muffinsmuffinsmuffins

In between making three different kinds of muffin in one night (carrot cupcakes with cream cheese icing, Snickers and peanut butter muffins, and banana, cherry and white chocolate cupcakes) for a birthday tomorrow I finished up W. Somerset Maugham's 'The Painted Veil'. I was complaining that the book reads like a trashy supermarket romance novel, minus the sex scenes. Then I watched the trailer of the movie adaptation of the book online - am now very glad I didn't catch the movie during its short run in the theatres in Singapore - and thought, "Wow, it's like a trashy supermarket romance novel, complete with the sex scenes." Trust Hollywood to make a melodramatic and implausible piece of writing even more melodramatic and implausible. It's a shame, because I really quite like Naomi Watts and Edward Norton, and I've heard so many good things about Maugham (particularly of 'Of Human Bondage') that I was quite determined to like his work. I'm not sure if the book's like that because the main character is your typical swooning, simpering Victorian female... I did quite like the husband character though. Picked up two more books today - Neil Gaiman's 'Fragile Things', and Kiran Desai's 'The Inheritance of Loss' (which I'd been resisting because she struck me as Arundhati Roy-lite, not that I didn't enjoy 'The God of Small Things', I just thought I didn't need two similar books taking up precious shelf space), which I will ambitiously aim to finish reading by coming Wednesday, because that's when I go back to Dunman to pick up my materials and get assigned classes and start being all good and responsible and grown-up and teacher-like (ha, right).

I've also just signed up for some Strategic Issues Group project studying the "Socio-Economic Stresses of Middle-Income Workers" - I'm hoping for once it won't just be a paper-pushing exercise (like, not much time to paper-push once I start work can?). Someone told me once to always assume that the papers you write in the civil service end up, by default, as toilet paper, so don't get your hopes up about actually effecting any change. And on that optimistic note I shall go to bed and feel perfectly sanguine about my ability to wake up early for church tomorrow morning :)