Not. Getting. Better.

The covid situation is dire. Yesterday, Malaysia notched up two more unwanted records: number of cases (24,599); and number of deaths (393).

The total number of deaths now stands at 15,211 (and may well be higher). In the first of this month's posts, I was talking about total deaths having gone over 10,000, so you can see how fast this thing is travelling.

And Sarawak's R-rate is 1.20...

Given the horrendous profile of our local line on this week's graph (to yesterday), I suspect our local R-rate is worse still.


Aaaaagh...

Provisioning takes up a lot of time these days, as there seem to be even more interruptions to supplies than usual. Most of it we do online, but we've had to resort to actual shops this week.

Cheese is extraordinarily hard to come by, but our latest Boca Ria haul introduced us to San Simon, which is Galician, smoked, and really delicious.

And, still on the subject of food, another of my periodic pan mee cravings struck after our early-morning walk on Tuesday. Normally, I prefer the soup version, but we have it delivered, and there are complications with soup. No self-respecting vendor will allow your noodles to be transported IN the broth, and will therefore pack the two separately, often in infernally knotted bags... Re-assembling the soup is tricky. Accidents have been known to happen...

So this week we had X.Xing's special pan mee (the dry version). Excellent. All the expected ingredients (chewy noodles, cangkok manis, minced pork, mushrooms, and crispy anchovies) but also black fungus, three-layer pork, and a tasty sauce.  Yums.


The Hungry Ghost Festival, the high point of Hungry Ghost Month, fell on Sunday 22 this year. So there was the usual crop of ghost stories in the newspapers.


On our walk the following day we came across countless little areas, duly marked off with brightly-coloured flags, where food offerings had been put out, or joss paper burned.

What we celebrated on Sunday, however, was the two-year anniversary of moving into this flat. What a weird two years it's been... Three months when we expected to be here, but couldn't be; and then over a year when we've hardly been anywhere else (I think we clocked up 10 nights away in the final third of last year before pandemonium struck with a vengeance, and grounded us completely).

Anyway, we marked the day with a succession of little treats, including BACON!


Otherwise, well, there's been rain...