Coping. The past few days have been more tolerable, as I've taken ot the strategy of uber-medicating myself at the first hint of pain. Tomorrow I get the super X-ray, where they inject me with dye (I'm hoping it's just a regular needle, and not one of those big ol' amniocentesis needles), which I'm expecting to look something like this.

Interesting possibilities ahead -- I may have to jet the country temporarily after my temporary dependent pass expires in week or two, while Marjorie's back in the US. So, I'm having to pick somewhere nearby that I can get a decent deal to. Marjorie's given me a list of places that I'm not allowed to go without her, for safety, medical, and jealousy concerns, including Cambodia, Burma, and Borneo. I'm leaning towards a place that I had never heard of before yesterday -- Fukuoka, a city on the south island of Japan, which looks to have a lot of interesting historical and cultural sites, as well as having all the mod cons. Japan is awfully far away, though; I never realized before coming out here, but it's as long from Singapore to Tokyo as it is from Atlanta to Anchorage, Alaska.

Today was K2 graduation. As the kindergarten at my school is gigantic, this lasted WAY too long! The kids did really well though. The parents (in general, not our class parents) were obnoxious though: They were all armed with camcorders to film every moment and had them stuck in our faces for every second of the two hours and pushed their ways into the area taped off to be seating for the kids so the kids had to sit in the tiniest little space with the knees of parents practically in their backs.
One more week and we're free for the summer.
Mark's still hurty. Poor thing. Selfishly, I just hope he passes the stones before I go home to the States so I don't have to worry about him being hospitalized when I'm away.

The Pain-O-Meter. For those of you keeping score at home, it got about up to a 9 last night after I blogged. That lasted only fifteen minutes until the drugs kicked in. It came back a half an hour later, but again only lasted fifteen minutes or so. Got to sleep around 2am, and slept fine until 9am when the pain birds woke me up again. I'd rate it a 6 right now. It's moving down a bit -- now it feels like I've been kicked in the, uh, tackle, but at least it's moving along.

Today was better; I had a few impending attacks that seemed to be held off by the drugs. Actually, it's coming on pretty bad again right now and I'm waiting for the pills to kick in.

Forgot to mention; the four different drugs they gave me yesterday came to a grand total of S$7.15 (like, US$4). Crazy! A country where drugs aren't priced like a luxury item.

Ouchy. C'mon, pills, do your thing.

I left school yesterday when Mark called me from the hospital. I told my kids I had to go because of an "emergency" so today they had questions. First question: "Why did you leave yesterday?" My response:"I had a friend in the hospital and I needed to go and make sure he was okay". Their next question: "Was your friend your husband?". My response: "Yes, it was my husband". Next question: "Did you kiss?" followed by many giggles. Me: "Okay now, let's get started on our calendar."

If you've ever seen the movie Full Metal Jacket, you remember the scene where they pin Private Pyle to his bed, and the whole platoon takes a whack at him with a bar of soap wrapped in a towel; afterwards he lies there in bed just crying and going "Ow, ow ow"... That's a pretty good summary of my morning. Worst pain ever (and you're talking to a guy whose doctor bent his broken arm the wrong way when trying to set it). I had a 10:30 am appointment to see the doctor; I was up at 5 a.m. from the pain; by 8:45 it was so bad that I just went in for my appointment early to see if they could do something. They were all very nice and accommodating. The X-ray seems to show a good size stone in my left kidney; the pain is probably from a smaller piece in my urethra. I got some new meds: a painkiller, an antacid, an antibiotic, and some sort of liquid (potassium citrate) that's supposed to help break up the stone. I have an appointment for some further, more extensive X-rays, then who knows, maybe that ultrasonic thing. I wish there was something they could amputate.

Woke up yesterday and today to some pretty nasty abdominal pain that didn't seem related to any digestive issues. Today it was bad enough that I figured I had to go do something about it, so I hopped a cab down to Singapore General Hospital. After having my temperature taken at the door and being fitted with a mask (for SARS prevention), I was admitted and given a urine test and had X-rays taken. I'm glad I went down when I did, because by the time all the testing was going on, the pain really became excrutiating. They gave me a shot of something in me bum that seemed to fix me up okay; I'm fine now. No conclusive results yet, but they seem to think it's kidney stones -- a prognosis which, though not life-threatening, promises lots of of pain. Fun fun. I go to see a specialist tomorrow.

Has it been a year already? One year ago today we became husband and wife. Our first year together was nothing if not eventful. Love ya, sweetheart.

We decided not to make a huge deal out of the day. We did go out for champagne brunch at the Ritz, though. We usually don't go in for the chilled fork, lifted pinky, "More scones, love?" sort of scene but we really had quite an excellent time. The free flow of champagne didn't hurt (at least, not until later).

Apartment hunting on Saturday yielded three no-gos and one place that was super nice, tons of room (three bedrooms!), beautiful greenery out the balcony, big beautiful pool, in our price range -- all in the middle of nowhere (Bukit Timah/PIE area). We were all ready to commit to it, but the more we thought about it, the more we realized that the isolation would be a constant, daily frustration. Bummer. We keep looking.

Next week is K2 graduation (in spite of the fact that we have one more week of school afterwards). I'm recommending that one of my students not graduate, and spend another year in K2. He's a sweet kid, but he's extremely disorganized and my suspicion is he will probably be diagnosed as learning disabled at some future date (and I'm a Special Ed teacher usually). I've got to meet with his parents and tell them this next week, and I'm really, really dreading it. I've made more than one parent cry in my time working with special needs kids, I was hoping for a break this year. I hope they take the news well.

Wildlife spotting. Most of my wildlife spotting has not been in restaurants, unless you want to count animals that are already cleaned and gutted for cooking. Today, however, while lunching at a local restaurant, I spotted a little nose and whiskers poking out from under a refrigerator in a curtained-off cubbyhole. I first thought mouse, then rat. But then the little critter came out from his cover completely to sniff some section of the floor, and I could tell right away (from all the nature shows I've watched) that it was a shrew. Most probably an Asian musk shrew. For some reason I feel better that it wasn't a rat or a mouse, but apparently these guys are just as qualified to be labelled "vermin". I know every restaurant deals with things like this, but there seemed to be several of them there, and they were infringing on the guest area, so I don't see any need to go back to this place...

Enlightenment on the subway. I've always thought that, if I were a black person, say, I would just go around, boldly, into places that don't see a lot of black people. And if anyone said anything nasty, or gave me dirty looks, well then, why would I care what a racist thinks?

Today on the ride home I found myself feeling sheepish, because I was carrying home the dry-cleaning I took in earlier for Marjorie, which included a nice flowery dress. I even kind of folded it so that it wasn't so visible.

It dawned on me. What a hypocrite I am!

There are a lot of attitudes out here that I would consider sexist, and for some reason I was worried that some of these guys would see me as -- I don't know, not wearing the pants in the relationship? Just because I was so obviously doing something laundry-related for my wife. It's not like I was even doing the laundry; I was just a courier.

If I care so much about what sexist people think, what makes me think I would be so casual about racism?

Deep, huh. Riding mass transit gives you lots of time to think.

Today, before dismissal, my class and I sang a very interesting rendition of "Old MacDonald" where we ended up discussing animal sounds in several different languages (Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Hindi, and English). Apparently cats "say" the same meow and cows "moo" in all of our countries, there's some variation in the sounds of roosters, ducks, and horses though. I love these kinds of discussions with my class. And I love hearing them talk to each other in other languages. There are frequent Korean and Japanese conversations in our class. I'm ready for the school year to end, but I will miss these types of experiences.
On a completely different note......Singapore has a SARS channel on TV now. Really, a TV station devoted to SARS. Sadly, I suspect the ratings will be pretty good.

The Matrix, Retarded. Saw it with my boss, and we tried to figure it out afterwards, and decided that we might trying to make sense of something that the creator doesn't even have a clear picture of. When the audience is laughing at the movie, not with it, there's something wrong. Obviously, not without its entertaining points, but the fight scenes got boring, the psychobabble was laid on thick, and the plot was almost incomprehensible. I'm surprised as anyone that it sucked for reasons other than Keanu Reeves.

Spam, spam, spam. I've been getting more and more spam these days. One spammer in particular has been offering me a "free trial of HGH" every day -- sometimes two or three times a day -- for the past two months. He keeps varying his mailings to sneak around the filters I have set up. If they ever catch him, I hope it's in Singapore, although maybe a thorough caning is too good for him.

Bossman is reconfiguring our web site and mail server. He says that "dictionary attack" emails (which come from spammers who are trying every stinking word in the dictionary at your hostname -- like aardvark@yourhost.com, abacus@yourhost.com, abalone@yourhost.com -- in an effort to discover addresses they can send spam to) are coming in at a rate of more than one per second.

I can't believe this problem is still ongoing. In fact, it's getting worse. Spam accounts for something like 40% of all email traffic these days. Why can nothing be done? I've seen proposals for a pay system -- where it would cost you something like a nickel per email. I would be in favor.

By the way, it's a bad idea to leave your email address when you post comments; spammers seek them out and add them to their lists.

Pain in the *ss. For a while there, I was actually developing a butt. I even had to buy a pair of fat pants. But, now that I've been getting into some kind of shape, it seems to be disappearing. Aesthetic concerns aside, my job pretty much requires sitting on it all day -- and even with a fairly plush chair, it's been increasingly sore. I even had to use a pillow this past weekend when we rented the car.

In other local news, just when it looked like we were about to be declared SARS-free, somebody goes and mucks it up. And, they've declared martial law across the water in Sumatra. Nothing to worry about here, though; the only time Sumatra seems to affect Singapore at all is when it catches fire.

Some random driving today landed us way out on the west coast of S'pore, where there are acres and acres of cemetaries. Apparently this is where everyone who dies here ends up. Interesting, in that the cemetaries are segregated; we drove through the Hindu and Chinese sections, and also past a number of [something]-atoriums, where they had hundreds of little lockers, presumably for burial urns containing the cremated remains. On a small, densely populated island, what else would you expect?

Marjorie drove for a little bit, out in the middle of nowhere; her first left-side-of-the-road driving experience. She did well. But after I took the wheel back, somehow we suddenly found ourselves on the north part of the island, and almost drove into the Malaysia checkpoint by mistake.

We figured we had to go out to dinner, since we had a car. We did Mexican twice already this week, but it was at the places in Holland Village, which are passable at best. So this time we hit Margaritas, which, near as we can tell, is the only place in town that "gets" Mexican food. Num.

Singapore is a different city when you're behind the wheel. We rented a car today, to drive around and look at neighborhoods where we might want to live. It was really strange, having not driven for almost six months, to suddenly have to do it from the wrong side of the road. It wasn't too horrible, but I did get to remember a lot of things I hated about owning a car. Had to blunder our way around a bit. It's quite easy to get lost, even on familiar roads, if you've never actually DRIVEN on them before. I had to come back home and zonk out for a few hours after a while; the concentration and tension involved in driving in this unfamiliar environment can be pretty exhausting. Anyway, we found some pretty nice areas, and didn't run over anyone or anything, so that's good.

Goooooooaaaaal! Today is a national holiday (Vesak Day) in Singapore, so we had a soccer game scheduled for 9 this morning. I was supposed to be playing defense, but at one point I snuck up... and scored! Collected the ball on the 18 yard line, beat a man inside and launched a beautiful curling shot into the far side of the net. I've been playing better and better with each passing week, and having more and more fun. I could do without these 9 a.m. games though. That nasty equatorial sun made the second half brutal...

We're thinking of renting a car this weekend, to drive around and look at apartments. I haven't driven in nearly six months; should be interesting.

We're also considering a trip to Japan in August, to coincide with the Summer Sonic 2003 music festival. Looks like a fantastic line-up. I don't know if I'll be able to swing this, work-wise, though. Even if I can, we can't seem to figure out how to buy tickets.

Your quote of the day:

"You know the world is off-tilt when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest basketball player is Chinese, and Germany doesn't want to go to war." --Charles Barkley

We're working on a "poets and penfriends" unit in my class. The past two weeks we've been focused on poetry. I've been trying to instill my love for Shel Silverstein to my class and it seems to be working.
This week we've been focused on different styles of poetry. This is the Haiku we wrote today. I suppose it's debatable whether "squirrel" is one or two syllables. For the purpose of our Haiku it's one:

Big tree, brown branches
Squirrels climb on trees, birds fly by
Trees are really strong.

They did it on their own, clapping out the syllables. Not bad for a kindergarten class.