First things first

The first things I did after waking up on New Year's Day were: clean the two-week-old nail polish off my fingernails, cut and file my fingernails, whip Xmas leftovers into a late sandwich lunch, watch the second disc of director's/writers' commentary on the extended edition of The Return of the King and take a nap.

If that sounds intolerably tame, then remember that we abandoned our New Year's Eve tradition of doing nothing, and kissed 2004 farewell with two parties and an impromptu karaoke session in Chinatown. The parties were extremely civilised, even with the game of Twister that mysteriously materialised at X's shortly after midnight. Karaoke at Cha Xuan was in its own universe, however. For all that it purports to be a "family karaoke" place, it was filled with mostly Chinese men whose gaze I didn't want to meet as we filtered through the main singing area to the upstairs private booth where our friends were. They sang, I took a nap, and when the place closed at 4 am, it smelled a lot worse than when we first came in. Outside, there were no cabs, natch. A tribe of young men in white shirts and black pants clustered protectively around one of their own, who retched and heaved every two minutes or so. The poor grass.

I was going to blog before Xmas about how the monsoon season, having arrived early, had correspondingly fled before the new year. However, while we had a deceptively dry Xmas, with only one brief cloudburst around lunchtime, it's been raining energetically for two ---no, three days now. I should go run before it starts up again.