I was going to say "a wash-out" but Sprite beat me to it

Also, it wasn't technically a wash-out. The food was decent. Fun was had --- maybe not your crazy miniature golf levels of fun, thanks to the rain, but the boys (T, cousin Dan, his brother David, and my brother) didn't seem to notice how much time was passing during their very long game of bridge --- at least not till they tried to stand up and then had to spend a good few minutes stretching their legs.

To clarify, we were at Sentosa for a family picnic: my family, Dan's family and another aunt and uncle. A picnic in the rain carries a whole different mood. It slows the pace down, certainly takes your mind off the heat (usually the primary peril of any picnic in the tropics), and I'm a rainy-weather kinda girl anyway. There was a lot of girl-talk and Sprite was plagued by mysterious raindrops that sporadically anointed either her cup or her head and we ate a week's worth of junk food (though there were plenty of chips left over for Dan's birthday party later this week). The rain was "teasing rain", as Uncle Henry called it --- except that I thought he'd said "kissing rain" to describe the light drizzle that alternated with stormy outbursts. And there's nothing like an angry gray storm charging in from the sea to really get you into the end-of-the-year monsoon mood.

We eventually packed up about mid-afternoon, and went home and overdosed on the extended DVD edition of The Two Towers. T had already seen it the night before, on account of his impatience for not waiting for me, so he dozed while I watched it. Then I watched the first half of it with cast commentary, which wasn't as sparkling as the cast commentary on the first movie. I figure when the cast did the commentary for FotR, they were all euphoric about how well everything had turned out. Now they're a little more into the promo work of it all, and a little more distanced from the fun days of filming, maybe they're a little less bubbly, less thrilled-to-the-bone about everything. Sean Astin still talks too much, of course, and Elijah Wood kinda plays second fiddle/sidekick to him in the commentary, but I suppose that's a fair tradeoff/reversal of their movie roles. But I want to hear more anecdotes along the lines of the hobbits' "Tig-Tag" from FotR. And why didn't Viggo Mortensen do any commentary?