The Last Day

August and my last day of being in this house begins with a long, seemingly endless shower. It is so gentle and long that for once the tropical birds are also singing whilst its raining. I can hear a woobly bird very very distantly.

After all those bucolic, peaceful thoughts, a giant moth the size of my palm suddenly flew into my room, resulting in panic and screaming. Mike had to help me chase it out. He opened the window to let it out. "How strange," I said, "in all this time living here I have never thought to open the window before..."

Birds and Earthquakes

So apparently a bird flew in and shat on our Kitchen table. Unfortunately Kent cleaned the table before I could come down to take a picture of it. So this is purely anecdotal. Anyway we are also constantly besieged by fruit flies downstairs. They will go to far as to fly headlong into a frying pan full of hot oil, frying up and dying instantly and causing me to have to discard the entire pan of oil because I am superparanoid about food hygiene like that. WHY FRUIT FLIES, WHY?????

I also gave a call to the National Environmental Agency earlier this week to lodge a complaint report of "earthquake tremors" coming from the construction site of Vacanza@East not more than 150 metres from us. I'll bet they are often exceeding the allowed sound limits, gathering from the fact that they have installed a noise monitor not more than a few metres from my window - so they must be trying to cover their asses in case of NEA checks by showing that they have noise monitors around the neighbouring estates. And I know its usually quite useless to report noise violations, because the men will probably stop for a while when the NEA officers come, and then just resume another time because they simply have to finish the work. But the tremors and quaking effect it was having on our apartment in an old building was really the last straw. They followed up with another call today, but I don't expect the construction or quaking to stop. I'm just glad that the sounds haven't scared all the birds away, since they're clearly still living in the tree next to my window, and coming into our kitchen to take a shit on our table.

Sitting bird

There's a little bird that likes to sit on the railing outside my window...
I'm not sure how birds manage to balance, but they do it, with their fat bottoms

Things I found on a walk around the neighbourhood

I have just moved to a new house in Lengkong Empat. A blog I had recreated for my previous house at Rowell Road featured a picture of my rabbit toy sitting on the window ledge looking out; here the same is happening, except now Kobain the rabbit is accompanied by his doppleganger, Cobain the cactus. As the construction noise was quite loud but the weather looked lovely outside, I went for a little walk around the block. I hoped to find the path to the overhead bridge across the PIE.



The House.



Some assorted pots.



A series of clothing racks standing in the distance.



The source of the godawful racket.



The source of the godawful racket, shielded from view by some lovely plants.



A construction noise monitoring device from "Straits Construction Singapore".



A Flowering Cannonball Tree



A useful if not alarming chart of 12 large breed dogs that must be muzzled in Public Places



A sign for the Park indicating that it is an Interim Park for Temporary Use only.
Don't worry, I won't use the park for too long. Temporary only.



A banana tree.



A discarded bag in the grass, full of flowery braided women's belts.



A POSB cash machine next to a sleepy industrial estate canteen. A useful find.
It is only 5 minutes away - a small jog up a hill along Chai Chee Lane.



A snail, some squashed plants, and a housefly.

I did not find the overhead bridge to the PIE but maybe next time I will.