::GIBBERISH::The Fiction of Everyday Life.

Gratifyingly, I've been way too busy with work. Been running back and forth between several schools and artmaking moil, missing writing and tax deadlines (this is sooo bad), languishing under all the packing and unpacking, moving and transporting, more heaving and hauling hell, alternately having fun and tearing my hair out with the kids, and a new unhealthy addiction to strawberry-red-tea-please -add-more-syrup-more-ice-with-pearls bubble tea.

To everyone whom i've met up with so far, all i could say was, moving in is a hideous beast!

You see, after the handover, trish and i got down to work immediately!
And, being obsessively and compulsively over zealous, anal and perfectionists - after so many years we still haven't got the fact that we're such bad friends for each other coz we egg each other down to the extremes!

Anyway, we launched operation cement-meltdown - after neurotically being made to believe that every inch of our studio was covered in a layer of invisible cement-dust, that if breathed over a long period of time will result in serious nasal maladies or severe itch, because tiny organisms will start living off them and soon our place will be crawling with mites!!!! (see what i mean?)

So armed with a gallon of cleaning fluid, aka 'muriatic acid', we launched an insurgent attack diluting it with the most offensive amount (read: minimal amount) of water determined to win the battle against any stubborn evil blobs of cement spills on the floor - and started wiping the place down in a frenzy. And would you believe it, we were so thrilled with ourselves when the fluid fizzed the life out of those cement blobs and misted up the entire space, we stood there, BREATHING with excitement, BREATHING with relief, BREATHING victorious - or so we thought.....

Because, when we returned to the studio 2 days later, we realised to our horror that ALL the steel handles, legs, parts, sinks, hinges, handles etc in the studio was covered with war-scarred-tarnishes or streaked with rust brown stains.

We almost died. Or ok fine, I almost died and in a bid to keep my mental state from approaching maximum entropy, we tried to clean it down, but the stains were etched right into the steel and like those darned trick-birthday-candles, they kept coming back! argh! And did i forget to mention how much steel there is in the house??? *freaks*

When we got home, we did a quick research on the muriatic acid, and found it wasn't as 'muriatic' as it sounded - whatever that means - definitely not as harmless as the cute rhino it had as its brand mascot!! It was Hydrochloric acid! Egads! And the fumes symbolic of our triumph turned out to be acid mists, and was most corrosive to human tissue when BREATHED in. Great.

Man, if our neighbours didn't know better, they've thought trish and i were alchemists engaged in a domestic chemical warfare. Dang! Technically, We could have died??!!

And man, despite being a pure chemistry student, why wasn't i taught such basic things like this?? instead of pouring endless liquids from one test tube to another, they should have taught us through real life scenarios mah! what the hell. (ok fine, so maybe i wasn't paying enough attention).

Anyway, we googled that sodium bicarbonate was our best defence as it will help to neutralise the HCL, and so we marinated every morsel of steel in the house - and I'm sharing this just in case any of u run into the same mess we did - it works!

So we've whizzed past the dramatic saga - that could have made it to an episode on the Desperate Housewives (it would be the one where 2 friends try to kill each other on the pretext of helping to douse the house with a deceitfully harmless gallon of cleaning fluid.... ) - to the moving and unpacking stage right now, and you guessed it, moving is a hideous beast.

And Thank God for Dad - he's been such a great help, arranging for the movers and the grilles and the clean-up.
And when i tore the accompanying yellow sticker off the front of my new rubbish chute and left another sticky mess, dad came to the rescue and spent an hour in front of my chute, lighter-fluiding and gum-balling my chute to a sparkling sheen - I can now check my hair and make-up even when i'm cooking! (just kidding).

Although i AM beginning to wonder if the 'yellow' came with the chute??? I can almost imagine my contractor nagging me (translated from mandarin): "aiyoh, miss long hair (he calls trish, miss short hair, heh), do you know i paid an extra hundred bucks just to get it in yellow, if plain one will be cheaper lor!"

And as a result from all that brutal steel-wooling-scouring-scrubbing-and-washing, our epidermis became so brittle, that papers (from the mountain of books we have to sort and shelf) are leaving gashes - not cuts can?? - on our fingers, it looks like we throw knives for a living.

And all this amidst hunting for the best deals in town for furniture and appliances - and as i've learnt, it pays to wait - we got a 2-door samsung fridge at 699, and chic bookshelves at 125. I am so on my way to be hdb auntie bargain hunter, i can even tell you that the cheapest and most delicious bubble tea is the one at serangoon central. $1 for a cup only!

I would like to go on to some of the other things we have been up to, so stick around for updates, and snaps of the studio, our uninvited house guests - benny the beetle, and harry the housefly (we're still waiting for charles the cockroach, but no sign of him yet, thankfully), and thanks for your patience on the so many million things undone as i try to mitigate all this excitement.