Loves to tug…
… violently.
Loves to fetch…
… but doesn’t always bring it back.
Loves a tummy rub…
… she loves you back.
Tag: postaday Page 3 of 4
I scrolled through my iPhone camera roll of thousands of crappy pictures and found a slew of memories I had forgotten. Most of them are random, repetitious and nonsensical when you look at them again months or years later. Then I found a set of pictures with a common thread in them.
Taro Gomi’s Daily Doodle Calendar was a birthday gift from my friend. I worked on it daily until August 2011. That was when we got really busy with work, the wedding and the new flat. On 17 May 2012, I was still grumbling about the many defects about the place, how we were kept awake by bright as day lightning flashes at night, the howling wind and worrying about leaking doors and windows. But I digress. Needless to say, the doodle that day was bleah~
But I was happy too. After endless tarrying with non-contactable contractors, we finally got 90% of our storage up that week. Yes the toilet cabinet was still missing doors but the relief of finally having storage brushes all that away!
Looking back at the previous posts and photos of every leaf of hand-drawn doodle captured into my phone brings back a linear trail of memories that is rather heartwarming. An event for every single day of the month, captured in the same silly format, crystalising a particular thought, a point in my own personal history. Together, it all becomes such a great gift that I still enjoy looking at two years later, even if they were memories largely captured in crappy pictures! :P
To think I would find a copy of this calendar in a garage sale far away from home on this make believe weekend road trip that Daily Prompt has cooked up! Wahahahahaha~
Anyway, here’s a small selection of doodles from my own copy of the calendar:
Jan 24: That’s my mom in the wheelchair. She fractured her knee.
Feb 19: I watched 127 hours.
Apr 19: Parliament is dissolved today.
Apr 24: Random boxing potato heads. Maybe I was watching Hajime no Ippo.
Apr 29: My girlfriend and I were holidaying in Australia when it happened.
May 08: The election results were only announced at 3am.
Quite sometime back, I saw this documentary on TV – I love you, mummy. It basically documents an American family’s adoption of a child from China.
Now this was not a puppy or a shelter dog but an 8-year-old human child. Although she was abandoned as a baby, she had grown to view the Chinese foster family she lived with as her own. The foster mother was her mother and not the new adopted American mother. The foster siblings her real siblings and not her new siblings from her adopted family. Was it hard for the Chinese foster family to give up the child? I do not know the machinery of China’s fostering programs. But the Chinese foster family was on board for a reason I find hard to argue with. They explained that the international adoption was her best chance in life. She was born with clubfoot and dropped wrists and they feared she would have a hard time as an adult if she had stayed in China.
The documentary was emotionally hard to watch.
Puppies adopted and then returned to the shelter again when they are in their “terrible twos” may cry, may retreat into a corner as they struggle with their new circumstances. The child may be adopted by new parents but at the same time, wouldn’t she feel a conflicting sense of abandonment? What complex emotions does an 8-year-old child feel?
She struggled and she cried. She was the alien in a new country living among people who look not at all like her and who don’t speak her language. She can keep crying about how terrible she feels but no one can comfort her back in the language she understands.
It must have been difficult for the adoptive parents as well, taking a strange child (no matter how much they wanted her) who did not want them, who wanted to go home and who can’t communicate to them when she is hurting physically.
But as it is with life, people adjust when they are forced to it, no matter how difficult the circumstances. They make do. They adapt. And so the adopted child learnt to get along with the other children in the family and also a different set of expectations from her new parents. She learnt English. She gradually forgot her mother tongue.
The manifestations of love by man is manifold. Giving up a child with the hope that the child may have a chance at a better life even knowing that it would be very difficult for the child. Taking in a reluctant child that protests against being taken in and refuses to acknowledge you as family. Learning to be comfortable with and care for a strange new family that you have been forced into and had to depend on in order to survive.
The responsibility one takes on and the endurance and commitment the family, including the child, needed to put in to making the adoption work is perhaps hard to conceive unless one finds oneself in their shoes. Love alone is not enough. Now somebody tell this irrepressible dog please! :P
See also, 10 Cats of Instagram adopted as Kittens!
Julius and Walter @juliusandwalter were kittens found cowering in the drain without momma.
Come :) Follow weliveinaflat.com on
Instagram @weliveinaflat | Facebook donna.weliveinaflat | Youtube Mutt Vlog
The pictures are real, taken in our flat or on a recent walk.
The words are fairy-tale.
Now, where shall we begin? Oh yes…
Three people walk into a bar that we went past during our walk today. Three men in striped shirts. We saw them in the doorway, against the patterned mirrors, stamping their feet as they made their way in.
One of them, nearly tripping over the curled corner of the oriental patterned rug, bumped into the umbrellas by the doorway and sent them scattering.
The clatter got the attention of the people in the bar, who turned to look at the man at the entrance. He smiled apologetically, embarrassed at the unexpected attention. He noted the ladies who seemed to have some unspoken colour code in their dress.
They soon returned to their conversation.
The three men seated themselves at a table by the window. They placed their orders. He turned to look out the window. The scene outside was overcast and dull.
Suddenly, the man who never paid attention to bright colours missed the cheer of his former girlfriend in frills and floral prints.
But all he saw out the window was a nondescript woman walking an equally ordinary-looking mongrel. And both were looking distracted.
He sighed. No use thinking about the ex.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
She was contemplating patterns. And light and shadow. Probably an influence by Lens and Pens by Sally. And so she snapped some equally nondescript images of the path she and the dog were on. Patterns that perhaps got repeated in other cities in other countries. The pattern of foliage silhouettes on concrete, the repeated twists of the fence, the weave of leaves in and out of it.
The pattern of the tiled path, its brick borders and the drain covers that make up the very fabric of this corner of existence.
And the columns of the sheltered walkway, as they lined themselves until the end of the path. A regular pattern of columns that unfortunately gave dogs plenty of opportunities to discover and enjoy, and cats to hide behind as they continued their way down the path.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The woman stopped and fiddled with her phone for a while. The dog sat as she squatted unglamourously by the side of the path, pointing her phone at something. But then the dog nosed into her viewfinder perhaps. She looked surprised and stunned. It took a few seconds before she suddenly made for the dog’s muzzle, prised it opened and looked into its maw. The man has never seen that happen with anyone before but it was obvious that it was not the first time she did that.
“What are you looking at?”
The man turned back to his two friends.
“Nothing,” he said, “Ah, the drinks are here.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
She was contemplating macro, until the dog ate the subject.
Oh well, the shots aren’t really macro-macro anyway. And the experiment ended rather unfortunately for the Cupid’s Shaving Brush. She thought she would try again some time later in the week. Guess cupid will have to shave another day.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
“*Ahem*, is this seat taken?”
The three man looked up to see a young man, unshaven, blinking down at them.
“Do you mind if we share a table? Every other table is full.”
“Sure,” his friend replied, although he sounded a bit unsure.
The man could have sworn that he saw the slight flicker of luminescent wings as the young man sat down among them.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Outside, the wind grew strong as it danced roughly around the trees and the bushes along the empty path. But nobody noticed.
Note: The first and last image are photos taken of the prints in the flat. Copyright of the actual design and prints belong to Samantha Hahn and Wun Ying.
Note2: I was thinking of a movie title as I wrote this.
Well technically I didn’t set out to teach Donna the high-five. It was when we just brought her home and I knew nuts about dog training. We were in the park downstairs. Donna was sitting on one of the steps in the fitness corner.
We were practising “shake a paw”. And on the spur of the moment, I took her paw and placed it up against my palm and said “high-five”.
She looked at me, her head slanted at an angle the way dogs do when they are puzzled. Then I held up my palm and said “High-five!” The world shushed as everything paused. Time literally stopped as wheels turned in the dog’s head. Then it happened. Her paw tapped lightly against my palm. The world started to turn again.
That was the one and only time she learnt something in less than 3 minutes (estimated).
I wish it happens more often :P
Donna – will high-five for food.
The daily prompt is celebrating successes today.
Oct 6, 2014
NGC Free Pet Shop
We went to the 2014 National Geographic (Natgeo) Free Pet Shop at the Playground at the Big Splash, East Coast Parkway on Sunday.
Address: 902 East Coast Parkway, Singapore 449874 [map]
Time: 12:00p.m. – 06:00p.m.
The National Geographic Channel’s Free Pet Shop is Singapore’s largest dog adoption drive. The event will present a total of 80 adoptable dogs each day from various shelters, so it’s a good time to check it out if you are looking to adopt a Singapore special.
We went the previous year where the event was held over a grassy area. Saturday was rainy and thunderous, so we decided to to go on Sunday thinking that it may be less muddy. Our worry was needless, since we discovered upon arrival that the event was held over a paved area this time around.
Meeting old friends
This is about the one and only occasion Donna ever gets to see the humans that used to care for her at Gentle Paws. So of course, she was totally out of control jumping around and knocking them down in her excitement to lick the familiar faces to her.
Honestly, I think my dog has more friends than I have. Haha!
It was always awkward for me though. I mean, these people are there to talk to potential adopters to rehome their dogs. So it always felt out of place for Donna to be sitting there waiting for her friends to pay her some attention and refusing to come away so we’ll stop obstructing the traffic.
But I guess, they will forgive her exuberance and excitement to see them again.
The Booths
Eventually we got away from the row of shelter rehoming booths to visit the other commercial stalls. If I remember correctly they were in this sequence
- Starhub Happy Tails Lawn (got a scarf),
- APAWZ (we already got a trainer, sorry),
- The Barkery (not into carbs),
- Therapy Dogs Singapore (already joined),
- Solid Gold (Donna doesn’t eat this),
- Furry Photos ($400 photo session) and
- Subaru (FREE Prinstagram!)
Since the human is an Instagram fan, she went to the Subaru booth to ask more about what the Prinstagram was about.
Besides free printing of your photos hash-tagged #subarumoments, there was also an artist who would draw a caricature of you and your dog for free! The waiting time was 30min because there was a queue but the human decided Donna should get her first caricature, yay! :D So we added ourselves to the waitlist.
The Lost Paws Booth was adjacent to Subaru
They asked if we wanted to take a photo with Donna. Ask and you shall receive, so we did.
Enjoying the seabreeze outside
Because the paved area got pretty hot in the afternoon heat despite the tents, we spent much of the time outside on the grass waiting to be notified for our turn at the caricature booth.
That’s where Donna met Dywane, also from Gentle Paws.
Donna wanted to play immediately, the silly girl.
Here’s a picture of her with another Gentle Paws dog. They have a few in this colour, so I’m not sure if it’s Dywane or not. I was told he is Mario. It’s just a funny photo because his paw is touching her nose, due to the camera angle. I hadn’t realised it until a Gentle Paws volunteer commented on Facebook! :O
Meeting insta-friends
Mango the Sheltie and we were making our rounds around the fair separately, so I wasn’t able to take a photo of him when I had my camera out. Besides him, we also met a few of our insta friends like samforest and pecanwoods loolim, skippy and jestasheltiex. Yes, I never took photos of all of them. Boo!
But here’s Cobie with a #dogsquish face. :P
Lemme out of this bag!
I took this just as Cobie and Mango were leaving.
Then we walked over to 7-11 to get our brainfreezed and finally, we got summoned for the caricature.
Our caricature!
Tada!! Donna says I shouldn’t have photobombed her.
Last thoughts
We went last year, and I was a little overwhelmed by the crowd and shyer about looking at the stalls, which meant I was mostly standing about the sidelines and feeling quite bored. Haha.
But this time round was really good because I was just more confident about handling Donna in a crowd. We also got to talk to one or two of the shelter volunteers who have kindly commented on our Facebook and sad, to say, I know them by their Facebook handles only. So it was definitely good to put a face to the Facebook name!
Also fun to see some of the insta-folks, even if it was more hi and bye because of the crowd and the traffic.
And last but not least, we appreciate the little mementos we get to bring home from the event both years we went – the caricature, the prinstagrams and a freebie collapsible waterdish from Subaru. Donna also got a toy Subaru toy car last year that she really liked.
Prinstagrams – one for Mr P and one for the human, perfect!
See more Singapore dog-friendly events.
May 6, 2013
Event advertising image via ngc singapore
There was an adopt a free pet event this weekend and Donna’s shelter was one of those shelters taking part in the event. The nature of an animal shelter is an interesting one, in that they exist because there are many unwanted animals. A shelter will probably never be half-full or half-empty because the demand for space exceeds the supply. If a shelter were ever half empty, it would actually be a good sign of dogs being rehomed and less dogs on the street to take in. But I suppose shelters will be heartened if they are only half-full since than they have the capacity of taking in more homeless dogs. I don’t think any shelter will ever think that they are half-empty, only that they are half-full and running out of space pretty soon.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty you ask? Doesn’t it really depend on the contents of the glass and how much you desire whatever is in it?
The crowd of people and dogs at the National Geographic Free Pet Shop event had Donna all excited. We tried to get her to sit for one minute on the Subaru challenge mat but she was too distracted to last that long :/ She jumped all over the shelter humans that she knew but hadn’t seen for quite awhile. Until they had to “dismiss” us so that they can get on with their business of finding good homes for the other dogs. But that’s ok since Donna was happy to return to her main preoccupation of inspecting the grass very insistently. Yes, not the other dogs, not the other people but the grass. The only dog she paid attention to was a brown dog Dada, whom the shelter people called her boyfriend. So it was good she found someone to play with for a while.
We were told that Donna was one of the dogs on the event advertising banner. Can you spot her?
So yah, we happily clambered onto the empty stage to take a picture to keep for posterity :P
More about the local shelters and the mongrels that they try to rescue and rehome in the brochure below. Click to see the bigger image.
Facts You Never Know brochure via huneyzworld.
We’re not really good with crowds, and since the event was at East Coast Park, we took the opportunity to check out the beach with her. She went into the water readily enough but then found it uninteresting and turned back. She seemed to prefer digging at the sand. The day’s activity knocked her out and she ignored us in favour of her bed by 7.30pm tonight.
The cup of green tea on my desk has cooled as I sit here typing out this post. I’ll say it’s half-empty, since I do not plan to drink the rest of the tea that has gone cold.
"Hey Donna..." "Yah?" "You know you're supposed to be depressed?" "Really?" "Yah, really." "Oh" "So you can't look like this anymore.""I can't?" "No, you can't. Sorry." "So.... can I look like this?"
"No, that's the you sniffing at something look." "Er, or maybe I should look like this?"
"That's not depressed. That's you waiting for something to happen." "How about this?"
"That's you feeling sleepy and too lazy to do anything... " "This is too hard."
"Hey, that's kind of close to looking depressed I guess."
So I saw this discussion thread on a forum the other day and my simple mind went, well isn’t it a matter of the dog either being intrinsically well-behaved because of its individual personality or a dog being well-behaved because it was well trained to be well-behaved? Regardless of which, the end result is the same — a well behaved dog.
Of course, a dog could be a part-time well-behaved dog. Donna for instance is wonderful when we are at home, but when we are not, there the dog goes on the forbidden sofa, there goes the household plastic goods, there goes the lemongrass teabags hung to keep lizards away, there goes whatever looks like a toy to her. Thank goodness that does not happen too often and through time, we learnt what we need to keep out of reach.
Some dogs behave well at home but get so distracted they behave as they will outside, regardless of their owner’s wishes. Some dogs behave themselves outside but their owners will tell you what holy terrors they become at home. Some dogs probably are well-behaved, except that their owners and the dogs don’t see eye to eye on what being well-behaved really means. Some owners don’t even need their dogs to be well-behaved. These dogs could do no wrong then right?
That one little thing about Donna is, she is generally well-behaved once she knows the rules and expectations. Disaster almost always only happen when routines get broken such as when we fall sick and don’t take her for longer walks or as regular walks/loo breaks. But sometimes people don’t really see that good behaviour. Somehow, people think that it is normal for dogs to be noisy, to bark, to pull on the leash, to do all sorts of doggy things. And when they visit and see Donna sitting and staying on her bed quietly, they ask what is wrong with the dog? Is the dog depressed? Why is she so quiet? And when they pull too hard on the leash and Donna obediently stops and sit, they ask why is the dog so lazy and keep sitting down?
Even when Mr P explains that Donna’s behaviour is a result of training and not because she is depressed, some people still find it hard to reconcile that there is nothing wrong with the dog. We spent a lot of time bonding and working with the dog, gaining its trust and from there helping it learn to be a well-behaved dog that will not frighten friends and strangers who are scared of dogs. Unfortunately this effort and Donna’s good behaviour sometimes are overlooked because people already have preconceptions of how a dog should behave and being well-behaved is just not a part of it.
There are few pet-friendly establishments around. We’re not sure about this one but Marugoto Shokudou is the rare restaurant in the neighbourhood with a resident cat.
That said, we never did see it inside the restaurant. We only see it loitering around the entrance most times we were there.
Still, it’s a rare cat that bows at you at the entrance.
kid at the vet: is she a doberman?
me: no, she’s just a mongrel
Maybe, I’m habitually self-effacing and sometimes I discount my dog too much… I was thinking I need to remove “just” from my answer. Anyway, the last time I introduced my dog as a rescued dog, my friend thought the dog goes around rescuing things haha~ so I’ll just stick to “she’s a mongrel.”
But I love the idea of describing the dog’s personality. Morgan from Temporary Home, Permanent Love‘s new post on rescued mutts tries to introduce particular dogs not by breed but by their personality and character traits. And since Donna is a mongrel, I thought I’ll writing about Donna in her format.
Donna: 50% exuberant, 50% tamchiakgui, 30% kiasu, 30% kaypoh, 20% potential disaster, 20% suspicious, 10% loving and 100% patient buddy for dog idiots.
*tamchiakgui = greedy ghost, used to describe someone with a love of food
* kiasu = afraid to lose out
* kaypoh = busybody, tries be in the know or have a paw in everything
Donna struck us as quintessentially Singaporean in her kiasu and kaypoh ways.
How kiasu is Donna?
She likes to get a head start when we play fetch. She won’t sit and wait for you to throw the toy. No, she must already run for the toy when you haven’t even thrown it. If she were in a race, she’ll be the athlete that gets disqualified for false starts.
And when it comes to being kaypoh, Donna is quite the busybody. She is “big brother”. She must needs keep an eye on everything. Mr P in the room and me in the living room? No problem she will be right smack at a point where she can see me and the bedroom door for when he comes out. Donna supervises me doing chores. She tries to inspect our food. And now and then, she’ll try to suss out unsuspecting strangers too, some not too happy about her sniffing them :/
I had briefly thought about teaching her “don’t kaypoh” every time she make to sniff some stranger but I haven’t really done it. So yes, she is essentially still a monolingual dog.
Napping and surveillance. Not mutually exclusive.
And food, what dog doesn’t love food? Stalk the kitchen? Yes. Sport the saddest soulful eyes for as long as it takes? Yes. Yes. Yes. I always thought saliva dripping out of the mouths of cartoon characters and visibly plopping on the floor was nothing more than overly-dramatic caricature. Doesn’t happen in real life. My dog showed me how wrong I was. :P
I’m not too sure how tamchiakgui came into popular use. Perhaps our ancestors think all ghosts are greedy, hence all the food offerings on top of the paper burning during Chingming. Now that I think about it, people do append the word gui (ghost) to the back of the adjective so kaypohgui works as well. Maybe our ancestors just had a fixation with ghosts in general, haha~
Anyway just so you know, 50% exuberant, 50% tamchiakgui, 30% kiasu, 30% kaypoh, 20% potential disaster, 20% suspicious, 10% loving and 100% patient buddy for dog idiots, may not all sound like all awesomely amazing traits but to us they can be pretty adorable at times and if that’s who our dog is, that’s who our dog is.
But that makes the introduction kind of wordy because a dog is not just a dog is she? So I’ll keep to “She is a local mongrel” for now.
Tamchiakgui, kiasu and kaypoh are words in the Teochew and Hokkien dialects. Use them with English with a sprinkle of Malay here and a smatter of Chinese there in Singapore and it becomes Singlish. Short, clipped sentences will do. We prefer efficiency in our language unless we’re writing it.
