there's amazingly limited information on gout on the internet, and what little there are are ads for cookbooks and contrasting views on what a gout sufferer can eat and can't eat. no online recipes. its aggravating.

am making dinner for friends tomorrow in order to empty the fridge but as it turns out, one of them has gout. i'm told by a doctor friend that he can't eat anything with proteins and from the internet i learnt that its the purines in them causing the problem. because it converts to uric acid or something like that and when there's just too much of it, uh oh. the eventuality is that the poor chap suffers from some form of acute arthritic pain. doctor friend says the big toe very painful.

so with his big toe on my mind, i have a challenge ahead of me. esp since its not as simple as avoiding meat... because, apparently, some veggies have purines as well.

erm.

the past few days have been frightfully frantic. we've moved within the move, that is, we've had to send all our stuff to storage and move out of our dear flat with the beautifully-shaped shangri la-esque swimming pool that freezes your tits off, into a little 2-bedroom in town for what we thought would be two weeks but has now become a month. and all this just cos we have to move to another country. sigh. life is soooooooo complicated.

the dog, she got sick the first night we moved in here. started getting the shakes and kept them going for over an hour. could have been the a/c, which at 24 degrees is nowhere near the temperatures we'll expect in our new environment up north a notch or two or three.

she better get used to it, that brat.

anyway. i promised a friend i'd give credit where its due and the title picture belongs to her... well, the photograph she took, miss Art, who deserves much praise for some fine shots she captured of the first half of our wedding. the other half of it is to take place later this year, up a few notches north of the few notches north that we're relocating to. and also a bit more west. but east of here. got the gist?

updates will be slightly slower this week as we've been forced to use dial-up connection until we get broadband, which we're told will be available early April.

we ran into the scary taitai who threatened to kick my little poochie the other day. she was at corduroy & finch in the late afternoon when the hubby and i walked in for a snack, and we eyeballed each other.

except i was in sunglasses, so i win.

nah nah nah nah nah.

love story, my backside.

ok. admittably, i think it was a good book. but its hard to remember why because the horrific beginning involving that damn air balloon is the only thing my mind has retained.

the balloon, which i presume is the one on the cover with what seems to be an upward-looking eyeball, was carrying a little girl when it got blown off the ground and taken into the air. some fellas, i don't remember how many, grabbed the ropes attached to it but were unable to hold the damn thing down. they were thus lifted up, up and away.

slowly, the men started to fall one by one by one but for the last man hanging, who refused to release his grip as the balloon rose higher (cos obviously, it got lighter as the other men fell from it).

eventually, he did. of course. and when they found him on the ground, he was in somewhat of an upright, stumpy position, and looked from afar like he was praying on his knees.

u know why? well, the book explained in explicit detail that it was because he fell legs first in a vertical position, and his entire vertebrae column had collapsed along with everything else inside, or that's how i remember it. so it was literally a body bag of bones, organs and tissue. gross. so gross that i don't remember anything else in the book past this chapter.

thanks to sassy song, dear friend in hongkong, for changing my life with this book by so generously giving me one more phobia to deal with.

i usually skip her column because... i catch no ball. either i can't relate or i need to get back on my adult ritalin prescription. but i do try. because sumiko tan is such an awesome role model.

u laugh. but when was the last time anyone flipped to your column in the sunday morning paper for the ink that would fuel your conversations for the week until you next pen your thoughts?

no doubt that sometimes she is less than inspiring, but there are moments when ms tan sparkles with her ability to send shivers down your spine with that warm sunday morning coffee and catches you off-guard. Because just when you think you've seen the true depths of cringeworthiness, she emerges to surprise you; and once in a while, on one of those special and magical sundays, she presents a column filled with the most surreal ponderings, insights and conclusions a mind could conjure, and thus provides you with excellent fodder for your monday afternoon high-tea sessions. she is, at best, dali with words.

however, today was not that day.

finding little to respond or react to, i stopped reading about her feelings on superstition and went about sorting out our collection of books to be packed and sent to our new home in the new land. some interesting surprises there, mixed in with some old favorites, forgotten reads, and silverfish.

Gross Jokes. Printed in 1990. this one has stains on it and i don't know why. but i swear, i've never seen it before. this one not sure to keep or give or throw.

mild excerpts:

What's Spanish Human?
- A new insecticide that makes flies so horny they screw themselves to death.

What did Pinocchio say to the old carpenter?
- Quit bitching about your crabs. I've got termites.


How to Murder a Millionaire

Cheat my money one. is not a real how-to book.

is about some chick whose family skips the county for tax evasion while her sisters inherit everything and she gets nothing. or something like that cos i don't remember.

still, it goes into the box. because the cover very pretty.





Complete Guide To Symptoms, Illness & Surgery

the hypochondriac's bible.

it's good if you want to know how many ways you could die slowly and painfully from, say, a pimple.

fun stuff.

definitely a keeper.

Went out for dinner tonight with friends of ours to a nice japanese restaurant called nagae or something like that and i learnt that the japanese word for tai tai is celebu.

it stems from the word "celebrity".

i like.

i almost got into a taitai fight this week, but as you'll see, my new-found maturity as wife and potential mother kicked in and the violence, alas, was avoided with elegance and grace.

i was walking my baby pooch in the park behind our apartment, made up of nice, serene winding paths that are bordered with meticulously-cut cow-grass... just the type that my little poochie likes to poo poo in.

seeing no one around, i decided to take her off the leash and let her run and sniff about, knowing full well that she's too chickenshit to venture further than 2 meters away from me.

children came by playing and she ignored them... a jogger jogged by spraying warm droplets of perspiration all over the grass and she ignored him... and then suddenly, something caught both her attention and mine.

a young woman with long blond hair and rather chic looking geek glasses comes striding up along the path towards us. little poochie straightens her ears upon the flippety flop of the lady's thongs. the lady sees the dog and increases her pace, storming towards our direction. poochie thinks that she wants to play so she runs up to say hello before i could stop her and narrowly escapes being stepped on. as i was about to apologise for the intrusion, the petite woman remarks under her breath in a surprisingly manly german-accented tone:

"i 'ate it ven dish happenz. you shood take kahr auv yor dawg" she barks.

the apology stopped at the tip of my tongue.

"I AM taking care of my dog. she's right here with me and minding her own business until you came along!"

and then to my horror, she replied, with a spasmic jerk of her thong-clad foot,

"next time i keek yor shtooopid dawg!"

oh no she didn't just say that did she the stupid bitch is she asking for trouble does she want a piece of me ya come over and get it you sick piece of trash i'll show you who's boss here.

and then i replied, with all the dignity i could muster:

"OH YEAH? THEN I KICK YOU!!!"

sheer elegance and grace, i tell you. teach also difficult.