Equatorial Musings

When I came to work yesterday, I had the most pleasant of surprises. The people in my branch had taken the trouble to clean up and decorate my cubicle. The former cos I tend to be a bit untidy. The latter cos my birthday's coming. Given that they had stayed behind after work on Thursday evening to get everything done, I was touched to say the least. What they did was to play on my name Don and decorated my cubicle into a sushi place selling all types of don, which of course is rice in Japanese. There was also a trail of paper cockroaches being attracted to my cubicle in view of the 'food' on my table and the wall immediately behind my chair. I had a good laugh and some of the other colleagues joined in the fun too. I must say I really appreciate the time and effort they took to give me the surprise. For lunch, my people, a friend from another branch and I went to Lot1. No prize for guessing what we ate - sushi of course. But we passed on the mini dons promotion ; ) After t...

Last evening was the first time I tried my hands at baking, along with 5 other friends from the office. At the end of 3-plus hours, we made 2 desserts. I used the word 'made' cos one of my friends, Wei Ching , pointed out you don't technically bake tiramisu . Touche. Anyway, the other dessert was mixed berries oats crumble, which entailed baking. The verdict - it was really fun, even though the 6 of us were split into 3 tables cos we arrived a tad late. Jason, June and Siok Ling were at one table, Cheryl and I another while Mei Ling kindly volunteered to join a third. What made it fun was the fact that the instructor was a nice man with lots of patience. He went through the recipes with us and completed some of the more time-consuming processes (like making whip cream and boiling syrup water etc). During the making of the crumble, we were supposed to add in the eggs one after another into the mixer, but one of the groups did it a bit too fast and with hilarious results. ...

This is turning out to be a year of many firsts. In Jan, I started a blog after toying with the idea for years. Then, I bought a digital SLR, again after many years of thinking about it. Now, I'll be trying my hands at baking. Come this Friday, I'll be making tiramisu , among other delectable desserts. It's one of the many welfare events that my company organises and I was inspired to go for it after seeing the email. I also promptly roped in my colleagues, who may have obliged because I also happened to be their boss. But I'd like to think they also look forward to learning how to bake too, and perhaps not to the same extent, spending some quality time with me - ha ha . I must say I'm looking forward to learning how to bake. I've always been amazed by how chefs can whip up the most dazzling and delicious dessert. I'm sure its both an art and a science. An art because it takes an artiste to create new recipes and present their creations in a way that is both...

For some reasons, I've always liked Einstein. But then who doesn't. Although a genius, he was not one to take himself seriously. One only needs to look at the way he styled his hair to know he had a great sense of humour. And he wasn't just smart too. He was wise beyond his time. And there's a difference between the two. Smarts may give you a good living, but its wisdom that makes a life. If you don't believe that Einstein's wise, check out his quotes . I especially like his quote on insanity, which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. You'd think that this should be obvious to all of us. Yet, if you look around, you'll realise that things are quite the contrary. In fact, we ourselves are often to blame for this. We wonder why we're stuck in life when we keep doing the same things day in day out. To move ahead or out of the place that we're in, we need to change. And it starts with our mind before we can p...

Bibliophiles of the world, unite! I've always wanted to do that, so please indulge me. Anyway, for the uninitiated, I was borrowing a phrase from the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. It just seemed fitting to do so since the manifesto, like a book, comes under the category of reading material, and bibliophiles just love to read. But of course, this manifesto had an immense impact on human history, as it was the ideological undergird of every communist wannabe state from Cuba to China, not to mention Russia of the iron curtain era. Anyway, this excuse of a blog entry is about books. I've always loved books, and not just for their ability to transport you to seemingly parallel universes or to another world that you'll never know if not for our glorious writers. I'm also very much taken by how a new book smells, how it feels to the touch and how it promises to deliver a good read. There's so much anticipation wrapped up between the covers of a book, and I suspe...

For those into philosophy, "Heraclitus" should be a familiar name to most. After all, he's probably one of the first to say that character is fate. But I first came upon this notion during my junior college days. As part of my class' English Literature syllabus, we had read Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge ". And of course we debated at length if Henchard's character caused his rise and downfall. For a long time, I've always thought that we were destined for greatness or ignominy based on our character, and there was nothing we could do about it. I'm talking about those of us who aren't born great and who aren't likely to have greatness thrust upon us. But I was wrong, and I suspect I'm not the only one. Of course our life is an outcome of the choices we make. And our choices are grounded in our character. But we're not victims of our character because we can decide to change our character, and this is what differen...

A sky shot I took from my yard while doing my laundry. I must say it turned out quite decent ; )