David is 12 years old.
Posted on March 24th, 2016 by yowch
For David’s 12th birthday, we ate at Great World City.
He is 12 now.
Trip to Taiwan 12-20 March 2016
Posted on March 22nd, 2016 by yowch
We had a 1 week trip to Taiwan, mostly in the North and East. click on photos below for our trip records.
Freeze maker – Yonanas
Posted on March 5th, 2016 by yowch
Grace bought a frozen fruit grinder that makes sorbet or smoothies for $40 (usual price $99). The Yonanas classic machine makes smoothies from frozen fruits.
Here you see Joseph grinding honeydew.
We have also tried banana and mangoes, and will continue to experiment.
Esther’s new laptop
Posted on February 28th, 2016 by yowch
After Grace got her Lenovo Miix 2, the Acer AspireOne (2009) was given to Esther. But the Acer was really rather slow and not too effective, and with a dying battery. So Esther asked for a newer laptop. We searched around and found a good deal in the Asus TP200SA, with several good features: Intel N3050 processor with 2GB RAM, 11.6″ 1366×768 10-points touch-screen, built-in 64GB memory, light-weight and low-power (8 hrs on battery), tablet mode, decent processor and memory, USB2, USB3 and USB3.1 (type-C) ports, micro HDMI, Micro-SD slot and full keyboard with touch-pad. The dark-blue unit costs $499 and runs on Windows 10. Comes with 3 years free anti-virus.
We bought a 64GB micro-SD card to function as a built-in data hard drive.
Here’s a look at the keyboard details
The dark-blue cover and body is rather nice.
Unfortunately, there is no bundled office software, so we downloaded and installed Apache Openoffice. Esther paid out of her savings half of the total cost for the laptop and accessories.
Weekend updates
Posted on February 14th, 2016 by yowch
After church on Saturday, we had dinner with Grace’s parents at Old Street Bak Kut Teh at ARC (Alexandra Retail Centre). The food is costly, but tasty. Grace had her favourite tea, Small Bitter-sweet Moon (小月甘) which is previously called Xiao Ye Gan (小叶甘). Too bad the furniture design of this brand of Bak Kut Teh is not very good as the iPad for ordering is stuck to only one side of the table.
Samuel was asked to work with parents to build a guitar for craft. We assigned siblings Esther and David instead.
The shoebox guitar can actually make sounds.
YowCH wanted to get back into sports-mode after the 4 weeks of travelling and eating for TYLin KL Annual Dinner, TYL Chongqing Annual Dinner and CNY holidays and feasts. On Sunday, at the swimming class, he swam 500m in 15 minutes, then in the afternoon, while the boys trained soccer, he ran 1.5km (short run only, very hot day) in 8’40″.
1/10 violin, David’s basketball match
Posted on February 12th, 2016 by yowch
YowCH visited Salvation army and saw a very good condition 1/10 violin for only $30. It is a Eurostrings 200 (about $230 new).
He bought it for Samuel, but Samuel will still need to grow more before being able to use this 1/10 violin.
David’s school team played against Holy Innocent on Friday 12 Feb, and YowCH took leave from work to watch the game with Esther and Joseph. While Gan Eng Seng Primary School lost the game (17-42), David played well.
Chinese New Year 2016
Posted on February 10th, 2016 by yowch
We went back to YowCH’s parents’ place in PJ on Saturday, 6 Feb and returned to Singapore on Monday, 8 Feb (1st day of CNY). Then we went to Grace’s parents place on Tuesday, 9 Feb (2nd day of CNY). Please click on the photos for the page.
David’s alternate basketball jersey
Posted on February 3rd, 2016 by yowch
This is the alternate basketball jersey of David’s school team, white instead of the blue set.
David’s fracture and YowCH’s TYLin China dinner at CQ
Posted on January 31st, 2016 by yowch
David had a fracture in his right hand middle finger when he played basketball on Friday 29 Jan.
He will be out of action for basketball for 2 weeks and will miss some of his league games.
In the mean time, YowCH is away in Chongqing China for TYLin China office annual dinner from 28-31 Jan. Click on the photos below for the page:
Weekend swim, meeting Phans and playground
Posted on January 24th, 2016 by yowch
Esther had school prefect camp over this weekend, so she stayed over in her school.
David went to youth service early on Saturday, leaving Joseph adn Samuel to play in Sorrento pool with yowCH while Grace was knitting.
This is Joseph’s dive.
And this is Samuel’s dive (actually, YowCH threw him):
He loves being thrown into the water!
For dinner, we met up with the Phans (from Taiwan) and Wei Yeu who is in Singapore, and yowCH’s sister for dinner at Tunglok Signatures. Nice time for the families.
Lastly, on Sunday, at the wedding reception of Grace’s colleague, the boys had some playground fun, before going for football.
