tousled tresses desired

so nice!!!

i want i want i want!!! acccck! this is destroying my aim of becoming stingy! how can i ever become a millionaire?!

accccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccccck!

i must remain calm! rational!

post-festival effects

i would gladly travel to bras basah to get the blades and the glue that my aussie bro needs, while browsing in the bookstores over there which carry some gems occasionally.

but the weather’s too hot, and it’ll be halfway across the island on a train.

i know i need to get out more before i turn mouldy, but but but.

meeeh.

i wonder if they sell those special blades at popular bookstores. i wonder.

it’s such a luxury to stay at home for the entire day, doing some online shopping and stalking here and there.

as compared to yesterday, when we went on an intensive qing ming festival routine. for all those people who don’t go visiting their ancestors’ graves during the qing ming festival, yes, that’s what the chinese are supposed to do this time of the year.

but yesterday was a little more erm, eventful than usual.

i was supposed to repaint some red words on my grandfather’s grave, and an awful accident took place. i held the small can of red (read: bright red) paint in my right hand and a brush in my left. then a strong gust of wind blew and my hair was all over my face.

in an attempt to toss all the messy hair away from my face, i did it violently, forgetting that violent tosses results in huge arm movements.

the paint from the can spilt out in an amazing arc, landing on the grave behind my grandfather’s. maaaan, i felt sooooooo guilty. i mean, it isn’t so bad if i splashed paint on the gates of my neighbour or something, i can offer to clean it all up with thinner and repaint it.

but to splash red paint on somebody’s grave is so unrespectful and offending, i kept muttering my apologies to the erm, owner of the grave. plus, what would the family of the deceased think when they see that offending red paint on their loved one’s grave?

though i spent about 20 minutes scrubbing with strong detergent and a piece of rag, i didn’t manage to clean it up entirely, cos the paint kind of dried up a little and we didn’t have any paint-removing stuff with us. all i could do was to offer my apologies to the spirit resting beneath the grave who had its place of residence rudely vandalised by a person who just wanted to get the hair out of her face.

when we went to pay our respects to our granduncle later in the afternoon, we were all flabbergasted when we couldn’t find the urn containing his ashes. i mean, the urn had been there for the past twenty years and was placed more than two metres above the ground.

so we asked the attendant about it and he valiantly insisted that no, it wasn’t possible. after some checking and climbing up and down on a ladder, he found out that oh yeah, my granduncle’s urn was somehow relocated directly behind his original one and was thus completely blocked from view.

according to my dad the “new occupant’s” descendants had probably given the attendant a red packet to shift the positions of the urns. while shifting my granduncle’s urn to its original position, my sister and i were mumbling about how disrespectful it is to shift a deceased’s urns here and there, especially since the descendants had paid for that specific location for their family member’s ashes.

and the attendant talked about how dusty my granduncle’s urn was, didn’t we clean it? but hey, the urn is like up there, how the heck do we clean it? so he said we can actually “request” him to do it. bah. he just wanted an ang pao, which my dad gave him for the trouble of shifting the urn back to its original location, and to ensure that my granduncle enjoys the premium location overlooking the world outside. anyway, he seemed to be hinting that dusty urns meant that nobody visits them and thus it would be an ideal candidate for their corrupted activities.

while other typical families have an average of two graves to visit, my family visits a staggering eight graves - my four grandparents, my dad’s maternal grandparents, my grandaunt and my granduncle. yes, it is indeed a little extended and they’re situated in four different locations, but i wouldn’t mind, if the weather isn’t *ahem so hot.

when i was young i always thought it was normal for families to visit at least four ancestors’ graves if they do so every year. little did i know that my family seems to be the only one who has such eventful qing ming activities, and so far, nobody has broken out records for the highest number of graves visited each year.

no wonder the rest of the population who participates in such activites had the time to set up foldable tables, bring out tupperwares of beehoon and various food items for a standing-picnic at choa chu kang cemetery, no kidding.

sheesh.