Day Out at the Botanics

KM & Beanie All Smiles
Originally uploaded by metaphoric.

So we finally checked out the Singapore Botanic Gardens which has a cafe (Cafe Les Amis at the Botanics) which serves food to both pet owners and their pets (says the cafe - but they serve mostly water to dogs).

Wonderful day out for both dog and SLR... and led to (among the collection) this one of both KM and B looking very posed for. I am absolutely delighted to say that this is one of my biggest successes in pet and people portraiture yet. Both of them look sharp, relaxed and happy looking at the camera.

This one is for enuwy... can't wait to get both our cameras aimed at these two highly photographic personalities.

Ten Things New

Looking back on everything, it seems everyone's been recounting (votes and memories) and recollecting (donations and sentimentalities) in the last few days of 2006. We hope we haven't wasted the year. We look forward to having things changed for us in the past. We desperately wish we haven't grown a year older for nothing.

Here's my "Ten Things New (in 2006)" list:

1. New Places: Munich, Germany; Palm Springs, California; St Andreas' Fault, Calif.; Tuscon, Arizona; Orlando, Florida; Brighton, UK; Reading, UK
2. New Faces: All the people from work, London, and friends of friends from around town
3. New Job: like we all know
4. New House: as we've all seen
5. New Pet: you know Beanie was a this-year thing. Last year for Christmas, 2005 nobody had any idea I was going to have such a wonderful lil' sweetheart join my life.
6. New Computer: My lovely Apple wannabe and a Toshiba M400
7. New Things: Teak furniture, 32" LCD tv, lots of unlisted homeware and kitchen appliances
8. New Music: My CD of the year: Cesaria Evora
9. New Presents: 60gb iPod; Canon EOS 55d
10. New Hobbies: Mastering cheesecakes, cooking at home, watching tv (believe me, this didn't use to be a hobby before!), being, in the words of a colleague, "like an eternal flame (they never go out!)"

Seasons Greetings are upon us...

It's the holiday season, that time of year
When moods are uplifted and all in good cheer
So with the high spirits, it's appropriate to say
Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year's Day!
And with those wishes I'm sure you've heard before
Are a thousand good blessings brought to the fore
And although we know they won't all come true
Here's a true hope that this year, they do!

Merry Christmas everybody!
or as they say in the US
Happy Holidays!!

Another Type of Piano Playing

I've rediscovered Tori in her land, now clad in seasons of mists and frost. Walking home at zero degrees, Tori's live Bells for Her ringing. Step. Start stop again. Her piano plays a different tune. I need to sit with her for a while, black and white under my fingers, delicately tracing the lyrics under my touch.

You have absolutely no idea how much I'm craving this. She plays like someone recollecting images of my long lost friend. You know how I've always said that music shapes my life. Music, and the things that surround me.

There's something to be spoken of this land where things ring true, people speak plainly, if not always welcome words, Gaiman wrote his stories and the earth itself has history. There's something to be said about the envy of friends when you're living their dreams.

I've rediscovered Tori in what has always been for me Tori and Neil land. In some way, I can't believe I'm living this now.

I miss the lil' muppet...

Muppet Owns the Table
Originally uploaded by metaphoric.

Term of endearment from me (obviously inherited from Laura at some point in Berkeley) - muppet.

Was just browsing through my family photos from when I was a kid and came across these sweetheart photos of my niece, then probably around 9 months old.

And had that realisation that I completely missed the litlte muppet. I'm not gonna see her again for quite a while, and this time when I'm back in town she's not gonna be there... awwww....

I dream in music

The air is cool and reminds me of a dream I once had of one version of a perfect life. There is no all encompassing plot I think. I dream in sights, sounds and colours.

1. Nocturne softly playing in the background
2. Crystal clear glass
3. View of green grassy fields
4. Slender, tall trees with minimal leaves not completely lush
5. An apple tree
6. A glossy polished black grand digital piano
7. Coffee in a ceramic mug on a beige/khaki tile in the middle of a khaki themed kitchen
8. Loved one leaning in bathrobe, silent. Cup of coffee in hand, listening to the music
9. It is mid-morning, with 10am sunlight
10. The air is spring time cool, around 15 degrees celcius

There is emotion in the air, a mutual appreciation of loved ones and loved things. But other than the music, all is silence.

Did you think that if I got my Clavinova I'd be playing classical music?

For my next birthday...

Red Velvet Cupcake
Originally uploaded by metaphoric.

For my next birthday, I want a single black candle on a Red Velvet cupcake from Hummingbird.

Probably cheapest birthday cake ever at £1.35. But we'll cut it up into many yummy pieces and share it.

My place is people ready!

Luscinia View Room II
Originally uploaded by metaphoric.

I finally have a people-ready house, with the 2nd room and bathroom all done up and ready for people. In the words of one colleague of mine who recently moved down under, "Now all we need is friends..."

I'm not maintaining an online calendar for guest lists, but drop me a mail should you be in the area and I'll be happy to put you up.

Loves... the taste of butter, Recommends... Lurpak Spreadable Unsalted

How typical that the 101th post ever would be about food. As you probably already know, I have returned to yummy butter land (UK) and left yucky butter land behind (Australia).

I love butter. I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world, not low fat options, yogurt, cream cheese, margarine (god forbid!) or olive oil spreads. Butter is butter. It comes from the goodness of blessed cow and is made of creamy, warm, lovely, fatty goodness. Fat though it may be, it is au naturel just as Mother Nature intended. If you have to stuff yourself with something that makes you fat, why choose polyunsaturated vegetable oils saturated and solidified by petroleum fossil fuel extracts? You don't eat what you put into a car, so explain margarine.

One of the regular, affordable staples these days is Lurpak's Unsalted Spreadable butter. It is a blend of vegetable oils and real butter (yes, I admit, it has some oils, but not solidified with petroleum) and is a low fat, low sodium option for being unsalted. I only go so far. The creamy, savoury richness of real butter, coupled with just that touch of vegetable oil to make it spreadable far outweighs the thought that it is actually a healthy option.

Oh, and how does it compare to blocks of organic, home made Memnonite butter in Virginia? It cannot.

New Year Resolutions (in advance)

Incidentally, in case you didn't realise, this is the 100th post.

The year is ending. 2006 is coming and going, and is no less eventful than the previous year, and probably no less exciting than the next. I'm starting to tally up the books, sweep up the papers and look for the key to lock up the year.

And in setting targets and budgets and resolutions for next year, I have come across one that I think I'm putting on the page.

2007 Resolutions (Part 1):

1. Master cheese cake as I like it
2. When I'm done with that, master cheese cake as my best friends like it
3. Make kunefe - have made Turkish friends who may make that goal a little bit easier.
4. Go to Cornwall and Scotland at least once next year (this should not be difficult!)

Wedding Songs

Perhaps this comes appropriate, reading Fe's blog. I've been drafting this for a while now, and while not getting married any time soon, wanted to document the wedding song I'd always dreamt of as the perfect piece to accompany that obligatory wedding video showing boy and girl growing up so relatives and friends know more about the wedding couple.

I know my best friends aren't religious, and to some extent, I think that the frequently mentioned love triangle of God, Boy and Girl is quite often misused. But in these lyrics (and you should hear the melody, it's even more beautiful with music...) I find the role of God, Boy and Girl ideally expressed. If things should be this way, if this should be the ideal, then may every single boy and girl with God in their hearts as they walk down the aisle think if things this way.

My godbrother is getting married next year to the girl that he's been with since 17. He's my age, and it is freaky on one hand to think that people my age are flocking to the aisle and getting married in throngs, while I am nowhere near getting myself to the aisle. Partly I am also influenced by the French way of considering weddings a horrible waste of money without any real, tangible increase of commitment or love on the part of the couple.

But in another way, I am still dreaming of my white wedding to the one that I love, something that will be denied me for quite a while more, thanks to the complications of real life.


A Page is Turned - Bebo Norman

A page is turned by the wind to a boy in curly grin
With a world to conquer at the age of ten
But as history unfolds and the story book is told
He finds salvation, but not at the hands of man

And the God of second chance
Picked him up and He let him dance
Through a world that is not kind
And all this time, preparing him the one
To hold him up when he comes undone
Beneath the storm, beneath the sun
And now a man, here you stand
Your day has come

A page is turned in this world to reveal a little girl
With a heart that's bigger as it is unfurled
By the language in her soul that's teaching her to grow
With a careful cover of love that will not fail

And the God of second chance
Picked her up and He let her dance
Through a world that isn't kind
And all this time preparing her the one
To hold her up when she comes undone
Beneath the storm, beneath the sun
And grown up tall, here you are
Your day has come

Beneath the air of autumn, she took him by his hand
And warm within the ardour, she took his heart instead
And high upon the mountain, he asked her for her hand
Just for her hand

A page is turned in this life, he's making her his wife
And there is no secret to the source of this much life
When the grace that falls like rain is washing them again
Just a chance to somehow rise above this land

Where the God of second chance
Will pick them up and He'll let them dance
Through a world that is not kind
And all this time, they're sharing with the one
That holds them up when they come undone
Beneath the storm, beneath the sun
And once again, here you stand
And once again, here you stand
Your day has come

Born to Try

I know this is so completely pop, but somehow this song has been playing on repeat on my mp3 player. I want you to believe in me. And I know that you do, so thank you. Perhaps this is justifying things in that very Australian way.

I know where we both want to go now. And I promise you that I'll get both of us there.

Delta Goodrem - Born to Try

Doing everything that I believe in
Going by the rules that I've been taught
More understanding of what's around me
And protected from the walls of love

All that you see is me
And all I truly believe

Is that I was born to try
I've learnt to love
Be understanding
And believe in life
But you've got to make choices
Be wrong or right
Sometimes you've gotta sacrifice the things you like
But I was born to try

No point in talking what should have been
And regretting the things that went on
Life's full of mistakes, destinies and fate
Remove the clouds to get the bigger picture

All that you see is me
And all I truly believe

Is that I was born to try
I've learnt to love
Be understanding
And believe in life
But you've got to make choices
Be wrong or right
Sometimes you've gotta sacrifice the things you like
But I was born to try

I was born to try.

Unique Pieces

Floral Pendant
Originally uploaded by metaphoric.

In my previous life, I must have been a magpie of some sort. I like collecting things. Especially shiny, happy, silvery things.

I get very attached to the pieces of jewellery I buy. Each and every piece to me needs to have a story, it comes to me with history and gets entrusted to people that I care about, if not kept shiny and happy in a jewellery box at home. DWP (Devil Wears Prada) though that may be, there's a huge potential for these pieces to be like art for me - so the more unique, one of a kind and historical the better.

This piece I found while window shopping in Notting Hill. Lovely bit I fell in love with used to be a tiny remnant of a 19th century teaspoon that the maker didn't quite know what to do with until a while later. He gave up, and shaped it into a pendant, which suits this piece perfectly as a second life.

What I fell in love with on this one was the fact that you could hardly tell it used to be a spoon unless you had been there at the shop. Spoons seldom have that blank space in the middle, almost like a metal carving, and the same patterns on both sides.

It reminded me a little of Arwen's Evenstar. And so I felt it was appropriate that it's going to my very Arwen-looking friend for Christmas this year.

The Measure of All Things, A Master of None

A little known fact about me: my sole defining ambition in life (and surprise surprise, I do not have many), constructed since my youth aged 17.5 years, is to be deeply and passionately expert in two fields: mathematics and music.

This is something I think you only found out recently too, as you contemplated Christmas presents.

A friend of mine commented yesterday on IM that I am by far the most adventurous, ambitious and talented person he knew. I can readily admit to the first, but not to the second or the third. I like attempting the difficult or impossible (adventurous). I do not like being told I cannot (adventurous, potentially contrary). I refuse to believe I am not born to do certain things (ditto).

But ambitious? Besides the ambition listed above, I have only one other ambition. And that is to make a difference by showing people that things are possible. To be an inspiration to others simply by defying the laws and norms of Possible and Impossible. Perhaps this is the biggest, most ambitious thing of all.

But let's come back to the first ambition, and of music and mathematics. Let's talk about laws, and the ways of the world.

I was born into a family that believed that there is no mathematical gene in the family gene pool. This is a belief, a strongly cultivated one, and as a child I was encouraged into the arts, history, the humanities, literature. I can't draw to save my life or play Pictionary. But one thing I could do since the age of two was play a tune on my favourite electric toy piano. My first song (don't laugh please) was Chariots of Fire. My mother quickly recognized this and packed me off to music classes (de rigour of Singaporean parents) and I started Yamaha classes on the organ before I was tall enough to have my feet touch the pedals of the organ while keeping my hands firmly on the keyboard. I was about as tall as the organ itself, and needless to say, this turned out to be quite a disaster since it was evidently an important thing to be taller than the musical instrument that one is playing.

Enter the piano, attempted for 5 years between the ages of 7 and 11 before being painfully told that should I quit, I was never to start piano lessons again. I promptly gave it up in favour of French lessons, because the latter didn't require me to ever perform in front of my parents if I didn't want to, or practice daily in earshot of my neighbours.

Along the way, I was also introduced to the recorder, standard issue between the ages of 13 and 16 in all schools. I usually fared miserably at any formal lessons in music.

I was equally dismal in formal mathematics classes until I entered university, surprisingly surviving mathematics classes until then. The problem with mathematics was that it was similar to music in one unnecessary way: you needed to practice practice practice. Teachers, principals and parents gave up one by one by the mystery of the fact that I could only do a problem sum, play a tune by heart, string up a composition on the piano without a glitch only by accident, if I set my mind to it. But tell me to do something, tell me to solve a problem sum in a certain way, and almost certainly, my mind rebels and I am suddenly unable, physically unable to do it.

It was only until university when I realised that mathematics was more than the study of computation, a science that was only taught in schools. It was an art, the logic of understanding and expressing, in a clear and defined language, the underlying way and law of the world. It was my key to being the observer from the outside in, the path in which I could finally resolve the many puzzles of human behaviour and the natural world once and for all in my mind.

Music worked the same way for me. There are natural steps, notes which exist, notes which don't. Seven notes in solid white setting the structure for a melody, five in black to fill in the gaps. Tune it upward and gaps suddenly turn to structure, white to black. My favourite key, incidentally, is E minor.

Suddenly without these things, the world wouldn't exist for me. I realized that, similar to being born with perfect pitch, I had been subconsciously counting things, measuring things. The size of round pots fitting into shelves, the dimensions of luggage in an overhead carrier, the number of people in a crowded train, the time it takes to walk from home to the train station. The moment it becomes conscious, and I realise that I am counting, I lose the number. But these things float by me and surround me, day after day, like many lost dreams. There was a fact and a certainty, a certain measure of solidness in the fact that things were countable.

Why am I telling you these things? Because you, of many people, have always wondered what it was like to see what I see, and hear what I hear. This is my way of explaining to you that the things that we see, feel, react to, touch, hear, smell, and sense are exactly our world as we know it. This explains why when I buy things, I always buy in pairs or threes if I can help it. Why I believe that there are perfect numbers. Why I look at my watch, not to tell the time, but to be assured that it is still there. Without these things I am quite possibly, in my own beliefs, insane.

The world to me is a measure of all things. How many, how long, how high, how sharp. How do I love thee, let me count the ways. Elizabeth Barrett Browning had expressed it perfectly. But let me count the ways and the steps and the measures to more than Love. Let me count the measures to Life itself.

Broadband and Television

I was quite confident at first about my ability to live without "the essentials" of life. Namely, broadband internet and digital television. It's been three months now. Three whole months.

This week has been a week of accomplishment. Two days ago, I just got my digital television working (free). And now today, to my utter surprise, I have the rudimentary set up of broadband internet (thanks to the Company).

Fingers crossed that things all work out well as they should. It's amazing how the wonders of technology find their way to seep, slowly but insidiously into every day life.

Kudos to enuwy (and my greatest thanks!) for enlightening me on the state of television in the country.

Improving my sense of the world

The communion of Google, Wikipedia and a host of people from different lands, coupled with a sense of embarassment about knowing so little about these countries is improving my sense of the world.

At work, we discuss things like the idiosyncracy of having subsidiaries named Yugoslavia, completely out of the sync with the fact that politically, Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore as a country. Just the other day, a person from the US thought Slovakia and the Czech Republic were one and the same, and removed that country from a list of subsidiaries we held up as being part of EMEA, the happy region I support now - Europe, Middle East and Africa. We humbly call it a region, nevermind that in terms of land area and population, it probably makes up more than half of the world.

I see a delicate and sometimes tenuous blend between business and world affairs. This is an aspect of life that I had never considered before, is it really strange these days to discuss business in Bosnia, Israel, Iran, Kuwait, Tunisia? When one thinks of these countries, the general notion is that these areas are too poor, too war-torn, too politically fraught with danger for it to be possible to have business as usual, and yet its humbling to realize that despite war, despite hardship, life goes on with a resolute determination for normalization. Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan are places drawing business for the company.

Nearly every day I'm meeting and working with people who in their curious little way are teaching me more about the world, and making me rather embarassed about my own little assumptions about how things are. It is not all war and fanfare in these places around the world. There are little pleasures. And there is business as usual.

Little pleasures at home

Sliced Bread
Originally uploaded by metaphoric.

Sometimes filling your life with little but simple pleasures are the nicest things. I sliced this bread, and in front of the light by the kitchen window, it turned out so pretty I had to take a picture.