thanks darlings, for making the zhongqiu party a great one - especially to cindy, our riddle master, for her very funny deng mi's, such as the one that goes, zhi you qi ge wei zhi (hint: name of a mall. ri boys should get this one.) it rained heavily into the early evening, so all the carefully-arranged tea lights that led from front gate to house were extinguished, and i moved them to the porch and placed some along the window sills, and on the stepping stones in the garden. cindy arrived first (yen, addy and su-lin were caught in a traffic jam on upper serangoon road. why didn't you take the train, there were seven NEL stops along the way, we tried, the taxi driver pretended he didn't hear or know where the boonkeng station was. hah!) and we hung up her deng mis with green twisty bits my dad found. sarah and ariel came over carrying lanterns to watch us. cindy shook hands solemnly with each of them and says her maternal instincts are going into overdrive.

my mater gave us maki, sliced pears, pomelos and mooncakes, but otherwise left us to our own devices. we also made jasmine tea, and i broke a cup. which was okay, because it was a wen xiang bei, for smelling tea, not drinking, and addy obligingly had a blocked nose. when we weren't racking our brains over cindy's deng mis (here's another one: cong bu fu chu. hint: local political figure) we gave a few moments to making a sentence using the word aardvark, in such a way that sentence illuminated the word in question. "the aardvark walked into my room and i was surprised" was voted down, as one might in that case suppose an aardvark to be a naked man juggling pots. it would help, addy said, if we knew what an aardvark looked like. su-lin also enlisted choonping on her side to prove that greengages are a sort of fruit related to the plum, but choonping admitted that he was thinking of anne of green gables. i ask choonping to tell us about su-lin and farmer giles, but choonping wanted to know if he can heap adverb upon adverb, because he wanted to tell about how he was once morally reprehensibly (addy made him correct that to "in a morally reprehensible manner") browsing through su-lin's documents and unearthed smutty prose. su-lin denies this. how is it su-lin manages to generate the most delicious stories, like the reading romances in bathtub observed by jianyi rumour? shu da zhao feng.

we sat on so late we didn't have time to go to the park, but we did light our lanterns and carried them to the bus interchange. everyone had brought lanterns except choonping, but he got to carry bear's. cindy had a traditional paper lantern (yellow) with floral patterns, yen had a cellophane squirrel, mine was a bird, and su-lin had a dragon. and addy had a japanese elephant complete with flap ears and a trunk! (oh i bought 2 boxes of sparklers that i completely forgot about till this morning!) you know how, when you're a child, mid-autumn festival can degenerate into playing with candles and/or setting ur lantern on lobsided fire? whereas now we're very careful and protective over our lanterns. we're old and not much in for excitement...