It’s been sporadically raining the last few days and I’ve been having to steal… ahem, I mean borrow umbrellas from work because my purse sized one broke last month and I keep on forgetting to buy a new one. I walked home one day in the rain though because it was only thundering when I left work and I thought I could make it home before it started… but today I went to buy myself a cheap-o umbrella to carry in my bag so I won’t be without one again.

But when there’s rain, there usually are rainbows. Yesterday evening, I met up with Ron at INSEAD because it was Dutch-German national week so they were having all-you-can-eat sausages and all-you-can-drink beer for $10 so to show our support, we had dinner there. The BBQ was being held in the courtyard between the school and the residences and the rain had just stopped. Unfortunately I only had my compact digital camera and couldn’t get it to take a very good picture of the rainbow peeking through the clouds… (this is why I need a nice camera and take some classes!)

We stuffed ourselves with the sausages and a few glasses of beer…

We got home around 8pm and I was in bed by 8:30pm. I only meant to nap for a while but ended up sleeping until this morning. I felt quite refreshed this morning!

Today I wanted to share with you a Malaysian dish that I tried today called Tahu Goreng where tahu = tofu, goreng = fried. At our staff canteen, there is a Malay food stall which has recently changed owners. The last month or so I’ve been trying their food to see what it’s like. When I feel like something spicy, I usually go there. You can’t beat Singapore food stall prices, you can get a full meal for only $2 to $3!

Anyways, about the tahu goreng, it’s basically a large piece of fried tofu, about 5″ by 5″ square, topped with this spicy and sweet peanut sauce and also has fresh bean sprouts and sliced cucumber. It’s really good.

(Taken with my handphone… err, cell phone! camera)

It’s pretty filling for just being tofu and this particular peanut sauce was pretty spicy, my nose was watering and my eyes tearing as I continued to eat. They give you quite a bit of sauce so I saved it and am going to try mixing it with some noodles… if you’ve ever had a Chinese dish using cold noodles, sliced cucumbers, sliced ham, and a peanut sauce, I think this will taste good with the Tahu Goreng sauce instead of the Chinese peanut sauce.

Now for pharmacists humor… I think our pharmacists here may work a bit too hard. Even I’ve been having dreams about work. My dream wasn’t very funny though, just stressed about not putting something away and it becoming expires. But I can’t help laughing when I think about my co-worker’s dream that she had last night. So at our cancer centre, we make this pumps that are filled with chemotherapy that the patient wears at home for a few days. The medication is filled into this plastic bag that is put into a plastic casing. From the plastic bag comes a tubing, which is how it runs into the patient’s intravenous line. There are not allowed to be any bubbles inside this tubing or else you’ll be introducing an air bubble into the patient’s vein, basically an air bubble in the blood is very bad. So before the pump is attached to the patient, the pharmacist will do a double check of the tubing to see if there are any bubbles… we get the bubbles out by tapping the tubing until it reaches the end of the tubing so the air bubble can be released. There is a cap at the end of the tubing to keep the drug from leaking out. Any air bubbles at the end will be released before the nurse attaches the tubing to the patient.

The pumps are usually filled with the drug 5-fluorouracil. One of the major side effects of this drug is mucositis, ulceration or inflammation in the mouth or mucus membranes of the digestive tract. My poor co-worker had a dream that she was checking off one of these pumps and trying to move the air bubble out and suddenly the cap of the tubing came off and the drug started to flow into her mouth and she started suffering from severe mucositis. I think it made us all laugh hysterically because it’s such an absurd and inconceivable notion that this can happen and from this, you can tell she is overstressed thinking about work even while sleeping! Okay, maybe it’s not so funny to put it into words but if you heard the ways she tells it, you’d be on the floor laughing too…

If anyone reading this is wondering what’s been going on with Joyce, I can tell you she’s been very busy wrapping up the semester so I’ve only seen her for 10 minutes in the last few days when she came by to visit my workplace. She’s been busy at the school or at home working working working.

I’m still being distracted with the thought of going to visit home at the end of the month… can’t wait!