The Weekend

  1. Unglazed windows, cheap cabinets that I keep being accused of breaking (if they were better quality, they wouldn't break was my defence!), a kitchen needing renovation. Lily woke me up earlier than usual and when I sleepily trudged upstairs to give her some food, the view of the peninsula was an ironic reminder of why our crumbling palace was worth so much, in spite of..

  2. Everything’s in bloom. I’ve had this Tahitian lime and this olive tree for over years and I’ve seen kids grow bigger and taller in a year. Now suddenly, they’re bearing fruit.

  3. So much food, so little time. Clams + garlic + butter + white wine + fresh pasta.

  4. We just went to the mall to buy fresh jandals at Havaianas and there it was- the walkway to the new Ikea just across. The Sunday crowd was okay but if you’re hoping to get some food, the queue was over an hour and a half, and for what? Meatballs and $2 hotdog?? I bet the food lines in Gaza are quicker. The kitchen stuff was intriguing; you pick a kit, they make measurements and consultations with you and if you get cold feet putting everything yourself, they have installation referral. A basic one starts at a startling $2,227 (for comparison with our two-bathroom, 1 toilet, 1 laundry reno, our bathroom vanity cost more than that).

21 Days Before Christmas

  1. I’ve just been busy the last two weeks that I didn’t notice that all I was eating was protein, which lately, is so easy when it’s everywhere. Protein wraps, protein water, protein canned soup and my favourite, protein-dense coconut yoghurt which has the consistency and flavour of really soft cheesecake, yum! And then one day, boom! You’re on the toilet doing a dump and you can feel it- your shit is as dense and heavy as a damned brick!

  2. So many treats popping up but at this point, I’ve gone far beyond the initial plateau, the constant, irksome cravings. It’s a feeling of triumph tinged with a bit of sadness to stroll through a Dutch deli on Black Friday and leave with NOTHING (pistachio stollen bites, tres leches stroopwafels and Gouda cheese half-price).

  3. Finished my test packing, and it came in at 14kgs, 16 kgs more stuff to possibly put in. Now how am I going to fill it up on my return? Clothes aren’t necessarily cheap in the Philippines (the good kind anyway) and there’s nothing I hate more than going to the mall during the holidays looking for stuff. Maybe I’ll get canned tuyo or bangus or something and tons of dried mangoes.

  4. We found a drowned wax-eye bird in the pail of water on the deck. I read somewhere that curing the browned tips of my indoor never never plants involved only watering them with distilled water. So we’ve placed a couple of buckets around the house to capture rain-water. Our hypothesis is that the wax-eye flew onto the glass sliding door, got knocked out and fell into the pail which sits just in front of the door. Poor bird. Don’t know which is a worse fate, drowning or being eaten by the cat.

(last working) weekend

I thought I was going to get sick. I had this scratchy, niggle in my throat and I’ve lived long enough to know what that meant, so I got ahead of it by buying over a hundred dollar’s worth of (anti-bacterial) lozenges, throat-drops, paracetamol drinks and immune-shots.

I was describing it to my colleague and I told her to picture the illness just outside your door trying to get in, but you’ve barricaded it. But it’s there, waiting, this heavy, slightly stifling and itchy presence inside your head, right behind your eyes and nose.

I think it was Sunday- pack-up day- when I woke up and it was gone. I looked under the door just to make sure and there was no shadow, just the glare of the bright Taupo sun as it reflected off the lake. But it left a parting gift; I felt a congestion in my throat and nose as if I had eaten marshmallows in my sleep but didn't manage to keep it down.

I tried to hawk it up and didn’t really care if people in the other rooms heard me (I was doing it in the privacy of my own room anyway), and after a few tries when I thought I was going to throw up, it was expelled, a golem of a phlegm, green and grim. Bye!

Separation anxiety

We had to go away for a couple of days so we had to leave Lily at a cattery. She had been there before with no issue, but we still requested daily reports on how she was doing.

Friday’s one was funny; we brought in her specialist food, but being in a space shared with other cats presented an opportunity. She was probably sick of her own food that she gently pushed the other cats away and sampled their meals.

When we picked her up Sunday, all the other cats came to the screen partition at the first sign of human visitors. But not Lily; she was sitting inside one of the hutches up until we called out her name and she let out this cry that broke my heart before running to where we were.

Mondays

  1. Did you know that a size 14 chicken only takes an hour and a half to cook in the oven?? So why not a roast chicken on a Monday? I usually do a whole clove of garlic mashed into olive oil flavoured with Old Bay seasoning, pepper and garlic-herb salt. Two hefty wedges of butter are inserted into each breast, just under the skin. I don’t normally do gravy, but since I’m having rice for this one, I’ve kept the juices and spiked it with a few lashings of Maggi seasoning.

  2. Ugh, the gym is starting to smell (uhm, from the people working out) because the temperature is a bit warmer.

  3. Spring is in full swing.

  4. Rice and chicken take-away meals at the supermarket! (we live a part of Auckland where the ethnicity is partial to rice).

The (working) Weekend

  1. Over-salted margarita glass

  2. HATE manual labour

  3. Do cleaners look at your stuff and judge you?

  4. Cambridge is a great town

  5. Indian without much of the omnipresent curry flavour is refreshing

This week

I must admit that I’ve always felt a little miffed when someone asks me how my weekend went because:

  1. Equally good stuff also happens on the weekdays

  2. A failure of imagination about how else to greet a co-worker

  3. I’m not really inclined to share how my weekend went (it has never, ever been my greeting on a Monday or Tuesday at work).

  4. I’ve never been curious as to how people spent their weekend.

But now, I’ve fallen into the habit lately of just highlighting my weekend (and sharing it to the world lol) because admittedly, we’ve been planning it a bit better which makes all the difference in feeling that not only have you accomplished something, but that you somehow triumphed over time itself and its ever fleeting nature (more so it seems when you’re absolutely doing nothing).

But I still wallow in not caring about time at all- I normally sleep past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, I wake up just before 9am, I take leisurely naps.

But weekdays are also a goldmine of pockets of time where you can move things along and not be stuck in the cycle of your 9 to 5 or 8 to 4:30 in my case. If you’re fortunate that you’re in charge of your own time, then get as much out of it as you can.