Sojourn a journey through life

NZ Countdown

I thought it would be a good idea to get one more post up here before we leave for New Zealand. The taxi is scheduled to pick us up in another 4 hours and 13 minutes, so that means that we better finish our packing.

It seems we’re bringing a lot more stuff than we originally thought, and managed to fill up a suitcase and both of our backpacks, but that’s alright, it’ll all get tossed in the trunk as we make our way around these crazy islands.

We’re both really looking forward to the trip, and hopefully we’ll have a ton of great pictures for y’all when we get back. I’m hoping to be able to find a few LoTR type scenes that I can manage to get some pictures of, but with our itinerary as it is right now, I’m not too sure what we might bump in to.

Well, hope you all have a super great Christmas, and an awesome New Years. If anyone happens to be in Auckland for Christmas, or Queenstown for New Years, well, try to find us, cuz that’s where we’ll be.

Talk to you all soon!

Santa Clause… indeed.

Ok, as long last, and as promised, here are a few photos of one Daniel Wintschel in the role of Saint Nick himself. Um, I don’t know what else to say really. It was quite a lot of fun, despite a number of “You’re the principal” or “You’re Mr. Boal” (who happens to be the principal’s husband… as to why some of the kids thought I was the principal, who happens to be female, is as good as anyone’s guess).

For the record, a full-on Santa suit when it’s 46 degrees outside with the humidex factored in is “frickin hot”. I believe that is the correct technical term.

Holiday Parties

Dan and I had a great weekend with two different holiday parties to attend. Our first party on Friday night was at the Canadian High Commissioner to Singapore’s place. All dressed up with the secret address in hand we schmoozed with fellow Canadians over wine, horderves and desserts.

Saturday night was Oscar Night for the CIS staff party held at Raffles Marina. Across the water we saw Malyasia. This event was also fantastic. Everyone was shocked to see me with straight hair for the first time – I miss my own straightening iron! Oscars were presented throughout the evening including the Oscar I presented with Rachel – I as the tallest girl and she as the shortest. We had a fun little act we did together which received lots of laughs. I had to take my shoes off!

Both of these evenings were great fundraisers. The proceeds for Friday night’s event went to KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital. On this upcoming Saturday we’ll be involved with helping to deliver the bears collected by “Santa” last week to the children in the hospital. Saturday’s Oscars raised money for Tabitha, a house building project in Cambodia. Daniel and I added a Thai meal cooked at our place to the silent auction for that evening and were able to raise $140 for it. We also made a bid or two ourselves on some of the items. We lost out on winning the Canadian Maple syrup…but did win a gift certificate to a restaurant here in Singapore – Brewerkz. Saturday night raised enough for Tabitha to build 3 houses.

Here are our Christmas decorations in our place!

How many programmers…

…does it take to change a light bulb?

Hah! Gotcha! Just one. Me!

Well, not before I had to go downstairs to the security guard and try to borrow a ladder (our ceilings are about 11 or 12 feet, and despite me thinking I’m as tall as Carly a giant, I’m not).

The security guard seemed to not believe me when I told him I wanted to change my light bulb. He asked me three times “You change your own??!?!!?” before he finally led me to the closet where the step-ladder was. This leads me to believe that not a lot of white-trash in Singapore lift a finger to do any of their own kinda housework and stuff. But alas, that’s also (stereotypically) what I’ve observed in the past several months.

Even after I returned from the store with lightbulbs in a grocery bag, went up to our apartment, changed it, and came back downstairs with the ladder, he asked me again, “You changed it yourself?”.

At any rate, I’ve manged to change my light bulb, so I can now work late into the night as all geeky folk should.

Pictures of me dressed up as Santa Clause are coming soon, I promise!

Santa’s and such…

So yesterday I was indeed Santa Clause for a few hours at the skewl, “Merry Christmas”ing and “Ho Ho Ho”ing and such.

Carly ended up having to be my body guard for a while, because each time I tried to go from one classroom to the next, I would be viciously attacked and swarmed by 14,000,000 rabid children between the ages of 4 and 7… The bits about vicious and rabid, and 14,000,000 for that matter might be grossly overstated, however when a group of about 50-60 started chanting “SANTA CLAUSE! SANTA CLAUSE!” over and over, and quite literally did swarm me, I was beginning to wonder where exactly I had signed on the dotted line to be some sort of a cult leader

For the record, it is unbelievably hot when you’re decked out in a tshirt, pillow, second tshirt, wig, beard, santa touque, santa jacket, shorts, socks, running shoes, santa pants, santa booty covers, and santa mittens when it’s 35 degrees celsius outside with 95% humidity.

At any rate, I had a lot of fun. Later yesterday evening, Carly and I went to a fundraiser event for a women’s and children’s hospital here in Singapore, which was a small gathering at the residence of the Canadian High Commissioner. What can you say to this place except, “Wow”. Beautiful home, and a whole lot of excellent food (the pork was the bomb… Mmmm, pork. And the little mini-pumpkin-pie tarts.).

Right after we arrived our hostess (the wife of the High Commissioner, unfortunately I don’t know her name) introduced herself and ensured we had some wine. Shortly after, a man I had never seen before came by introducing himself. He asked me what it was that brought me to Singapore, I told him Carly was a teacher at the Canadian School and I had been doing some freelance software development. I politely asked him what brought him to Singapore, to which he replied “Oh, I usually just laze around at the High Commission, mostly.”. To which I wanted to reply by kicking myself in the teeth, because it was the High Commissioner himself. C’est la vie, if I’m not going to stick my foot in my mouth, who will?

Unfortunately, we don’t have any more super cool pictures for you right now, so instead I’ll show you my new chair that I got from IKEA the other day. It’s pretty awesome, really adjustable and comfy, and I needed it badly after sitting in whatever piece of junk chair I had here before. Ten hours a day in a $29 chair is NOT recommended. Oh – it’s worth noting here that when I went to check out chairs on Orchard Road, Herman Miller’s Aeron Chairs (my dream chair, which I _WILL_ own one day) cost around $2000. And that was the cheapest chair I could find. They had some other ergo-craziness that were topping out at $6000. A little beyond what I wanted to spend.

More Planning…

…not planning being parents or anything like that though. Probably wait til we get back to Canada for that. But it seemed like everyone and their dog/cat/[insert random beloved pet here] has already been making their Chinese New Year plans, and so we decided to jump on the bandwagon.

Carly has a couple extra days off, which makes for a four day weekend at the end of January, so we’ll be heading off to Bintan in Indonesia for a few days… about 3 weeks after we get back from New Zealand.

Bintan is a small island that’s a part of Indonesia which you can get to from Singapore by a short ferry ride (I think it’s 45 minutes or an hour – something like that).

And for the record, I want to maim and / or destroy people who commit credit card fraud. Don’t ask me how they got my number, but someone racked up $4000 on my card buying up Google AdWords. I’m not liable for the charges, of course, but regardless I was not impressed. I just hope that the bank manages to courier my new card to me before we head off to New Zealand in a couple weeks. What’s really aggravating is that the same thing happened to Carly (on a completely different card, one which she hadn’t even used in months) just a few weeks after we arrived here in SG. Meah.

Today I’m also off to the skewl (Carly’s skewl) to do the Santa-Clause-Dressup thing for the kids. So that should be fun… hot and sweaty, but fun.