CNY Day Minus 4 – Grocery Shopping + Online Gaming + Recording

Although I have decided to hibernate during Chinese New Year, there are a couple of things I cannot do without: a sumptuous New Year Eve dinner, 1st New Year Meal (vegetarian is a must), and a sumptuous New Year dinner (steam chicken is a must). Also, I gather most of the Chinese dinning place may be closed during the new year period and besides, can’t see myself dinning alone in this festival period, a visit to NTUC is a must.

I drove to NTUC – the supermarket – before noon hoping to beat the crowd (some people do work in Saturday, no?). The queues to the car park were the longest I have seen. When I reached the supermarket, most of the trolleys were gone. In fact, I took the last one. It was so crowded inside the supermarket that I kept on bumped onto and getting bumped by people. It was as though people all came out to shop for food during CNY. Strange!

As I was busy grabbing the food and vegetables, I was pleasantly surprised that there were so much fresh vegetables around. Even those that I seldom able to buy during weekends, I saw plenty of stock. I even bought two packets of spring onion – a rare commodity in any even weekends. And I have not seen so many (dead) chickens in NTUC before!

Strange indeed! You mean all the Chinese just decided to cook on New Year period? NTUC should consider stocking up fresh food every hour or so and not just for the New Year.

I was about to grab one of the corn chicken egg packets when one of the NTUC staffs anxiously stopped me and told me that new stocks were coming in 5 minutes. Yet another surprise – I mean I didn’t think that the “old” stock was any less fresh than the new ones. I guess the staffs are just being helpful.

My friend Mark told me that weekend afternoon is the best time for online gaming because all the Americans are in it. So right after my grocery shopping, I went online to play Dark Age of Camelot. This type of game can be quite addictive to me because ever since I was in the University, I spent much time “mudding”. Pretty much like nowadays’ Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) but was all in characters. So you’ve got to see the perimeter of the dungeon in characters and got to see the monsters in characters such as @. Mark and I managed to team up with someone new and we did have much fun.

After dinner, I have decided to record the classic guitar track for all my nine new songs. I was wondering if I should record the practice session as usual but I didn’t think my voice can make it. I woke up with a soar throat and feeling weak the whole day.

Little would I know that recording the classical track for all nine songs can take that long. Since all tracks were one-take, any mistake along the way I would need to restart the entire recording again. I didn’t know that so much concentration of the mind was required. The moment my mind drifted to somewhere else, I made a mistake. At the end of the recording session, my fingers from my left hand were numb and so were the muscles of my right hand for all those heavy strumming. I gather the recording session was no less than four hours but I was both physically and mentally exhausted.