Our government-issue SARS kit has arrived. Contents:

A pamphlet, "Taking Your Temperature Correctly", translated into English, Malay, Chinese, and Thai.

Two surgical masks.

Mask instructions, also in English, Malay, Chinese, and Thai.

A rather nice digital thermometer, with instructions in English only.

Just in the nick of time, too.

Mark and I watched a documentary on Bhutan tonight and it struck me -- I'm the third generation in my family to spend at least a year in southeast Asia. My grandfather was stationed in Bhutan (then Burma) during or around World War II, my father spent a year in Vietnam, then another in Thailand, now Mark and I are here. Of course I'm here under very different circumstances than my predecessors.

A great site for movie reviews is Rotten Tomatoes. What they do is to collect and summarize views from critics around the world. A good review is marked with a red tomato; a bad one with a green splat.

It's a rare movie that some critic, somewhere does not like. But there is one out now. Maybe the filmmakers should have listened to their focus groups.

Update: Oops! Looks like they found one reviewer who liked it.

The latest "Awwwww...." My dad's been on a mission to scan in all our old slides. Here's Another picture from my childhood (me on the right). I love this stuff. Hey Dad, where the heck was this, any idea?

We hosted pub trivia last night at Shamus O'Donnell's. It all went pretty well, excepting the small turnout. We did make the mistake in one question of implying that the Boomtown Rats were British, when in fact they are Irish. This is not a good sort of mistake to make in an Irish bar. Marjorie, who was reading the question, received several indignant shouts. Proving she can "take the piss" with the best of them, she responded, "England, Ireland... Aren't they the same thing?" This cracked me up, and everyone else too.

I'm fed up will the old comments provider (klinkfamily.com) which kept going down, so I've swapped in a new one (haloscan.com). These will hopefully be more reliable. Now all I have to do is come up with some actual content that's worth commenting on.

There'll be two comment links at the bottom of each post for a little while, if the old comments come back up. Please use the one that just says "Comments".

We had a pretty nice day yesterday. We went up to the Chinese Gardens and walked around for a bit. It's a great area for birding. The first thing we saw there was some kind of Heron (perhaps a Purple Heron) eating a snake. The gardens were quite nice themselves, but overall I'd go for the critters (turtles, and fish, and birds, oh my!) The turtles were engaged in a rather bizarre behavior which involved the little ones repeatedly and persistently getting into the faces of the bigger guys. I have no idea what this was all about, but the big guys looked (understandably) annoyed.
After the Chinese Gardens, we went to buy plants for the new apartment. The nursery also turned out to be a nice place for birding (I know, we're scary) and we got the best view yet of a crimson sunbird. We also saw some cool pitcher plants, which Mark would have been happy to take home, but are a bit too creepy for me.