Gimme A Break

Yesterday was a record-breakingly crazy day for me. Yes, there’s busy and then there’s busy. I started my day at the gym. After a hour-long workout, I came home, checked my emails and then it was time to get lunch ready before the kids came home from school.

Then I was off to pick my girls. We had lunch at home and then we were off to visit a relative at the nursing home. From there, I went straight to pick up my son from college.

We came home, rested for an hour and I was out the door again to drive my daughter to her friend’s and back. I had a hurried dinner at home and was out with my son to an event he had to attend at the mall.

We got home at close to 11pm and didn’t get to bed till midnight. Gosh… talk about crazy!

• where’s the real lunch?
• a day in the life of a mom
• one big blur of a week
• cold, sneezy, hungry, sleepy
• wild woman

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These weekends, I’m being a good girl and staying home more, cooking more and eating in more. The kids aren’t complaining so I take that as a good sign.

With the prices of things going up, it seems every time I go out I end up spending more than I want to. Suddenly I’d remember that I need to buy this or that, not big things but the little things do add up.

Let’s face it, for many of us, money doesn’t grow on trees so we got to watch it. It’s also a good lesson for the kids to learn to be more thrifty. I can foresee that with gas prices going up, everything else is just going to follow suit.

• work hard but won’t spend
• rushing to school
• a day in the life of a mom
• the stumbling cook
• the black hole… that was popcorn

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My son and I were walking past a promotional booth at the mall today. The MC was pulling up people randomly from the crowd to answer a question about their product and win prizes.

All of a sudden, the MC stopped us in our tracks, pointed the microphone at my son and asked him a question. Of course we had no idea what was going on but my son gave the correct answer and won a keychain, a fridge magnet and a pen!

Small prizes, yes but we were practically jumping for joy. We’ve never done anything like this before and we certainly didn’t expect to win!! Yay!!

• not getting to watch the Olympics sucks
• how to vary your menu
• you can bid 4 prizes
• ungrateful B’s
• can you keep up?

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I’m so proud of my daughter for rescuing a little bird that was trapped on our window ledge. She heard the chirping and went to investigate.

True enough, there was a little bird struggling to get unstuck from the window. It was a good thing she found him and he wasn’t too badly injured. She was rather sad to see him fly away though.

• gotta have that cake
• fishing for shirts
• strength from a cactus
• gone!
• that elusive turkey

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When it’s hazy like this, just going outside the house is like walking into a wall of smoke and leaving the windows open ushers in lots of little particles of dust.

It seems like I’m dusting and sweeping all day long and still there’s a layer of dust enveloping everything. Yuck.

I honestly don’t know what it will take to get the house clean. I’ve tried everything short of hiring a bunch of steam cleaners to do the dirty work. If the haze continues, I might consider moving out of town .

• hot weather garb
• sparkling clean car, yeah right
• borrow but never return
• due for a car wash
• how to keep your home cool

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Well, it looks like the haze may be making its way back here. It’s either that the open burning of forests has started again, or that the weather’s been super-hot in the day and cool at night because of the rains.

Frankly I don’t mind the sun and the rain as much as I mind the haze. I can’t open my windows for fear of letting in this horrible smoky smell. Yet I have to, simply because of how stuffy it gets inside the house after a while.

We used to have one of those air purifiers around for days like these. But I lent it to a friend and that was the last I saw of it. Don’t you just hate it when people borrow stuff and never return them?

• thankful for a cooler spell
• haze fighter cleans the air
• hot weather garb
• dusty everything
• haze time again

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If it’s one thing I’ve learnt from doing my groceries on a Sunday night, it’s that I couldn’t have picked a worst time. I don’t know what it is that makes people more desperate on a Sunday night.

Maybe it has to do with the next day being a working day, a school day. The supermarket shelves were near empty and it seemed everyone was in a hurry and quite rude, to be honest.

For weeks now, I’ve been saying I won’t do my groceries on weekends any more. And I haven’t for a long time. It’s just that I’ve been so busy these past few weeks that I’ve gone back to doing it on weekends. Big mistake.

• why you should shop on weekdays if you can
• rain spell
• how to reduce back-to-school stress (1)
• ten hours sleep
• home more

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We just got back from a drive out to the boonies where we’d been invited to a party. It’s in a new suburb that’s very popular with the thirty-something’s because of its resort living concept.

Personally I can’t see what’s so attractive about the place. It’s out in the middle of an industrial area surrounded by factories and criss-crossed by a couple of highways.

There’s nothing here, I said, we’re miles from civilization. DH was quick to point out that we could actually see the highway from where we were standing.

Yes, I argue, but highways are just roads leading in from civilization. There are no malls, no schools, none of the conveniences we enjoy where we live. So I could hardly call it a very civilized place.

• sunny days
• driving in the driving rain
• island vacation (1) – rooms with views
• with a pinch of salt
• trawling the newest mall

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Recently I saw an uncle of mine wearing a watch that looked similar to this one here. Of course, I had no idea it was a medical ID watch. I mean, who would’ve known?

It looks just like any other trendy watch to me. Isn’t it amazing how medical id tags have evolved to such fashion statements?

I thought he was joking when he told me its true function. It would be so much easier to convince someone to wear this than some bulky, metallic badge that used to be the standard years ago.

• the necklace
• the watch master
• great timing for a watch
• medical professionals gone fashionable
• fashion on the run

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Strangely, when I was growing up, I used to imitate other people’s handwriting quite a bit. Just for the heck of it. Like if my friends had small handwriting and if I thought that was cute, I’d be influenced to write smaller too. And so it was with my daughter.

She started writing miniscule. She thought her handwriting was really neat and cute, but her teachers weren’t impressed though. One of them joked that pretty soon, all the teachers would need magnifiers to read her homework or they’d go blind!!

So she promised to start writing bigger. Now her handwriting is huge enough that even the blind can read! A humongous improvement, says her teacher!

• stuffed
• happily swimming
• noddy on the road
• eleven golds and counting
• told you so, boss

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