the space of half the pot.

Biggie's Carrots on the left, Parsley in the middle, Brinjal on the right. They all have since been upgraded to bigger individual pots.  Brinjal leaves seem to have gotten bitten by neighbour's brown poodle.  Carrot leaves got peed on.  But all is good still.

My Thai Basil looks a bit sparse on the bottom half, but that's because the plant came like that.  i have harvested at least 3 batches of the leaves to distribute to friends for their consumption.  After the last harvest where i generously cut off the top of the plant, the leaves have sprouted big, strong and green.  All thanks to the alternating wet sunny weather.  The magic of the rain when the sun comes out is when you see leaves and buds and flowers sprouting overnight.  Chye Sim has just been replanted into the long tray yesterday and i hope they will do well.  Replanting sprouts always gives me a semi heart-attack most of the time because they look terrible right after the move.  

My Pandan is not doing so well... i can't get the leaves to become a deep green.  They are becoming slightly yellow and there's not much of a fragrance.  Will try not to water so much.

Planted tomato seeds yesterday.  i don't like to eat tomato but never mind, i'm just curious how it will turn out.

The space is always a huge constraint as we are taking up a portion of the common area.  i had to shift Money Plant to the corridor outside our unit because it badly needed a break from the onslaught of rain and sun.  Now the leaves are growing huge and green.  :)

Will try to update again... maybe when the tomato sprouts grow.

Yesterday was an uneventful Saturday consisting of mostly the usual chores and some tidying up of the plants.  Will post some photos of the planting we have been up to the last few months.  It's not my biggest interest but out of concern for the housemite's plants, i've been spending some time to care for these living greens.  

Back to the topic... since i had some free time in the evening, i decided to ask her out for drinks/dinner.  i chose this really chill cafe, Necessary Provisions, which was sort of in my neighbourhood as per her request.  i chanced upon the place some weeks back when hunting for this grocery shop but didn't try it back then.  It looked like a really good place for relaxing... and they serve beer on the tap!  The place was almost empty on a Saturday night, so it was nice a quiet for chatting.  

The general topic last night was rather interesting... and thought-provoking as well.  We discussed a lot about societal norms and ideals, about relationships, about ourselves.  Talked about polygamy and tearing ourselves apart from agreeing that we believe in polygamy but finding it hard to accept if our partners were to have other partners.  Talked about what we hope for the future and so many things that i would never have said to anyone.  Just wondering... does the nature of her training and her job as a counsellor make her able to elicit certain information more easily?  

i do look forward to meeting her again soon for teh or beer or dinner or kayaking.  :D

Seeing her again at the bbq just now just kinda melts me a bit.  :D  She went around feeding us with chicken wings, bee hoon and beef... AHHHH-UMM!

This year has actually been rather exciting (or at least i'm supposed to feel pretty excited by so many things).  The first few months had been occupied by doing up the house.  i know i should have recorded all the little things that we did so that we can look back at it down the line, but i guess i just couldn't find the energy to do that.  But looking back now, it has been fun/interesting to do all these:

• Getting the keys in December 2016 (i think so)
• Arranging the defects to be settled.  It was rather a pain in the arse because the contractors took a while and lots of ding dong.  Fortunately, we decided not to be too picky about all the details.
• Shopping for fans, table, chairs, lights, kitchen stuffs, beds, TV, internet/cable provider, sofa, my cupboard, HS rack, etc.  The window shopping portion had been on-going since 2014 when we bought the place.
• Arranging for our contractor NGP to change our door to glass door, fix up our glass panel, install the lights, install towel racks, etc.  Vomited blood a couple of times because of workers showing up late or no-show a couple of times.  Almost every item they installed had been installed wrongly - glass door hinge on the wrong side, not tempered or laminated glass on panel, ceiling fan mounting not done correctly which caused hollow vibration sound, wrong lights from light supplier, etc.  
• Curtains supplier was horrible too - no-show or very late on multiple occasions, most of the time uncontactable.  The only saving grace was the nice curtains and decent installation.  One of the 2 boys who did the installation nearly fell out of our window though... just minutes after i told them to close and lock the windows before installing the curtains.
• Packing my stuffs and moving bit by bit to the new place
• Moving in on 27th Jan 2017?  (i can't remember the exact date either)
• Then all the other little stuffs trickled in to complete what we now call our home.

It's tiring and i'm so glad that the house had already come partially furnished.  No worries about some basic cupboards, fridge, cooker, microwave oven, toilet fixtures, etc.  We probably would have strangled each other over choosing the designs.

We made friends with neighbours living along our corridor.  We now love to disturb the 2 brown poodles who are living at the end unit until this December.  We had a drinking session with the owner of the poodles and another neighbour 3 days ago which left me very stoned the next day at work.  The couple living opposite own the unit and have a white poodle who has staycations at their unit fairly frequently.

The management, security and concierge staff here have been horrible.  They have rigid and stupid policies that flip at every of their whim and fancy.  

• Somebody's electric bicycle beeping and disturbing us till late night - no action taken to look for owner even i had reported it at around 8pm.
• Security guy told my friend no smoking near the side gate.  A few days later, concierge girl was smoking there and she said that it was raining, so where would i expect her to smoke at?  
• Indecisive about function room deposit and booking fees.  Then tell me that i can't book it a second time last month even though nobody else had booked it.  Then told me okay, they would let me have the room this time but the problem was because i didn't make payment. They bloody rejected my cheques when i made the payment because the amount tallied with the form but did not tally with what they wanted to collect.  They ate too much roti prata.  
• Water bottle cannot put by the jacuzzi area near the walkway.  
• Neighbour's friend was in the pool and had this guy on the top floor waving at her and wanking off - concierge people only had to say "oh, that guy again ah".  In all fairness, they gave him a warning, but i told neighbour that she should just call the police if it happens again.  Our management is not taking it seriously.
• No floating ball in the pool i think.  There seemed to have been some argument between another occupant and security.
• Et cetera et cetera...

i was so close to emailing to the "resort manager" to show my appreciation for making this place more and more undesirable to live in.  

Okay, housing matters aside.

Just in a bit of a down mood now... well, it's my norm right?  Office is going to shift to Pioneer area in a couple of months. Work has been barely tolerable.  i need to make something happen.  i need to make myself happy again.  

Blind test for the Yamazakis

Little bonsai got a haircut and a new sexy bamboo pot

In all that gloom, there was finally a sparkle of light today. This morning was the handover of the keys to the new tenant. The couple seems like a cheerful bunch. Hope they like the studio and take care of it well too. :D

It's been a while... i've been too lazy to switch on my laptop to blog.  i don't like posting from my phone or the tablet.  Nothing beats the keyboard.  Which brings me to the point... i want the new BB Keyone but it doesn't seem to be in Singapore.

It's pouring elephants right now.  I'm lucky to be on the little couch at home, warm and dry and with dinner coming up in a couple of minutes.

In the recent months, i've been feeling really tensed and stressed over... work.  Actually the work itself is fine and it is a quiet season for us.  It's just the culture... it's been a year since (what i term as) the Japanese Occupation.  The culture after the merger is poor - basically the bad bacteria is eating me alive.  Every action has to be thought out carefully, but not in the sense of what's the best for the company.  Instead, it's all about how not to get myself nor my good colleagues into trouble - directly and indirectly.  Initiative is not welcomed.  Calamari Camaraderie has been highly promoted by the company president, internal communication emphasised within our company, but the team spirit does not feel appreciated and is in fact dampened most of the time.  And a close colleague resigned today.

So tired.  Dread the daily thing.  The only motivation is that office is just 15 minutes away from home.  Commute is short. i can get home fast from bad energy.

i've been feeling terrible the last few weeks.  So on one of the days when i felt better, i decided that i should clear some papers, feedback about the glass of our glass panel, look into re-financing the property loan, amend some criteria for the search for our tenant, find some part time job, etc.  i don't know if doing all these are just to clear the emotional baggage, to buffer for the future, or just to occupy myself.  Maybe just to pass time and take things off my mind.

Okay, gonna settle some stuffs and attend OJY's father's wake.  :(

久しぶり~

It's been a while since the last post. I shifted to Hillford on 11th Feb 2017. I have always envisioned a lot of excitement and happiness for this day, but the actual feeling was just... like that lor. Don't get me wrong. I am really happy about this big event in my life. It's just that lately I've been feeling the void again. 

I lost that drive for anything at all. On most weekdays, i go back home right after work, to cook, clean up, and rest. No desire to meet anybody, nor to go out for a walk nor get some exercise. It's just a way of getting through each day and keeping alive. The negative energy is eating me up. I flare at many small things and am starting to show a couldn't care less attitude at work. 

Work is somewhat mundane and meaningless at the moment. 

It's eating me up. I'm in Taiwan now to attend my friend's wedding. Taiwan is one of my favourite places and i always love a holiday. Except this time, i decided to just hide in my hostel cubicle and rest instead of exploring the nooks and crannies of Kaohsiung. My soul is feeling worn out. I wonder again when my expiry will be. 

I told him, maybe i should just splurge on a car, just so that I'll be effed up broke and have a reason to move on a bit in life. Btw, age is catching on...

Pained.