Looking at my brother and I, you can never guess how many seasons we spent under the sun; scaling the hills and bushes, rolling in the field, playing hide and seek at the chalk factory nearby, catching creatures (fish, tadpole and worms to feed the fish) in the drain, making kite with glass-tinted-strings, gambling marbles & collectible cards, making "lastic", etc, etc while our parents were busy working their fingers to the bone for survival. I wish we had a camera to capture those sweet childhood memories, but we don't. These two are the rare photos that I found.





My parents were so cool huh, given the fact that they can even supply us with "strainer" to add to our fun? I couldn't remember if it was only after much begging and crying or was it because my mum was under confinement (deduced from the cloth diapers hanging to dry there) thus we were free to sneak around. :p

If I'm not too slack, perhaps one day I shall blog more on how to make a prefect kite that can fly the highest and furthest, how to make the strongest sandball that can withstand other sandball's knock, the marbles and collectible cards that we won and lose (after all, these "properties" determine your ranking in the neighborhood), the countless childhood games that we played, the leaves and flowers that we cooked, the ducks that my grandma reared, the BMX that we cycled, my childhood life and my childhood dreams.

This is part of the lyrics from Westlife's Season In The Sun, dedicated to all my childhood neighbors.

Goodbye to you my trusted friend
We've known each other since we were nine or ten
Together we've climbed hills and trees
Learned of love and ABC's
Skinned our hearts and skinned our knees
Goodbye my friend it's hard to die
When all the birds are singing in the sky
Now that spring is in the air
Pretty girls are everywhere
Think of me and I'll be there

We had joy, we had fun
we had seasons in the sun
But the hills that we climbed
Were just seasons out of time

We had joy, we had fun
We had seasons in the sun
But the wine and the song
Like the seasons have all gone

Yup, you'll never know what you're gonna get. -- Forrest Gump.

1) A couple of days ago, LiLi told me she saw our wedding album as a promotional/sample album at Aspial Rock Queen bridal show last weekend (http://aspialwedding.com/main_anni.htm ) and the funny thing is, we haven't even saw them ourselves! We are supposed to review the album design next month and can only get the actual album by January, 2007. I wonder how many people will get to see them before us. I wonder if they show them the before-and-after photos :p. I wonder ... Ok, ok, stop wondering. I don't care. I don't really like the photos at the first place. Anyway, I guess this would be the closest thing of being a "model" in my entire life. Pathetic huh?

2) Many many moons ago, during one of the lepak-ing trip at Gurney Plaza, we come across a giant wishing lantern. It was a donation drive to build an old folks home. I like the idea. For a small sum, I can post a wish like "I hope Hui Hui will be smarter and prettier" so I elbowed MH. He sat down to fill in the card. While I was fascinating myself reading other people's wishes posted on the gaint lantern, MH had wrote down his own wish. He wished for "the good health of the old folks there" and pledged a RM50. However, the person in charge told us that we were also supposed to fill in our own wish as for the lucky few Gurney Plaza would make our wish come true. That explained why everyone wrote "I want a RM1500 voucher" which I was so puzzled with earlier. So, MH also wants RM1488 worth of voucher too.

He just picked up his voucher from Gurney this afternoon!!! One of the lucky five. :)




It was vouchers for Dome, Add On and Redbox karaoke, which interest me little. :( How I wish it was RM1500 worth of voucher for Vincci or Esprit or even MPH.



By the way, nope, I didn’t bath with pamelo leaves and UJ, I didn’t manage to scrub pamelo skin to my head either. :p

Have been suffering from a patch of bad luck lately. First, my cell-phone broke down after being drenched with water that leaked from my water bottle during the routine Penang Hill 84 hike last weekend. Luckily it only cost me RM45, a few days out of coverage, trip to Bukit Jambul and trip to post laju office to pick up MH’s old hp that his mum sent all the way from KL.

Then, my laptop went ga-ga from weird signals to blue screen and then completely failed to start. I suspected that the culprit is the user interface, namely the keyboard. Being true engineers, we started to debug with help from Dell’s diagnostic test and service manual.

And true enough, it’s the problem with the keyboard. So we proceed to fix it, taking out the innards one after another and then blah, blah, blah and then blah, blah, blah and bravo, my baby is back alive! Smart engineers! :p







Well, I’ve to confess that I shouldn’t take any credit in the success of this operation. I was preoccupied with a tougher task. I was figuring out stuff like:
- When using first inversion of the tonic triad (Ib), subdominant triad (IVb) and dominant triad (Vb) you should avoid doubling the bass note, but you can double either the root or the 5th.
- It’s better that the space between A to S and T to A is not over an octave although B to T may exceed an octave.
- Use a falling seventh progression in two different keys and a cadential six-four chord.
- et cetera, et cetera, et cetera …

Catch any ball? Me either.

Yup, by the title you should have guessed how the taman negara trip went. It was way below my expectation and I didn't even expected much at the first place.... maybe just to develop some new skill - leeches removal skill or see someone pee in their pants after hearing tiger roaring from afar? But, nope... nyamuk pun takda.

Ironically, the most exciting part of the whole trip was the first few hours. The boat that carried us from Kuala Tembeling to Kuala Tahan (access point to Taman Negara) was so faulty that it couldn't move for more than 5 minutes without dying off. Mid of the journey the boat totally refused to start, prompting the boat navigator to take off his shirt (yeah...he has a good body), jumped into the river to pull the boat to the riverside and tied it to a tree so that we won't be drifted back to Kuala Tembeling. Due to the extended journey (~4 hours of boat ride), we had to brave both the afternoon sun and evening rain.

From there on, everything was an anti- climax. The night walk was nothing but a 30 minutes scroll in the well-pathed jungle observing not the wildlife, but insects and flora & fauna (that's a better word for trees). It certainly did not amuse a village girl like me. (i'm referring to Sibu, the village with the longest river in m'sia). The next day didn't get any better either. The canopy walk, supposedly the longest in the world, was a merely 300m walk for us, thanks to the on-going renovation. Shooting the rapids, which I thought was water rafting (many thanks to the countless misleading brochures out there) was nothing but another short boat ride, a bumpier one. The three meekly activities are supposed to be all for the trip! Fortunately I negotiated with the guide to bring us to visit the aboriginal settlement. That was the other highlight after the malfunctioning boat ride. Never did I know such primitive people still exist in our beloved country that shouts development as the bone fide agenda. Anyway, some fact/myth we've been told about them by our guide:
- they don't really go to school.
- their ‘house’ is really just a roof over their head.
- they left their dying relative in a small hut up on the tree.
- after the dying relative die, they just left them there eaten by the birds.
- they can earn up to RM5000 per day during the peak time* (by demonstrating how to start fire & letting their photos to be taken by curios people like me).
- they spent the entire RM5000 on the night itself (don't ask me how).
- the male can marry 2 female at the same time, at the same ceremony & they will stay together under the some roof.
- there is no specific age for the orang asli to get married, a marriageable male is when they know how to make the roof and a marriageable female is when they know how to search for food in the jungle.
- yes, the female is the breadwinner. they need to find sweet potatoes and other edible in the jungle.
- what's the male work/responsibility?!? RE-LAX-lar....**
*I seriously suspect that the spot was just their acting stage and when the night fall, they will retreat to their bungalow.
**MH is planning to curl his hair and get further tanned before packing a few pants and move to somewhere 4, 48' N 102, 21' E.

To sum up, we saw buffaloes, otters, insects, reflective mushroom, orang asli, one pathetic leech & seas of homo sapiens. (easily outnumbers the buffaloes by 1000x). We burnt RM600+ each. We brought back almost unused baygon, insect repellent, waterless wash cream, unused salt, reminding sun block, MH's torn adidas sandal, MH's torn nike shoes & sun tanned skin!!! :(((

I like Professor Shih Choon Fong's speech. He is the president of NUS (yeah..NUS was corporatized early this year and that's where the title president comes from). Whoever the text writer is, he certainly has the gift of turning something as ugly as "kiasu-ness" into something really noble.

"In a competitive, fast changing world, we must run. We must run just to survive. We must run twice as fast in order to have a shot at global excellence. Aspiration for global excellence must be linked to purpose. Running faster must be about running somewhere – somewhere worth running towards. That somewhere must be a meaningful and hopefully, exciting place."

"We must see our students as unique individuals, each with their own passions and aspirations. They need opportunities to discover their talents. They need space to explore beyond their immediate interests. They need challenges to stretch them and develop their potential to their fullest. I would like to tell a story to remind us that the young like to be stretched and challenged, and they can find their own paths. It also helps if the process is fun, and they can feel proud."

Now I know who to thank to for the never ending assignments, sleepless night "savoring" the technical papers, eternal hours in the lab, out of the syllabus exam questions, etc.

http://www.nus.edu.sg/president/speeches/2006/soua_1.htm