A Day Well Spent

After my bout of insomnia, I finally fell asleep shortly after my last post. Despite the late night, I woke up at 6 am naturally as usual. My sore throat had dissipated, with the potential to bring good or bad tidings. It either means I've recovered or the virus has gone further down my respiratory tract. In my case, it was the latter. My throat felt weird & scratchy, causing me to cough. Having nothing planned for the day except moving some of the more portable items to the new place, I decided to start tidying up the exterior.

Hub's work is physically demanding. So I thought if I can take these chores out of his hands, it'll be great. We bought the cheapest lawn mower available in Bunnings months & months back. Of course, it comes with a price. Also, the grass is long, requiring me to go over the same area countless times to cut them down. Before long, I started developing blisters on my hands from the effort. That's after only 3 horizontal strips of the back lawn. So I put on hub's boxing gloves for the padding & continued working. Sweat ran into my eyes & my hair was drenched. Finally, after just under 3 hours, I got it as close to perfection as possible. At this point, my fitbit vibrated, signalling that I had achieved my 10k steps for the day.

As I was mowing the lawn, a scene from our favourite romantic comedy came to mind. I don't watch such movies but this particular movie was something hubs enjoyed & had introduced to me. It's The Proposal starring Sandra Bullock & Ryan Reynolds. SB came across RR's grandmother in the forest, performing some pagan ritual & was invited to give thanks to mother earth. She started out awkward but it turned into a dance cum rap. There's this sentence that appropriately describe my circumstances at that point of time if I indeed have balls. It goes, "Sweat drip down my balls." I was covered in sweat, my top was totally wet & sweat dripped down the ends of my hair.

I then trimmed the edges that the mower couldn't reach with a pair of garden shears. Next, I sawed off the branch that had spilt in half & my dad helped saw it into smaller pieces for easy disposal. The word branch may give the wrong impression that it is small. But when we threw the cut up pieces into our bin, it filled it up 3/4 of the way. I dug up the dead rheos in the garden bed along the outside of the kitchen in preparation for new ones to go in. Then I raked dead leaves from the garden beds in front of the house.

I was deadbeat by 12 noon. Having done all of the above, I took a shower, prepared lunch & proceeded to load my boot with the packed items. We finally got home at 2.30 pm after 2 trips to the new house. I collapsed in bed & didn't get up till hubs got home from work at 3.30 pm. My whole body was aching, either from the viral infection or the physical work, probably from the latter. Hubs was tired so he took a nap before we head out for dinner.

It was starting to get dark when I woke hubs up at 6.20 pm. We left for Alfred's Kitchen which supposedly serves the best burgers in Australia. We were super lucky to get the last remaining lot in the carpark. The place was absolutely crowded. We left my parents sitting on a bench while we placed the order & waited for collection. When we got back to the bench, I was horrified to see that my mom had done the Singaporean thing. She placed her bag on the other half of the bench to "chope" the seats for us. I nearly fainted. If there's anything I'm ashamed of about Sg, it's this choping of seats.

When we 1st got here, people were raving about Pea & Ham soup. We tried the canned version but I wasn't impressed. But I must say the canned version did it a great injustice for the one served at Alfred's Kitchen is way better. The burgers were fantastic too. But then I'm not a good judge of food for I'm super chin chye. I know people who will throw away the entire packet of rice just becoz the fish has got 鱼腥味 or chuck the entire serving of noodles away becoz it's been sitting in the soup for too long & has turned soggy.

The fire was burning away on gigantic charcoal chunks. I love the smell of burning charcoal. As we were driving back, I told hubs that the only thing missing is something sweet to finish off. It's ok, we'll do it tomorrow when we head down to the chocolate factory. Hee...