Our little lives are still dominated by The Monster.

Yesterday (21 January), Sarawak registered 132 new positive cases, bringing the number of currently active cases to 1,363; the total number of confirmed cases ever to 2,702 (which includes us, of course...); and the number of deaths to 22. The trend is really quite bad by Sarawak standards.

Not surprisingly, then, yesterday also brought the announcement that all social events and gatherings are banned for the duration of the MCO/CMCO, which seems a very sensible move.

Yesterday, Malaysia as a whole had a total of 41,755 active cases, and the cumulative death toll had gone up to 642. This thing is just not going away.

The decorations are up for Chinese New Year next month:



But I don't know how much fun it's going to be:


On a brighter note, you remember the story of the mousedeer and the crocodile? Well, the little frieze is being painted, and the initial panels look very jolly:


In that same previous post, the closing picture shows a buoy and a boom. Well, it seems the whole contraption broke loose at some point (maybe during last week's storms and floods). Today, we watched them trying to tow it all back upriver (not an easy task, as the big buoy seemed to have snagged on the bottom of the river somehow).





As per my new, stricter remit, I'm trying not to overload the blog with the day-to-day (now highly repetitive) stuff that mostly constitutes our lives at the moment.

But food is an exception... And I'd been missing pan mee so much that we finally ordered some to be delivered. This is a Hakka dish, very common in KL, but really quite rare here. I love the chewy noodles and the tasty broth, and I think the combo of accompanying ingredients is nothing short of inspired: pork, mushrooms, anchovies, and cangkok manis (a leafy veg that rejoices in the scientific name of sauropus androgynus, and is known in Chinese as mani cai).