my admiration for people's mothers keep soaring. today is duan wu jie and so all week we've been receiving bak zhang from just about all of my parents' students and almost all of them are homemade and peculiar and all the tastier for that. aha. my mom can make bak zhang but it's too much of a hassle. i wonder how other people's mothers have time for it. if ever i am a mother i shall be the non-bakzhang making kind. yea and verily.
on the book front today: i have penelope fitzgerald's human voices and tibor fischer's the collector collector from orchard library and i look forward to reading those. chengsan library sends me a notice saying that the john fuller book (a skin diary) i asked for has arrived. also, i find the discovery of heaven is back in chengsan library already, despite my dropping it off at tampines last week. so all in all, very pleased with the nlb. also poach i've been to bedok library it really looks huan4 ran2 yi1 xin1. not the grey cement block i last visited with you. despite complete idiocy and incompetence with re: to acquisitions i think nlb has done a good job creating the right kind of atmosphere. i like our libraries.
also i see norton juster's phantom tollbooth (of which nlb has 7, but stock in woodlands) at borders so i grab it, also my dad thrusts me jon j muth's "the three questions". i pick up another copy of trumpet of the swan and of haroun and the sea of stories for my dad's children's library. the phantom tollbooth is hilarious, in a very thurber-esque way. already i've met the whether man, tock the watchdog (who goes ticktickticktick), the lethargarians in the doldrums (where anything is permitted so long as it is nothing, and everything allowed if it's not anything), and in dictionopolis, the cabinet of azaz the unabridged king of dictionopolis, monarch of letters and emperor of phrases, sentences and miscellaneous figures of speech: the minister of meaning, the count of connotation, the duke of definition, earl of essence and the undersecretary of understanding. alright. it's that kind of book. aha. i must run and make tea for we have an unexpected guest.