Aside from the vowels (also known as Finals in Hanyu Pinyin), I like to think that the father of Pinyin saw various modern English letters as wild cards and repurposed them for novelty sounds that the English speakers might not be accustomed to. It was a rather clever move in…

At some point in our Chinese learning adventure, Jon found the confidence to sign up for Mandarin lessons in San Francisco. On the first day of class, his teacher from Beijing invited me to sit in and I gladly sat at the back of the class as an observer. Throughout…

I smiled as I pulled out my Strawberry Hill Birders T-shirt from the package, delighted that my illustration has made a plain white T-shirt come to life with a happy memory. I put it on immediately. I can’t remember when I fell in love with rowing a boat on Stow…

Sometime in July last year, when the city told us that we need to hunker down for a year (if not longer), I started documenting San Francisco’s weather @loveyoutotheSutroTowerandback. In the last six months, I learned that the sun shifts one degree every day, the Perseids meteor shower is an…

Thirty years ago, my parents moved us from downtown Singapore up North — to live opposite a jungle. We would watch Monitor Lizards cross the road and stumble upon the Atlas Moth. We would document the transformation of pearlescent green caterpillars with our old Olympus film camera with the faintest…

Last year, we started a rooftop party for the backyard birds with two pairs of worn-out Converse shoes and a broken suitcase — it…

Jon pointed out the 🌳 in earlier days when we started seeing each other. He made me say “Three trees” a million times and I have corrected many 🌳 into Three. Non-English conversations are almost non-existent after I moved to San Francisco in 2017. Occasionally, I get to use my broken Cantonese in our Inner Richmond neighborhood, but not so much since shelter-in-place. Tuning in to the live results of the Singapore General Election last week was quite interesting — probably the longest Singaporean program we have ever watched in the last 🌳 years.

Shelter-in-place happened too quickly and coincided with my tooth extraction. We had no time to stock up our bird seeds. Around the end of March, when the lockdown dates got extended, we felt we should order some bird food online for our rooftop party. We happily bought a 10-lb bag…

It was a nerve-racking ordeal to lose thirty-two books in the mail. On hindsight, it was probably a wake-up call for us to focus on the many other things we could be doing (which we did). More than two months after we filed for missing mail on the USPS website…