Well, my feet are aching, and so are my calves, and I think I may have cracked a rib, but the good news is .... I'm alive!
We just moved out from our rented place to our new cluster house, lugging along 50 boxes and miscellaneous pieces of furniture. Moving house is always stressful, but what makes this move even more challenging is that our new place is still not quite ready. There's dust and debris everywhere, and workers keep dropping in to do more renovation.
For the next two weeks or so, we will be living in the basement and one bedroom. The rest of the house is still under renovation. We have no kitchen to do any cooking (the kitchen is in the process of getting rebuilt), so for the time being, we are going to eat out and/or live on food like sandwiches, fruits and milk. At night we sleep on mattresses placed on the floor, and we are living out of boxes. I'm on leave this week, but next week I have to get back to work - and I hope to be able to find my working shoes by then.
I imagine that normally, I would be quite upset about living like this. What's keeping me (relatively) sane and composed is, oddly enough, the earthquake in Japan. Thinking of the 350,000 homeless folks in Japan, plus all the others living without electricity, makes me feel quite unable to complain. It makes me feel glad for my blessings, actually.
Singapore's disadvantage of a lack of natural resources is counterbalanced by its lack of natural disasters. We don't have gold, coal, steel or oil, but equally we don't have earthquakes, tsunamis, blizzards or hurricanes. All things said and done, life for the PAP government is pretty easy because they never have to deal with natural calamities such as Australia's floods, Japan's tsunami, New Zealand's earthquake or the snowstorms in New York, for example.
All such events are a true test of a nation's leaders and, well, our leaders have never been tested. In fact, many of them have never even contested in an election (they just "win" by walkover). We are a nation led by "leaders" who mostly look good just on paper.