Fry day

Wow – although I didn’t meet any CEOs (interviewed one by phone – does that count?), it was still a great week. Thursday was a regular busy day, but at the end of it off we went to Ang Mo Kio in the north of Singapore to eat crab! Fun!! Took the subway and a bus, crowded and jostled, and when we got there we found that our colleagues who had driven there by car were just joining a queue with a wait of 45 minutes, so we went for beers, then joined them when they had already ordered and been seated. Great! The food arrived soon, as did more beers, and we ate and drank. Left the place, went for more beers, then took a cab home. Phew!

Friday I worked at home all day to a soundtrack of Ramones and Galaxie 500. Took Zen to school in the morning, then came back and had a nap, started work at 9:00 sharp, edited, answered emails, helped out some colleagues to check stuff, arranged BBC stuff for Monday and Tuesday, then the repairmen came to give us a new living room light (previously we had a single bulb burning at the top of our cathedral ceiling not really providing adequate lighting) and a big kitchen drawer that had a ruined rollers and was very hard to pull open. Much nicer now. The shower stall is not fixed yet, maybe next week. Cool. Here’s a pic.

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New ceiling light

For dinner we had Naoko’s great “om rice”, which is a Japanese rice omelette. Yummy!!

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Rice Omelette / om rice

Peter. Zen. Om rice.

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We love Naoko's om rice!!

Peace, man. Om rice!

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Peace. Om. Rice.

After dinner we enjoyed the new lighting by playing some card games, which we haven’t done for a long time. Amazing what little light can shed.

Book reviews:

DOAWK:DD

DOAWK:DD

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days, by Jeff Kinney: Zen has been buying the Wimpy Kid stories, starting with the Second (Rodrick’s Rules) and now the fourth, Dog Days. Sooner or later he’ll get the first. As usual, the chapters are short and funny, and can be enjoyed in short pieces. Or course, it’s never really convincing that it’s a kid writing all of this – seems more like a hipster with a sense of humor, but never mind, it’s good fun, even when it’s a bit embarrassing. Check out a description of Greg’s trip to the pool:

At the town pool you have to go through the locker room before you can go swimming, and that means walking through the shower areas, where grown men are soaping down right out in the open. The first time I walked through the men’s locker room at the town pool was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life. (Cue picture of hairy men showering, with certain areas blocked by a strategically-placed table) I’m probably luck Id idn’t go blind. Seriously, I don’t see why Mom and Dad bother to try to protect me from horror movies and stuff like that if they’re gonna expose me to something about a thousand times worse. I really wish Mom would stop asking me to go to the town pool because, every time she does, it puts images in my mind that I’ve been trying hard to forget.

Besides this part, the book had a few other laugh-out-loud parts (the naming of the family dog is pretty funny, even if the dog chapter is a bit irritating/uncomfortable). The book is full of great illustrations, in particular the “hisssss” drawing that appears on the back cover as well as the beginning of the book. The book covers the start of Greg’s summer, when he tries to be a hermit because life is lame, but he quickly gets out. He also gets traumatised by watching “Hello, You’re Dead” with the story of the “muddy hand” that goes around killing people (is this some sort of Oliver Stone thing?). There’s also the Reading Is Fun club that Greg’s mum tries to organise, then some sort of nonsense around Greg working off $83 that he owes Rowley’s dad for having ordered up too many fruit smoothies at the country club.  Ooops!  Greg’s venality gets a bit over the top as he tries to start a landscaping business with Rowley with no experience or equipment.  Sure, why not.

Other funny episodes include Greg blaming society for his laziness (there’s some logic there), birthday greed, weird “friends” (FREGLEY!! “Wanna hear about my ‘hygiene issues’?”), a crazy dog-eaten birthday cake, a messed up cell phone, a pirana, delusions of grandeur, a visit to the water park, one or two “Löded Diper” stories, Greg’s sad attempt to write a comic strip, silly poolside adventures, a trip to the beach with Rowley’s family, a lame episode with a girl bike, goofy pranks that go wrong, and a silly urban camping story.

One of the undercurrents of the book is the satirization of other comic strips, such as “Li’l Cutie” and “Precious Poochie.” Greg’s relationship with his father is an awkward point in the story (and, as we see in the Father’s Day episode, his dad’s relationship with his own dad is no better), but this is the glue that holds them together, and it’s quite amusing/touching in an unusual way. Besides “Li’l Cutie”, there are other recurring themes, such as the beauty parlour that Greg goes to to catch up on his gossip, Rodrick’s beach babe photo, and also the thing about mum now carrying a camera (isn’t that all mums do these days – surveillance?).

Unfortunately, Rodrick is not a major character in this book. But that’s okay, because he gets plenty of screen time in Rodrick’s Rules.

BQ:CTWT

BQ:CTWT

Beast Quest bumper edition: Creta the Winged Terror – Zen loves reading the Beast Quest books, and as an interested father I make sure I read them too to understand what’s influencing him and to be able to take part in his conversations. I haven’t enjoyed the previous books I’ve read in the series, but this one has been one of the better ones, good enough to review at least.

In the story, Tom discovers that a plague of beetles has come to attack the kingdom, eating their way through the castle walls on their way to retrieve the Golden Armour that the evil magician needs. The story sees the return of some of Tom’s beast friends (Epos the fire bird and Arcta the snow cyclops), as they fight the disgusting, putrid beetles. The swarm has kidnapped a brave army captain, whose body is used to form the horrid Creta, a bug giant formed from millions of beetles that cannot be attacked or destroyed. The team is transported to a magical stream where they manage to figure out how to defeat the beast and return important magic objects to the kingdom to save it.

In some ways, it has some resemblance to the story told in The Mummy, with the scarab swarms, but the story is engaging and exciting enough, I’m glad I read it and would recommend it to any parent with an eight-year-old who loves action books that are not terribly violent.

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