quick update and more photos; too tired to blog properly. we bought our baby girl a new red collar, and a red leash to match, this past week. this evening, we also brought her downstairs and watched her go crazy in the way that only puppies can.

we haven't brought her down in a few days - the last time she was unleashed on the grounds, she promptly swatted her green plastic ball into the pool. she then galloped after it and came to a screeching halt besides the pool. after sniffing at the water, she decided that she didn't want to get her paws wet, and turned around to return to her parents (us).

unfortunately, she turns like she does everything else - clumsily. imagine if you will : she decided to pivot on her front paws, which, rather unintelligently, she kept perched on the edge of the pool. predictably, she promptly fell straight in. and sank like a stone. no sporting prodigy, is our daughter. strangely enough, she seemed to find the episode great fun even though the pool is usually cold enough to keep her parents from swimming in it.

i also spent 20 minutes trying to cut her toe nails this evening. for the longest time, and to my great chargin, i could only find 3 toenails on one foot. the missing 2 eventually turned up, but i gave up after 20 minutes and her front paws will just have to wait until tomorrow evening.


our handsome girl with her new red collar


our handsome girl trying frenetically to claw off her new red collar.


surrounded by her toys


and asleep on my lap, after playing with said toys


continuing her slumber with her paw trapped between the coils of her spring-action bunny. which my mother describes as her 'bolster in the shape of a pink worm'. did you know puppies pee in their sleep?

chelsea's didier drogba on the world cup stage, illustrating that he has wholly imbibed the spirit in which his club plays football. have an argument with a fellow professional? grab his gonads to demonstrate your displeasure.

i vaguely remember the tabloids a while back, reporting (complete with pictoral evidence and all) that chelsea's players all go for brazilian waxes, and have nary a hair on their bodies. this carries on that disturbing trend.

possibly titillating if you're gay, but disturbing for the rest of us.

i was chatting to one of my colleagues, the great fairy, a couple of days ago. we had another one of those exchanges that deserves to be noted down, for posterity.

halfway during our conversation, i mentioned that i was bringing sahara to the vet. the great fairy pondered this bit of information for a while, staring at the (extremely dirty) ceiling, with an increasingly dreamy mien.

"did you know that one of the recent miss singapore universes is a vet?", he asked.

preoccupied pause

"i have a magazine featuring her. she did a photospread in it."

second preoccupied pause, accompanied by what might, for the less fastidious, be described as a beatific grin

"that was... quite some photospread." this observation was accompanied by a sagacious nod.

third preoccupied pause

"i think i lent the magazine to one of my friends. i should get it back."

fourth preoccupied pause

"i think i was serviced by her once." (for the record, since one of my other colleagues, pripapus, has, just today, baselessly accused me of being prone to exaggeration, these were his exact words. and, again for the record, every one of my entries is based entirely on fact. which i think is way more blog-worthy than fiction could ever be. i do not fabricate these happenings. they just seem to occur.)

fifth preoccupied pause, till he saw me looking at him strangely and replayed what he had just said

"not me, my guinea pig," he hastily clarified (likely story. he then went on to explain to me the history and genealogy of this guinea pig, to give him credit.)

subsequent to this, he made an attempt to change topic. unfortunately, his brain was still exalting in its little reverie.

"are you bringing sahara back to mount pleasure?" he enquired. (he would make an excellent politician, for he immediately clarified that he meant the vet practice, mount pleasant, and that he had gotten its name wrong because his mother happens, most coincidentally, to live in a development named mount pleasure.)

the great fairy is leaving for bigger and better endeavours. life will be a lot less amusing when he is gone from the office. for his sake, may his future pets be fraught with ill-health.


sahara, fresh from a bath.




our sleepy girl.


everytime she soils her pen, she gets confined in this little box while we change out the newspapers and wipe down the pen. naturally, she doesn't seem to like this very much, and insists on poking her head out to see why we aren't responding to her whines. if we don't do a sufficiently quick job, she shits in the box, and leaps around in it, just to teach us a lesson.

when i watched these two clips, i laughed so hard that i ended up slumping off my chair, onto the floor and triggering off an athsma attack. i had to use my inhaler. and i'm not exaggerating one iota.

you probably won't find them as funny as i did, if only because i take an inexplicable (and slightly deranged) delight in toilet humour. still, they are, without doubt, worth a watch. keep on past the beginnings of each, which are slightly incomprehensible. it's worth it.

it's been a crazy week. i've actually embarked on writing an entry four times prior to this one. but a combination of work and whimpering puppy cries have conspired to ensure that i never got past the first couple of lines.

having a puppy is much like having a baby in many ways. the cries in the middle of the night that wake you up to trudge downstairs to comfort her. in multiplicity. having to take precious leave to babysit; being unable to go out for dinner without worrying that she's found a way to ingest the centrespread of the business times. having to clean up mountain ranges worth of puppy crap and oceanic expanses of puppy pee - and the most potent of all, festering amalgams of puppy pee and puppy poo treked by puppy paws all over the kitchen. bet you didn't know that cocker spaniels have such long ears that they leave twin trails of pee behind them after they gambol through pee puddles. on either side of a tiny pattern of brown, wet, puppy paw prints.

the major difference between having a puppy and having a baby (having as in having to deal with, as opposed to birthing), as i see it, is that babies can wear diapers. puppies can't. if i had the luxury of making a choice, i'd rather wrestle a rabid mongoose blindfolded than do this toilet training exercise. or at least i think i'd go with the mongoose, given that i don't really know what a mongoose looks like, or what exactly having rabies entails. the only symptoms i know offhand, accurate or not, are frothing at the mouth and going mad. neither of which seems particularly unpleasant, in theory at least. especially not when compared to soaking up cakes of pee-soaked poo with kitchen towels.

to think i almost brought my wife to banyan tree, bintan, for our wedding anniversary, instead. one of those defining moments in one's life.

but, on the bright side, even though sahara is somewhat like a furry, fecal-producing fire hydrant, she's an adorable (albeit smelly) furry, fecal-producing fire hydrant. i just had this telephone conversation with my mother, who popped by my place to drop by some stuff. my mother, incidentally, hates dogs with a vengence.

mother : "she hasn't pee-ed or poo-ed yet."

me : "good. is she ok?"

mother : "yes. she responds to every name you call her."

me : "?"

turns out that my mother had been prancing in and out of the kitchen, calling sahara every name she could think of to see if she would come. apparently, my attention-seeking (and confused) baby girl responds to 'elizabeth taylor' with the same enthusiasm as she does to 'sahara'. my mother's opinion of dogs as intellectually-challenged creatures has been vindicated.

more photos, till next time. she's growing at an alarming rate. maybe i should stop feeding her.


sahara and her new best friend, mr. monkey.




sahara and her bedding - which has to be changed twice a day because it inevitably gets contaminated with strange stains and smells. wonder where those come from.



freshly bathed sahara, under a freshly laundered blanket.

one year ago, on this day, my wife and i got married. today, we welcomed a new addition to the family. we also cleaned up 4 poos, and 7 pees, in a staggeringly exhausting evening.

will write more when i have the energy. but for now, meet sahara, our baby girl cocker spaniel.









video of sahara in action :

hot tip for the betting man. stumbled across this a while back. i don't read german. but - pictures, thousand words - one gets the general idea of which country is the hot favourite to win this world cup. and every world cup. as well as which country is not. it's all about the right kind of motivation.



and for the geeks out there who prefer gaming to, well, brazilian babes, a computer simulation of the entire tournament carried out by electronic art's 2006 fifa world cup computer game saw the czech republic edging out brazil in the final.

first game kicks off at midnight tonight. macs 24-hour delivery hotline is 67773777.

nicked this off a friend's blog. it's absolutely hilarious.

i have spent the past few days on mc, unable to sleep. not due to insomnia, but rather due to the fact that i have been coerced into waking up at strange hours by my wife. for this joy i can thank my sister-in-law, who recently returned from the states and introduced my wife to the delights of ebay. given the natural order of things, my ankle is now left to recuperate propped up against the subwoofer. the rest of my appendages are splayed out at the computer, ensuring that my wife's ferragamo shoes are not cravenly misappropriated by a faceless third party with the temerity to outbid her.

i am gladdened to report that i have won 2 out of 3 auctions that i have been instructed to win, and that my wife is a proud owner of 2 pairs of new shoes - ferragamo and gucci. unfortunately, when i am not thinking straight as a result of insufficient sleep, my competitive instincts trump my sensibilities. i.e., i only won the gucci shoes by bidding US$30 more than my permitted maximum, in increments of $2.50. but - take that, ratita0123, newbird13 and clncms! especially ratita0123, whom i beat by a princely sum of US$0.01.

chances are, ratita0123 is just another poor sod is also sitting in front of the computer, two browser windows open, staring at the second counter of a digital clock, waiting for the auction to run down so he can trump all other bidders with a, literally, last-second bid on behalf of his significant other. however, he's probably located in the states, and doesn't have to be awake at strange hours in order to secure the closing of the bid.

i thus have no sympathy whatsoever for ratita0123, and gloat unreservedly at his tragic ebay-incompetence. when the shoes eventually arrive, i will take a picture of them and send him a short commiserative note with that picture attached. noting, by the by, how comfortable and elegant they are, and what a bargain they were.

even more amusingly, ratita0123 has no feedback from previous auctions whatsoever - and presumably registered just to bid on this pair of shoes. hm now i'm starting to feel slightly bad. maybe i should offer to sell the shoes on to him out of the kindness of my heart. say, for a small US$20 administrative fee.


well, at least now i don't have to worry about finding an anniversary present.

the rest of my family brought pizza over to my place for dinner tonight, which was a nice surprise. over dinner, my sister informed me that she had lunch with one of her friends, who inquired as to why i had stopped blogging, stating that she had been checking my blog for fresh posts everyday, but to no avail.

i am blessed with numerous and varied talents, as well as prodigous quantities of empathy and big-heartedness to go along with those talents. since my noble character cannot stand to see a fellow human being left disappointed, here i am again, stepping bravely up to the plate.

in truth, i've been rather busy. what with work, the nba playoffs, my ongoing (and, sadly, quite dismal) attempt to master swimming free-style, etc. plus, i'm finding blogging a slightly less amusing distraction than previously. having said that, i'm on mc the next few days, and since i've busted my ankle so bad i can't possibly go to the gym - or do anything other than sit or lie about - i should be able to churn out at least a couple of entries.

while i'm at it, the ankle hurts. landed on someone's foot while trying to grab a rebound (basketball, i'm talking. not girls.) - and heard a very loud crack. the most annoying thing about the whole incident is that i'm quite light, and the bugger i landed on didn't even feel me landing on his foot. at the very least he could have suffered some momentary discomfort. anyhow, i'm pretty sure a ligament is gone. last time i did this in jc i heard two cracks, and my leg swelled up to just under my knee. this time, at least, the inflammation is restricted to the ankle itself.

meanwhile, in liberia, school pupils have been told that they will face criminal prosecution and possible imprisonment if caught cheating in their exams. and i thought my teachers were anal retentive.

oh, and in case you were wondering, the title of this post has no relevance to anything.