On the covid front, the news from Sarawak is still largely the same as last week. The case curve continues to fall; the R-rate continues to stay below 1; but the deaths-per-million-people figure is still the worst in the country... Nationally, the covid death total stood at 29,155 as of yesterday.

On the Tern front, we've been busy, busy, busy...


We hired a car for a couple of days, to facilitate the completion of some of the tasks, and we made the most of it by also doing some little outings (which you'll find here and here).

Today -- drumroll -- we had our long-prepared-for pre-flight covid tests (no results yet, but we should have them tomorrow). We opted for the saliva test. We're going to be having plenty of sticks shoved up our noses in the near future, so we figured that one fewer would always be good. We didn't realize quite how much of a sample you have to produce, though... The guy recommended we take our little receptacles out to the car, "and just relax". Pretty farcical, really... There we both sat, with the aircon running, as it was a hot day, spitting away into our respective containers until we'd produced enough to reach the line he'd drawn.

For sure, travel is a different animal these days...

Anyway, we took some time out from the busy-busy-busy to celebrate Deepavali on Thursday, and were very happy to find the Big Padungan Cat celebrating too:



He didn't dress up this time last year, as we were all experiencing our first taste of enhanced movement controls (oh, how little we knew then...)

But this year, the Cat is festively attired, and we reverted to the (not entirely appropriate) tradition of ordering biryani, this time from Mahashafi, a waterfront eatery that we often walk past on our morning route. Very tasty. Would order again. And of course we picked out an Indian movie, the very touching Aligarh, but I'll leave that for a VC post in due course (POSTSCRIPT 27 December: Here it is...)

Finally, the rest of the week's gallery: