Above all else

My family and I have lived in the same place for many years.  It's a 20 year old development, pretty non-descript, but we love it!  We have a NTUC supermarket 2 minutes walk away, a small shopping centre 5 minutes away, a larger one 7 minutes away, lots and lots of shophouse eateries around us, and we can jog to the beach (can you believe this picture is from my morning run??). It's a small place, and we keep very few things at home, which means that in even all the years the children were growing up, we never needed a helper, which is great.  Even better, about 10 years ago, we actually managed to get my parents to move in to a unit in the same block, which means we get to see each other all the time! But one of the problems of having successful colleagues and acquaintances is visiting them and seeing their places.  And whoa, some of those places are pretty amazing - like, seriously can get lost trying to find the toilet.  I once even saw a huge place f...

My wife and I go to a gym class called "Pound" most Saturday afternoons.  The idea is to take two drumsticks, and then do (according to the instructor) 500-600 assorted squats and lunges across 45 minutes of workout tracks - the drumsticks incentivise you to go lower so you can hit them against the floormats.  The first few times we did the class, my legs were literally wobbling!  Even now, every class leaves me on the edge of exhaustion... One thing my wife and I are most amazed by, is the instructor's ability to keep up with all the exercises, while talking to us and whooping enthusiastically XD Even more incredibly, we know that this is her second class in a row - she teaches an hour of kickboxing just before our pound class! The instructor doesn't really look like much - I mean, you'd think she'd look like Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman, but she just looks ordinary, I wouldn't even say she's particularly slim.  Then just last week, we had a su...