"I like a bit of hunky dory ... "

T meant to say "blackened dory", which is his fish meal of choice at Blooie's when he's avoiding red meat. "Hunky dory", I suppose would be a whole other kettle of fish (pun intended).

That was the highlight of last night. The Gallery Hotel is funky, but also tries a bit too hard in its funkiness. We really should've just stayed home, especially since the weather prevented me from swimming.

At 9:30 am on a Sunday by the Singapore river, the only people up and about were joggers, tourists, and a grizzled tan Chinese man in his 50s, sharing a cigarette with his bicycle and casting the only monochrome silhouette against a landscape of pastel Mediterranean hues.

At 10 am, in the Orchard MRT environs, stir several bevies of Filipino women into the mix.

At 10:20 am, at the basement food court at Scott, there was also a smattering of local famlies having breakfast, as if it were a neighbourhood coffeeshop in our legendary HDB heartlands, in stead of a cheap eat-and-go place in the heart of the shopping district.

I spent most of the afternoon in the throes of a cleaning frenzy. I've been plotting various stages of this clean-and-tidy operation for several days now, and when I got home today, I knew the moment for execution had come.

First, the simple Xmas decor over the grilled gate went up. No problems there, plus I got compliments from people who dropped by later in the day.

Then there was the cleaning of the roomy but ill-used bookcase in our bedroom. An hour or so later, I'd relocated all drama, poetry, humour and travel books over there, to keep T's collection of men's magazines (of the FHM rather than the metrosexual variety) company warm under the blast of the airconditioner.

I was going to go on cleaning the bookshelves in the next room, but I thought about all the dust stirred up in the bedroom and the fact that my eyes have been itching for about two weeks now, and I decided to wash the sheets instead. While that was humming along nicely, I rearranged stuff on our bookshelves and finally, properly, unpacked the books, files and notes that I'd brought home 2 years ago when I cleared out my desk at the school I used to teach at. Some books are still on the floor, but that's because we are going to buy new bookcases *squeal* for the living room and once our science fiction/fantasy collections are moved out there, there will be room for all our books on shelves at last, and there will definitely be no books on the floor.

Which should tide us over for about two months before we buy even more books and our floor is overrun again ...

I don't clean up very often, but when I do, it's with a vengeance. Amen.