10.5km MacRitchie Loop

S and I had a rather adventurous jog yesterday. We did the 10.5km route around MacRitchie for the first time. We only started at 6:30pm (never never never again!) so by the time we were looping back, it was almost dark. We kept on jogging (in fear) until S tripped on a root and then we decided we were better off walking because of the dark. Luckily for us, we saw three guys walking in front of us and so we followed them until we got out to the road. At one point we could barely see 50m in front of us. *shiver*

I tell ya, adrenaline is the best way to keep from being tired. I carried my hp just in case, but at the point where we thought that we might have made a wrong turn and there was nobody in sight and it was already 710pm, my hp made a beep and it said, “No network." Boy did we run. We did it in 67mins, which was faster than what we did in Australia.

AND I get home and what does my dad tell me over my mee goreng dinner? That when he was a young man, his friend from the church youth group went jogging at MacRitchie and they couldn’t find his body for 7 days. In the end they found him in the water crouched in the fetal position. He was only 16, ended up getting 7As, but wasn’t alive to get his results. Sheesh. No wonder I couldn’t sleep last night.

Read More!

Well, I've succumbed to blogrolling. It keeps my Favourites folder orderly, and it is much easier to add links. I've also added a number of links that I've been reading on the sly. Now, the only webpages not in my links are those whom I know in real life. :) It seems somewhat unfair that I get to read their blogs and they don't get to read mine, but my conscience is not pricked enough to tell them where to find me, not yet anyway. Man, I have to build my own virtual reader base.

Read More!

What does it all mean?

Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing

Read More!

Singaporeans are very funny

I found this way of mrbrown's post on the tremours felt in Ponggol. Do Singaporeans SMS each other when they are in the same house?

We live on the 22nd floor near Bedok. At about 1215, I woke up because my bed was shaking! Even the door was swaying away. I felt like Linda Blair in Exorcist! I sms-ed my hubby (who was sleeping next door) to keep me company because I was too scared to leave the bed. ~ maunderlin

And this:

i saw a SMS when i woke up and turn on my phone tis morning. it is from my bro who is sleeping just next to my room. it read: "bro! the whole fucking room is shaking! is tis an earthquake or someting? run or stay?" ~ jasontty

Wah, very funny, cannot tahan.

Read More!

Thoughts on the North Sumatra Earthquake

The influence of the media on our worldview is both subtle and powerful. The media is given over to disasters that are "of the minute", disasters that create a lot of terrible images. Consider this:

One African child dies of Malaria every minute.

Globally, for every two people who die in traffic accidents, one mother and 20 children die from preventable and treatable causes.

1,400 mothers die every day from complications in pregnancy and childbirth. 70% of deaths are from just 5 causes: haemorrhage (24%), infection (15%), unsafe abortion (13%), high blood pressure (12%), and obstructed labour (8%).

More than 6 million children could be saved each year if they were reached by a small set of preventive and curative interventions.

Ironically, I would not have known of these numbers without the publicity of the World Health Organisation either.

I scan the news report for the casualty rate. I read, "1,000". I think, "Oh, okay, that's not too bad compared with the boxing day tsunami." Yet a father who loses his child in this recent earthquake experiences the same tragedy as a father who loses his child in the earlier one, no?

Read More!

Tip of the day

This is for the benefit of anyone who uses "Hello" to load their pics, and find that sometimes the picture doesn't load and it shows one of those little white boxes with a red "X" in it. This is my TIP - try shortening the name of the image to a single word (no blanks). I discovered this by mistake while trying to to load the pics for the Malaysia post. The pic "Frangipani" would load fine, but not "Eyes wide open" nor "Cat on firetruck". After I shortened both to "Cat" and "Firetruck", both loaded fine.

Read More!

A widow for one year

I liked it. A lot.

I was mildly uncomfortable the first few chapters of the book. Irving has the knack of telling you what is going to happen before telling you how it happens. His books are never like horror movies with things jumping out at your from behind corners; instead, they are like peep show -- you know what you will eventually see, but the adventure is in the unrevealing. (Hmm, there must be a better analogy than a peep show!)

Anyway, I was mildly uncomfortable the first few chapters cos I knew what was going to happen and I didn't want to read about it. But I got through the parts I didn't want to read about, and as it unfolded, I felt increasingly drawn by the characters and their life story. It was refreshing having a female protagonist too, and at some points, the dysfunctional love between mother and daughter made me tear.

I liked this novel second only to The Cider House Rules. Even though I'm getting tired of Irving's repeating theme of sex (too much!) and over-anxious parents, it was funny, heartwarming, and chock-full of eccentric characters.

Read More!

the blue and green yellow eyed cat

I was in Malacca this past weekend but haven't found a chance to blog about it, in flagrant flaunting of the blog-everyday blogging rule laid out by Cowboy Caleb (oh wait, I think it was Tony Pierce. Cowboy Caleb's rules very cheem.) It can’t be helped – when I am at work I’m too busy working; when I’m home, my internet connection is too slow and expensive. But no excuses! Excellence costs!

So I am posting here a picture of an adorable blue and yellow eyed cat hanging out on a 1950s fire truck in Malacca. (And I don’t mean blue-yellow eyed cat, I mean blue AND yellow eyed cat.) Isn’t she adorable?

She was very tao though. I was standing at the front of the truck with my camera posed, while my friend made every cat-like sound in her estimable vocabulary to get the cat to look at us, but she stubbornly refused. After five minutes, I drop my arms in exasperation, and then what does she do? She turns her head and gives me a what-the-big-fuss look! Luckily for me, my reflexes were quick enough to snap the picture on the left.

Read More!

Terry Schiavo

The legal tussle for Terry Schiavo's life has dominated the front pages of US papers this week. Some words are very emotive, like "starving to death", and "no chance of recovery". To me, it boils down to these questions:

1. Is Terry Schiavo alive?
Yes. The only thing that differentiates Schiavo and me is that one, she is unable to feed herself, and two, she is incapable of responding or relating to the outside world. The first problem does not mean she is any less of a human being - if I get to 90 I may need help with my food too. About the second, I think the human consciousness is over-rated. I think it is part of what it means to be human, but it is not the ONLY gauge of homo sapien life. Aren't there people with down syndrome who seem incapable of communicating with the world, but yet are given the same rights as everyone else?

2. Does a feed tube constitute ordinary care?
Yes, I think so, as food and drink is somehow different from being on an apparatus that helps you breathe, or your heart to beat.

3. Do we have the right to die?
I'm not sure. Personally, I will not use this right, but that is because of my own beliefs. As I did not choose to be born, I will not choose to die. As to whether society should confer to us the right to die is a whole different kettle of fish. I don't see why not, frankly, but at least in Schiavo's case, it is not proven without doubt that she would have chosen to die. Also, what is stopping her from changing her mind now? Maybe being in a vegetative state is not as we "non-vegetative states" perceive it to be?

4. What are the alternatives?
Really, we all have to die from something or other. If Schiavo does not get her feeding tube re-inserted, she will die from lack of food and drink. Otherwise, it may be pneumonia, or an infection, or something else. The tragedy is not her dying -- it was what happened ten years ago -- and I feel very sorry for the family that it had to stretch out for so long.

If I were her gaurdian, I would choose to continue the feeding tube, but not have any further extraordinary care, such as resuscitation or antibiotics etc. But who am I, or the court, or the politicians to say?

I pray for God's mercy on her and her family, that they will have relief.

Read More!

Benefits of working here

One of the benefits of working where I work is my colleagues. They are so nice. When they have two ham sandwiches, they will give me one; when they are out on an errand, they will get me lunch when the canteen is closed. This week I've had an excellent chocolate mousse cake from Tanglin Club, a bowl of sliced fish bee hoon, one tuna bun from bread talk for breakfast, a yummy Thai bah kwa on rice krispy snack and today, a ham sandwich, which I am munching on now. I am so blessed.

Read More!

desert run

If you think people who run are crazy, wait till you read about this ultramarathon man. I quote:

But an ultramarathon - technically any distance longer than a 26.2-mile traditional marathon - is not really a race at all in the ordinary sense, Mr. Karnazes said. A day and a night of running, he said, is more like a melodrama than an athletic contest - full of euphoric highs and gloomy, dispiriting lows. The emotional climax - the Dostoyevskian moment of suffering - comes when exhaustion and despair loom up and smack you in the face and the finish line seems unattainable.

"That's exactly the moment I seek," he said. "To me, life is in the struggle, and I never feel more alive than when I'm struggling."

wow

Read More!

Come, fly away with me

The sky from my office window as the sun sets. Awesome eh? One of the perks of working in a job that gives you more office space than money.

Read More!

blogging issues

Decided to play around with the layout of this blog and ended up with more problems than I started with. But I like the more "finished" look of this site for now, so I'm going to see if I can work through the bugs.

Installed the code to add a "read more!" button to truncate my longer posts. Internet is interactivity so you might as well fly with it.

The contents in the right column (viewed in IE) are pushed down way to the bottom. I read somewhere that it is a problem with my pictures and tables being too large. In IE, the container enlarges to fit its content, so if I put a picture that is too large in the main column of my blog, the container enlarges, bumping all the content down in the next column. Brilliant. So these are my proposed solutions:

1. Re-size all my pics manually. (What a bother!)
2. Increase main column width (But that affects the layout of the entire page)
3. Don't do anything about it. :)

I've started a flickr account. And I like it a bunch so far. :) It appears less cranky than hello, and it gives you cool features, like the "flickr stamp" you see in the column in the right (pushed way down of course, at least until I get it fixed.) My flickr stamp are of my running routes. But how do I limit the stamp's range to a particular group of pictures in flickr?

I'm considering taking my running log offline. Since end July last year, I've jogged 279 kilometers in 42 hours. It is so much easier to keep track in excel, and no one looks at my log anyway, and it is really a record just for me. But of course if I take it off, all my earlier links would be dead, but no one looks in the archives anyway.

I'm also considering taking onemillionpictures offline. I used this page primarily as a "holding place" for the pictures in Pencil Shavings, and now if my flickr use goes without a hitch, I may not need this blog anymore. I kinda like the name though.
see, you can read more!

Read More!

What endorphins??

Running endorphins is a bunch of crap. I never feel high while running. I feel my heart, my lungs, my thigh muscles, the uphill, and my side stitches quite acutely, but never ever high. I feel high AFTER the jog, and AFTER a shower, and largely because of the feeling of being clean and having accomplished something.

The route posted on the right had an unrelentless slight incline through Mount Faber Park which made me want to crawl up the hill, stop at the first bus stop and hail a bus home. But I couldn't cos there wasn't a bus home from there, and I had promised my parents that I would pick up dinner for them on my way back. So I slogged on in the evening drizzle.

Yesterday's jog, on the other hand, was fast, short, and poised to kill. I swear my heart was about to thump right out of my chest when I finally stopped. Later, I had a massive tricep cramp when I lowered myself in my first tripcep push-up. The things we submit our bodies to...

A bit of trivia - How do you know when you've drunk too much water before a run?read more!

Read More!

Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

I finished another book by John Irving, this time a compilation of short stories titled Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. His short stories are interesting enough – I read the entire compilation over two days – but after reading four other full-length novels by him, his short stories are, well, too short. I’m usually left with the thought, “What! Is that it? What happens to so-and-so after his long drive to Iowa? What did that entire dinner conversation mean?” There were some stories where I didn't have a clue what Irving was trying to get at.

This compilation includes The Pension Grillparzer, previously found only in The World According to Garp. The title is derived from the first story of the compilation, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. In a way, this story is an explanation of how and why Irving became a writer. It is a bit like jumping into cold water to suddenly have Irving as Irving address you – refreshing, different, intriguing. This was my favourite story of the compilation (not counting The Pension Grillparzer), and it starts thus:

“A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely exactly what happened; the most truthful detail is what could have happened, or what should have… Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just as carefully imagining the truth you haven’t the opportunity to see. The rest is the necessary strict toiling with the language…”

And he goes on to tell a fantastic and believable story.

In another strand of thought, remember what I said concerning dreams in The Fourth Hand? I was wrong in thinking that dreams and premonitions were a new theme in Irving’s latest novel because there is a story all about dreams in this compilation titled “Other People’s Dreams”. In this story, the main character has the gift (or curse?) of dreaming other people’s dreams when he sleeps in their bed. In the last two paragraphs, there is a hint of premonition as well, which is how dreams feature in The Fourth Hand. So there, mystery solved.
read more!

Read More!