There goes another good franchise.
Suddenly feel like getting a seal or two after seeing a discount on wax seal stamp sets on Groupon.
I want to get both a Chinese seal and a Western wax seal stamp. The former is a square seal containing the three characters of my Chinese name (with my family name stretched to fill the space of two characters) that uses red ink while the latter would use the three initials of my English name.
Both aren't cheap and are, frankly, quite impractical.
I think I can get a stone Chinese seal with my zodiac sign for about S$50 in Hong Kong or S$80 locally, and the English one can be ordered online for about S$100. These are higher prices because they need to be custom-made. Most Western stamps come only with a single initial and I want all three of mine in a single stamp. Similarly for the Chinese one, I want the ancient Chinese font and my surname streteched into a rectangle.
In addition, the red ink would be easy to get but the sealing wax is going to raise the costs significantly.
I'm planning to use the Chinese seal for cheques. On the days when I haven't been using a pen for about a week, my handwriting can get noticeably uglier than usual. That's when I can whip out my wooden/stone seal and ink pad instead of signing my cheques. I'm pretty sure seals are accepted too but I'll have to confirm it when I inform them of the seal to be recognized as a secondary signature.
As for the Western wax seal, apparently people only use it for wedding invitations, so I can't use it for my mails in case it causes confusion among the receipients. However, I can also use it on legal documents, but I rarely have to sign any.
Actually I already have a Chinese seal but it's a much simpler and kinda Westernised one in which my name goes from left to right in one horizontal line. I want the square sort with the characters in red and in the ancient Chinese font.
Tue
Got up at 7am today. Hopefully this will become a habit. To encourage this, I am leaving my curtains opened so that the sun can go at full blast into my room through my east-facing window.
Studies have shown that sunlight can wake people up, likely due to natural instincts after millenia of evolution. I can either feel that very well or it's a psychological effect from reading about that.
Also trying to do some strength training in the morning but the elastic band is degrading after a year of neglect, so I've told my bro to order another one. It's just not safe to continue using this old one.
But before the training I went downstairs to the market for some vegetables. All I've got in the fridge is 10 chickens' worth of chicken breasts, bone-in, and three thighs. Although I can simply bake or steam them, I'd rather not do that for all of them.
So I got down to buy lots of lettuce, sweet potatoes, onions, potatoes and a bit of mushrooms before getting the 60 fishballs and, this time, also some yong tau foo.
Just when I was thinking of going home, I walked past the chaw siew stall... AND IT WAS OPEN!
IT WAS ONLY 7.30AM! After so many years of not visiting it due to timing issues, I've totally forgotten about it!
Better still, there was almost no queue since it was a weekday morning.
Straight away I got behind the two people queueing there and started looking around for clues on how to order.
None of them ordered a whole stick of char siew like my mum used to, so I wasn't sure if the system had changed. Regardless, I can't just tell them to give me a whole piece because many of them hanging on the hooks was small round pieces the size of my palm. I could also point at one of the larger ones but since I can't see any difference between all of them, what's the point?
In the end, I just ordered half a kilogram of it. She asked me if I wanted the "heads", and I wasn't sure if she meant the charred ends, but I said "yes" anyway. They are known to be carcinogenic but those are also the best parts of the char siew. Next she asked me if I wanted them chopped and of course I did.
When I got home I put everything but the char siew into the fridge and used the leftover rice from last night that I had forgotten to store in the fridge to make char siew fried rice. The rice was still fine and I made a point to fry the plain rice in the oil a little longer before adding the light soy sauce, char siew and eggs.
I should make more of this.
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