Great weekend. Friday I came back from Hong Kong at 3:10, Naoko and Zen came out to the airport to greet me and my boss, we all had lunch together. Took a cab back home, but had some bad luck – there was a bad accident on the highway that turned a 30-minute commute into a 90-minute slog. It would have taken just as long, or less, on public transit. Got home, unpacked, chilled out a bit, gave Zen his present (two Roald Dahl books: “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator”… can’t wait to re-read them myself) and then collapsed – exhausted at 9:30. I slept until 9:30 the next day.
Saturday was a day of errands – a bit of this, a bit of that, taking Zen to art class, then to his Kumon math lesson at Beauty World nearby, then home for some lunch, some chilling out when Naoko and Zen went off to his Japanese lessons downtown. I left the home around 6:30 to meet some friends at the free concert of The Observatory, which was nice (see previous blog for a full description of the show, as well as the two CDs I bought there). Got home, did stuff until late at night, which mainly included uploading photos of Hong Kong onto the blog, listening to the new CDs, and also making friends with The Observatory through their MySpace pages.
Sunday was a chillout day – I just sat around the house reading. I also had my first swim in our pool, which was nice, and Zen and I practiced sitting on the bottom of the pool like little Buddhas. Mainly I was getting my peace of mind back. It was good. I did a bit of editing work late at night, and went to sleep at the not-unreasonable hour of 1:30 AM.
Monday I did a bit of work for the company in the morning – wrote a short article – and then at 12:30 we took the bus to Hillcrest Drive and Greenwood Lane (street names that would not have been out of place in Mississauga, Ontario, where I grew up… in fact, I think we had a Hillcrest and a Greenwood!) to the Cafe Iguana restaurant where we had made a 1:30 reservation to celebrate Naoko’s birthday. It was a quiet place with only a few diners, we enjoyed the lunch special of good Mexican food and cheap frozen margueritas, as well as good Brewerkz microbrewery beer. Check out the photos below. Lots of nice places nearby. After that, we went home, I did a bit more work, Zen and I went for a swim, then we hopped on our bikes to see the Malaysia train pass by Bukit Timah train station. It’s been ages and ages since we’ve done that! Got there at 6:15, then found out that the train was scheduled to pass through at 6:45 instead. Waited around for a bit, but then the sky started getting very dark with rainclouds, so we split and got home just in time to save ourselves from getting drenched in a tropical downpour. What an adventure!
My guitar setup in the new place. Cool elephant, huh?
Naoko’s belated birthday lunch.
Zen in Naoko’s shades.
A less attractive pose of Zen.
Does this guy look like me or what?
