A day of firsts

Sales are everywhere! but i'm finding myself a little too tired to shop. had quite a packed Saturday today... was asked to Botanic Gardens today and tried taking a new bus service (No. 5) from my bus stop to Far East Plaza... finally there's a bus that brings me all the way from home to Orchard... took more than an hour though... but at least there's now an additional option :) then met up with a couple of old RGS classmates, whom i've not seen for years... cos it's Cat's birthday today and we decided to go try out this Korean restaurant (Jang Shou Korean BBQ) at Esplanade. Well, i wonder why it had decent reviews, cos the food was just so-so and expensive... and it had inflexible ordering policies, such as making customers order at least 2 portions of bbq meat if we wanted to choose from the bbq menu... the bbq meat is supposed to be good.. but too bad we didn't order it :P. lost track of time at lunch and ended up missing my weekly STEP class.. so decided to go try pilates for fun... it's actually pretty interesting... cos you fiddle around with this multi-purpose stick (multi-purpose cos this stick has elastic bands with loops at the ends for you to stick your feet into) a lot during the workout... haha erm I think i've just succeeded in making pilates sound like a super weird form of exercise. but yeah. i think it trains your muscles...though I had a lot of trouble doing all those stretches and prob did >half the things wrongly, I still hope that whatever I did contributed a little towards a flatter tummy :P

the nasty episode of painful swallowing is finally over! my throat is nearly as good as before today :) didn't expect such a speedy recovery, but it was really sudden sickness, sudden recovery. when i started getting better, I realized that I appreciated being able to swallow painlessly and unawkwardly a lot more... hai. perhaps it's a tiny lesson to punish me for my snacking-on-dry-heaty-stuff habits. Speedy recovery was also in part due to late night consultation at Changi Hospital on sunday night. the unprecedented painful condition got my paranoid dad quite worried and he insisted on taking me to the A & E dept to do some check. (well, so i contributed to that pool of non-urgent cases that the A & E dept receives yearly) Expectedly, non-urgent cases were also not tended to immediately, so ended up waiting at the hospital till close to midnight... nonetheless saw the doc, who confirmed that it's prob not tonsilitis... he also gave me a much stronger antibiotic... which worked wonders! two lil thoughts on incident -- 1) it's a blessing to have such loving (albeit ultra-paranoid) parents 2) ENT stands for Ear, Nose and Throat (dept?) hehe. feel relieved that I didn't need to have funny tubes stuck down my nose/throat etc.

Maybe I have tonsilitis

And so the watermelon powder thingy failed me. Woke up this morning with a full blown sore throat... and even after taking my medicine it hasn't shown any signs of getting better... Doesn't help that the doctor whom I saw this morning didn't give me any form of reassurance at all. He somewhat lackadaisically asked me... how long has this been going on? any fever? have you been taking fried, spicy food lately? etc etc. then when I said... it's veyr painful... is it serious? to which he answered, it's probably an infection, but you don't have any fever yet... (so i get the impression it's not serious, though he gave me a cryptic answer).... found it very hard to concentrate with extremely awkward throat so took MC and came back late morning. THEN, later this evening, i started googling for 'tonsilitis' and it appears to describe my symptoms pretty well... esp the bit about finding painful and hard to swallow... yes, I know that it can help me jian3 fei2 (since I either dun feel like eating, or can only eat softer and not so yummy foods), but please go away soon...

my sore throat 'brewed' into an extremely painful one in 2 days and I suspect the culprit is some ulcer... cos pain feels somewhat localised. i can't even swallow without wincing... let's hope the funny watermelon powder works wonders and that I'll be ok tomorrow. on a totally unrelated note, I'm wondering if I should spend $500 on a good electronic Japanese-English dictionary which will allow me to look up words and how to use them in sentences in a few 'clicks'... hmm.. $500.... quite ex... but may be a good long-term investment though.