"Don't be a sickie!" I'm ill. Fortunate timing too as we have our first visitor in town. To her credit, Jen's been super about my pathetic state and has gone off to Changi Museum, Palau Ubin, and now to Malacca on her own. I'm starting to feel human again after two days in bed sneezing and coughing. Mark's already feeling the beginnings of his own bout as well. The one thing worse than the symptoms of your own illness, is the guilt of passing it on to your loved ones. Hopefully Jen will manage to avoid all the germs floating around us, the 30 hour plane-ride back to Atlanta is bad enough without a cold.

Hobbled. Went knee-to-knee with a guy on the other team who was at full sprint last night. It was early in the match, but I still finished. As soon as the game was over, though, it began to stiffen up like heckfire. The human body is a strange thing.

There was a guy, Ari, playing with us that's usually on the morning team, so I had never met him. He had a really strange accent that I had never heard before -- turns out that he's Finnish. Nice guy; got to chat with him a bit after the game while we played pool and had drinks at the O Bar. I've been meaning to list out my teammates here, just for my own benefit as a diarist, so if I read this down the years I can remember everybody. There's three teams, but we end up playing with (and sometimes against) each other a lot. All are Singaporean except where otherwise marked:

Coach: Munnn

Goalkeepers: Derek, Ivan.

Defenders: Edward, Andy (UK), Chris (UK), Andrew (UK), Ari (Finn), Pomp, Wi, Michael (UK), Ricky (UK)

Midfield: David, Charles, Jeffrey, MJ (Korean), John (UK), Taufig (sp?), Wilson, Ali (middle eastern?), Tim (UK?), Kelvin

Attack: Ottavio (Italian), Steven, Gimson, Greg (American), Graham (UK?)

In other news, Marjorie is laid up with a bad cold, and with me working, her friend Jen has been having to go off on her own a bit. She's seeing all the things we've been wanting to see, like Changi Prison and the mosque on Arab Street. Now she's off to Malaka in Malaysia, where we've never been. The fire walking, btw, was a bust; despite what the web site said, it actually happened in the morning. The cleanup crew was dismantling everything when we showed up at the supposed starting time of 5pm.

Props to Germany for winning the women's world cup. Wish they'd actually shown a game out here. Maybe they did and I just missed it.

Marjorie's friend Jen is in town. Yesterday we dragged her all over and regaled her ad nauseum with our pithy comments about all the interesting little differences here. We did Chinatown, Boat Quay, the Merlion, drinks at Clarke Quay, and dinner at Little India, which is crazy on Sunday night.

Today they're checking out the botanical gardens, and later we're going to try to check out the fire-walking which goes on a block from my office, and is part of the start of the Thimithi festival commemorating the start of Deepavali. I doubt we'll be able to see much -- there's already about five hundred pairs of shoes out on the sidewalk by the temple entrance.