episode 2: downtown east with The Brother! (not the big one. the skinny, cool, smartass one.)

:D

suffice to say that tomorrow, after the 6 hour long screamingscreAMINGSCREAMING session, i think i'll have no more voice left. recurrent laryngeal nerve palsy here i come :D

anyway i think it's quite senseless to try to give a blowbyblow account of what we did, so here's the incredibly concentrated itinerary:
10am - wake up... VERY LATE. haha. made off for pasir ris via the long mrt route cos i thought there'd be seats. WRONG. even later. haha.

12pm - hit orange julius at escape theme park for a drink and rehydration before the adrenaline kicks in and symapthetic overdrive occurs, whereupon the ADH overload just kills any idea of thirst. haha. the triple berry was reported to be very satisfactory... the mango chiller was a tad too sweet. haha.

12.15pm - 1st ever theme park ride for nana, trial warmup for bro. looks bloody innocuous and tame, just a row of choochootrains on a teeny, teeny wireframe going at abt 30kmph. try it yourself... the accelerations, turns and swoops make things WAAAAAY different when one is trapped in the cart than when one is placidly criticising from the ground. gave brief thought about calling up the insurance agent and checking the last will and testament thing. haha :D

12.30pm - "Strike while things are HOT!!!!" proclaimed my brother. so we tried the inverter. i died like 3 times in 5mins. crap, just thinking about it now makes my head spin and gives me vertigo. haha. screamed my larynx out. and seriously, seriously thought about the insurance. haha.

12.30 to 6pm - went on the 360deg cup thing called flipper, the rainbow ride that swings this busload of people up 4 storeys high and tosses them down forcefully again, the haunted house, the lie-down-and-play-superman ride, THE PIRATE SHIP THE PIRATE SHIP THE PIRATE SHIP (i SERIOUSLY understood what it meant by people with heart problems please refrain from taking this ride), the daytona go-kart (lost to bro... shucks. but accelarating down the slope was uber fun in a concussion sort of way), the inverter again, the game stalls (won a totally totally adorable puffer fish... the rest were crap. haha.), more pirate ship, flipper, inverter... you get what i mean. in the end we lost count of the times we rode each ride, the amount of screaming chalked up, the winner of the no-hands-scream-OLE competition (i was an idiot for suggesting to have no hands for the inverter. WHO THE HECK WAS I KIDDING????) and eventually, our names and addresses. lolx. it was a blur. a very very scary, heart-stopping blur. haha. but every single ride was a hoot. after we managed to stop sweating and quaking from the vertigo and fear. haha :D

after all the excitement (understatement of the year) we indulged in subway!!!!! subway club rocks. and their cookies rock!!!! :D we luvluv subway. wanted the waffles but i was too stuffed to even talk coherently, so we're KIV-ing it til we come back for wild wild wet next week :D

then i got expensiveexpensive ben and jerry's S'MORES for church cell outing!!!! (cheaper at cheers lorh...) and we played heart attack :D where jackie had magical fingers and slapped kunfu 3 times!!!!!!! :D haha. too bad we didn't have a forfeit... haha. the chicken and pizza was nice! but i was seriously too full to eat anymore than a little of each :P faith gave us all a lift home - ANGELANGEL luvluv faith. haha :D if she didn't we'd all be cinderellas.

okay. so conclusion of today - my brother is the lamest human being on earth. and he's a recalcitrant liar about the "not scary la"-ness of theme park rides. and i scream less like a gal than some BOYS who sat behind us on the inverter! yes. they squeal like girls. really. and YESSSSS nana managed to stifle a scream for the entire duration of an inverter ride on the 3rd try!!!!! so did my bro... i vaguely remember yelling at him halfway through the infinite ride: "scream u bugger, SCREAM!!!!" so that i could scream without being a loser :D haha.

here's the pics! too tired to give commentary larh so just enjoy the pics!!!! :D

okay i can't resist.

mister fish has thyrotoxicosis, people! :D

note the gross exopthalmos, lid retraction, proptosis, chemosis and opthalmoplegia.

he also has saggy crumpled fins/spikes from being squashed in captivity with his fellow fishies in the rattan net!

bro says he wants to iron mister fish's spikes to make him look more fearsome with sharp pointy spikes. lolx.

you look a bit better if you were on a sashimi plate with some wasabi...

guess which one has smaller brains! :D

cool man.

cool, man.

another inmate to woodbridge.

hyukhyuk :D

hahaha!~

for once nana has peekchas!

PEEKCHAS!!!!!!!!!!!! speak a thousand words. not that their garrulous quibbling nature makes them any less likeable than plain ole lexicology.

so here we go..... wednesday! 4.6.08 :D out to see the cats and dogs with jerlyn... which became a cross-island marathon to vivocity to watch narnia!!!!!! and the canine residents of pet safari instead. no SPCA cos it's seriously a deathwish to attempt to lug a 7 yr old kid who has more energy than a brood of chickens on amphetamines from yishun to serangoon. yes.

so we trooped to vivo, where we were unabashedly accosted by a couple of overenthusiastic promoters for this aromatherapy inspired skincare range with some funny tri-numerical name (i really can't rmb... probably some spinoff cresting on the success of royston tan's numerical film delights). the funny thing was that the lady went bumbling right away to jerlyn and asking her where mummy's bringing her to and which hand of mummy's she'd like to see whitened on the spot. i was seriously trying SO HARD to contain the effervescence in me cos all the CO2 was threatening to bubble out from my bloodied alveoli from the funnyness of being called her mum and the sheer insult of it :D but it's really obvious that promoter schools nowadays teach them to hardsell by the children method - tackle the kid, and the incessant tantrums and MUMMYPLEASEMUMMYPLEASE works like a charm. but anyway i explained my relation to my poor sis, who was being charmed off her pants by the uncle with the amazing Singapore Pools 4D ball shaking machine. haha. it was a instant win lucky draw thing, and i guess they made my sis play so i could be distracted for a few minutes to listen to their rabid spiel on the benefits of smelling the crushed essence of dead flowers. too bad they didn't realise they were speaking to an incredibly dense woman who has never deigned to buy cosmetic products for her incredibly bad skin and besides, had absolutely no money. haha :P too bad then. i whisked jerlyn off once she shook the ball out of the noisy rattling cage and took her for the movie!

but before the beautiful world of narnia overtook our visual field, here's the pre-movie ben&jerry's icecream treat :D

so this is the legendary cow that provides ALL the milk needed to make the legendary ben&jerry's icecream. NOT.

:D

pretty cute to make the cow lure customers into the store, eh :D well me and jerlyn needed no extra encouragement... we fairly stalked into the shop like determined, commissioned commandoes trying to storm a brood of refugees.

this is what someone who anticipates consuming some ben&jerry's magical confection in the very near future generally looks like.

there we go!

strawberry cheesecake, chocolate fudge, and the free promotion jamaican pineapple.

p.s. we REALLY didn't like the pineapple. it was cloyingly sweet, unfortunately... and was like glorified shards of syruppy ice. so we endeavoured to eat our 2 chosen scoops buried underneath by digging trenches around, under and through the free scoop. which was quite funny :D

hesitate no more!

yumyumyum!

*burp*

the 2 dumbdumbs who have never seen, eaten or beheld ben&jerry's in all its frozen glory before.

grinning like... well. dumbdumbs.

heh :D

okay so after that we went to the super comfy, super spacious, super plush red velvety cinema hall that hosted the world of the narnians! it was incredibly cold though :P (reign of the ice queen is over??? hello???) and the impossibly intelligent miss jerlyn tan brought a cardigan that had many holes in a knitted pattern that totally offered ZILCH suffrage from the biting cold.

so we took turns sitting on our hands, which evoked giggles from her. haha.

OH YEAH. and jerlyn has this totally hilarious and malu-ating habit of shouting like a hard-of-hearing old woman when she's listening to music on earphones or when she's surrounded by DIGITAL DOLBY SOUND. (on the mrt - IF YOU NEED ANYTHING JUST CALL ME OKAY JIEJIE!!! *cue 10,000 people turning to look at the source of the booming voice* and at the movies - WHERE IS THE TRAIN GOING JIEJIE!!!!!! *cue jiejie stuffing popcorn into her mouth and glancing nervously backwards at other moviegoers*)

and after the movie we went to kick water at the rooftop pool! well she did anyway. i took a video of her not doing very much, just self-consciously dragging her feet through the liquid and giving up in 5mins. haha. so we went for lunch! after getting money from my depleted account :D and discovering a pair of doors that lead to nowhere! next to the posb in harbourfront centre. which totally amused our little girl as i queued for the cash :D haha. we partook of BK's gloriously fat-saturated food, and while i struggled to finish transferring the contents of the tray to my stomach, i let loose the little gal to play in the playground. haha. and then it was toys r us time! :D since i promised her we'd go either to the arcade or toys r us... guess it was literally a win by the one nearest the "moonlit waters" :D jin4 shui3 lou2 tai2 xian1 de2 yue1 :) got her a pretty cure tamagotchi thingy that cheered her up like she struck lottery twice over :D and then we took the train home, where she slept like a babe. apparently richard clayderman and his piano really knock out her neurones, or else she was just plain exhausted from all the shopping and excitement :)

another spastic picture :D courtesy of nana haha!

but kids just look adorable lah. oven when made to do incredibly embarrassing things.

poring sombrely over the japanese instructions of her new captivity target :D haha. a belated birthday present! doesn't make her any less excited to get it though. and i'm glad i bought it late with her, cos if i went shopping by myself i'd probably get her something like playdoh and she'd never touch it with a 20ft long bargepole in her entire lifetime. haha :D it's always good to get children exactly what they want, cos they've got notoriously picky preferences and mantis-like attention spans.

scrub, scrub
the wood fizzes and bubbles; pops with a fierce vehemence
choking and gurgling
lathering
no scent of sweet apples and spice
but coarse astringent rubber

determined to scrub, scrub
the callouses sing in a lusty chorus
with the convicted cry
of a blender twice broken

the lithe reedy emeralds wink
from within the confines
of their lucent jewelcase

i lift my hand (wearily)
to the dripping forehead

the symphony ceases - for the brief interval
i pause my labour