TH goes in for surgery

Tubby Hubby (TH) woke me up a week ago. "Got terrible tummy ache, can't sleep," he said. "Well, what can I do? Just let me go back to sleep. I've got to go to work tomorrow," I replied grumpily.

When I woke up, he was still awake, face creased in agony. Knowing how much a baby he is when it comes to pain, I just told him to go see a doctor.

"Men have such a low threshold for pain," I complained to my colleague later.

At 3pm, I suddenly get a text from TH: "Got to go in for surgery immediately. Gall bladder severely inflamed."

Emergency operation. And his first ever. He might die... Aargh! I dropped everything and rushed straight to the hospital.

TH was looking remarkably cheerful for someone who was both in pain and being prepped for surgery.

"You're looking quite happy," I remarked when my pulse stopped racing.

"Yeah well, it's nice to feel vindicated," he replies. "Bet you feel really bad now."

Couple talk

Conversation in the Ong-Wood household:

Me: You know what they say about couples completing each others'...

Tubby Hubby: Sentences?

Me: Yeah. Isn't it weird that we also complete each other's...

TH: Songs?

Me: I mean, I sing de de dede...

TH: Everybody dance now!

Happy Valentine's Day... not

Tubby Hubby (TH) and I have a non-aggression pact for Valentine's Day – no flowers, no expensive dinner, no contributing to the already-fat coffers of romance merchants.

"You're so unromantic. How can you not celebrate the day of love?" my starry-eyed colleagues asked me yesterday.

Very easily. It doesn't cost anything, money-wise, to fall in love so why should you have to pay to declare it?

Anyway, as TH says, every day is Valentine's Day for us. Now tell us we're not romantic...

Water ways

"The more I know you, the stranger you get," Tubby Hubby (TH) tells me.

Case in point: He and I were trekking along the Hong Kong trail. The guidebook promised us "half a dozen steep, rocky streams" but, because this is the dry season, all we saw were trickles.

I soon became obsessed with finding my holy grail - a proper stream , possibly a waterfall.

Then I thought I heard it...

Me (excitedly): "Listen, isn't that the sound of water trickling?"

TH didn't even bother to stop. "Nope, that's the sound of your water bottle sloshing."

And he was right. Sigh, I hate it when he knows me better than I know myself.

Why do women have cold hands and feet?

"Brrr," Tubby Hubby (TH) said, edging away from me.

"But I haven't even put my feet on yours yet," I protested.

"I can feel the cold emanating from them even before you lay them on mine," he retorted.

Now that the cold weather's here, I've found a great use for a husband – as a hand-and-foot warmer. Problem is, TH is not too happy with that role.

"Why do women have such cold hands and feet?" he wants to know. His mum used to do the same thing with his dad.

He's done a poll of his colleagues and they all say the same thing – their wives have absolutely freezing tootsies.

Ever since the last frozen-foot incident, I've been banned from warming mine on his. So it's either the cat or...

"Aargh, what happened to your feet?" TH almost fell off the bed the other day. "They look like duck feet."

Aha, I've taken to wearing bed socks in bed. They're warm and toasty but there is one problem: They look exactly like baby booties, which makes my whole Punjabi-outfit bed assemble look really unsexy now.

To save his own feet, TH has allowed me to wear them, with one caveat: "Don't you ever call me Daddy!"

A geeky Christmas

My handphone beeped. "Me wuv me Ricoh," was Tubby Hubby's (TH) SMS.

"Me wuv me iPod," I SMSed back.

It has come down to this. We have unwittingly become technosexuals.

This Christmas, TH's present to me was an iPod. And not just any iPod, mind you, it had to be the special limited-edition red Action for Aids nano (more for the colour than the cause, I regret to say).

And his, which he'd been hinting at for the longest time, was the new Ricoh GR-D II camera.

Sad to say, we have bought into this whole sexy technology stuff. Which means that, even sadder to say, we have massively overspent this month.

So my spiffy iPod is being housed in a S$1 pouch while his sexy Ricoh has to go naked for the moment. But who cares? Me wuv me iPod.

Disneyland, our new "happy place"

Tubby Hubby (TH) and I have favourite spots to go to. We call them our "happy places" – which is rather self-explanatory, really.

So far, our happy places in Hong Kong have been restaurants (Bizou along Elgin Street is one and any Pizza Express outlet is another) and bookshops (Flow on Lyndhurst Terrace).

Then TH took me to Hong Kong Disneyland for my birthday and we absolutely loved it. Being journalists, we approached it with a hefty dose of skepticism but we found it a charming place – in a post-modern ironic kind of way of course, as TH would say.

The only thing is, you have to leave all cynicism at the door and give in to the "magic" or else you'd miss it completely. We love it, the kitschy parades, the inane mascots, the fireworks, the goofy grins on everyone's faces (not just Goofy's)...

So much so we bought annual passes. "I never thought I'd see the day I'd actually get an annual pass to Disneyland," says TH, who is a big Carl I-hate-Disneyland Hiaasen fan.

But he has. And I (blush) actually have Minnie Mouse ears hanging on the door. Bring on the magic, Tinkerbell.