So what's been up?

Nudged by Ms T's laments about the uncared-for state of my blog, I finally decided that some re-planting and pruning of my blog was in order to usher the coming of real spring. (Shanghai has been *struggling* to get warm for the entire past month. My poor tropical mama was frozen stiff when she was here.) Half-drafted entries were finished and new ones were started to form the retrospective posts you see below.

It is not for lack of interest that the blog has been neglected. But as I have mentioned obliquely in a previous post before, when time is a highly limited commodity after the fulfillment of work, familial and biological (sleep) responsibilities, it is a constant battle choosing between absorption (experience) and reflection. Just when you think you will dedicate a particular night to writing up something for the blog, you have all sorts of distracting things coming up such as:

• A marathon cough which refuses to let you sleep properly for days on end. You try all sorts of cough mixtures and remedies, including moving to sleep on the living room cough so that you can be closer to a glass of warm water when the cough fit starts again in the middle of the night. (In the end, a poached pear folk remedy was the one that did it.)

OR

• The internet suddenly dying on you at 1 am when you are trying to finish the last of your emails. You check all the plugs and connections - nothing wrong. Then you pick up the phone and found no dial tone. The immediate reaction wld be to call up the phone company and scold them but of course, the phone is deader than dead. And no, China Telecoms - who owns THE cellphone line as well as THE landline - is soooo not going to profit putting me on hold on the cellphone when they messed up my other line...

OR

• You have been hearing about this concept of a private social network called A Small World where you can only join upon invitation from an existing member and worse, only a small percentage of the members have invitation rights. An invitation suddenly falls into your lap and you stay up late to explore the discussion threads in the site because there are some very interesting and cerebral things being said (e.g. the idea of hearing a painting.)

So there, I accept full responsibility that I have not managed to resist / have chosen to prioritize these distractions above my gardening duties. But I believe some of these distractions will one day flower into something for the blog, so stay very tuned...