Jumbo Seafood

On a happier note, later this evening, Ruby invited Susan and I to join her and Mr Poh for dinner - at his restaurant Jumbo in Kallang Stadium. We had originally planned to meet with PG, but Ruby asked us to invite her to join too, so we did. Boy, was I glad we did. The food was F A B U L O U S! We had geoduck sashimi (one of my faaavourites), Sri Lankan crabs in two styles - black pepper and chilli. I preferred the pepper but chilli was good too. We also had these amazingly yummy drinks - like green slush. Apparently it's a vegetable drink with no sugar added. I loved it. I could drink my veges everyday! Heck, I have to get back to Jumbo before we go home..

I am so attached to food. Damn, this is slowing down my progress to Enlightenment. I'll work on it.. in the meantime... where's that crab!

Missing Sean

I had been away from my little rascal for almost a week and I missed him terribly. I called him to see how he was and had a quick chat. I don't think he missed me at all but nevermind! After my phone call, Webby said - now I'm going to call my baby. I was thinking.. yea yea.. she's going to call the bl**dy vet.. (one of our cats, Metta, is pregnant and boarding at the vet while we're in Sg) but to my most fantastic, pleasant surprise, she had called home and was talking to Sean.

I was so incredibly touched. For a whole 10 seconds. Then I realized that she had called home by mistake. And she confirmed it was a mistake.. she HAD intended to call the vet (so it wasn't just MY assumptions!)

I was then incredibly crushed. Talk about the transience of emotions. The illusory nature of assumptions, expectations and hope. This is my biggest battle on a personal level - to wish that my partner would treat my son according to what I think my partner should. We have discussed this issue to death and I am (still) trying to let go of my judgemental behaviour and just let things be. Whether she loves Sean or not, I should just take her word for it and not read into her behaviour. That's my logical, trying desperately to be Dharmic mind thinking. But it's not easy. Usually I just go with the flow and try not to have expectations, but today, when that phonecall happened, it was like a knife in my guts.

Oh well. Life is for learning. Isn't life fun? Where's that equanimity when I need it?

Joseph and Susan

After a long day at the booth, KMP Head and co-conspirator look all puckered up...

Meeting the Editors and meeting Kristy

Our first “Meet the Editors” session and launch of “Compassion Conquers All” was at 11am on Sunday morning. Susan Lim kick started the session with a brief power point presentation to introduce HE Tsem Tulku Rinpoche to the audience.

There were about a dozen non-KH faces in the audience, which wasn’t bad, considering it was the first session of the day and it was a Sunday morning! As you can see in the picture, some people didn’t want to sit down but merely hovered in the back, some even standing beyond the barricades. After Susan finished her presentation, she passed the mic over to Andee Uetz, who introduced the ‘Compassion Conquers All’ book, followed by Jamie Khoo, who read a chapter of the book.

A few of the people who attended the session came to visit our booth so it was time well spent. Well done to Susan, Andee and Jamie! The only question that was raised during the Q&A was from Jamie’s aunt, who asked.. Why does the Rinpoche have hair? She said she asked that because others would’ve wanted to know.

This hair issue came up again later, when a man asked Shin at our booth the same question. After Shin explained, he seemed to accept her points, but still refused to buy anything from us – saying, “I don’t want to buy anything because Rinpoche has hair.” Truly hair raising!

After the Meet the Editors session, Susan and I met up with an old friend, Kristy, who I hadn't seen for a long time. The last time I remember seeing her was in Bali, at May Lynn and Ledand's wedding.

We had a lovely Japanese lunch and caught up with a LOT of news. She came back to the booth after lunch and listened attentively to Susan's explanations of the Gaden video and others. She bought quite a few items and I hope she enjoys them as much as we enjoyed putting them together!

A champagne party for Dharma

After a long Saturday at the booth, JJ and Jamie had invited us to go 'PLAY' - a happy club. It was Joy and Justin's last night in Singapore too so they wanted to go out (hmmm just noticed that they are the four Js!). Susan knows how much I love to go out so she was very sweet and seemed quite gungho about going out.

So Shin, Susan and I tentatively agreed to go out though we were feeling quite tired so we headed back to shower and get changed. Yek Yee wisely said she was going to stay home. When we got back to Ros' apartment, we found our hostess having a party. We had been invited when we had first arrived but we got back, we felt a bit shy and grubby in all our sweaty t-shirts!

However, after we showered, we felt even more lazy to go out and sent our FFK sms to the Js. I must have been really tired to turn down going out. Instead, we squirreled away in our room on our respective computers but there was soon a knock on the door and we were reluctantly dragged out to be sociable. Actually it wasn't really that reluctant - how can we say no too many times to champagne? That would be too rude!

We met Ari, a charming Singaporean banker who is based in Hong Kong, a Malaysian in manufacturing and another Singaporean who works for General Electric. Altogether there were eight people. When asked what we were doing in Singapore, we shared with them and showed them the Compassion book. Immediately, Ari said the eight of them would buy a copy each. At SGD22 each, we raised another SGD176! What a fabulous day!! I was so glad we didn't go out in the end and stayed in for the party. Below is a photo of us celebrating the sale and we hope that Ros and her generous friends will have lives touched by the Dharma.

Tomorrow we will have our first “Meet the Editors” session – and we will be meeting up early to regroup before the session.