With Courage Not Cunning: Nothing exciting happens when you are sick

I’m happy to have time today to write. It seems like our two last weekends were spent shopping, building furniture, fighting with our credit cards to work in Malaysia, and disposing of cardboard. Somehow I picked up another bug and have spent the week with coughing and chills, body aches and congestion. Made an appointment to see a doctor, which turned out not to be an actual appointment, it was first-come first-serve between the hours of 9-12. The hospital/clinic area was filled with people, who all brought family members for the appointments. You drop off your paperwork in a box on the doctor’s door, and then wait for them to call you in.

After getting labs and a chest X-ray I finally saw the doctor and she was lovely and gave me all sorts of meds to manage my reactive airway issues. I will go back to see her in two weeks for a lung function test to see if my asthma needs to be regularly treated again. At least as of today I can say that I’m starting to improve. I’ve spent both days this weekend getting 6 additional hours of naps in and I can tell that has made a big difference.

Enough of the health issues! I’m ready to start exploring again. Since I haven’t left the house much this week, I am going to sprinkle in a bunch of random pictures taken over the last 7 weeks…and hopefully next week I’ll have something interesting to write about.

The view from our home is stunning - here is a sunrise pic taken our third day here. They are building a park area along the waterfront that should be completed within the next 6-9 months. You can see all the construction occurring at the bottom of this picture, and they do seem to work pretty quickly.

I seem to take a lot of pictures of squid. Some are wearing Christmas hats (IKEA), others are served as food or waiting to be picked for dinner.

I do enjoy calamari, but probably because they are fried and sometimes have a yummy aioli sauce to dip…Erik ate both of these squid tapas because it was a little too realistic looking for me.

My candidate for As Seen On A Scooter this week is unfortunately lacking a picture. The scooter was understandably driving very slowly and we couldn’t lag far enough behind by the time I had my camera ready. You know those pallets of eggs that you can buy with about 30 eggs in them? This person had two of those pallets on the back of their scooter, about 4-5 levels high…about this many eggs:

Watching them go over speed bumps was comical. Would have made for a great pic if I had been prepared. Next time.

Modern Coffin Trading - who knew this was a commodity to trade? The Malaysia Casket Company probably doesn’t do much in futures trading.

I do love some gummy candies, like the gummy peaches, but this was mostly just creepy. Reminded me of the wax lips that we had as kids (although I remember only getting them once and thinking that they weren’t as great as I expected).

I bought a few puzzles here online, and didn’t realize until this one arrived that something was off with the name. I did develop a hankering for pastries while working on this puzzle…but had my Dounts about how good any of these would taste.

There is a shopping center that caters to expats here, called Straits Quay. They have a grocery store there and the section for pets was larger than the section for personal care items. This pic was taken in September, you should see it now that they have Halloween costumes in.

Also at Straits Quay this creature:

And a restaurant that we ate at that specializes in Taiwanese Chicken - they cook it in a giant urn and bring it out attached to a rack. Then someone has the great honor of donning two pairs of gloves and deboning the chicken. Erik’s employee took us out to eat there, so he insisted that Erik be honored: