Akai EWI 4000S

Check this out! It would be great if I had one of these. I would be able to play into the night without being complained about by my beloved wife for excessive wailing :)

Amazing the kind of effects this can have!
But the sound is still not as rich as a real saxophone.

- a salivating lion

Yamaha Tenori-On

I want one! Then I would bask in Orchard MRT with Darcy and earn lots of money. Rex got his in London for 600 pounds!

The First Meeting

Place: Fong Clinic for Women
Date: June 25th, 2008
Time: 16:33:24

We met our dearest baby bean for the very first time! Baby is the size of bean and is 8mm tall. We think this is the cutest creature we have ever seen, maybe even a bit cuter than Darcy. Here is the baby's 1st picture:


I know it's not easy to spot. Serene kept asking, "Where, where? I can't see!" But I tell you most solemnly, I saw it quite quickly when I noticed some movement in the centre of the dotted line. It was our our baby's heart beating. The most amazing thing was that it was magnified for us to see and hear!
That was the most amazing rhythm I have ever heard and I was very moved at that instant, that I could experience a new life through my own ears and eyes. Leaving the clinic, I saw the world around me with a whole new perspective: that of joy, hope and overflowing life everywhere. I will not forget the heartbeat rhythm I heard, it is one that signifies a miracle, a gift that God has given.

I will end the post with this picture:
This was the 2nd sign that baby is coming. The first was 2 weeks of mood swings from Serene and hunger pangs that kept hitting her :)

The Dog Who Loved to Sun Tan

One of the happiest feelings in the world is to watch Darcy sun tan on our balcony. I love the way he plonks himself just where the sunlight streams in. He looks so happy with himself and afterwards is just a nice pile of warm, white fur. I miss him so much during the week when he stays at my mum's.

The Ultimate Authority on Tampons

Look! I am the new authority on tampon insertion! How cool is that? Rex did the animation.

Fantastic Diving at Sipadan

The sea scape at Sipadan is lovely. Wall dives mean great visibility of 30m or more (no silt to cloud the water), even in rainy weather. Hanging Garden was a magnificent wall of brightly coloured corals of all shapes and sizes, with turtles sleeping in the crevices. Lovelier than the most intricate and ornate cathedral.

Lionfish
Quite common but always thrilling to watch and think about how majestically poisonous they are.

Mandarin Fish

We were fortunate enough to witness these tiny creatures (no bigger than 2cm) engaging in carnal pleasures amidst the grey coral rubble of Kapalai's house reef. Cheek to cheek, the happy couple rose slowly together and quick as a flash, released their embrace and darted apart. It must have afforded them great pleasure as they repeated this over and over (and over!) again!

White-tip Reef Shark
We saw so many sharks that we no longer got excited!
Normally, the dive guide clinks his tank with a metal rod to attract our attention when something interesting is up ahead. The Pavlovian diver's reaction is an increased heart rate followed by rapid finning ahead to have a closer look. In Sipadan, it reached a point where after we raced forward to look and saw it was yet another shark, we thought "Chey! It's just a shark!"(In most of the other places we've been to, if you see ONE shark during your entire trip, everyone hears about it!)

Bumphead Parrot Fish
They are amazing to watch in a grotesque sort of way. As their name suggests, they look like they've just developed a baluku from swimming into a wall. Their parrot-like beaks are for snapping off coral bits. We saw a large school of these huge 4 foot long creatures.

Chevron Barracuda
Being encircled by a school of thousands of barracuda is not something you'll forget easily. You feel hopelessly outnumbered for one, by a silver battalion with mean faces, and you know better than to aggravate them. It is an awesome experience.

Stonefish
If it looks like a stone, acts like a stone but is vaguely shaped like a fish - don't touch it!

Frogfish
These are really hard to spot - because they could easily pass off for bits of coral. They are absolutely cute. They have 4 legs, and if you prod them, they waddle away placidly!


Nudibranch: the cutest slug in the world
I love these cute little self-absorbed sea slugs that come in bright combinations of every colour. But in Sipadan where you have too many huge pelagic creatures to gape at, nudibranches are more often than not overlooked.

Turtle
I never thought of turtles as cute until I saw them asleep in rock crevices, or holding onto corals. After a particularly turtle-filled dive, the first thing Panliang said when we ascended to the water surface, his regulator barely out of his mouth, was - "The turtle's so cute! He looks like Darcy!" At that moment, I could not have loved him more.

The Camouflaging Octopus

One of the most amazing and mind-boggling creatures we saw was the camouflaging octopus. We were about 14m underwater at the Kapalai house reef when we saw this little octopus, about 25cm long, being stalked by 3 nasty-looking fish. They wouldn't let him out of their sight and blocked off all his escape routes. We hovered there for about 10 minutes, watching in awe as the octopus melted into his surroundings. Settling between a blue, spongy coral with vertical tubular protrusions on his left, and a light and dark brown rock on his right, he seamlessly became both, growing light blue moving tubes on his left and melting into the brown rock on his right.

That was one of the most amazing things I'd even seen. I really wished there and then that I had an underwater video camera. It would have been jaw-dropping if I didn't have to keep my mouth firmly clamped around my regulator to breathe. There we were, clumsy and fully dependent on our big air tank and dive gear, watching effortless underwater magic. Diving always fills me with great awe and respect for creation.