Relocating Fergus Ong

is no easy task. For a self-professed communist, that man has a lot of stuff. Also, we've decided to not kill ourselves climbing the stairs, so we've been moving bit by bit over the three weeks, since renovations finished. Oh yeah, we forgot to post that bit up. Opps.

So. People have been asking "So any updates on the house?" and all we have had to offer is "Errm, we're still moving Fergs into it." After a few weeks, we just sound lazy. And slow. Please bear in mind we've been out of town a number of weekends, which is prime moving time; there's been several rounds of celebrating Jesus' birthday; and after that there was a funeral to attend. So there. We don't look so bad after all.

Anyhow, in his own words, here's what the last two moving rounds have looked like.

Moving house deadline watch: 5 days to go
9am Pack microwave, beanbag, folders and box with boxes, boxers (the sportsmen) and boxers (the shorts)
10am Pack box with boxers (the dog)
11am Unload at new place and travel back to Muar

Moving house deadline watch: 2 days to go (at this point things heat up a little as the December 31 deadline looms)

9am Pack work gear and some more boxes. Work at new house
12pm Put long work process to run and head back to old room
12.15pm Pack clothes into box and backpacker bag
12.35pm Dismount deer head from wall and pack in plastic bag
1pm Unload and return
1.15pm Pack ironing board, tiger rug and kitchenware
1.45pm Dismantle PC
1.50pm Unload and return
3pm Pack kitchen knives, swiss army knife, hunting knife, samurai sword, axe, viking hat
5.10pm Pack movie posters, music posters, propaganda posters, table lamp and books
6pm Unload
6.45pm Kill puma
7pm Dinner

At the time of writing, there is ONE day left. There's still several carloads of stuff, mostly bulky stuff like his bookcase, TV and sofa. Will we make it before this year slips away? Ooo the suspense.

Postscript: On the first night of 2010, Fergus Ong will finally sleep under his very own roof. Hoorah!

Happy Blessed Merry Super Mirthful Christmas!

Fergus: Merry Christmas everybody!

Athalia: Yes, Merry Christmas everyone!

Fergus: Thanks for reading our blog.

Athalia: And leaving us all your fantastic comments.

Fergus: Athalia will respond to all your comments on Boxing Day.

Athalia: I will?

Fergus: Of course you will.

Athalia: Oh, how come me and not you? I'm always responding to comments.

Fergus: Not to this post, you haven't.

Athalia: -_- This post hasn't even gone up.

Fergus: By the time someone reads this, it would have.

Athalia: And so your point is?

Fergus: Athalia will respond to all your comments on Boxing Day, guys!

Athalia: You are a lazy blogger, Fergus Ong.

Fergus: And she will post about what we got for Christmas!

Athalia: Stupiak.

Fergus: And she will do a 1,500-word post about New Year's Day!

(Throat clears from behind Real Fergus.)

Real Athalia: Eh, don't la.

Real Fergus: Don't la what?

Real Athalia: I'm busy wrapping Christmas gifts and you're goofing around on our blog? At least write a proper Christmas post.

Real Fergus: Too late!

-Click!-

Guest post from Lionel Messi!

Hola Fergus,

It's me, Lionel. I heard that you've been saying that blue and red don't go together? What's this, bro? I always thought you had good taste but I think maybe you've been a bit stressed, no? Well, don't be stressed - impossible is nothing and that includes painting your wall or your door or your ceiling blue and it will match with your red couch, just like FC Barcelona. Un momento...

(Es su sala de estar, Andreas. Que no quiere que en azul y rojo. Está bien. Está bien.)

My friend Iniesta ask me to tell you that the blue shade, if it is near the purple tone, it is very nice to go with the red. He likes that very much.

All the best with your house. Come and see me one day, I will show you my World Player of the Year trophy. Oh. That Athalia has good taste. You should listen to her advice.

Adios,

Lionel Messi

Guest post from Natalie Portman!

Dear Fergus,

I heard that you said that red and blue do not go together, so I thought I'll send you pictures from my latest photoshoot with Marie Claire to show that if you pick the correct tones, they can in fact look very nice side-by-side. Don't you think so?

I think the trick is to avoid the bright, primary shades and to have one colour as the dominant one and the other as an accent. I hope this helps you and Athalia with picking out colours for your new place. Be sure to post pictures up once you're done so I can drop by and have a look okay? Looking forward to it!

Wishing you both a very merry Christmas and happy new year.

xoxo,

Natie

Pictures from a weekend in Muar

The backyard of the family house leading out to the vast stretch of greenery by the side.

Muar is close enough to tap Singapore TV stations with the help of tall antennas like this. Can you see it?

The clock tower peeking out from behind the row of shops. The next time we go back I really want to do a proper shoot around town.

Fergs' favourite stall: cui kueh. The bubbling pot of chai poh sits on a charcoal stove, which lends a touch of old-fashion charm to this uniquely Muarian breakfast.

Firecrackers at his cousin's wedding. It's been a long time since I've seen one of these go off.

The still, cool light in the living room before the entire household has woken up.

The most photographed member of the Ong clan. Smile!

Home-made coconut candy being cut. Serious sugar high there.

Our kitchen window

This is the view from our kitchen window. I don't know about you, but I'm quite in love with it.

Don't tell Athalia, but I can see myself doing most of the cooking next time. :)

Lesson 04: Toilet bowl trajectory

The next lesson to learn about buying a toilet bowl is to be imaginative when you look at it. Specifically, you have to imagine your WC in all its most gory detail.

Ours, so it seems, has turned out to be the poster child of horror toilet bowls from the dark side. Innocuous on the surface, this monster has a ceramic portion from the front of the bowl going some two thirds of the way towards the back of the bowl. Coupled with water that doesn't fill past the surface of this ceramic portion, one ends up with very little water in the bowl to do all the dirty work of catching one's excrement when it exits one's proverbial arse.

What all this means is that we've got ourselves a streak-prone toilet bowl. It's an insanely poor architecture, but there just isn't enough water filling up the bowl to stop the shit from falling and getting stuck on the ceramic portion. The only way to prevent this from happening is to develop a technique where you actually shit backwards. The change in trajectory of the shit would cause it to hit the water and not cause streaks.

Honestly, though, I don't know if I will ever master this technique. I think putting a powerful spray hose next to the toilet bowl is a better option. Either that or keeping a crap-eating, ceramic-clinging, flush-resistant pet from the tropical jungles of Borneo. Just gotta make sure it doesn't bite.

Working from home

I worked from home yesterday. Not just any home - the new home!

Yes, I spent the morning and evening legs yesterday working from our new and newly cleaned apartment as seen above.

It's actually quite comfortable. Short of having a chair and table to hammer away on, the concrete floor is extremely cool to sit on (temperature cool). With the front sliding door and the back door and window open, it did not feel like 1pm on a Malaysian afternoon. Not at least till I left the apartment and got into my car.

Can't quite do breaknecking work there yet, but everything else, from scripting to logging and capturing video footage can be done from the new home. Just gotta get some furniture and that beautiful thing called An Internet Connection in. And a fluffy kitten. And a 9-foot teddy bear that speaks in Hebrew. Yes, once those are in, I can properly work from home.

Ah, gorgeous days.

Postscript: I should disclaim that the photo I took above is a nod to my next-year-to-be-brother-in-law david's post on his own house works and moving in. Go check out his swanky grey walls!

Late afternoon series 01

Took this on a cloudy day last week, just before it started raining. When I was young, I remember going out into the garden every time the sky looked yellow. We had a very yellow sky last Sunday evening. It reminded me of those late afternoons that end so quickly.

Lesson 03: Toilet bowl hole distance

Among all the lessons we're learning, the one about toilet bowls may not be the hardest to learn, but it definitely stinks the worst. Here's how it goes.

You can't just buy any old WC, shove it into your half-renovated bathroom and force the holes to align. Each toilet bowl comes with a certain measurement that relates to the distance between the wall and the center of the hole in your floor. That's the hole where all the brown stuff goes, so buying a commode that doesn't align is bad news.

On most toilet bowls, this measurement is something like 7 to 18 inches. It's not entirely hard to shop for a toilet bowl if your hole ... ahem ... is that far from the wall. But our toilet bowl hole (this is getting tiring) happens to be a whopping 22 inches off the wall. And nobody sells toilet bowls 22 inches off the wall. Nobody except one shop, selling it in one brand, one model, one colour.

Other than that, we had a grand total of zero options.

It helped that it didn't cost a bomb, cos if it did, we'd still have been robbed into picking them up. So the lessons learned are manifold:

(1) Know the distance of your hole from the wall

(2) Get your contractor to measure it - we measured 20 inches but Ah Yaw measured 22

(3) A toilet bowl that doesn't meet the wall may be funny, but only for a while.

There are more lessons to be learned from this ill-fated WC campaign. Cheap things bought with no viable alternatives can and will turn out nasty. More on this in the next post.

Lesson 02: Lab sink

If you're a sane person, the kind with at least one practical bone in your body, and you are generally sensible, and you tend to make fairly solid decisions in life backed by the wisdom of those before you and your shrewdness on the day, then you're nothing like us, and you would buy yourself a normal sink.

But noOOOoooOOoooOoo. We had to go and buy ourselves a lab sink. A what sink?

A lab sink.

OoooOOo.

No, seriously. Some days, I really wonder what posessed us to buy a lab sink for our animal testing lab bathroom. It costs more, it doesn't have brackets that let you ram it into the wall and you can't just slap on any old tap. For starters, your tap has to come from the wall, not from the bottom. We've had to construct a base on which the sink will sit (see pics, from my lovely doodle to the finished article), and this hasn't only eaten into our fixtures budget, but it's also eaten into our tile budget, albeit at a whopping bill circa RM25.

Ok, big deal. It's about three square feet in total surface area. We even bought the perfect faucet for it only to have to rule it out because it's a tap that comes up from beneath and it's also too short. Yes, a lab sink on a base sticking out of the wall needs a faucet that juts out some 8 inches if you want to wash your hands with any semblance of peace. All-in-all, it's a fuss that 10 out of 10 sane people would avoid.

Which is why we are loving every bit of it. All hail the white lab sink!

All: Hail!

Fergus: Thanks All. You're very sporting to play along.

All: No probs. Nice sink.

The begining of the end of the year

And to mark this beginning, we've put up a new banner. I plan to do this monthly, hopefully this is not too large an ambition to handle.

Festive banner aside, Christmas looks in danger of being an after-thought that's crowded right at the end of an incredibly packed month. Here's what we have lined up over the next three weekends:

• Moving Fergs into our new, unnamed place
• Doing up said place - plenty of painting and laying floor boards and tinkering around
• Two weddings, one in Muar

Also, Fergs will have to write, shoot and edit the final three episodes of his TV program, which may eat into the weekends. Thankfully, there are plenty of public holidays that fall nicely on Friday and I'm poised to take most of the following Mondays off, giving me a four-day weekend. Such bliss.