After the trip to Chengdu, YowCH and Grace were looking forward to the numb-and-spicy hot-pot again, and we found the Chuan Jiang Hao Zi restaurant at West Coast Plaza (next to church) with the hot-pot on the menu. Last night, we had dinner with mum and dad, enjoyed a good sample of the Sichuan hot-pot buffet.
Not as good as what we had in Chengdu, but close enough. For reference, here’s what we had in Chengdu (click on photo to get to the page):
On 14 Feb, while waiting for YowCH after school, David was running around and fell onto a concrete kerb. Looked bad, but nothing serious. In 3 days, the wound healed.
With the HTC Touch Cruise 09 coming to 2 years, the aging problems became quite unbearable: dead vibrator, sms not waking the phone from sleep-mode, erratic battery life and sudden shut-downs. YowCH moved from Windows Mobile on the Touch Cruise to Android 2.2 (Froyo) on the HTC Desire, bought from Singtelshop at Junction 8 on 12 Feb 2011. Nice phone, but took quite some time to import the data. With a 2-year phone contract, the $700 phone was only $98, with free ‘egg’ shell and screen protector (worth $25).
The next day 13 Feb 2011, Grace managed to arrange with a seller on eBay and got an iPod Touch (G4) for $293 (shops selling at $328).
Here, you can see Joseph playing with it.
We had a Chinese New Year dinner with eFG at the Leongs’ place on Friday 11 Feb 2011.
Again we did not travel back to PJ for CNY, YowCH’s parents and sister Loon come to Singapore instead. Here’s the page for CNY 2011.
Here’s the photo just as they left for Malaysia on 5 Feb 2011:
Grace’s grandma passed away peacefully on 23 Jan 2011. We went back to Pontian on 26 Jan evening to attend the funeral on 27 Jan 2011.
The newpaper obituary:
She was buried next to grandpa in a graveyard near Ulu Chor.
Updated 19 Feb 2011:
YowCH had a burn on the neck due to a gust of strong wind blowing up some burning joss paper (right after the photo of the flames above). The burn took off the outer layer of skin immediately, but wasn’t deep. Here’s the progressive natural healing over 3 weeks (no ointments or other medications):
Just an update in the middle of the month. We had finally printed photos, since Feb 2010! The total for the stack was about $1,100.00!
Here, you see Joseph practicing a new trick, mouth stretching:
We joined Yan and PQ in celebrating Siu Hei’s first birthday last weekend:
Finally, YowCH, Esther and David had a walk this morning with 3 of YowCH’s colleagues at Wessex Estate for some hobby photography:
We have a small dedicated page here or you can click on the photo above.
Thank God for watching over David from birth until now, he has just entered primary school today. We pray for him to be a good student at school and learn to be a useful person to society.
Here’s David and Esther after first day of school (yes, David’s bag is larger and red)
We had dinner at Sin Hoi San, Tiong Bahru, last evening with Grace’s parents. Apart from some normal noodles and fried rice, we ordered two interesting dishes:
Stinky beans or petai (Parkia speciosa) rice:
Garlic fried mantis shrimps (stomatopods):
Each mantis shrimp weights about 200grams and measures about 25cm (10″) long. A mantis shrimp is not a prawn, a shrimp, a mantis or a lobster.
