I'm thinking I shouldn't be going to China in early winter. If I'm only windowshopping, why pick China?
The problem with being big is that everything cheap is too small for you. Like everything on sale in online Japanese or Korean stores. Looks like I'm destined to own only shoes bought at normal prices or above.
Went to the ENT specialist at NUH today and I'm going to have to do a sleep study to confirm whether I have sleep apnea.
Consultation fee was S$101.65 and the larygnoscopy cost me another $197.95.
The laryngoscopy was just expensive. It was a little uncomfortable but the doctor did what he could to avoid irritating my sinus too much with his cable-like camera. He also took some pictures that his assistant copied for both him and myself, although I have no interest in seeing what my nasal passage looks like.
Apparently other than my weight, I'm also suffering from an allergy and a sensitive nose. I know my weight caused my snoring but I've gotten used to it long ago. It's this allergy that's making it so much worse that when the doctor sprayed something into my nose that was supposed to be stinging and bitter, all I can sense is the bitterness when I swallowed.
The strange thing is the allergy. I have no idea what I'm allergic to because little has changed in my home all these years.
The only thing I'm known to be allergic to is penicillin but if I'm sensitive even to the airborne spores that's present everywhere, it would have caused the reaction a very long time ago.
He's going to test for it in a month. In the meantime, I'm supposed to see if the steroid spray works enough to stop the swelling gradually.
A week before the appointment I'm also going to have to do a sleep study to confirm whether I have sleep apnea.
This is another weird part because for some strange reason, a private practice is able to do it more cheaply than the public hospital.
Both cost about the same in cash of about S$200 but the difference is that, according to the doctor, the hospital charges an additional sum from my Medisave (which is empty btw) which will raise the total bill to a grand.
Moreover, the private practice recommended by the doctor (and he highly recommended this option) is able to let me do it in my own home while the hospital's version has to be done within itself.
A very easy decision there.
For treatments, he presented me with three options.
First, I can just stick with the nasal spray I'm using. It does work but only to a small degree for me.
The second option was a simple procedure to reduce the swelling.
Third was a slightly more complicated procedure to the same effect but lasts longer and has a few slightly possible negative side effects.
Obviously, all three won't work well as long as I continue to be exposed to whatever is causing the allergic reaction. The first will continue to work only for a couple hours and to a small degree. The last two will only last anywhere between several months to several years before I have to go back to him with the same problem again.
Finally, I also bought a backup bottle of the spray from the pharmacy there since it requires a prescription and I didn't want to go back just for it. This doctor prescribed a different spray called "Avamys fluticasone furoate". They're about the same size but this new bottle cost $25.26 whereas the old bottle was $29.
So everything I ordered from Amazon last month arrived.
Couldn't get the $20 off at Vpost even though I logged on at 1.30am on the first of July. Clearly lots of people wait for it on the first of every month since it's only limited to the first 150 people per month.
So I only got the 15% off which, for this order, was about $11.
Regardless, I've paid for it and they have arrived.
The shoe tree was indeed aromatic. I'll have to give it a few months to confirm whether the light pleasant smell is naturally from the wooden shoe tree since I do not recognize this smell nor the smell of cedar wood in general.
More importantly, they fit inside my shoes snugly.
Perfect.
My two bottles of suede waterproofing sprays were also among the packages. It's just unexpected that both came in oversized cardboard boxes filled with these full plastic air bags. I wonder if they could have just used smaller boxes and hence saved on the shipping.
I just used one of them and I'm keeping the other as spare. This bottle's instructions was that I was supposed to soak the leather in the liquid so I sprayed so much they rolled off the leather.
I just hope this doesn't deform my suede shoes, but then again, I had left the shoe trees inside so they could probably help hold the leather properly. So far so good.
The suede eraser I bought from Amazon didn't remove the old sweat stain from the suede but I'll have to try again to know for sure, and this time I'll rub harder.
It's not much so eventually when I visit a cobbler or laundry shop, I'll just get them to remove it, if the eraser doesn't work.
Finally, my book came. It's entitled "Valuation" (5th ed) and is about how to assess and improve the value of a company.
Right now I've only read the very beginning of the book and it's already given me a completely new view on the financial crises.
From what I can understand, most of the financial crises we have today is based on the use of short-term debts to buy long-term illiquid debt (an simple example of an illiquid debt is a home you're still paying for), usually because the investors believe the things they gain from this long-term debt will outweight the cost of the short-term debts.
This is known as "leverage".
This alone does not trigger a crisis. In addition to this, there needs to be some kind of reason for lenders to stop lending, thereby stopping the flow of short-term debts.
In the 1997 Asian financial crisis, an event I never really understood even after reading the Wikipedia page on it, the book explained that it was caused by an explosion of borrowing and building of industrial plants in Asia. When they finally realized there was too much production capacity everywhere and what they were going to produce wouldn't be able to cover their debts anymore, obviously financial institutions became reluctant to lend them anymore money to do something about it.
Since they couldn't borrow money to repay their earlier debts, they had to sell what they built to cover them... except everyone else was also trying to do the exact same thing.
Same with the 2008 mortgage crisis in the US, except this time replace the plants with homes. Banks were offering home loans for very low interest rates for a period of time in the beginning followed by a much higher rate for the rest of the payments, a rate that most people wouldn't be able to afford (up to a whopping 20% according to Wikipedia).
The common reaction of the borrower/home buyer was to think that he/she would get a raise eventually and that would cover the new interest rate when it comes, otherwise they could just sell their homes. The prices of homes there were in an upward trend back then, so nobody worried about the latter.
Except the pays didn't rise enough and US home prices began to stop rising eventually.
So they only had one option - sell their homes - that was essentially a non-option.
The rest has been explained in the previous story.
Oh wait, there's also another complication to this one - the banks sold these mortgage debts as parts of securities thinking it would reduce the risks to themselves by spreading them around, so everyone who bought these (including the banks themselves) also got dragged into the shit, which, in hindsight, there was quite a lot of.
Obviously there are more to these tales than what I've said here but I'm actually just rephrasing what I got from the little I read from the book just to prove to myself that I understand it.
These crises also proved the power of hype. With enough of it, all the geniuses in the world cannot stop the hype-powered tide of idiocy.
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