So, the reason I haven’t blogged for weeks is that a lot has happened.

It sounds a bit ironic because lifestyle bloggers tend to have more to blog about when more things happen but, for me, I just get overwhelmed.

 

I haven’t done duck face in years, honest. So it’s totally time for one!

 

After barely recovering from severe jet lag, I got hit by a cold. At the same time, Piers and I were frantically scraping my UK visa application together. It’s a hair-yanking, eyeball-exploding task for the hundreds of documents we have to scrounge up from every hidden corner of earth and the amount of history I have to dredge up from the dimmest recesses of my cobwebbed memory bank.

And, to top that all off, Piers and I decided to add to our overflowing cauldron of stress by getting married.

 

 

Uh huh.

I won’t talk about it in detail because we got married without fuss in Singapore in order to strengthen my case for a UK visa. The visa costs $1,787 (£892) so there is a lot invested to justify the extreme lengths we had to go to to ensure a positive result.

Of course, it also felt right. We’ve already been dating (living together) for two and a half years and can’t imagine life without each other. Aww.

We’ll have a proper wedding in England next year so I’ll blog about that instead, if I haven’t died from stress then.

But it’s all good and relaxed now, apart from the fact that my newly-made husband had to go back to England five days after our marriage, while I stay in Singapore to wait for my visa.

Okay, I really hate the word husband. It’s such an unwieldy, ugly word. Someone ought to come up with a better word for it. Something easy on the lips, like, I dunno, man?

They always say “I now pronounce you man and wife” anyway, which is possibly a bit sexist (or illogical?) but I’m not a feminist so I don’t care.

 

 

Hubs and hubby are equally stupid words so I refuse to use them. Spouse is just as bad.

The Chinese versions are even worse: “Lao gong” and “lao po”, meaning literally “old grandfather” and “old grandmother”. Those are kind of colloquial, but the formal words (“zhang fu” and “qi zi”) actually sound more yucky.

Maybe there’s something wrong with me; a subconscious rebellion against the institution of marriage. But I tend to be very sensitive to the way words sound so it is more likely just coincidence that all the words in the marriage category offend me.

I mean, I don’t like many other random words too, for example, “poignant” and “tonsure”, so it’s not a selective discrimination.

 

 

So, after I receive my visa, which could be months from now, I will fly back to England to get all stressed up again with house-hunting and wedding-planning.

Yay. Can’t wait.

In the meantime, I suppose I can relax a bit, play a lot of stupid iPad games, eat a lot of seaweed shaker fries, and think of names for our future children, who will, hopefully, not inherit my stupid sensitivity to word sounds.

My life will be as unexciting as a bricked iPad in the next couple of months but I will try and pretend that it’s exciting by digging up old stuff to blog about.

Or not. Depends on my mood.

Now, your comments can influence my mood, so comment away! :)