Balestier Buildings 1: Lam Yeo Coffee Powder Factory

I live just off Balestier Road in Singapore, and I really like the street, and my neighbourhood in general. Among other things, there are quite a few buildings with real character – interesting in a quiet way. The street is eclectic (or chapalang). There are the usual shopping malls, hotels and condominiums, but also Buddhist temples, 90s-style nightclubs, durian stalls, baroque shophouses and a Chinese opera stage.

Most of Singapore is modern – at times it feels almost too modern. But Balestier has several older buildings and establishments. One of those is Lam Yeo Coffee Powder Factory, which sells ground coffee and beans. And which I decided to try and draw.

I'm hoping this can be a series, which is why I optimistically titled this post Balestier Buildings 1. This one is a fineliner sketch, but in future I might try watercolour as well.

For me, the gold standard for this type of drawing is abbillust (no relation to my friend Abbi, mentioned previously). If I could choose between painting like Raphael and drawing like Abby – I kid you not: I would choose drawing like Abby.

Herpetofauna by Night

A few months ago I shared a photo of an oriental whip snake, but that was in the daytime. Now here's one by night, also in Pasir Ris Park:

And a four-lined tree frog (such lovely colours):

We saw a few other snakes that night: dog-faced water snakes (which I've seen before), a bronzeback, and – finally! – a mangrove pit viper. The viper was far away though, so I couldn't get a photo. Maybe one day...

Unfair Contest

My friend Abbi – previously featured on this blog, though not by name, here and here – is in the hospital, and for the past week or so, I've thought of little else. I lost 3 lbs in 3 days, probably just from worrying and being sad. I told her about it, and she said, "Hey, I've lost about 25 the past few months 😅" I said this is an unfair contest.

There's a passage in The Great Gatsby which makes me think of her. In the book, the narrator is talking about Gatsby's smile, but in Abbi's case I'm thinking about her conversation and personality.

It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four of five times in life. … It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.

I don't know if other people who know her feel this way, but I really do.

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Blog note: Many of the blogs that were on my blogroll are no longer active: some have merely gone quiet, while others have been made private or disappeared altogether. I moved the inactive links to the sidebar of my CQA page. I didn't want to remove them altogether because it's nice to have this record – a bittersweet reminder of a time when blogging was more of a community activity.

Friends, Older and Younger

It's fun having friends from different age groups; I think I'm lucky that way.

A few months ago I used the term core memory in a blogpost. Tommy, who is in his 60s and a former software engineer, commented, "I'm old enough to remember when 'core memory' was what computers had before semiconductor RAM."

Last week my friend Wu Chi asked me my MBTI type. I said I did the test five years ago, and can't remember what I got.

"Five years?! MBTI is that old?! Five years ago I was in high school!"

I looked up MBTI on Wikipedia, which said the Briggs Myers Type Indicator Handbook was published in 1944. Wu Chi had to take a few sips of yuzu soda to recover. "1944," she said wonderingly. "That's older than New China."

Adulting

Three things which I do now, which I didn't do, say, 10 years ago (okay I was well into adulthood 10 years ago, but adulting is a work in progress):

• Add birthdays of friends and family into Google Calendar, so that I get a reminder on the day. For a long time I thought I could (or should be able to) just remember birthdays, but eventually I realised that's not happening. There is no shame in taking recourse to technology.
• Give myself treats. To celebrate when something good happens, to console myself when I am sad, or to reward myself for doing an unpleasant but necessary task. The treat itself is usually simple and low-cost, often free – like pizza, or taking some time out of my day to go for a walk in nature. I've done this sort of thing for a while, but these days I do it more intentionally, as a treat. Or self-care, you might say.
• Clean my flat before I go on holiday, to ensure a more pleasant homecoming for future me.

Speaking of holidays, I just got back from a trip to the UK; I'll post some photos soon.

[Edit: Photos are now up.]

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Blog note: Last month I wrote 12 posts, which is a new record for this blog. Granted, some of them were photos with not that much text, but hey it all counts. The previous record was 11 posts in March 2011, and some of those were short extracts.

In my final post of 2023, I wrote that (a minimum of) 24 posts a year is a good number to aim for. With this post, I've already reached that number, and we're only in the first week of June. Time to treat myself, maybe :)

Nobody Home

Ornate sunbird nest, now empty because the chicks have fledged.

The skin (technically exoskeleton) of a cicada. When a nymph matures, it crawls out of its skin which is then discarded.

Bike Friend

Of all the things I've owned or used, a bike, to me, feels most like a person – like a friend, even.

The inscription on this bike, which I saw one night when walking back from Toa Payoh Public Library, made me smile. "Always be with you."

Banded Snakes

After banded arthropods, I now bring you banded snakes.

These pictures are from a night walk along Old Upper Thomson Road. I went with a few friends who are amateur herpers.

They are all quite good at spotting snakes, but one of them – a Thai guy who moved to Singapore some years ago – is particularly sharp-eyed. He spotted both snakes pictured in this post – this gold-ringed cat snake:

…as well as this twin-barred tree snake, which – like the paradise tree snake featured earlier – is a "flying" snake.

My friend Kwang Ik and I were sharing a camera – my camera, but with his lens, flash and diffuser. Moreover, one of us typically took the photo while the other held the off-camera flash and diffuser. At this point we don't really know who took which photo, and in any case it doesn't really matter. "Collaboration is the condition of photography in the most basic sense," as this book puts it. We decided to share credit, and also thanked the snakes.