A cold sweat and a journey completed

I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I have no idea what happened, whether I had a scary dream or if it was just physiological and my body was just reacting to something. But I was shivering and I was so so cold. I just wrapped myself completely after waking up, and just tried to go back to sleep. I probably should’ve dried myself and gotten changed into a dry set of PJs, but I was too cold and tired to think straight at the time!

I did go back to sleep relatively quickly, thankfully. But when the morning came around, I did not feel well rested at all. I was just so tired. And even after my usual cup of coffee in the morning, I was still just really tired, I couldn’t really shake it off all day. Sighhh.

So after my usual FX seminar, I went home and took a nap. I did feel a bit better, but still not all that great. Ugh, I really hope I’m not coming down with something – AGAIN. 😔

We finished the evening watching Game of Thrones: I am now all caught up! Omg I can’t believe I made the long journey. Now I want to read the books 😊 It’s not a genre that I would normally read, so I don’t know if I’d enjoy the books as much as the tv series, but maybe I’ll give book #1 a go and make up my mind after I finish it. Or not finish it, as the case may be 😆 Unless I have an overwhelming urge to read something else before it, then I think it will be my next book.

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A sign

We went and had dinner at one of the hawker centres near the dance studio after our lesson. N still has his cold (argh!), so we decided to skip Latin practice tonight and just go and have a quick dinner before heading home.

While we were there, some random person walked by. He had a long gown on and a sign on his back that said something like “has terminal cancer, mental patient”, and his doctor’s name underneath. He sat down and he seemed to be there to eat dinner too. He had no nose. Whether he lost his nose to said cancer or from something else, I don’t know.

Anyway, I was sad for this gentleman, but also glad that he was allowed to go out of hospital and walk around on his own. He must have enough mental capacity to be allowed out on his own, and not be a danger to himself and/or to others. Plus his doctor’s details are on his sign, I assume just in case he needs assistance to find his way back.

I am also glad that Singapore is safe enough for someone like him to be able to wander around and not be physically or verbally assaulted. And that the medical staff allow him to live life as normal as he possibly can, given his circumstances. People just leave others to their own devices here, and so he just sat down at the hawker centre by himself and ate his dinner, much like everyone else there. I thought it was so lovely.

Multi-pronged progress

Today was one of those days where I felt like I moved forward in almost all of my goals. I didn’t get obsessed with making progress on just one or two of them, to the detriment of the others, which is what I normally do. Not all of my goals were touched on today, but enough of them moved forward that I feel like it’s been a very productive day.

Work – I finally had a profitable trading day, after so many losing days in a row. Not that I felt happy. I probably felt relief more than anything else: relief that I am not completely hopeless at this. Maybe this is the start of my feeling more detached with the outcome of my trades?? 🤔 Tick.

Languages – Did some review of old words and grammar structures, and learnt a few new ones. Tick.

Reading – I read a bit more of my new book The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Tick.

Finances – Paid some bills and organised a few things on this front. Tick.

Family / Home – FaceTimed my parents and learnt a new recipe from my mum, which I tried today – and it actually turned out! That’s a first! 😂 Tick.

Home – Ran a few errands this morning, and did a few other things around the house. Tick. I intend to do a few more things around the house tomorrow, so this should be a double tick by then.

So not a bad day. Not a bad day at all 👍

Reading while in this slump

The crap trading continues. It just feels like whatever I do, I just get it wrong. Sighhh… It’s so demoralising. I just wish this slump would end soon, so my work life can get back to normal 😔

So to distract myself, I read my book The Last Mrs Parrish. And went searching for a new book, coz I finished this one 😊 It actually wasn’t too bad. I didn’t find it as “cannot-put-it-down” as much as other books, but it was still pretty good.

I decided to go for a light-hearted read for my next one, so I’ve gone for The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Well, I’m assuming it’s a light-hearted read, since it’s young adult fiction, but it does apparently touch on rather heavy issues such as rape, drug use and sexuality exploration and discovery. So let’s see just how “light” this book actually is…! 😳

And we finished the evening with a few episodes of Game of Thrones. Season seven is short, so we’ll easily finish it this week. What should we move on to next… 🤔

A relaxing Sunday

We had a nice, relaxing Sunday. Firstly, we met up with friends for a belated Easter lunch. We started this tradition of going for an Easter lunch with them a few years ago, but they were overseas during Easter this year, so we postponed the lunch until today. It’s a nice tradition that we’ve started, and I hope we can continue it for a while yet. But like I’ve said before, who knows where we will be or where they will be next year, so I just take things as they come, and appreciate the time that we are all in Singapore together.

We then went to a Dyson exhibit at the Art Science Museum. Yes, the vacuum cleaner company. I thought it would be more about the evolution of their products over the years, but it was more about promoting their current products, and learning some science along the way. They had a few interactive displays to learn about science and engineering for kids, so that was quite cool, but it just wasn’t what I was expecting. The kids of our friends who we just had lunch with would probably have had a better time. Oh well. But it did get us thinking about buying the brand new Dyson product, especially with N being allergic to Kitty 😔 so I guess their marketing efforts have paid off…! 😆

And then we rode share bikes to Suntec to watch Rampage at the movies there. We’re getting into the share bikes at the moment. Singapore is such a perfect place for it: it’s a small city, so it’s quite easy to get around on a bicycle. The pavements are smooth, the cost is cheap, and there are so many areas where you can pick up and drop off the share bikes that it just makes it so easy.

And we finished the evening with an episode of Game of Thrones. We finished season six. Now I only have one more season to go before I am all caught up. But then once I’m finished with season seven, I’ll be waiting with bated breath for season eight – for about a year! 😳

Comp #3 for 2018

It wasn’t the best start to the day of the comp. Firstly, I just wasn’t in comp mode, if that’s a thing 😆 I just felt like I was doing something that I didn’t really want to do. Not that I ever feel like doing a comp 😂 but today was just different. Also all our events were in the evening, which allowed us freedom to do whatever we wanted during the day. So that freedom didn’t help me focus on dancing either 😐 I ended up getting hooked on Game of Thrones (we’re nearing the end of season six) and I’m also now up to the crazy bit in one of my current books, The Last Mrs Parrish. So the last thing I wanted to do was abandon things when they were getting good!

Today’s comp was at the same venue as our previous comp, so at least we knew the venue relatively well this time, and we didn’t have to spend any time familiarising ourselves with the layout – where the change rooms, the bathrooms, recall numbers and the marshalling area are; how fast/slow the dance floor is etc etc – and just focus on our dancing.

Well as much as we could, that is. N’s cold is still bothering him, and people were saying he looked like he was going to faint in our Slow Fox 😔 I asked him if he can last through all four events that we registered for, or whether we should pull out of one or two. Of course he wanted to tough it out 😳

Despite his illness, we actually danced ok, surprisingly. Not perfect, and a few dances fell apart at times, but overall, we were relatively happy with our dancing, given the limited practice we got in these past few weeks. Our teachers said that we improved from the last comp, which is great. One of the quotes that I like from the interweb is this: “no matter how slow you go, you are still lapping everybody on the couch”. That’s how I feel about our dancing! 😂

So obviously a bit of a break from dancing has somehow helped us today. No dancing tomorrow, we’ll just extend our break that little bit longer😆

A mental health day

I took the day off to give myself a bit of a break from trading. A mental health day, as we called them, back in my previous industry. I’d like to get my mental health back in order before returning to the trading screen on Monday. I hope other industries are embracing the importance of these days as well.

I wanted to have a local breakfast this morning, but all the kopitiams (coffee shops) near our place were packed as, with locals having their daily breakfast, I suppose. So that left me no choice but to have a western breakfast.

The cafe where I ended up was having cash register issues, so when I went to go pay, things were going awry. So the staff member exclaims “Alamak! The receipt won’t print!” And continues to say alamak a few more times until they finally get a receipt printed for me. That’s the first time I’ve heard alamak said in real life! It was used a number of times in that book I read recently, Crazy Rich Asians, by Kevin Kwan, a Singaporean author. And I’ve seen it mentioned in Singlish related stuff. So from these, I knew how it was used, but up until today, it’s just been an academic word for me. So it was rather exciting to actually hear it in real life – and with so much frustration from the speaker as well, it just really brought the expression to life! 😆

After breakfast / brunch, I went to Gardens by the Bay, like I said I would. It was the first day of Tulipmania in the Flower Dome, and I was very excited to go see it today 🌷🌷

Until I actually got there. The display was a bit too artistic for me, it just went over my head. I just didn’t quite get it 😐

Are they meant to represent certain people? The Dutch people, perhaps? The eyelids actually opened and closed on some of them, which was also a little freaky. I don’t get it… I just don’t get it…

Despite the odd display, the flowers were very pretty, as they always are, so wandering through both the Flower Dome and Cloud Forest raised my spirits.

I then did a bit of wandering around the shops on Orchard Road, before heading home and relaxing for the rest of the evening. We were supposed to practice tonight, but N is still not feeling all that great, his cold is still lingering around 😔

We have a comp tomorrow, but we’ve barely practiced in the past few weeks, with me first having the cold, and now him. If we hadn’t already registered and paid, I’d pull out of this comp, to be honest. Our dancing probably won’t reflect what we can actually do, and it’ll just make me feel disappointed if we don’t dance to the best of our abilities. It’s not about the results – like I’ve said before, we always rank poorly against the specialists anyway, so we’re used to not placing well. But it’s when we don’t – or can’t – give our all that will be more disappointing. Sigh. Oh well, it can’t be helped. We just have to make the most of tomorrow. Who knows, maybe the lack of practice will let us ease up and just enjoy the performance tomorrow, rather than get all bogged down in the technical detail, like we usually do😆