furry murry

rainy days are good for cuddling up in a fetal position in bed, half enshrouded by the warm quilt and eyes firmly glued onto the words in a book.

preferably a King, Koontz, Archer, Kellerman, Evanovich or Hiaasen masterpiece :)

chinese medicince makes a person fart. or rather, my version of the powdered cow's manure (it certainly smells worse than it looks, and tastes A LOT WORSE than it smells) makes me fart like a choo-choo train that got disoriented. sigh. i might be named an official methane collection centre soon if this doesn't stop :)

this morning was dedicated to prayers for my paternal ancestors. i was salivating over their food! heh. it was delicious... tofu and fishball soup, steamed fish Teochew style, roasted meat (e quivering 3 layers kind), tau kwa, handmade glutinous rice balls, meepok, soon kuey, charsiew and big meat pau, tau sar piah, huat kuay, yam cake... @_@ it was all i could do to keep myself from plunging headfirst into the soup cos the aroma was just too tantalising.

thereafter my mum tossed 2 coins to determine if they've come and done a nice ghostly visitation :) and if they're done sampling the dishes. jerlyn was wailing nonstop to be allowed to eat the food - that sort of drove my mum nuts :) so she stuffed her a bottle of milk to shut her up. when my 3 ancestors were done eating (they even had French brandy!), we trundled out of the house and headed downstairs to burn the paper offerings. i remember that it used to be a huge, red chest painted with elaborate lion motifs, but this time round it became 3 smaller green and red bundle-packets. i guess the economy's not doing very well heh :) eh seriously. i believe that one can estimate the current economic status in S'pore by observing the contents of paper offerings burnt to dead relatives at those big festivals (Tang Chuek, Ching Ming). my mum said that we had to open up the "door" to invite the ancestors to help themselves to the burnt paper money, so we had to burn this special white, plain strips of paper to open the aforementioned door. jerlyn clamoured to have her own pile so we allowed her to have a small stack, which she promptly scattered all over the 100m radius around her, and anywhere but into the pyre. i had the unenviable task of going after those errant pieces of paper (but i'd very much rather go after my errant sister's neck hehheh) and expose my hair to the raging flames.

when we went downstairs the sky was a clear white stretch of clouds, but just right after we finished watching everything burn the sky overhead became a disturbing, roiling brackish-grey. yeah, brackish. like the muddied water in a stale pond. soon after the first raindrops fell, but we've already gotten into the dry void deck. mum says the rain always unfailingly comes during such festivals cos the ancestors are crying for our filial piety, and to show their unwillingness to leave the mortal world. the tears are purportedly a sign that they've heard our prayers and are blessing us.

of course, skeptics have given perfectly reasonable scientific explanations: the huge volume of burning all over the island led to increased surface evaporation, leading to rapid cloud formation and rain precipitation. as a student of science it's perfectly logical to be inclined towards this school of thought.

but there's still this little part of me that wants to believe that my ancestors have heard our prayers, and are crying for us as a blessing.