Yesterday was a quiet day at home. Unusually quiet. So quiet you could hear a pin drop! After sending Steev to class, the girls and I headed for the book sale. Yep, that one, the big bad one where books were going for a steal (at 70-90% off, I would definitely call it that)!

Once we got into the sale, Raine (our resident book fanatic!) went berserk with Skye only two steps behind. In 30 minutes, my dear girls managed to pick out 29 of the books they’ve been waiting to get their hands on, the poor kids, hmm!

Yes, thankfully we have incredible sales like this once or twice a year where I can afford to let my hungry bookworms loose! If we shopped like this during normal times, I’d be like Ma Baker sending my kids out to rob banks!

Now that my wallet is lighter, I told the girls we can only afford to eat porridge for lunch. But this here is no mean pot of porridge – it contained 3-year Japanese scallops (luckily we didn’t die from this) which have been sitting around forgotten !!

We had a quiet Thanksgiving dinner, just me and the girls – partly because we were hungry (porridge digests too fast!) and partly because our tongues were on fire, the black pepper lamb chops were oh so spicy !

And why is the house so quiet again? That’s because the girls and I aren’t speaking to each other! Well, they’re in their rooms, eyeballs glued to the new books (duh!) and remember, there’s 29 books so I reckon the house is going to be quiet for a while?

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Here we are, at the start of a six-week weekend, woo-hoo! Can you imagine that? Six whole weeks of nothing but weekends. Are we in luck or what? Just one of the benefits of being a WAHM, I guess. We get to have all the fun !!

We just came back with several bags of shopping after four hours at the Jusco Sale. Surprisingly the sale wasn’t that crowded, there were hardly any lines so we took our time trying out clothes. We only bought jeans, shorts and underpants. As usual, we couldn’t find any nice tops. The rest of the bags are all food .

Last weekend, we got the girls’ guitar strings changed so they can continue learning on their own, now that they’ve quit classes. It took us two trips to find the music store which wouldn’t rip us off. That’s what a big help GooMaps and my internal GPS are, honestly !

Skye’s friends from school want to go watch Twilight New Moon this week. I’m not a Twilight fan, neither are any of my kids *whew*. It’s just as well that Skye’s friend who’s organizing it decided to call the whole thing off.

Except for the fact that I still have to chauffeur Steev since his classes are still on, it’s nice being able to kick back, even if it’s only for six weeks which, I’m sure, will fly.

I decided to play hookie this morning and skip gym. Never mind that I’ve put on 2 lbs from eating irregular meals, even missing dinner (is that even possible ?!!) because of last week’s AAR concert hyperactivity – uptown, downtown collecting tickets, meeting the band, dancing the night away (I think that does it for gym) and doing all the crazy stuff that only a mom like me would do. No biggie, we had a blast!

This week, I’m trying to get back into the swing of things. For the first time in history, we ran out of hair shampoo we’ve been washing our hair so often last week. Hate being in crowds and having people breathe and smoke into our hair, ew!

Not only that, we also ran out of dog food and poor Tyson (our beagle, not Ritter though it wouldn’t be so bad having him eat out of our hands !) had to survive on bread crumbs.

What was heartening though was that I noticed quite a number of parents (mostly dads) at the concert that night. True, they looked rather disoriented. Maybe they’re not into AAR music. Maybe it’s their first concert. But at least they made the effort to get themselves involved in their kids’ interests instead of just dropping them off and driving away. Way to go, that’s what I call good parenting!

I think a lot of times, we limit ourselves by saying, now that I’m a parent, I’m too old to be seen doing this or wearing this or whatever. But at the end of the day, as long as I don’t go overboard, it’s okay to have a good time and be myself. To heck what people think, I just do my own thang, ya know .

I really have a thing for clam chowder and eating it always brings me back to that wintry day at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco when I slurped not one but two cups of steaming hot clam chowder standing on the pier overlooking Alcatraz. Mmm, good memories!

Since then, I always order clam chowder wherever I go. I had it at Bubba Gump on our first and last visit there, won’t be going back. And I’ve been lamenting ever since about why Friday’s doesn’t have it on their menu. I think they heard me .

This is the Clam Chowder I had at Friday’s over the weekend. Lots of yummy bits, just missing the croutons. I ordered this for myself but ate very little because Raine and Skye gobbled most of it .

For the main course, I had Cajun Shrimp and Chicken Pasta. Nice and spicy, and loved that they use linguine.

The price of a really good meal like this these days is almost like rv financing. Okay, not quite but still it’s not cheap either. Important thing is we had a nice meal and a great time. If you want to see more pictures of what else we ordered, go salivate on my food blog.

I was on a vegetarian diet yesterday as it was the first day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar, the lucky month for weddings which explains why we already have a stack of wedding invitations stretching all the way into December. Woe to our wallets !!

We jumped straight from bed to the mall. As usual, vegetarian is a bit of a hassle when we’re  eating out. But I guess, where there’s McD, there’s a way. Me and the kids gobbled 6 large French fries and we happily wandered off to Sun Moulin for strawberry tarts and chocolate cake .

Shopping has a way of speeding up our metabolism. An hour later, I was driving to Domino’s. Raine got a Domino’s pizza voucher as one of the prizes for getting straight A’s last year. Notice they don’t reward you with brain food but at least we’re lucky it’s Domino’s, not Pizza Hut!

Since when is one pizza ever enough? We ended up with two large vegetarian pizzas and a non-vegetarian one. And yes, it was drizzling when we went to pick up our pizza takeouts, hence the title of this post .

So we’re back to school… all except Raine, that is, who has a persistent cough left over from last week. I finally took her to the doc’s this morning as the cough doesn’t seem to be going away. I waited this long because my philosophy is, there are infinitely more germs at the clinic so let me try to be smart and prescribe my own medication first.

Speaking of last week, it was kinda laid back. Though the kids are old enough to keep themselves entertained, they always come around looking for me to chat or watch music videos with them. There were some afternoons they were pretty bored especially when the heat and humidity sent this sleepy mommy off to la-la-land .

Anyhow we managed to catch a few movies at home and that’s always nice. We watched Ironman for the second time (or was it the third?) and I still love Gwyneth Paltrow as the slim, sultry and stunning Pepper Potts. She’s too gorgeous for words.

And all those slave bots at Ironman’s house, wow, I could do with a couple of those. Do the laundry. Cook up a gourmet meal. Get me into that iron suit so I can zoom out the window to pick up my kids from school, hahaha, nice! Can’t wait for Ironman 2 coming out next year, woo-hoo!

Jumper is a pretty cool movie too. It’s about a guy who can ‘jump’ to any location and of course, the first place he ‘jumped’ to was the bank vault. Makes sense, why not, I would do that too, hahaha. Can you imagine going on holiday just ‘jumping’ to any place in the world without having to, um, book airplane tickets !? Pretty neat, huh? Yep… and you can stop dreaming now!

This is what I’ve lately become addicted to. Does this somehow have to do with the fact that I’m 48% nerd? Never mind, don’t answer that .

I’m at this practically every night and the girls jump in to help me or cheer me on when I’m stuck. Growing up, I remember hogging the Sunday papers for these, much to the frustration of everyone else in the house.

Then there was a stretch when my Dad became totally obsessed with submitting his entries to some weekly crossword contest. He’d come by waving his stack of entries, and how could I say no? I didn’t mind helping with the crosswords but cranking out those slogans really threw me .

We had another family gathering over lunch at another cousin’s place, the one who used to help us source for life insurance quotes. SIL and hubby are back from their brief domestic holiday and will be flying home to Australia tomorrow.

Lunch was homecooked, seems to be a new trend with the in-laws these days. Well, at least, the food was much more palatable than the lunch at the other cousin’s two weeks ago. This time, my kids managed to polish off a full lunch in spite of what we’d eaten before we left - noodles and nachos with guacamole.

Before we go to any meal invitation, I always make sure I feed the kids first. While we always make it a point to respect other people’s time by arriving early/on time, it’s not a common practice here where guests rarely ever arrive on time and there’s no telling what time dinner will be served.

Also if the kids are fed, they’re less likely to make a dash for the food. Nothing’s more embarrassing than seeing my kids make a rush for the food as if they’re so deprived they’ve never seen good food before! I teach the kids to stand back and let others rush ahead if it’s a buffet-style dinner. We’re not in a hurry as we’ve already eaten.

But if it’s a sit-down Chinese meal, I encourage them to quickly take a little bit of what they want before everyone else “washes” their chopsticks in the communal dishes, and not go back for seconds no matter how good the food tastes. If they really love the food there, I will take them back another time and we can have a leisurely meal on our own, sans the saliva cocktail.

Oops, looks like I’ve digressed. Lunch today was curried jumbo prawns, fried noodles, deep-fried chicken, cauliflower mix-fry and rojak (fruit salad). Later we had walnut cake over a pot of Chinese tea. I might even say the afternoon with the in-laws was pleasant though watching reruns of the same wedding video 5 times proved a little too much .