......

very bad day :(

Earth Day

22-23 April 2006

Being a day especially dedicated to the celebration of nature on earth, it's only befitting for me to celebrate over the weekend with trips to the great (yes, I actually think we can describe nature in S'pore as great) outdoors.

T and I enjoyed a rainforest tour at Botanic Garden. By the end of it, we were enlightened as to how to identify a primary forest (fig/banyan tree and the existence of a kind of tree with perfect stripes across its leaf) and what is needed to give nature a helping hand and prevent it from becoming 'botak'. But the trip is also memorable for the wrong reason. I've forgotten my lesson and forgot to bring my repellent - a fatal mistake as the mosquitoes in BG are only second to the kamikaze army at Ubin.


Sunday saw a happier trip to Khatib Bongsu, which I had visited eons again with Z (how r u???). We had a propitious start with the sounds of a koel (?) , kingfisher (!), sighting of a woodpecker (!!) and a raptor's gigantic nest (!!!). Wonder how the bird gets back to its home.... crashlanding is inevitable... even if it occupies the highest of the trees (even many of our trees are immigrants from somewhere else... Australia and Panama???)

But the most enduring imprint of the trip was looking through the fieldscope at the dollar bird. (don't see the $ sign anywhere) . It was so powerful that the image is a high-resolution, enlarged copy of the real McCoy. As WT said, you can see the bird smiling at you!

I could update 'birdwatching' under 'Hobbies' in my biodata but ......
let's wait for money to buy the binoculars first.......

But maybe a trip to search for my 'love' - snakies. Happy to get reacquainted with Ben again. Will be waiting for his call to search for nocturnal reptiles of Singapore this coming May...

or maybe Kym's dogsnake-catching trip will come up first...

anticipation......

Busy, busy, busy

The busy week has finally passed....and hopefully not to return. The frenzy of activities started with the Sports Day, reached fever pitch with the enthusiastic support of the students in the Inter-CCA bazaar and culminated in the Awards Day. I hope whoever planned the schedule for the term reaped his/her just rewards by drowning in all the proceedings....but highly unlikely... teachers are always in the frontline to bear the brunt of all sorts of nonsense....and buffer the higher-ups from the dirrrrrty work... Don't they know it's exam soon?

The classes are certainly not in the mood to study. I would be too if I were a student, but still, there's no excuse for not following orders for them to behave like a decent human being should...
There should be a difference between homo sapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom, right?
There were a few times I very nearly lost it, and feel like wringing their necks.... violent ..... time to read the Buddhist books lying somewhere in the rubble (literally!) of books.....

Luckily, where there's bad, the good also exists. Must put on record here the students who rescued my sanity from the brink of exhaustion, especially Nurul with her kind words, Janice for her usual sensitivity and call to ignore the .....

Of course, there are also the two emcees for the Awards Day who really put in effort for the part and to T too for her helpfulness.... I think we all enjoyed the stage but still, I was surprised I wasn't nervous when I stepped out to speak. I actually enjoyed listening to the transformation the microphone and PA system made to my voice.

At the risk of sounding like an egomaniac, I think I have a very nice voice when I'm not bellowing at students...

Beauty of the land...

In Thursday's class with 4-8, I shared with them what I viewed on tv the night before - top 20 islands showing on Central. The unanimous choral response went "Huh? but S'pore have (sic) wat??" What comes to mind when we are asked for Singapore's iconic places? Synthetic beauties (?) like Changi Airport, Esplanade and NS? If my memory didn't fail me, S'pore landed at 17th position, ahead of the pristinely white Santorini, marvellously enchanting Mallorca and terrific Tenerife...

....but I think we do have a lot (2 separate words, ok!?) in terms of views, just that we never bother to look at what's in our backyard... at least, I feel our skyline from Sheares bridge is nicer than HK's.

Anyway, in faithful deference to MOE's 5-day work week thrust (can we have 4-day? maybe Fri for CCAs only?), I optimise Saturday by satisfying my wanderlust with nature, going to Sungei Buloh. Greeted by a familiar sight...someone I knew from that ineffective story-telling course, the day looked good with the skies a fortuitous shade of grey-white, allowing the sun to peep through only occasionally.

Perhaps I should have trekked with WT, for the guided tour was dominated by some (overaged?) scouts, too crowded to ask teacher questions :(

(<--- beautiful picture of heron eating a lizard. See the trail of water? Can only be captured with cam with high shutter speed. Picture courtesy of Wang Tao. Thanks!)


Enjoyable though was the chance to see:

• water monitors
• cattle egrets
• lots of tree-climbing crabs (with one poster boy doing the necessary on a branch)
• remmants left by burrowing lobsters (yes, Singapore has it)
• an unidentified but definitely majestic raptor, and the highlight of it all
• a Siberian plover, a laggard who hasn't embarked on the arduous return homeward
• attap chee palm
• the mangrove teeming with lots of unseen bubble-blowing residents, lurking just below the surface of the deceptively quiet waters...

Apparently, some migrant birds, estuarine crocs, otters and many other creatures, big and small, have decided to apply for Singapore PR, residing in Neo Tiew Crescent. I was also surprised to see that puffer fish is really a small guy, but of course its ability to pull off a big bluff is legendary...

Definitely a place to return to a lot of times....need to be earlier next time... the tide waits for no man and so do the fishes.

Next stop on the beautiful Singapore nature trail ....Khatib Bongsu...

3rd island

Another belated entry... it's amazing how you can't even squeeze out a tiny window of time to do something for yourself. Such is the whirl of daily activities plus meetings (recess meeting... eeee....) plus special occasions like Sports Day, Awards Day....

Sorry, Wee Kiat, to have kept you waiting. Hope you will not give up on this blog...

Can only blog now because it's Good Friday tomorrow...even now, I have 2 piles of compre in front of me, to keep me gainfully occupied in case I suffer from an unwelcomed bout of writer's block... and typing rather furtively because of the hive of activity buzzing around me....Am I the skiver here?

8 April 2006, Saturday



Today's the second consecutive Saturday I went out to sea...Haha, I can claim I went out of the country again though I am still in Singapore waters . This time around, I'm no longer drifting around at sea but enjoyed a sojourn to the 3rd island I've set foot on belonging to Singapore - Pulau Semakau. Open only to special interest groups like Nature Society (I'm a one-week old member!), it's a peacefully quiet little island (the size of Sentosa when it's fully filled up with incinerated refuse from mainland) where the only hum are the ships going to Bukom a stone's throw away or on their onward journey to the international waters. According to one staff there, they can even sight the occasional group of dolphins giving the waters here a try.



Our birdwatching trip was a tad disappointing though, but wholly expected since the migratory season is already over. Even the resident osprey (before this trip, I thought osprey is only endemic to Australasia) that Willie spoke about decided not to show its face or hunting prowess. Birds are really shy creatures; you hear them so much more than you see them. But they are definitely around, and I should count my blessings to have seen the Brahminy kite (my favourite feathered friend), pipip (is that the way to spell?), and sunbirds...

This place also boasts of the highest concentration, 'greenest' (playing cheat here with the inverted commas), youngest- and most vibrant looking of all mangroves I've seen. Prior to that, I've always regarded them as lifeless, drab, crude-looking plants...




Feel out-of-place among the others with their field guides, tales of past travels (Kruger!! Nepal!! Bhutan!!!) , high-powered lenses and camera.... sigh... am going to need more money to indulge.... Why do I have expensive hobbies??

All-in-all, an enjoyable trip..... hope there's more to come
all 64 (or 67?) islands of Singapore......

NPCC weekend...

31 March 2006

The last day of March went off with a bang....literally. Took the cadets out for their classification shoot. Also tried my hand at it. Alas, I think my finger muscles have atrophied dramatically with the passage of time in the past year.(The last one I had was OBTC two years back.) It was a mammoth effort just to pull the trigger and the momentum inevitably takes my rounds skywards .... and of course I'm not going to report my score here...

The range at PA must have seen much better scores, and I'm sorry to have it suffer the ignominy of my score on its last day of operation.

I've always preferred archery though.. even if my first try at it was a greater misadventure than my encounter with guns. Can you imagine hitting the bull's eye, but at the target belonging to the one beside you? Of course when it happened, there was a complete hush enveloping the place, with everyone gawking at the phenomenon created by yours truly.... Anyway, I've since gotten the hang of it....but as the Friday lesson shows, any skill must be practised or it will perish...


1 April 2006

April Fool's Day...glad not to be in school as I still remember Jennifer's trick last year which got my hands all gooey.... This year, it was spent at sea with NPCC sea units of RGS and ACSI, really well-behaved kids who are focused on their work. Save for one who kept imitating his teacher's admonitions of students and supposedly insulting ways. His whiny impersonation and constant falsetto really grates on my nerves, but thanks to him, I was driven up to the upper deck. Part of the reason I love the sea to such great depths (no mean feat for a non-swimmer) is the solitude out at sea with only the wind, the ripples of white emerging from the blue and assimilating back into it again, and the occasional bird crossing the sea. Far from the madding crowd, there is none of the clamour associated with overpopulated Singapore (the government says we need more people, but whenever I stepped onto the MRT, I wonder if the government got it right). Only my breathing punctuates the droning of the propellers. Where others might find it monotonous, I think it's great to be by yourself, free of all the obligations of conforming to society ... Being in a crowd and yet alone....


The trip was also memorable for the nuggets of information dished out by Captain Vincent eg. the RSS Courageous crash at sea last year, the fact that ICA has its own fleet, whose personnel are armoured at all times ready to crash their boat onto ships fleeing from being caught for smuggling....All these make for a wonderful time at sea...

I must remember to upload the pictures... does anyone know how to do that? Just copy and paste? (done on 5 may.... finally!)