This week

feels long, esp. after a nice holiday. Looking back at the pics that I took, I am surprised at how much i did this week. All I remember though is feeling tired (Ike back to waking at 4 am for a big poo) and I now have antibiotics for this cough.

Took Ike to another activity based in dainfern, he is liking all this stimulation tho he does not like baths anymore, am not sure what changed after mozambique, he just cries the whole time he is in a bath, maybe he wants to shower instead?

On the environmental front, I found a company that will pick up and recycle almost all non-organic trash. The organic stuff goes to my worms and I just placed and order for another worm farm - the worm factory and the tumbleweed composter (compost in 3 weeks!), I hope this will handle all my summer garden clippings. Next year maybe I look into how to recycle the washing machine water and solar power? For detergents we use a bacteria cleaner that eats up dirt.

My swimming pool is another pet peeve, it is high maintainence, environmentally unfriendly in a land where water is scarce and high evaporation rate and the amount of chemicals I throw into balance it, or make the silt sink (which is this shot). I have asked about turning it into a big sand pit but if I drain the water the walls will crack or something like that. This is the white elephant in our home.

Thanks for all the condolences, many asked about the funeral, if it is anything like my granddad's it would have been quite a party, or rather my memory of my granddad's funeral.... some scenes, I remember everyone is folding paper money, the stack was so big it filled a basketball court. My granddad had 4 wives, 22 children and I don't know how many grandchildren and great grandchildren. But there we were making origami gold ingots, he also had paper houses and paper cars, paper electornic goods, paper clothes, burnt as well, which led me to think of another business, kits that families can put together at the funeral as opposed to buying ready made ones. But I was disuaded by the fact that the exobitant paper things are mafia controlled and all this burning is bad for the environment, better to write a single check and burn it. Or as my dad the economist says, chinese hell or heaven is suffering from super hyperinflation.

The monk chanting was the hardest to bear, having to sit and chant for sometimes a few hours. The procession is kind of fun, the staying up and chatting with other cousins about the "good old days" when we were kids biking around the neighbourhood is probably the best part.

17 days till marcia is here! 24 days till I see chicken rice and wanton mee in KL.