We also bought badminton racquets today, in an effort to be more Asian in our recreation. We had a little indoor how-many-times-can-we-hit-it-back-and-forth session in our living room, which was almost as fun as the time in Marjorie's old place when we moved aside all the furniture, put "Dancin' Queen" on the stereo, and discoed around in our rollerblades on the hardwood floors.

I've been helping Marjorie out at her job where she counsels students who want to study abroad in the US. I've proofread a few student essays now -- for some reason, I just love to proofread -- and it's an interesting perspective on at least one segment of the population here. Today I went in to help with their computers. Apparently they've been getting a lot of pop-up ads and such from websites of ill repute, so I installed some various scanning software and pop-up stoppers. Ad-Aware found a LOT of nefarious things going on on their system. The suspicion is that people have been treating the place like it's their internet cafe, or worse, their free peep show. Actually, they suspect it's mainly one kid in particular -- and he came in while I was there. So I got to see Marjorie take him by the scruff of the neck and send him crashing out through the plate glass window. Well, almost.

Marjorie had the quote of the week there that I overheard while she was helping out another student and his mother. The kid was looking to maybe double major in Mechanical Engineering and Criminology. Marjorie commented that that was an odd major, "unless you want to maybe be McGyver or something". They were Turkish, but they seemed to catch the reference, and laughed.

Zoophilia. The Singapore Zoo is considered one of the best in the world, with good reason. We went again yesterday. We're getting pretty familiar with it, but there's still new things to see every time. Among the new behaviors we spotted were a very bizarre ostrich dance, where he repeatedly banged his head on one side of his body, then the other, and a jaguar swimming underwater. I had no idea they did that.

The rains came just in time for my soccer game at 5pm. It was a total slogfest. It looked like a match played between five-year-olds at times, with players clustered around the ball as it moved up and down the field, because nobody could kick it out of a puddle any further than a few meters. On one of the few times when I got a hold of it, I almost scored the game-winner from 30 yards out, but the keeper tipped it over. A guy on their team hit a beautiful bicycle kick that beat our keeper but the ball just STOPPED in a puddle about a meter from the goal line. We later did get the game winner, and I saved the match in the dying seconds when an opponent had a shot at an empty net but I beat him to the ball. Pure muddy fun.