Ohnolah!

Expenses...arghh....

I stayed very late at work today to try to tackle the pile of business trip expenses that has been growing bigger and bigger over the last several months.  I'm terribly bad at getting the expenses filed, and I've let them pile up so that now the task of getting them all done is much too big...and much too time-consuming.  I know it's my own fault for not being more timely with this, but I really hate doing them.  It's procrastination indeed.  But the task is really dreadful: expenses in multiple currencies (Singapore dollars, Korean Won, Vietnamese Dong, Indian Rupees...), aligning the foreign exchange rate with my credit card statements to make sure I get reimbursed the amount I actually got charged; itemizing every single line item on the hotel bill (tax 1, tax 2, etc., etc.); and, to boot, the Singapore office of our company has even more time-consuming and labor-intensive processes -- each expense receipt has to be neatly pasted onto a white sheet of paper and properly labelled with the corresponding number on the expense report.  Arghhh.....is this a good use of my time??!!  But, alas, it has to be done.

I'd rather be knitting, of course!

On that note, I finished the mohair blanket for my younger son.  Yeah!  He loves it and picked the yarn and colors himself.  I find it a bit too prickly, but he happily sleeps with it against his skin.  It's made of Mountain Colors Mohair in the Goldrush colorway, knit in a seed stitch with a picot edging.  It's light and airy, what he was asking for, based on a mohair retangular shawl I knit a few years back.

Here it is, hanging on the railing of our balcony -- the blanket got to be quite large, but then there's room to grow into it! 

Now I just need to finish up E.'s Pi blanket...and I'm all set to start a new shawl :-)

The end of the year....

The school year is drawing to a close and summer is coming -- and this time of year brings with it school end-of-year shows and activities, extra-many birthday parties for 'summer' kids, and goodbye parties for other expats who are either returning back to their home country or heading onwards to a new assignment in another part of the world.

We had a birthday party for A. and his favorite friends from school.....9 boys for 4 hours.  It was fun, and between water gun fights in the pool, playing tag, and, of course, lots of goodies and cake, the time went by quickly.....A. had a great time.  I don't have any 'blog' pictures...too many faces :-)

The Art Show at the boys' school was inspiring and very well put together.  Art by the students was displayed in one large show room and throughout the school as well...here's the main 'gallery':

A visiting artist from New York came in to work with grades 3, 4 and 5 to create tiles...each student created one, and they have now been hung as a permanent installation at the school....so cool...and fun to look at...

The colors, shapes, composition....I really enjoyed looking at these....

The boys have really enjoyed their art classes.  The art, music, and PE programs were a big plus this year and an upgrade from our public school system experience in California, even given that we were in a good school there with decent facilities.  The art facilities and teachers at the Singapore school are wondeful and I'm happy that we have this opportunity to enjoy them.  Music has been very good, too; E. is playing the violin for the second year, and A. has discovered that he's got a pretty good voice for singing....

Anyhow, despite the challenges of getting up early to catch a 7am bus and not getting back home until 3:45pm in the afternoon, the school experience has been good and the boys are happy.  They've made good friends, too, and the school has proven much more 'international' than I initially thought it would be --- and that's a good thing.  Naturally, there are always rough patches and things to 'manage through' - but the boys are learning and are exposed to many ideas and ways of doing things that I hope will be useful in the future.

OK, that's it for now....

Tuesday morning sky

6:30am view from the balcony of our apartment in downtown Singapore....while the coffee was brewing and the boys were waking up....

 Changed by blog design back to the original template; I like it better, more simple. 

Flora and Fauna..at the zoo

Work has been really busy and so has our social schedule, so to speak.  It's a short week since this past Mondy was a holiday -- Vesak Day -- in celebration of Buddha's birthday and his, much later, ascension to nirvana.  We went to the Singapore Zoo which always proves to be fun and interesting, even after having visited several times by now.  Lots to explore, many different animals to see, lovely surroundings to walk in, and places for the kids to play and run around.  The Zoo is one of Singapore's key attractions as well, so it's usually always quite crowded, especially on weekends and holidays.  I caught a picture of this lovely guy...a grand old orangutan...he looks so nice....but lonely and not so happy?

The zoo has lots and lots of greenery, adding to the feeling of walking around in a tropical landscape...there is also an orchid garden, albeit quite small, and a section featuring plants and flowers indigenous to Singapore and Southeast Asia.  I found this beauty there.....it's a kind of ginger, and what I've found on the web indicates a "torch ginger", but I'm pretty sure that's not what the sign said.  Anyhow, striking all the same...

On our way out, I spotted this cool flower...I don't know its name, but it starts out like this:

and ends up like this:

How cool is THAT?

Lovely day, hot and humid as always, but somehow, it didn't feel that bad on Monday :-)

Tordenvejr!

The bubble of hot, humid and stuffy weather that Singapore has been living in over the last couple of weeks finally burst last night in a spectacular thunder storm.  I woke up with a start in the middle of the night as the room lit up completely and was followed moments later by a giant roar of thunder.  The lightning was very close, I could hear the electricity sparks in the air -- the lightning strike and the thunder were almost simultaneous.  The fact that we're in the middle of tall buildings make the thunder even louder as it ricochets off the cement and glass walls.  I got out of bed to have a look, and even though you expect the next lightning strike any second, it is still startling when it actually  happens. 

In the safety of our tall building and plenty of safe guards in lightening conductors all around, I can savour these thunderstorms; whereas if we were living in a small wooden house somewhere, they would be cause of great concern and worry.  I love these massive, spectacular thunderstorms that so clearly - and loudly - display the sheer power of nature.  It's one of the aspects of living in the tropics that I do really like.  That is, when I don't have to get out and about when the torrential downpour is at its highest....

The storm brought loads of heavy rain, tropical rainstorm-style.  As a result, this morning is a cool 25 degrees with a wonderfully refreshing breeze.  It almost felt "cold", a very, very unusual feeling...I'm loving the break from the heat.

I took this picture last year on the 53rd floor of the Swissotel Stamford, a thunderstorm brewing.

Springtime

I checked in on Liselotte's blog this morning and found wonderful photos of the spring landscape in Denmark.  She had captured one of my favorite images of Danish spring/early summer -- the bright yellow of rape fields against an intensely blue sky bordered by trees and grass in spring green. 

I love this vision, and I remember one day in May or June many years ago when I was driving just outside Roskilde and had to stop the car by the side of the road to step out and behold the fantastic colors -- this was with the added benefit of the blue backdrop of Roskilde fjord.  A couple of times I have returned to Denmark from overseas around this time in early summer, and so this specific image always brings back memories -- and makes me long for springtime in Denmark.  It is a lovely time of the year, a feast for the senses that holds a promise of the summer ahead.

To reflect my mood today, I changed the colors of my blog, from the cool blue to 'spring green'....

Time management for 10-year olds....

So, I got this email message today from one of E.'s teacher, his Social Sciences teacher.  She sent a note to all the parents in the fifth-grade class, lamenting the fact that only a few students were ready for today's oral presentation of a months-long project about Singapore's history.  Fair enough.  The only hitch is, in my book, that there was no clear communication of the deadlines for this project in the first place. The project kicked off a few months back and involved each student to pick at least 5 different places around Singapore to visit to learn more about this nation state's history.  Nice project and we had great fun at it -- it clearly depended on heavy parent involvement to take our kids to the different places, take photos, etc.  E. decided to do a scrap book with pictures, entry tickets, brochures, historial facts, etc.  He really enjoyed this whole effort; and so did the rest of our little family.

All good.  But what was missing was a sense of the timing -- i.e. the DUE date and some milestones to meet along the way.  Apparently, the teacher had walked the kids in the class through the timeline; not sure exactly when.  But here's my beef -- while I realize that my son is definitely not the most dilligent notetaker, nor the most focused in class, nor has the best of short-term memories -- despite this being one of the biggest projects of the year, spanning two months and requiring significant involvement from the parents, there was no milestones or other timeline sent home.  I really don't think this is reasonable; and by having at least given us (the parents) a sense of the timing, we could have played a constructive role in helping our kids manage to the timeline.

Alright, so maybe I'm not being fair here.  Afterall, it's the student's responsibility at this class level to make note of due dates, understand what needs to be done, etc.  And I'm not in class every day.  But a simple outline would have been helpful; I would have been fine taking it from there.  I don't seem to recall this complexity of a project assignment, level of required parent involvement, month-long timelines, when I was 10-11 years old.  Time management, organizational skills -- they are all key to surviving in today's world, absolutely.  But, we're dealing with a bunch of pre-teens here, especially the boys, who are still behaving like children (and they ARE children), with lots of energy, inability to stay focused for too long, enthusiasm and boundless energy....are they at a prime age yet to develop and manage to their own timelines, milestones, and deliverables? 

Over the last few years of observing and experiencing first-hand the primary and intermediary school curriculum of today (the US school system is the primary point of reference here), I feel it's too rigid, too pushy towards the 'ideal' behaviour.  We're very fortunate to be in a private school that has great facilities, superior art, music and athletics programs, etc. But at the end of the day, being at the small, local school that we attended back in California or the large internationally-focused American school here, it comes down to the 'standards', the curriculum, and the expectations of our children's achievement, at any age. 

I might be overreacting.  But sometimes I feel like quitting this system, of doing home schooling, of helping my kids learn the way they are inclined to learn -- everyone is indeed different.  But I'm not an educator.  And I doubt that I could do any better or even half as well as the many excellent teachers at our current school.

I have to work with E. to get more organized, to take better notes, to learn the essential skills to be successful in school.  And inspire him to be creative, to develop the skills and areas that he's passionate about, for him to feel happy about his accomplishments and proud of what he can do -- if it's writing, or drawing, or math, or knitting, or swimming, or whatever.

I've rambled long enough.  I was upset today, but I'll get over it.  I'm learning, too, what it takes to 'make it' in school these days.  It sure is different from 30+ years ago...(and this seems to be irregardless of the small school in Denmark I went to or the big inner-city school by husband went to in the US).  Times have changed.  And so has the way we bring up our kids and prepare them for life in today's world.

Finished!

I finished the Leaf Lace Shawl in the autumn-coloured Kauni yarn a couple of weekends ago, and it's been blocked.  I like the way it turned out...the colours shift quite nicely, even though I was debating while knitting the shawl whether to just have the self-striping yarn colouring take its natural course or to intervene and break and rejoin the yarn to have more dark colors in the middle -- I chose the former, and I think it worked out well.  I wore it at work last week :-)

I'm working on two main projects, and have put everything else on hold -- for a change, I'm trying to not get distracted by a new project until the two at hand are done.  The boys each 'ordered' a blanket....so I'm knitting one for A. in Mountain Colors Mohair in Goldrush -- a rectangle in seed stich with a to-be-defined border -- and another for E. in Mountain Colors 4/8 wool in the Mystic Lake colorway -- based on EZ's Pi Shawl pattern, so it'll be one large circle...I'm hoping both will turn out well.  It's a lot of work...but the Pi pattern is so straight-forward that I can take it with me to the movies and knit in the almost-dark.  OK, it's extreme, I realize, but one's gotta do what one's gotta do to finish... What's the rush?  I'd like to finish by the time school is out -- that's the at the beginning of June -- so the boys can bring the blankets on the upcoming on summer vacation (which, at this planning stage, will involve several long flights). 

We went to Ah Teng's bakery for breakfast this morning -- the cafe is located in Raffles Hotel and is always a nice outing.  The pastries are delicious, coffee is good, and there's dim sum as well.  E. is doing a report on Singapore historical sites, so a visit to Raffles is one of the places he selected to visit.  We're working on that project for most of the rest of the day....

Time is flying by, and I've been neglecting the blog entirely. 

This week is a short week due to the May 1st holiday -- very civilized to have off on labour day...certainly didn't have that privilege in the US.  It was A's birthday, and we celebrated it with presents, a movie (Ironman), dinner (Peking duck and other goodies) and cake....it was really nice.  A friend of mine who also has a May 1 birthday came over, too, and we all went out for dinner.  A. had a good time...can't believe he just turned 9!

Earlier in the week I was back in Ho Chi Minh City for business meetings.  With new product launches, press briefings, lunch with the team there, and planning sessions, it was very busy.  But I did manage to carve out time to savour a couple of wonderful meals -- Vietnamese food is high on my list of being some of the best in the world. 

The week before that I was in Seoul, also for business.  This was a short trip -- less than 48 hrs on the ground.  It takes about 6.5 hours to travel from Singapore to Seoul; I took the overnight up on a Wednesday to attend phone meetings in the morning and to make sure I had a little extra time to spend with two very good friends who live in Seoul.  This was the biggest treat -- seeing both of them -- one for tea and one for dinner :-)  And, I did manage just a little bit of shopping -- one of my favorite clothing stores is in Seoul (isai).  As you can probably tell, I'm quite enchanted with Seoul -- I've had some really nice times in this city over the years, and always love to go back.

A couple of pics -- first, a lovely tea house in Insadong where I met up with my friend Nick:

and, after a tasty bulgogi dinner over a hot fire (Korean food is, in humble my opinion, under appreciated), my friend Jaiy introduced me to his newly-opened side business -- a bar called "Click":

...this, needless to say and in best Korean tradition, went on quite late.

Looking forward to the weekend now....I'll need to make some significant progress on our summer plans to not run into too many sold-out flights and high-priced options...arghhh!!

Alright, here we are again...

...it's Friday and I really don't know what happened to this past week.  It flew by.  I've been very busy at work; annual performance reviews are finally done, so maybe that'll free up a bit more time.  We've got a couple of big product releases next week, and this week has been pretty stressful for the team in getting everything ready.

I get a little knitting done here and there -- I'm making progress on the Feather and Fan Shawl in unspun Icelandic wool, based on the pattern in Cheryl Oberle's shawl book.  I've knitted this pattern before, using Elsebeth Lavold's angora in the bronze green colorway, and I now remember those loooong purl rows...they drive me a little crazy.  That shawl was left in California when I moved to Singapore, thinking it was too heavy for this climate.  Anyhow, I've got this good color combo going with black and a very dark grey.  The shawl will be for myself, to have at my desk at work (it's freezing inside...one annoying aspect of life in Singapore is the pumped-up aircon) and to use for traveling.  Maybe I can finish before the summer :-) ... I've a few other works in progress that need attention too.

On our China trip, we went to Xi'an to see the terra cotta warriors, Emperor Qin Shi Huang Di's army that he created to join him in the world after death.  Emperor Qin believed that he would live on in the after world, and created his own massive army to accompany him, in addition to multiple other things one needs in daily life as an Emperor.  History has it that he even brought his many wives along with him when he died, ending their lives prematurely.  The Emperor's tomb is located a few kilometers away from the warriors, and it has not yet been escavated; some day, we'll know what else he brought with him....if the warriors are an indication, the tomb is sure to be grand. 

The warriors made a big impression of me, and I was more pleased than I expected to be.  They were very dignified, very detailed, incredibly expressive for a clay figure.  I was impressed by how the site has been developed into a major tourist destination in a very nicely laid out and inobstructive way, allowing the hundreds of warriors to stand in a space appropriate for them. 

Much of the site is still a work in progress and has not yet been escavated.  Waiting for potential future advances in technology, the Chinese are making sure that only a portion of the site is shown and that there is plenty of opportunity for future archaeologist to explore.  Some of the broken warriors that have been escavated are carefully being put back together....there is a work space at the end of the big hall where warrior pieces are neatly organized in colorful plastic containers....

Seems like a pretty impossible matching job to me....

One aspect of the warriors I did not know about is that when they were first discovered, they were colorfully painted; but the paint wore off in just a matter of weeks due to the natural light.  Archaeologists are working on various formulas to apply to retain the vibrancy of the paint in any future escavations of the warriors.  Interesting work.  On this photo, you can see some of the paint left over; this warrior is displayed in a glass case in a hall that has subdued lighting. 

By the way, the warrior statues are hollow and are created from multiple pieces of fired clay, carefully put together into one warrior.  Each face is different -- such incredible creativity at work.  The Emperor apparently ordered to have every one of his warriors captured in clay.  The statues were lined up in neat rows under wooden beams, the beams covered with thick mats, and then earth was placed on top.  As the beams began to rot in various places, the hollow space housing the warriors collapsed, leaving many of the statues badly damaged; damage from raiding enemies through the centuries has also limited the number of warriors that remain in perfect shape.

The warrior armor was very detailed, providing a view into aspects of clothing style and fashion as it was over 2000 years ago.  Which brought to mind the most excellent book by Elsebeth Lavold "The Embraceable You Collection" which shows knitting designs inspired by armor from different time periods, including some wonderful designs inspired by the terra cotta warriors.  She must have gone to see them?

 

I have this book and have previously thought of knitting one of these great designs....I think now I definitely will....at some point.

Seeing the terra cotta warriors is one of the memories I'll cherish from our recent trip; I bought a couple of small models to have on the shelf....but I really wanted a life-size one, guarding the door....now that would be pretty great.