This Mooncake Festival Was Real Disaster For Me!

Mooncake Festival, or Mid-Autumn Festival is an important day in our lunar calender. It drops on the 15th day of lunar month of August. Every year of this day, Chinese family members and friends will gather to admire the bright mid-autumn harvest moon, and eat moon cakes and pomeloes together while children will decorating their houses with lanterns and colourful candles. The culture of eating mooncake on this day, according to our ancestors' folk tale, is to commemorate an uprising in Chinnese rebel forces against the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty (1280–1368) in the 14th century. As group gatherings were banned, it was impossible to make plans for a rebellion. Thus, the Chinese rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang, distributed thousands of moon cakes to the Chinese residents in the city before the Mid-Autumn Festival which were inserted a piece of paper in each one of them with the message: "Kill the Mongols on the 15th day of the 8th Moon". On that night the rebels successfully attacked and overthrew the government and what followed was the establishment of the Ming Dynasty. Then Mid-Autumn Festival was celebrated with moon cakes on a national level.

However, this year's Mooncake Festival was a real disaster for me! As a start, our regular yearly family dinner was cancelled a day before due to some reasons. I thought it might be good for me initially as I could still stay at home to catch my favourite Kimi Raikkonen in action (Italy Monza's F1 Grand Prix dropped on the same evening), only to know later in the evening that my Kimi disqualified from fighting in the Q3 session and ended up 14th place from the starting grid on race day! :( ;

On the day itself, my in-law family decided to have swimming pool side BBQ session at our condominium which I thought should be a good alternative to celebrate the Mooncake Festival and admire the harvest moon with my in-law's. Unfortunately, it started to RAIN just after I've put up the fire for BBQ! Where was our bright moon?

While we were still charbroiling our chicken wings in the rain, Kimi failed to score a single point in the Italiian F1 GP! :( The sky was so dark without the moon and we couldn't even lite up our colourful candles....

All in all, the worst thing happened next. Just an hour before we called it the day of Mid-Autumn Festival, my wife had a severe stomach-ache! She had pills and an injection from a 24-hour-polyclinic but the pain persisted until the next morning! We had a sleepless night and had to queue up in the morning at Sentosa Medical Centre to take a blood test, CT abdomen scan. It was until 3pm in the afternoon that she was diagnosed as having Acute Appendicite! And she has had the stomach pain for 16 hours!

Nothing we could do but to take it out by operation. While I'm writing this post, my wife is still lying on the hospital bed.....

This is what I called a disasterous Mooncake Festival of year 2008! - Naked Ozone.