Loopie - Joop

The government has recently announced increases to the baby bonus scheme.  The scheme (!) is of course to encourage Singaporeans to have more children.  The current population replacement rate is 1.2.  I was initially mistaken that a replacement rate greater than 1 is pretty good.  Apparently the ratio is calculated using the number of female Singaporeans as the denominator.  That means we need a minimum replacement rate of 2 to maintain our population size.  In other words, the number of Singaporeans with pink ICs is dwindling and we are in desperate need of Singaporean babies. Perhaps the fundamental question to ask is 'why are people not having children'?  Why are the cash incentives not doing much to save the situation? I personally have chosen the dink path because I'm really not particularly fond of children.  I do think they're cute, but they are time-consuming and boy, do they take a long time to grow up, all 18 years in fact.  My dog Chewy was toilet-train

Two weeks to CNY.  The year of the snake is almost upon us.  This means Stef turns 36 and my dear Aaron turns 48! Gulp!  How time flies! Hao-e and I were talking in the cab this morning about Tony Leung (he's 50!), Andy Lau, Aaron Kwok, and all their compatriots, how they've not aged visibly and how they've managed to sustain their careers for so many years.  It's pretty amazing if you think about it.  Aaron started off in Taiwan all those years ago as bright-eyed dancer who can barely carry a tune.  He's now freakingly good looking and a rather watchable actor, i think he won a golden horse several years back as well!  Takeshi Kaneshiro too, who knew he could play a very good looking Zhuge Liang?!  He actually looked like he could be intelligent enough, ha!  And Tony Leung has always been a charismatic actor, remember those days when he and Andy were in TVB drama serials? Even Jacky Cheung has diversified into acting, and he got a best supporting actor award too

Holy grill teriyaki fish and chicken. Yum!

Chewy ran away from my in laws' house 3 times while we were away last week! She was lost for almost 3 days the final instance and was thankfully picked up by SPCA. Now that she's safely back in our apartment I find her behavior a little strange... She looks a little jaded. Seriously! Like she's seen the world or something. She has lost her innocence out there in the big big world...

Okinawa tomorrow!!  Yay!! I have been looking forward to this holiday since November... I am excited, it's our first time in Japan.  After the Tohoku earthquake and subsequent radiation scare, we've put off traveling to Tokyo for the time being, perhaps for the next 5 years at least.  Okinawa should hopefully be far enough from honto (main island). Will be spending a couple of days in Hong Kong after as well, might as well stopover there since we're flying cathay/dragonair.  CNY shopping!!

Didn't do much over Christmas or New Year's as I was down with a cold and cough.  It was so bad, I saw 2 different western physicians, the first gave me medicine that didn't work, the second prescribed antibiotics and cough syrups (2! the phlegm was so scary I needed two different cough mixtures) that sort of eased the night coughing bouts but didn't quite stop me from coughing out my lungs in the day.  Desperate times call for desperate measures so I finally bit the bullet and bought some super expensive Chinese medicine that is "chopped, stamped, guaranteed" to cure me in 3 days.  It's been 3 days.  The medicine has really cured most of my extremely phlegmy cough, although not entirely.  I would say I'm almost 80% well after a 3-day course.  I should walk back to Eu Yan Sang and tell the lady she needs to stop peddling this medicine like some magic cure.  Admittedly, they are very effective, I felt better the next morning after taking the first dose