According to the Mayan calendar, the world will end in 2012.

Yeah, it just might, since the Mayan calendar runs out of days just about then. And then mankind will be decimated in a mighty nuclear apocalypse or aliens will come in motherships with flashing disco lights and enslave humans to distant star colonies. Or maybe there will be giant tsunamis that wipe all land off the face of the earth - all because we did not heed the global warming warning. People will be lining up from here to eternity at the Pearly Gates and St Peter will be striking names off his longish list (about 144,000 according to the bible). There will be much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Something like that.

But before all that happens - there's my 20th wedding anniversary to celebrate. I refuse the allow the world to end before then.

Like crossing the international dateline, depending on your perspective, the actual 20th year is either in 2011 (where we registered our marriage and could now have permissible legal sex) or in 2012 where I had that horror-story of a tacky wedding with a bad perm and pink-eye. Either way, the world must NOT end until I've had my 20th anniversary fun. (for planning purposes I think I will define the period as being from June 28 2011 to Feb 8 2012)

Because I had a tacky wedding, I am determined to do it right this time and have a super-duper, solid, no-holds-barred anniversary celebration.

I don't want any fancy expensive diamond rings to commemorate 20 years together - why waste good money on a rock? Instead, just like how Singapore loves to celebrate milestone events - with many 'fringe' and 'core' events, that's how I'll plan our 20th WA celebrations! Cue gleeful handrubbing and evil cackling. Poor KH... he just does not have a clue what will hit him. Okay, neither have I, but I'm having fun with this for now!

Whatever plan I have definitely includes a weekend in Marriage Encounter. He owes me and the church. We didn't go for the church's Marriage Preparation Course back then and he promised Fr Francis that we would go to ME to make up for it. But of course, the man turned squeamish and thinks ME is marriage counselling AA style so he refused to go. But with the 20th year coming up, no more excuses!

But the biggie for me is The Trip. It will be our first trip sans kids in I dunno how many years! I think the trip will last at least 2 weeks if not more. Not sure where we will go and that's part of the fun of planning.

With my current Japan craze, its likely to cover Japan (ooh, onsens, rotemburo, ryokans - reason to splurge on a relatively expensive one for a night since we will not have kids with us! - love hotels, capsule hotels, backpacking). Maybe take an overnight ferry from Japan to Vladivostok and then train down to Beijing? I've always wanted to just backpack Japan with KH. We'll take the train mostly but also do a bit of driving eg in Shikoku. We would just stop for the night at any town when we got tired enough or if the place looked nice enough. Not too much planning, just spontaneity. We have not done this sort of trip for so long.

Or maybe we'll go back to Europe - its been so long. We'll visit old haunts like Venice, the Italian lakes, our favourite hotel in Sienna and in Sorrento (Hotel Lorely et Londres - surly waiter, beautiful room, old terazzo floor, a generous terrace, fragrant lemon groves below and the blue sea further down). And then there's pretty Vernazza on the Cinque Terra. I still remember the sunset on the top of the ruined castle on a hill overlooking the Mediterranean and the colouring-book cute pastel houses down below. You can't get more romantic than that... Only thing is, the euro is just too high to make any European trip value for money these days.

Or perhaps we will revisit Hawaii where we had our honeymoon in 1992. We still talk about it and remember all those quirky bits - when we unknowingly stayed in a 'boutique' hotel which had the night trade as a sideline and the slinkiest streetwalkers I've seen, getting lost in the misty hills off Kiluaea on the Big Island and then chancing upon the cutest little B&B I've seen, driving up past pastureland, into and above the clouds in our red convertible to the roof of Haleakala to watch the sunset, and of course, me puking three times on the 300 hairpin turns on the infamous road to Hana. Who can forget that.

This time, might be nice to go back to Maui and bring that long-held fantasy to life - renewing our wedding vows on a clifftop in Maui with the Pacific Ocean pounding on the rocky shores below, in a picture-perfect vermillion Hawaiian sunset... ooh yes nice thought... but first got to lose enough weight to look good on that clifftop! And we'll have to bring the kids for that vow-renewal thingy if we go that route. Would be more costly then... but still, wouldn't it be nice? To have my children around us as we renew our vows? I can see Isaac and Gillian rolling their eyes at their cheesy mom again...

In 2011, Isaac would be 15 and Gillian, 16 by then. Caitlin would be 10, Owain 8 and Trinity 6 years old. Just thinking about all this makes me sigh - how big they will be, how far we've come.

After all the hills and valleys that KH and I have trudged up and down together for 20 years, I think we've earned the right to celebrate this and celebrate this well! I'm off to do more fantasising... no, I mean planning...