Melbourne Cup

Today, it's All Souls' Day elsewhere in the world, where relatives and friends visit and gather around graves of loved ones. Whilst it's also a traditional public holiday here, people here though dress up in their fanciest and flock to the race course.

Well, wherever today is, I know public holidays spell out the same thing: no work.

Alicia, our bookkepper, and I had been anticipating it since last week, and all the more I had been looking forward to it because the following day is also my day-off. Then, when our boss told us it was "actually the busiest day of the year" for our sales-- ergo, we had work-- it seemed like my leap for excitement was prematurely arrested mid-air. Yeah, it felt like the world stopped, and I was suspended there like the Duracell bunny, looking stupidly outdone by the Energizer mascot. Alicia's smile froze, went brittle and fell somewhere.

So here we are on the "busiest day of the year". I had just relieved Alicia from her morning shift, from whence, I can only surmise, she was also "busiest" staring at the bottles tremendously enjoying ageing on their shelves. I was checking on my thoughts (which is always a good thing) and only found myself more frustrated upon running into things I could have accomplished had I been home. If I had gone to church (I heard they had a second mass intended for today's occasion-- the All Saints' Day one), done laundry that needs handwashing, continued spring cleaning, replied to emails, packed up my Christmas box, hot-oil treated my hair, jogged for at least 20 minutes, updated this blogsite, read Tyrone's magazines to learn a new dish for dinner, called home, resumed self-review for the board exam, and watched Oprah (yeah, you'll never know what you don't know yet. hehehe.), yes, it would have probably been busy indeed for me.

It's a different picture from Tyrone's kitchen. It's almost always never busy, and today will just be busier. At the end of the day, we'll ask how it went for the other. My answer will be as lame as he'll look. I might as well not ask his. The day will have had him exhausted to the bone, and requiring an answer from him will only melt the interior of an already very falt tyre.

Let's see the rest of the day.