I've been quite homesick this week. Two things cheered me up today:

But he's married
We use Skype at work for work related chat. This particularly helps when people are working remotely.
Yesterday Div asked one of our Indian team members (from the vendor) if one of his colleagues had a skype ID. The guy replies back with 'But he is married!'.
(apprently he thought Div was looking for some inter-continental online action)

Free burger for Jess
B sent me an email to say he missed me (aww). But not just normally mising me - missing me because I could've been the secret to Jess scoring a free burger - care of my gluten allergy.
The way he put it:
"I had a steak sandwich - no salad;
Christie had a steak sandwich - no meat;
If you were there, you could have had a steak sandwich - no bread; meaning
Jess could have had her steak sandwich - with everything - for free!
.... Technically"

Much better now.

Lazy blogger

I just looked at the date of my last post and yes, I am suitably ashamed of my lack of posts. So I thought I would update you all with a few highlights of the last month.

Lau Pa Sat Trivia

LPS is a great hawker centre near work. Although not my favourite, it is a reasonably regular lunch spot. LPS is also famous for their evening satay.
While enjoying my chicken rice with some guys I work with a couple of weeks ago our lunch was rudely interrupted with LPS Trivia! This was in celebration of 10 years of ownership by some company. Anyways, I managed to know how many streets there were in LPS and score myself a great umbrella. My first SG souvenir.

Not so wise

I was in Sydney one week ago (so hopefully I caught up with many of you) but the main purpose of the trip was to get 2 of my wisdom teeth pulled out. B made me two different types of soup and even translated the names (Moroccan vegetable soup into french and red pepper soup into some other language I forget). Fortunately my teeth came out pretty easily once I had been jabbed with 6 needles. As tasty as the soup was - I loved having an excuse to eat yogo.

Baking

I recently bought a great bench top electric oven. I have already made a batch of brownies and I have a pavlova base now sitting in the fridge to bring to work tomorrow. Hopefully I can start making banana bread - to take advantage of reasonably priced bananas!

2 more Aussies
Lucy and Andrew arrived in SG recently. I think they're having a good time, they are in a nice team but work in a different location to me.

Team video

While I was away, the project had a social event at which each team presented a video about what they do. My team had a great time filming at The Fullerton hotel. I taught myself how to use Windows movie maker to put it all together and with a killer soundtrack our team took out the prize. We enjoyed a sushi buffet last week as our reward.

Work
Although not exactly a highlight, work is exactly what I have been doing most of the time. Our team is still under resourced and the project is still crazily disorganised. I have had several 'discussions' with people to try and change some things, but the attitude to work is so different here that my suggestions are mostly ignored. I am doing what I can, but slipping into the 'it will be just easier if I work all weekend' mentality.