Nightmare at Tampines Street

Last night, I had a nightmare. At the climax of the scariest moment, I jolted up, let out a loud “AHH!” and opened my eyes wide. When I realized it was just a dream, I went back to bed, adrenaline pumping. Wifey was awakened by my shout and patted my hand. We went back to sleep.

The next morning, I have zero recollection of the details of the nightmare. When I related to wifey what happened, she laughed and said, “I thought you saw a cockroach.”

My memory of Pokemon

Honestly, the take up rate of Pokemon Go in Singapore exceeded my expectations. Sure, before its launch in Asia the game has taken the world by storm, but little did I expect this game to be soooooo popular that people are crowding ‘Pokestops’ as late as 11.45pm – 4am during the midst of Lunar 7^th month?!? The news had the craze reported – residents in Hougang were unable to find parking lots at night; 20% increase in sales at the coffeeshop; throngs of phone-in-hand pokemon trainers dashing across the road. Crazy, I tell you!

I did not download the game, by the way. And I hope it stays this way.

The first Pokemon games (which were played on Nintendo consoles, but me on PC) were from my era. Pikachu, Charmander, Metapod, Meowth, just to name 2.67% of the ‘first gen’ pokemons which totaled 150 – my siblings and I knew all their names by heart and often competed to take turns listing one after another and see who would run out of names first. These names stuck with us till now – heck, I can even rap the last verse of the ‘Pokemon rap’!

We started off with Pokemon Blue... 

followed by Silver. 

We completed both games.

I have a more vivid memory of Pokemon Blue. Interestingly, my siblings and I chose different pokemons to start with – me Charmander, sister Bulbasaur and brother Squirtle. The storyline ends after a battle with Elite 4 and Ash’s rival. My selection for the final battle was:

Charizard (fire), Gyrados (water/flying), Dugtrio (ground), Zapdos (lightning/flying), Victreebell (plant) and Kadabra (psychic).

In addition to playing the games, my siblings and I also followed the anime that showed on Saturday mornings. Despite Pokemon playing a large part of our growing up, I simply do not find Pokemon Go any fun or enticing. Anyway, I also feel it’s a bubble… I heard many have almost caught all of the pokemon. With many high level players guarding gyms and some resorting to spoof apps to gain an unfair advantage, most will get bored of the game soon. We’ll see.

All 150 of the 'first gen' Pokemons

Bye Blackie

Outdated post:

We traded in our reliable Blackie.

Due to the insane COE prices, buying a new car never crossed our minds until Feb this year. We learnt that my father-in-law traded in his 8 yr old Toyota Vanguard for a very good price. Just for fun, I sought a quotation from the same dealer for our 6 yr old Honda Fit. We were pleasantly surprised – for a car with less than half its COE lifespan, it could fetch us more than half of what wifey paid for it.

Now, I have been eyeing Honda Vezel for a long time now. It looks sturdy, has a good height, comes in a few colour choices, is of a reliable Japanese brand and is also very fuel efficient! We worked out the sums and discovered that a brand new Vezel costs the same in annual depreciation, as compared to fully depreciating Blackie's COE. This, plus a brand new car (COE reset to 10 years) and a bigger and more spacious one at that, it’s a straight forward decision to make.

On 12 July 2016, the deal was complete. We bade farewell to blackie (who saw us through friendship, dating, marriage and birth of our baby!) and welcomed our new servant –

Loving it.

As a typical Singaporean would, I went to buy 4d of my vehicle registration number. After 3 draws, the number came nowhere close. Curiously I searched on the history and was shocked to learn that in the history of Singapore Pools (since May 1986), the number had only opened 4 times! And the most recent was in 2005!

Milestones at 11 months old

Babywyx is turning 11 months in a few days’ time… how time has flown! In recent weeks she has grown exponentially; with her crawling all over the place, displaying hilarious antics and uttering new sounds. These new ‘entertainment’ to us adults almost seemed to obscure those tiring, confounding newborn days when we would have to guess what is it she wants when she cries. We would have to go through a mental list ranging from milk, soiled diapers, discomfort to crankiness, wind, carrying, womb noises etc to soothe her. Now, baby has developed a routine and thankfully, largely sticks to it. In addition, we are also blessed that she is able to entertain herself on the play-mat with a bunch of toys.

Just to mark down what she is capable of doing now:

- Wave bye

- Repeatedly blowing bubbles using her saliva

- Responds to ‘hao chi zhen mo jiang?’ -> “mmmm”

- Responds to ‘yes sir!’ -> place both hands on her head, apparently a very poor mimic of a hand salute

- Responds to ‘ring ring’ -> places her palm to her ear

- Responds to ‘flying kiss’ -> places her palm to her mouth and holds it there. Kiss but no fly.

- Repeatedly pushing and pulling the legs of chairs and stools

- When the TV screen is blank, she will rotate both wrists to indicate “no more”

- A few TV commercials will catch her attention like magic e.g. Barney, Peppa pig, news introduction, weather forecast music

- Responds to 'tou wai wai' -> tilts her head sideways

 Clinging on to something to stand up

- Recognize a book is upside down and proceed to turn it the other way! *shock shock*

- When lying down, understands when I place my thumb above her head. She will grab my finger and use it to pull herself onto a sitting up posture

- Responds to “dinosaur” -> growls like one
- Responds to "if you're happy and you know it clap your hands" -> claps her hands :D

- Understands “clock” and will turn her head to look for it. Same for “Mickey & Donald”, “liu2 lian2”.

- Always looks to the door when she hears the keys, door being opened or the lift doors.

- Currently, learning how to respond to 'chi bao bao' -> proceed to patting her tummy

Etc...

She's already displaying similarities to Curious George. We think she'll be one cheeky monster. Heh heh...

Our evaluation and choice of baby diapers (size M)

I wonder if I am the first papa to do an evaluation of baby diapers... Anyways, decided to do this for future reference haha. This evaluation is for size M diapers only.

Disclaimer: Tried Mamypoko, Huggies and a korean brand before, but weren't too impressed. Never tried Pampers and Drypers.

When babywyx was younger (size S), we used mainly Mamy Poko. Before we were parents, little did we expect so large differences between diaper brands! Our confinement nanny lauded Mamy Poko and we stuck to it. We tried huggies too but found MP to be more absorbent.

kthxbye.