A Tale of Two Kittehs: Samantha

Photo credit: Andrew Chan

Samantha is not the prettiest cat you’ll ever meet. But Sam (aka Sammie, Sammiecat and Baby) is certainly one of the most human cats I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.

Once upon a time, Sam wasn’t my cat. She was the first child of my friends Ismet and Merete, who adopted her as a kitten from the SPCA. She stayed here with Ismet when Merete moved home to Norway, and was billeted with Ismet’s mother when he joined Merete up in the cold, cold north. The plan was for Sam to remain in Singapore until Ismet was settled, then he’d come back in about a year to bring her over.

As with all the best-laid plans, something went awry. Less than half a year after Ismet’s departure, Sam disappeared. His mother said she had probably escaped while renovations were being carried out on her kitchen. He had friends paste up posters and comb the neighbourhood, but no Sam was to be found.

This is where I entered the picture.

James and I were dating at the time, and we’d toyed with the idea of adopting a kitten together. I spent many happy hours browsing the SPCA’s website, looking for orange or calico kittens we could potentially bring home. On one such occasion, I sent the SPCA’s adoption page to Ismet over Skype chat and told him which of the kittens I wanted.

But he never even noticed the kittens, because while he was scrolling down the page, he came across a listing for Samantha. His Samantha.

And so Operation Samantha Rescue sprang into action. Ismet’s sister was mobilised to visit the SPCA to confirm that the cat listed was indeed Sam. (She was.) However, she was prevented from taking Sam home because her flat lacked the proper combination of window grilles and height above the ground. I was the next best hope for Sam’s freedom, but for some clear obstacles. One, I was still living with my parents, who were most certainly not animal people. Two, James was still living at home too, and while he was happy to take in a rescued cat, his mother had reservations.

Adult cats don’t generally have the best chance of being adopted, and we were genuinely afraid that Sam’s time might be running out. So on a Saturday morning, James and I drove to the SPCA with his mother in tow. While James spoke to the centre’s staff and volunteers about adoption procedures, Ismet’s sister brought us to see Sam, cooped up in an enclosure better suited to a kitten.

Two of the biggest, saddest eyes you’ll ever see on a cat looked back out at us.

Like this. But sadder.

And that’s how we sold James’ mother on the cat. Or rather, that’s how the cat pitched herself successfully to James’ mum.

We were never meant to keep Sam for the long term. We knew we were just cat-sitting till Ismet and Merete came back for her. Trouble is, she worked her way into our hearts once she came out from under the bed. She endeared herself with her habit of just sitting there and keeping you company, being companionable without requiring much attention. It wasn’t long before James’ mother voiced what we were all thinking: “Can’t they get themselves another cat over in Norway?”

It was lucky, in a way, that Sam’s original parents were having a similar conversation on the other side of the world. Ismet was worried about the immigration procedures – what if Sam made it through the ordeal of the flight, only to get depressed while waiting to be released from quarantine? The weather would also be a problem; we found out quite early in our guardianship that Sam doesn’t even like being in air-conditioned rooms.

Eventually Ismet got in touch to ask if we would keep Sam for good. By then, we knew we’d be Really Sad if and when she left us. So we said yes. And that is how we came to share our lives, for better and for worse, with our little emo tortoiseshell kitteh.

(Her other set of parents pays a visit every time they’re in town, and Sam has a little emotional reunion with them until her abandonment issues kick in. Then she flounces away in a huff, and remains morose for days after they leave. It’s insanely adorable and just a little heartbreaking.)

Money Talks

This is something that has bugged me for a while.

As a child I was taught that it’s considered rude to talk about money. Specifically, that it was in bad taste to bring up what you spent or what other people spent.

Then as I grew older I found that in some circumstances people do find it acceptable to talk about what they paid for things. (This is especially so among women bargain-hunting for good deals ; ) Even though the rules on money conversations seemed more relaxed than I was taught to believe, I was definitely taken aback when an acquaintance asked me point-blank how much James and I paid for our condo unit.

Now I’m firmly on the side of caution when it comes to such conversations. Topics concerning money only come up when among good friends. And while I’m on board with the culture of showing off one’s purchases on Facebook, Twitter and the like, I still think it’s déclassé to openly discuss the price tag.

But I’m starting to feel like there is a reverse snobbery taking place in some circles when it comes to money conversations. I know people who go on a bit about how frugal they were or how little they spent on something, by way of contrasting other people’s spending habits. E.g. “My $20 pair of shoes serves me so well, people who spend $200 on shoes are ridiculous and extravagant.”

I don’t understand how this is more socially acceptable than someone bragging about her $200 shoes. Is it just me?

Happy Char Kway Teow Day

It started in 2006, the first year we got to spend Feb 14 together after a year in a long-distance relationship. We’d celebrated Feb 12 as the day we first started dating, and it seemed excessive to hold two celebratory meals almost back-to-back. Besides, restaurants scam you into paying stupid amounts of dosh for bad food on Valentine’s Day.

So we went to Margaret Drive food centre and queued up together for a plate of Hai Kee char kway teow each. We spent the rest of the night slumped in front of the TV, catatonic from overeating. (In future years, we learnt it was more sensible to share a plate between the two of us.)

The tradition lapsed slightly during the years where Chinese New Year coincided with Valentine’s Day, though we did make an effort to hunt down Penang char kway teow during the annual CNY visit to James’ mom’s hometown. This year, we decided to revive it at Gurney Drive – the one in Suntec City, not the one in Georgetown, Penang. It’s not a romantic venue by any means, yet many other couples were dining there that night, along with groups of single girls all dressed up to party. It’s nice to think that other people celebrate Char Kway Teow Day too

The Art of Conversation: Caveats

One random weekday afternoon, Elaine and I started listing out the annoying ways that people passive-aggressively preface their sentences with a caveat, in the hope that it’ll make what comes next less annoying/offensive.

Any more to add?

Morton’s Happy Hour

It’s been almost exactly 6 years since I first experienced happy hour at Morton’s Steakhouse Mandarin Oriental. Every weekday, the bar serves $12 martinis with a free flow of filet mignon finger sandwiches. It is a great place to spend happy hour if you like good martinis and good meat. The drinks are excellent; to say that the martinis give you a bit of a buzz is like saying that grass is a little bit green. As for the steak sandwiches, the meat is medium rare and juicy and the bread is beautifully buttery with a hint of creamy seasoning.

Blast from the past: Jem and I at Morton's, circa 2006

I’ve experienced Morton’s happy hour a couple of ways.
One – everyone has two or three drinks in the course of the two hours, watches the waiters like hawks for the sandwiches (which arrive every 15 – 20 minutes), and no one never quite gets enough food to absorb all the alcohol. We leave the bar completely plastered.
Two – a couple of suits with expense accounts commandeer a table or two, ordering rounds of drinks like it’s going out of fashion. This group typically features a couple of dozen friends and hangers-on, and lays waste to any tray of sandwiches that drifts into its airspace. (This also helps explain why the people in scenario one are left somewhat deprived.)

A couple of Fridays back, I was lucky enough to discover a far more enjoyable alternative.

Jacqui and I had arranged to meet at Morton’s no later than 5.15 pm, as every last seat at both the bars would be snapped up after that. She was running late, so I snagged a little table for two at the smaller bar located within the restaurant – and found myself drinking alone. Gasp.

Since I was already feeling like a bit of a cliche, I did the obvious thing and befriended the waiter. This turned out to be a good strategy for when the filet mignon sandwiches started flowing. Our table was closest to the kitchen so we were served first when each round of sandwiches came by. When he brought the first round, ‘our’ waiter murmured that we should eat fast so that he could bring the serving tray back to us once all the other diners had been served one each. And he was as good as his word! We were served twice each time the sandwiches came around, and had a dozen sandwiches between the two of us

Because we were both driving, we stopped at one appletini each. And before you condemn me for a cheapskate, scarfing down six free sandwiches with my one drink – we also shared a plate of pacific oysters on the half shell for $36 (or the price of three drinks). The result was that we enjoyed a decadent surf-and-turf snack (which amounted to a light dinner) with our drinks, and emerged from Morton’s feeling pleasantly buzzed instead of drunk as skunks.

And as for the nice waiter, I made sure to leave him a decent tip

2012 Resolutions – Part 1

The changing of the calendar is a great opportunity to take stock of priorities. The end of the preceding year is usually too hectic to regroup and think,  so I’ve saved my resolution-making for January.

In 2012, I will:

1. Invest in quality

This is not an excuse to go shopping. I promise.

This idea began with the life lessons I first learnt as a student attempting to live frugally in Melbourne. If you buy the cheap crappy winter jacket, you will end up paying more for good sweaters to layer warmly underneath. If you get the $15 haircut at the hairdressing academy, you’ll need to pay for another haircut very soon because your hair will grow out looking like a haystack.

It goes beyond the realm of goods and services: if you spend an hour socialising with people you don’t care about all that much, you’ll really crave the company of your real friends. Once I was at a bar with my friends and a guy chatted me up – I was afraid of being rude and ended up talking to him for about 30 minutes, which was a complete and utter waste of time considering I could’ve spent that half hour hanging out with people I actually cared about. (Who, in hindsight, kind of sucked insofar as they failed to catch all my telegraphed signals to bail me out!)

It’s been seven years since I left university and I still have to keep reminding myself to prioritise how I spend my resources on people and things. This year, I will make a real effort. On one end of the spectrum, I will stop buying blogshop clothes that never look that good once they arrive in the mail. And on the other end, I will make more time for the friends and family who enrich my life – and make more of an effort to enrich theirs in return.

A Creature of Habit

I like having my little routines. I’m not very organised, but I find a certain comfort in the repetitive patterns of daily life.

It makes me feel good to be able to mentally tick items off a list that seldom changes. Everything I do before the house each morning is compartmentalised into 15-minute segments, and I play a game with myself where I shave a couple of minutes off each segment when I can.

I like that these habits help me stay disciplined. For instance, having cornflakes for breakfast every day means that I enjoy my weekend pratas and big breakfasts even more.

I guess that’s why I get so much amusement out of the cats’ self-created routines. Sam and Bob love to perch in the same few spots day in, day out. I usually wake up to find Bob sprawled out across the bigger of our two sofas. And as for Sam, she’s nearly always in one of the balconies.

"Damn paparazzi, leave me ALONE."

Now if only I could parlay this random quirk into the basis for better work habits.

Doing Nothing In Phuket

We set out for Phuket with one objective in mind – to do nothing. All things considered, we pulled it off pretty well.

We did nothing at the beach – if reading and sea sports still count as nothingness.

I finished the entire Hunger Games trilogy on the first two days of this trip. I do love my Kindle.

James and I, kayaking for the first time in a decade or two. We lasted less than half an hour before getting bored and returning to shore.

Kyle and Alli taking a catamaran out for a spin. They looked pretty cool out on the water, but my camera lens doesn't go that far. You'll have to take my word for it.

And we did nothing in the apartment, which was almost indecently spacious for the two couples it contained.

The boys, hanging in the living room.

One of the two bedrooms. Count the pillows!

And the larger of the two bathrooms. We never did make use of that tub though.

In between spates of nothing-doing, we found quite a lot to entertain ourselves with.

There was a Swensen's next door to the resort - 59 baht ice cream cones ftw! (Not pictured: my husband dropping a scoop of ice cream, narrowly missing the head of a petite waitress.)

The housekeeping staff left an origami towel elephant in the middle of the dining table. James named him Dumbo. On the 2nd day of our trip, we found that Dumbo got tired of standing.

I have to claim credit for this one. Seriously though, Korean sheet masks are excellent after-sun therapy.

A holiday like this requires the right travel companions; namely, like-minded people who are entirely on board with doing nothing as well. Kyle and Alli fit the bill perfectly. (Said like-mindedness is evidenced by Alli’s trip update here.) I don’t know if the opportunity will come up for us to vacation together again, but I do hope it does – they’re excellent company!

:)

Also, it really helps to have someone to take photos of me with James. It's hard to get a photo like this when it's just the two of us holidaying together!

Consumed: Chikuwa Tei

Chikuwa Tei is the reincarnation of Far East Plaza’s Wasabi Tei, where the chef was notorious for yelling at errant customers who didn’t know the restaurant’s unspoken rules. The chef has mellowed considerably, but it was the service that was beyond the pale.

But first, the food. It was rather decent all round, and rightly so especially given that the prices have gone up by around 20% since they moved from Far East. The chawanmushi was chock-a-block with savoury ingredients. I had the famous chirashi don: the sashimi was both fresh and satisfying, though I found the tuna a little tougher than I like. Then again, I’m not usually a big tuna person anyway.

Chawanmushi.

Chirashi don.

The service, on the other hand, was pretty shocking. Our friends only arrived 10 minutes before us, but they were positively fuming by the time we got there. The hostess had apparently given them a very unpleasant time over whether or not they had a reservation, even though (1) we had rung up twice for our a reservation and (2) the restaurant was nowhere near full. It got to the point that the chef – the same crusty one from Far East Plaza days – stepped out to intervene.

And throughout our meal, that hostess (who also waited tables) was extremely abrupt and brusque to the point of rudeness. Very memorably, she’d stick herself bodily between two of us sitting side by side to plonk a dish on the table, and announce its arrival loudly right into our ears midway through our conversation.

Since the food was good but not earth-shatteringly so, I rather suspect that we won’t be back for another round with that waitress…

Chikuwa Tei
9 Mohamed Sultan Road, #01-01, +65 6738 9395

‘Tis The Season

It isn’t much of a secret that I don’t like Christmas. I must have stopped loving Yuletide when I was around 11 or 12, when I first became cognisant of the obligations, disappointments and other such family-related drama that accompany the season.

As much as I still love the Biblical meaning of Christmas, I hate just about everything else.

Except Starbucks’ Toffee Nut Lattes. I am a complete sucker for that stuff.
Last year, James even bought me a bottle of the syrup from a Starbucks that was clearing stock towards the tail-end of the season.

Today was the first day of Starbucks Singapore’s Christmas promotions. This was today’s deal:

The fine print in the lower left says "Complimentary Christmas beverage given will be that of the lower price." This will be relevant later in this post.

After lunch, I dropped by the nearest Starbucks with my laptop to get some work done while waiting for the queue to disperse. This turned out to be a good strategy because the queue was INSANE.

When there was no more queue altogether, I went up to the counter and placed my order of a grande toffee nut latte (half-caff, skinny) for me and an iced white chocolate mocha for a colleague. Except that the baristas weren’t going to let me; they insisted that the free drink had to be the same as the one paid for.

Me: That’s not what your ad says.
Barista 1: *checks with Barista 2*
Barista 2: No, you can only get the same drink for free. That means you can have a free toffee nut latte but not an iced mocha.
Me: Your ad says you can get the lower priced beverage for free. If it meant that you can only get two of the same drink, why would one be of a lower price?

Barista 2 then says to Barista 1, “Never mind, since she wants it we just give it to her ok.”
For some reason, this annoyed me a lot more than their initial refusal. I think it was the sheer principle of the thing – here I am trying to explain your own marketing collateral to you with logic, and there you are trying to humour me.

Me: I don’t see what the issue is. Your ad clearly says the lower priced beverage is free, and if that’s the case, that should mean I can get two different drinks.
Barista 2: Ok, ma’am, since you want it that way we will give it to you.

Now I was REALLY mad. Fuming, I marched off to where the sign was displayed, picked it up, and physically brought it to the baristas.

Me: “Complimentary Christmas beverage given will be that of the lower price” — this means that the customer can order two different drinks. I CAN READ, OKAY?!

Barista 2 finally capitulated. “Ma’am, so sorry for the miscomm, you are right.”
And then she whipped out a coupon book, tore off two coupons, and said, “This is our service recovery for you ma’am, you can bring this back for a free tall beverage of your choice.”

So I got my promotional drink, I won my logical battle, and I got coupons for more drinks.

But I still can't believe she actually said "this is our service recovery for you".

Seriously, universe. There is only this much about the trappings of Christmas that I look forward to. Don’t go messing with it now.