This is like the 2nd month I'm here in Tawau.

Resources are depleting as I type this out. We are running low on cash as we didn't forsee that we needed to buy so many things. Utensils, food, stocking up for the late nights where food is not readily available, some expenses that we didn't know we needed to use money on, like purchasing a new monitor, replacing stuff that we couldn't bring over from Sunway, and other stuff like medical bills.

I've been coughing for the past month or so. The thing just keeps coming back. It's like I'm slipping in and out of coughing. For a while, I was fine, and then out of no where, the coughs came back She's feeling a little under the weather. Not sure if it's related to the pregnancy.

But we're settling down. Trying to. We are still not entirely settled as our next move up to Mile 10 will not happen until the building gets set up properly. So, we've been staying at the staff quarters, a temporary refuge, trying to settle down, but at the same time knowing that we can't because of the inevitable move up to Mile 10.

I guess we still haven't gotten used to the whole climate of this place.

The baby is about 8 weeks old now, and we had a scan a couple of weeks ago, and it was a profound experience. It's weird looking into the screen knowing that your wife is carrying an entirely different life inside her tummy. We saw the heart-beat of our child, and it was a mixture of emotions as I glimpsed into the little screen trying to get a cleared picture of the little heart beating rapidly inside my wife.

No wonder they say fatherhood changes everything.

We're still living out of boxes for now, and everything is kind of everywhere strewn along the floor of the room. There's a lot of things we have grown accustomed to in our bedroom, and living in this temporary bedroom only highlights how used to the old bedroom we were. It's like, whatever we needed, we couldn't find or do because this is not going to be our bedroom for long.

And I keep getting tired in the evening, I don't know why. It's a weird phenomenon cause I don't usually get dead tired in the evenings. I mean, something's not very right with me. No matter how much I sleep, it's still not helping. I still wake up feeling lethargic in the morning, and by about 6pm, I usually get so tired that I can't resist napping. I don't usually do this when I was in Sunway. Is it the food? Or is it the environment? Or is it something spiritual?

Church has been so far, so good. It's not what we've grown accustomed to back in FCC, but it's not too different. The only thing is that they always lower the keys of the songs to suit either the worship leader, or the congregation, which I don't know why. Being someone who has been trained not to mess too much with the original writer's intentions for the song, I find it very difficult to sing the songs that have been messed with too much. Imagine singing a song that is originally in B on a F key. That's like, changing the whole feel of the song. The verse is sung with gusto because they sing it on the higher octave, and the chorus is somewhat built-up to a deflating disappointment because they sing it in the lower octave as opposed to the opposite in the original song. This I simply cannot live with. For those who know what I'm talking about, trying singing 'All Creation Cries to You' in F.

And I am taking up a primary role in the Boys' Brigade in Church. I've left the thing for 10 years now, and suddenly, I am called back to it. I guess God does have a whacky sense of humour. I mean, I have been trained as a Boy in discipline and in ruggedness, and then I have been called out of that into the Cell System, something that is totally social, and non-rigid like a uniformed body, and back again into the rigidity of the whole thing. It's like a counter shock to the system. I have simply forgotten how to act as a disciplinarian already. I used to be very good at it, but I have changed and moved on from there... and now I find myself back there again.

And I've been washing my clothes by hand since we moved over here. We don't want to get a washing machine first because it's gonna take some extra effort to move it up to Mile 10 when we eventually move up. And since she's pregnant, I am the one who's doing all the washing, and she the cooking. We still haven't gotten used to the economy here in Tawau. We're still trying to find our way around how to budget our daily spending. Then there's the need to buy a fridge, a washing machine, and oh, I must thank God for providing us with a free TV. There's a pastor's dad who plays golf, and apparently the father always wins TV sets from playing in competitions. So there's a few TVs in the pastor's house collecting dust. We are more than happy to relief them of one TV set. Muahahaha...

I guess that's all for now. I can't blog much because most of my time is now preoccupied with washing clothes, sleeping and taking care of a pregnant lady.

And then there's no table to type from. The computer is propped on the floor, the monitor on top of it's own box, and I'm typing from the side of my bed, with the keyboard on my lap.