Peace on Earth and goodwill to all Creatures

Have a blessed Christmas everyone!

Mr Bats, purring on my stomach. Presence is precious.

Pet Lovers Foundation 6th Christmas Dry Food Donation Drive for animal welfare organisations

I saw this helpful reminder yesterday evening, at the counter of Pet Lover’s Centre when buying cat food.

Pet Lovers Foundation is conducting its sixth Christmas Dry Food Donation Drive for animal welfare organisations in Singapore from 13 Dec to 29 Dec 2013.

You can contribute by buying subsidised and sponsored Fish4Dogs, 1st Choice or Pronature dry food at any Pet Lovers Centre store or call 1800-PETFOOD (1800-7383663).

You can donate towards Animal Lovers League (ALL), Cat Welfare Society (CWS) and Save Our Street Dogs (SOSD).]

Read more about this initiative here.

There always is trash, on every shoreline around the world

On Friday we walked a new rainforest trail created by The Andaman at Datai Bay, Langkawi, for their guests. Sadly, east of the bay, amidst some lovely waters off the trail, we found a fisherman’s cove littered with plastic bottles, slippers, wrappers and styrofoam (i.e. expanded polystyrene (EPS) or polystyrene foam). It wasn’t the fishermen alone, some items would have floated in from the sea.

So the next day (Sat), we walked to the cove and filled the five large trash bags with mainly plastic rubbish in two hours. While very little macro-trash remains but we hardly made a dent with the micro-trash from EPS fragments. The resort helpfully provided the trash bags and waste disposal.

I just learnt that the New York City Council passed a ban on polystyrene foam food containers and loose polystyrene foam packing “peanuts” w.e.f 01 Jul 2015; well done! We need to follow suit. We can’t recycle it and in the wild, EPS fragments into smaller pieces and become omnipresent, and even enters the food chain.

At Pantai Cenang later that evening, I saw a hopeful sign to reduce plastic bag use at a provision store. I think we will get to the point where the amount of plastic trash dumped into the sea will be less than the amounts cleared out during cleanups. I can’t wait!

Education has helped, awareness about this obvious problem is increasing. We need to be less tolerant about marine trash and other pollutants which make their way into the life-giving waters of our oceans. I hope this happens in my lifetime.

Tiger the cat

Photo by Xu Weiting

Toddycats The Next Generation! at the 20th anniversary of Sungei Buloh Wetlands Reserve!

We have been celebrating Sungei Buloh’s anniversary as a reserve since 1997. This is the first year I’m away but with good reason (talking about marine trash in Brunei).

The Toddycats presence has been coordinated by Dr Joelle Lai of the Raffles Museum of Buodiversity Research. Her first gig was Festival of Biodiversity. It’s a really great feeling as she was initiated into the mud at no less than Mandai mangrove in 1998!

And because she’s in charge now, I managed to finish marking before the 6th of December, Buloh’s birthday, and mine!

And this photo and the others streaming in on Toddycats LINE are a great birthday present!

It’s lovely seeing this fresh, capable faces at the reserve all set and ready to engage visitors. On the line up (there are 20+ of them signed up) are newbies who will be given OJT by their seniors with a single station. Accuracy is an important issue with us, and speaking accurately about few things is possible!

Some old fogies, from when we conducted the walks in the 90s, are with them and it’s lovely to see this inter-generational interaction!

I’m cheering in my heart in Brunei – Hooray for Toddycats, The Next Generation!

What they do when I’m away?!

Cats hang out on sofa.

Princesses’ hang out in town.

Rippin’ CDs

In a way, marking exam papers is calming. You have to abandon everything else and reject all appointments to just do one thing.

So it is meditative.

Besides the cats for company, I was also listening to music. When I got my MacBook Pro with its smaller SSD hardisk, I had chucked everything out. With my lecture files finally settled, there was space to rip my CDs back on again.

After such a hiatus, iTunes album management has improved lots and I found myself adding missing album covers last Saturday.

It was a journey back in time as I looked up art work. I recalled buying ABBA’s Super Trooper album for $3.50; with a Supreme (SR) label, and plonking a pretty penny for a Deutsche Grammophon cassette tape at Beethoven Record House. I think it was $14 – even more expensive than a Verbatim floppy disk then! I still have that tape somewhere.

And Naxos and its east European ensembles who did a great job, I still think. They all have wiki pages so its easy to read up about all this and the music pieces.

The best part, ironically, was when I was exhausted and needed a break. Then I sat back and just listened.

Exam marks submission over, now to put away that Disk Image

I store my exam documents on an encrypted Disk Image during the couple of weeks we do marking and marks processing. I still use that old method from 2007 which I described in this blog post; its a pretty neat tool.

To keep things cheery while crunching data and conducting tedious verifications with MS Excel, I add icons to my folders. I hardly look at icons anymore, so the fun is mostly in picking them out, I guess!

With marks verification and submission over, its a last look before these are filed away and flushed from my system!

20 Toddycats at Sungei Buloh 20th Anniversary Celebrations on Sat 7th Dec 2013!

Sungei Buloh Wetlands Reserve celebrates her 20th anniversary this Saturday with numerous events lined up, including the Raffles Museum Toddycats who will be part of the bog bash!

This year will be the biggest bash ever, so some 20 Toddycats are signed up to educate and entertain visitors with stories from the swamp. They will bring along museum specimens and tell tales of form and function and conduct walks.

In addition to swampy stories, there will also be these events organised for the public: Trash Bin Painting, Face Painting, Origami, Journey (Exhibition), Flora & Fauna (Exhibition) and a Nature Hut launch.

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Update: Fri 06 Dec 2013 – All set to go!