Post National Day Holiday

It is the day after National Day, another public holiday as it replaced National Day falling on Sunday. Juliane and I went to Food for Thought, Singapore Botanic Gardens for lunch. Marieann refused to go with us and she's smart because it started raining while I was ordering food. I decided to try local fare and ordered chicken laksa and iced rose bundung ripple latte. OMG, I almost died from the spiciness. No idea what I was thinking when I made my order! :P 

Juliane's kid meal

After our lunch, the rain had stopped. We walked around the garden to admire nature and to walk off our lunch. :)

A visit to the Singapore Botanic Gardens is a nice end to the National Day Jubilee Weekend. :)

Noisy Visitor

There was a noisy visitor to our home this morning. It was so noisy and loud that it felt as if I was in the gardens instead of being at home! I managed to locate our visitor. Can you guess what it is? 

It is a cicada. I pointed it out to my girls and managed to take a photo of it before it felt that there was too much attention on it and flew off lol. It is amazing that such a tiny creature can produce so loud a sound! The wonders of Mother Nature. :)

New Pet II

Marieann has a new pet and it is a praying mantis! 
It flew into our apartment which is on the 9th floor. Didn't know praying mantis could fly that high. 
For the first day, she kept it in a container. Later she decided to let it roam freely among my mother's plants. She thought it would be much more at home and comfortable to be among the plants and greenery. She would always be able to find her praying mantis among the plants, coax it onto her hand, feed it before releasing it back among the plants. :)

Can you spot Marieann's praying mantis?

See it? No? Ok, hang on...

Here I am!

Yes, Marieann has a pet praying mantis. For a girl, she has never been squeamish about insects and such and I encourage her to be this way too. It is silly to be screaming one's lungs out just because of an insect that is many, MANY times smaller than us.

Sunny Moth

Saw this little beauty resting on the floor along the corridor of my work place when I went to the canteen for lunch. It was still there at the same spot when I returned from lunch.

Managed to snap its photo before it flew away into the sun.

Green "Guest"

A little green guest came to our place tonight. No, not the green kind from outer space lol.

Marieann found this little praying mantis and was gently carrying it around in her hand lol. Yes, my older daughter is not afraid of insects. :) In fact, she loves observing and studying them closely.

Green insect

While working on something during the wee hours of today (12 am+), I had a rude shock from a green insect. It was of emerald green colour. A really pretty colour actually. What happened was it suddenly flew out of nowhere (ok, it did come from somewhere, just that I didn't see it coming) and landed on my arm. It really gave me a shock because I didn't expect something to land on me in the middle of the night! Hahaha. At least, I didn't scream or shout, I only said "Aiya" and brushed it off. It flew off and landed on the bamboo blinds.

I am not a person who is sqeamish about insects. I am not afraid to touch them if necessary and I most enjoy killing cockroaches! Hahaha. I still remember catching cockroaches for my Biology class in Sec. 4 and also helping my classmates to catch them because most of them were scared of cockroaches. Hmm... come to think of it, I should have charge them for each cockroach I caught. Hahaha. I also remembered an incident when I was at ACJC (for the first 3 months). I came out of the Ladies and I saw this JC 2 guy trying to run away from a cockroach which seemed to be "chasing after" him and he was telling me to run. All I did was simply stepped. And Hey Presto! DEAD cockroach. He was dumb with astonishment! I think he later got teased by his friends that he needed a JC1 girl to come to his aid. Hahaha.

Ok, there is something that I am squeamish about: SPIDERS but they are not insects. They are arachnids. Just thinking about spiders give me the shivers. I only started getting scared of spiders when I went to Australia to study because of the poisonous species of spiders there, like Redback and Funnelweb. To think I used to catch spiders for fighting when I was young. Yuck! Never again.

So Friends, please be NICE. Don't ever try to scare me with spiders. =)

Updated 9:13pm
Even though I DON'T like spiders, I did enjoy the movie "Eight-legged Freaks" - about spiders that grew to enormous proportions and attacked people. It was a B-grade horror movie but quite hilarious too.