All Packed Up

The past couple of days, I've had 3 people packing up all of my stuff.  Today, I've got a crew of 8 to finish wrapping my big items and load the truck.  Last night was our last night in the house!  I can't believe it.  

Yesterday I went through a little tour of my house, looking at all the boxes I have...and I saw about 7 different variations of my name spelled out....Mind you, my last name is Sokolik.

Sokoyka

Sokokea

Sokoyea

Sokoyik

Soyoyik

Sololik

Skokoea

..and my favorite:

That's right, KOKOKE!

Ahh how I miss my simple Chinese last name.

Here are a few more interesting labels:

For the longest time we couldn't figure out what Spicks were....

VT room? or TV room?

Xmas Lights...

and...that would be Xbox in hieroglyphics. 

Alrighty, they're about to pry this computer from my fingers to pack it up.  Signing off for now!

Cleaning House

Well this weekend flew by and we said goodbye to our last set of visiting relatives before we depart from sunny TX.  I had to say goodbye to my wonderful Civic:

If one could give a world's best car award, this car would deserve it.  It's pretty much earned it's value back through various minor accidents (all of which were not my fault).  So long fair Civic, Hello Singapore MRT! 

Yesterday my good friend Annie came over and I whipped up the "I'm-clearing-out-my-fridge" special.

Annie brought the french fries - she knows me so well - I am a woman of simple pleasures and one of the greatest treats in life are McDonald's french fries :-).  Otherwise, the meal was pretty healthy and delicious...not to mention, random.  We've got some pan fried tilapia, 3-day-old guacamole (still green under the brown layer!!), asparagus, and pot stickers.  Oh and I can't forget the bbq sauce and salad dressings for extra flavor.  It was a good meal :-)

The packers have been packing away all day today.  I've got two more days of it and all my stuff will be on various routes to their destinations.  I think they must have chopped down a whole forest to furnish the boxes and paper for this move....it breaks my heart.  You don't realize how much stuff you have accumulated until you try to move all of it.  I hope everything arrives at the right place and everything I bring fits into the apartment....yikes!

Going Once...Twice...and it's Sold!

It's official, we've sold our house!  We've finished taking care of all the nit-picky little things the inspector found issues with and no longer have to think about it!  I've sold my car to my neighbor and am handing over the keys in a couple of days.  Whew! It's really amazing and I can only praise God for how quickly our house and my car sold.  Everything is working out really smoothly...it makes such a big difference.

Now, I'm deep in the thick of packing/organizing/cleaning.  It's a company paid move so I don't have to worry about the actual packing process, but I do have to go through and organize what I want to take and what I don't.  For those of you who are wondering how an international move is done....here's what arrived in the mail for me today:

These are post-it stickers and I will now have to tag everything into one of the three categories.  One more week and all our stuff will be en route to where it should be going. 

It's really amazing how much stuff you realize you need to get done when you only have 1.5 weeks left in the country.  When you've got all the time in the world, you just keep procrastinating.  Now that I have these looming deadlines, I feel like a chicken running around with my head cut off.  For example, I went to the lab to get some blood work done, and somehow managed to leave a folder with all my immunization records in the bathroom.  Lovely.  I now have to trek out there and pick up my folder.  Another example - I drove an hour into downtown Houston to get a part of my camera replaced....only to come home and realize that it wasn't done correctly and my camera is only semi-functioning.  Now I need to make another trip out there...

I'm just ready to be done.  Ready to go up to Jersey where it's cooler and spend time with family before I head out...to just relax and let my mom take care of me. Boy I sound like a big baby...but moving is hard!

Sew Busy

No surprise, things have been pretty crazy around here.  Time flies when you don't have enough of it.  Last weekend we enjoyed time with family and are going to spend some more time with family this weekend.  I'm really looking forward to having everything done, but not looking forward to saying goodbye.

Since my last few posts have been non-sewing related, just thought you might like to see a project I've done in the past month or so....

A friend of mine wanted a special t-shirt made out of her infant onesie for her son.  Here he is in the cute outfit:

He outgrew the onesie, but she wanted to stick with the whale theme and incorporate the fabric from the onesie.  So, I drew a whale design and created this shirt:

Here's Calvin wearing his shirt - SO cute!!

For those of you who might like to give this project a try, I was inspired by this post off a blog I read.  I actually sewed the whale one using a satin stitch all the way around design so that the raw edges would be enclosed and the whole design would be securely attached.  But, if you don't mind having raw edges (and don't have a sewing machine), you can buy some Wonder Under (which is an iron-on double-sided fusible interfacing - it has glue dots on both sides) and draw the design right on the paper, iron one side to your design fabric and cut out your shape, peel off the paper backing, and then iron the shape right onto your t-shirt.  Easy peasy!

Well, I've got till Friday to finish my last couple of orders that have been outstanding for a month now....Sorry I am so behind!

Singapore Part 3: The New Digs

::edit:: Unfortunately I finished the entire post and then realized I deleted half of it....I hate when that happens.  

Now that you've read and seen our vacation details, it's time for a peek at our new digs!  We found an apartment on the West Coast of Singapore, mainly so that Andy won't have a super long commute.  It's a brand new complex right across the street from a soccer stadium.  I think there's a club team that plays there. It has awesome facilities, a couple of pools, a gym, an aqua gym, and a lazy river.  I know, up until I saw some pics, I didn't even know there could be such thing as an aqua gym.  It's basically a bunch of underwater treadmills.  I wonder what it feels like to run underwater...

So here's the street view of the apartment :

The dining/living room, which extends to the right past the curtain:

The view of the balcony from the living room:

The kitchen:

A spare bedroom - you can stay here if you come visit:

The view from the balcony:

And where I'll be spending most of my time - poolside:

So, now you've seen the place, doesn't it make you want to visit??  I hope so...it's going to be hard to leave all my friends and family.  I would definitely love to have some visitors!  We'll take you around to experience the sights and taste the food!

Singapore Part 2: The Food

Oh the glorious food.  The limo driver that picked us up from the airport informed me that Singapore's national sport is...eating.  I couldn't have picked a better place to fit in! So awesome.

Every morning, we had breakfast buffet at the Shangri-La hotel restaurant The Line.  This place is off the hook!  There's food from all nationalities, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Malaysian, Singaporian, Thai, Chinese, American....and then, they make these fresh yogurts and juices that are awesome.  Guava lassis, fresh pineapple juice, fresh mango juice....

My favorite stand - the noodle man.  It's so nice to have a hot bowl of ramen for breakfast...a little weird, but so tasty.  Andy tended to favor the Indian dishes, but it was a little weird for me to be having curry and prata for breakfast.

Yum Yum!

Enjoying the view of the pool and gardens from The Line

Continuing on....we mostly ate at mall food courts since that was most convenient.  Basically every mall has a huge food court in it (usually in the basement) where you can get all sorts of yummies.  $5 will get you a pretty decent plate of food.  The food court features foods from every nationality.  You can find almost anything you want (except burgers of course).  

Pick your own veggies for your ramen...or shabu shabu

I love these Japanese cake things!

Tried some Peranakan delights - basically colored/flavored glutinous rice

Hit up Din Tai Fung not once...but twice!  It's just that good.  I'm so excited that I will be near one soon.  They have the best soup dumplings ever!

Here's some of the spread at Din Tai Fung - note these are not the world famous dumplings, I was just branching out and trying something new.

So the food journey continues.  One night we ventured out to La Pau Sat, one of Singapore's most famous hawker centers.  On the way, we walked past this:

They should give that spell checker a bonus.

So, what is a Hawker Center you might ask?  It looks like this:

It's basically a clean, safe place where you can buy street food.  In an effort to keep things clean and sanitary, Singapore has set up these centers where the street vendors can operate out of and some of the best food in Singapore can be found here.  The place has no a/c, you have to buy napkins for the napkin vendors, but they've got some of everything here.  We went for dinner and unfortunately many of the normal stalls were closed.  However, we found out that at night, they close off the street outside and the satay vendors set up their stalls.  Once you sit down, about 5 different ppl bombard you with menus....in the end, I don't even know which stall we ordered from.  I was just happy to eat some good satay!  

Me and my prawn satay

Looks like I'm going to be practicing Singapore's national "sport"!  So excited to try more foods!

Next up - the city and our new digs!

Sing Sing Sing....Singapore Part 1: The Hotel

You may have noticed my absence from the blog this past week.  We've been in Singapore this past week, doing some apartment hunting and taking some time off from all the other responsibilities of moving halfway across the world.  I'm going to break up our trip into a few posts since there's too many pictures to jam into one post!

In the days before we took off, things were a bit crazy.  My brother came and visited for a week.  I took him around Houston all week, shopping, sight-seeing, eating.  He left Friday morning and we went to a friend's wedding Friday night.  Saturday, we were scheduled to leave, but first we had to get our house ready for an open house.  Amidst all the cleaning and packing, somehow we forgot to shower before getting on the 24 hour plane ride....so we had to improvise.  We stopped at CVS along the way to the airport and picked these up:

Here's Andy at the airport, giving himself a "shower" by face towelette...

After a grueling plane ride - 11 hours to Moscow, 1.5 hours in Moscow, 11 hours to Singapore, we were more than ready to get to our hotel.  Luckily the hotel allowed us to check in early so we could collapse and get some sleep.  Our taxi drove up to the Shangri-La Hotel and we were greeted by this guy:

How he can stand to wear that costume in 85+ degree heat and 95% humidity I don't know.  It's HOT there.  I thought Houston was bad, but Houston is like a desert compared to Singapore!  The humidity makes you feel all sticky and nasty constantly.  We stepped into the hotel's grand lobby...I think this is the fanciest hotel I've ever stayed in! 

The lounge area of the hotel, which is secretly a tea/drinks restaurant/bar.  Once you walk onto the floor, the waitress comes by with a menu of drinks for you to order, so you can't really sit and enjoy the view unless you're planning on having some ridiculously expensive tea or champagne.

We were more than happy to finally get to our room.  They had this cool spot by the entry where you just drop in your key and all the lights turn on.  When you leave, you just pick up the card and all the lights go out.  Pretty interesting....except for when you just want to turn one light off or on.

To welcome us to the hotel, they left us a little basket with a pot of hot tea.  

We had a cool little balcony - here's the view:

Our door faced the inner atrium which was designed as a waterfall terrace.  We could hear the soothing sound of water running faintly inside our room.

View from the pool area:

They had tons of orchids everywhere!  I'm gonna get me some when we move here.  It's so humid here you probably never have to water them.

Believe it or not, this hotel was located right in the city area.  It was like an oasis in the middle of a whole bunch of high rises.  The grounds were meticulously cared for, everywhere you looked, there was someone sweeping something, or wiping something.  There was even a lady going around wiping off the garbage cans! I guess that's how they keep it so clean.  The whole city country is that way.

More to follow soon on the AMAZING FOOD!