I'm back!

There is a request from my loyal "fan" that I should start writing my blog again, I have been blog hibernating for a while now.


So what's new? Yeah last two weeks I officially joined the "Smart" community, courtesy of hubby and after much consideration, finally he got me a Samsung Tab and a Samsung Galaxy smart phone at one go. It's a double pampering from him.

As expected the girls got hold of the tab and handle it with dexterity and started downloading it with God knows whatever games that they knew of. So this mummy is exercising her mother authority to control the usage and access to it else gone case. I must acknowledged that the tab came in real handy, yesterday I googled some queries from Michelle on her homework and I can get the answer at the tip of my fingers, must teach the girls how to put it to good use.

Now what about the Smart phone? The extend of connectivity you have with your existing contacts is amazing but with the extensive pool of people that now you can contact with, I realized it created another problem.... superficiality in your friendships. It's nice to get in touch but I would want to maintain connectivity with those few close friends that I have, lest I fall into the "hi and bye" or "touch and go" friendships. So I will limit my connection with a few close contacts.

Life at forty so far is..... indescribable, experiencing changes emotionally, spiritually and physically. I stumbled upon this phrase at my colleague's cubicle which sounded like this - "We cannot do much about the length of our life but we can sure do something with the depth and breadth of it", so I'm learning to just do that... everyday add a bit of depth and breadth to my life, God's gracious gift to me. May you do the same :)

My faith tomorrow

Amos wrote in an sms this evening:

Would be my great pleasure if you are kind enough to join me for a simple dinner tomorrow night? Propose at 7.30pm.

Elaine replied:
Invitation accepted

The girls' reaction when I announced that I got a date tomorrow night:

"Ah, that's not fair... it's your birthday and we want to spend it with you, daddy can't have you all by himself" (with their sour papaya face)

So... what do you think would be the outcome tomorrow?
a) I get to go out with my date
b) I get to go out with my date and two lamp posts
c) We all stay home and watch Barbie Christmas CD

2012

Happy new year! 2011 has been a great year with God's grace and mercy upon me and my family. Looking forward to another great year ahead and the big 4, some of my new year resolutions for Y2012 are:

Spiritual - Read the whole bible through, love God more through obedient service
Physical - Exercise at least 3 times a week, each time at least 45 minutes
Family- Spent quality individual time with the girls and the man of my life
Social - More friend's time, trip to NZ

May 2012 brings extra color to your life, whatever the painting going to turn out be, I just know it'll be another blasting year! God bless!

What's in your name?

English Name – “Elaine” stands for bright, light or radiant and I remember my French lecturer used to comment that it the French variant for “Helen”. So I’m a bright shining radiant star!

Chinese Name – Middle character represents wisdom and last character represents beauty as the way of writing is synonym to a type of flower, of course the first character bears the family sir name.

So here I am, a bright shining radiant star with wisdom and beauty. Ha ha what say you ?

We're back!

Has been real busy lately with marking, marking and more marking. Wow, it has been so long since I last posted anything on this blog.. hmm.... some of you may be wondering what has been happening to me and my family, well below were some highlights:

The entire family fell sick in the first 2 weeks of November, I was never that sick before but thank God I recovered fully before my trip to Guilin in early Dec. Hubby and I went for a 7 days tour to Guilin,Guangzhou and the neigbouring ...zhou.

We climbed some mountains, visited 2 caves, took 3 cruises around the river/lakes and had a great time shopping in Guangzhou. The weather was cool and refreshing, I think averagely we walked about 5km, so 5*7=35km, good exercise.

The kids as usual protested to the trip and was "bribed" with gifts.

Now back to college for more marking, marking and marking...sign... looking forward for Christmas!

My "tim chai"

Over the radio this morning, the DJ invited callers to call into the station and shared about their memories of the good old grocery store in their neighbourhood. The topic arised due to recent government’s effort in wanting to help owners or potential owners of such enterprise to improve their business as I believe they have difficulties making ends meet due to the mushrooming of the giant retailers out there.

Well since I won’t be calling the radio station, I decided that I’ll blog about it – my very own version and fond memories of my hometown grocery store.

Situated a few doors away (less than 100 meters) from my parent’s home was our “Seven Eleven”store back then. Owned by two brothers, the elder one we used to call him “fei loh” – fat man in Cantonese because he’s short and fan and the younger and more handsome brother “eng jek” – his last name is “Eng” and Jek is the term “uncle” in Hokkien, yet to know the origin of the Hokkien name as majority of my hometown are Cantonese and Cantonese is the dominion linqua franca of those days. We used to call our store “tim chai” or little shop back then.

Being the youngest I serve as the “mooi teng” – “little servant” in Cantonese and was usually assigned to order/buy stuffs from the “tim chai”. So a common assignment will sound like below:

My mom : Wai Wai, go to tim chai and tell fei loh or eng jek that we need ………..
Me : What is??? And what is ??? (Clarifying her orders)
Me : That’s all? What about the money?
My mom : Tell fei loh “oh tang” first, means “hutang” or on-credit first and ask him to write on the little book.
Me : Hah? What is “oh tang”?
My mom : Just said “oh tang, write on the little book” and they’ll know what to do.
Me : Oh.. Okay

So, down I run to our little “tim chai” and carried out my duty diligently. I was pretty surprised that I actually get to bring stuffs back by saying “oh tang” every time and guess what, the little book is a credit book with “555” printed on top of its cover. My first lesson on credit buying, see we were so advanced back then, everybody trusted everybody. I still remember my mum will confirm if the goods were packed my fei loh or eng jek because mum commented that eng jek is a more honest businessman.

Of course I patronized the tim chai (more than once) on my own everyday to buy junk food (my favourite satay fish, packets of cruncy and spicy ikan bilis, twisties, po-po muruku and a whole lot more) and tried my luck on the “lucky board” game where you pay 5 cents, choose a number/paper and see if it comes with a price in which often times it doesn’t (must be fei loh cheating!).

When mum cannot find me, 99.9% of the time I’ll be at the tim chai and mum will shout from the main gate and I’ll sprint back. As some of you might be brought up from small neighbourhood or kampong, you would agreed with me that back then we have care free lives, everybody knows everybody and our parents never worried that we will be snatched away by bad people as everybody is on the lookout for one another.

Besides mum, I’m also the “mooi teng” for my elder brother and sister, God knows how they abuse their seniority on me! And I’m no free labour cause I’ll demand some form of tips or wages from each trip, it could be 5 cents, a free snack or something else (Clever, I guess Emily inherited my wisdom, LOL).

Sad to say our tim chai has closed down, I think quite some time back, still see eng jek (but now fatter than fei loh) whenever I go back to Kampar. I really hope the government can actually do something for such micro enterprises, revived the business and really carried out their promises, it’s very much a part of our lives and I hope kids nowadays get to experience what we used to, back in the good old days.

Long live our “tim chai”s.

Cameron Home Stay at Ah Mah's Place

Here is the long overdue posting of our recent trip to Cameron Highlands. The trip was our 3rd one, first one when Michelle was about 9 months old, second trip was when Michelle was 4 years old and Emily was 2 and now our third trip, the girls are 8 and 6 now, so I guessed when Michelle is 12 we'll make another trip (we even can called that Camerolympic, a four yearly affair).

What's so special about this trip is the place that we put in. We went with 2 other families and some church youths (they were there for a camp and we thought of taggling along). Normally we would booked the hotel/apartment ourselves but this time round we passed the baton to a friend, little did we know the surprise that we were going to get.

All that we know is we are going to stay real near to Brinchang town where it is real convenient, to the night market, places of attraction, a lot of convenient stores etc.. So after our afternoon tea, we went straight to check in with hubby's car leading the way, hubby mentioned the place is called Holiday apartment. So we turned in Brinchang town and all of us busy looking for the signage to our apartment, this is what we saw!!


We could not believe our eyes and hope to spot another signage with the word "Holiday apartment", but there was none. OK, now that we have arrived, hubby suggested that we went down and investigate, we don't even bother to take our luggage because deep inside us we do not want to accept the reality that this is where we are going to spend the night in.

Hubby found a place to park, the men went down to check while we wives were still in a daze and try to talk ourselves out of the situation. OK, hubby went in, showed the fax to one lady, the lady who look like a typical "pau chou poh - rent lady" got the key, opened the grill door and lead hubby up. We waited anxiously for hubby to report the situation, hubby said "Yes, this is the place, OKlar not that bad... we can take our luggage down already". In me I was like thinking....oh boy, aren't this going to be interesting, my other friend still couldn't accept the fact but the children were like so looking forward to it.

We climb the stairs, a living hall awaits us, pity we didn't take any pictures but I'll try to picture the place to you as vividly as I could. In the living room there is a set of rattan sofa, a small TV with lots of notices pasted on the wall, one of the notice reminded us, the tenants to keep quiet after 12.00 midnight (can you believe it??) Next the rooms, wooden beds with cartoon bedsheets (the girls just love them), the dressing table is older than my late grandma's. Okay the best part are the switches, they are those way back black round bulky type mounted onto a wooden plank. Can you imagine the place?? Wonderful isn't it?

Well after coming to our senses, we might as well make the best out of the situation right, forget about self pity, we were trying hard to figure some of the good points, well the place is pretty clean, the heater works, the toilets are clean too, the bedsheets look new, it's a walking distance to convenience and best of all the kids love the place.

Well, slowly but painfully we learned to accept the reality and it was not that bad after all, we enjoyed the fellowship and time spent together in "ah mah's place". We actually experienced a truly authentic home stay.

Skype with the girls..

I cannot imagine that I'm able to do this with my daughters, with the spread use of internet. You see they have been playing guided and screened computer games online for half an hour daily since last week. They call up to ask for permission everytime they wanted to do so. I took the opportunity to check on them, below is our conversation:



What's next, we will be friends on Facebook :)

"Printer" date

Coming this Sat, 5th June hubby and I will be celebrating our 11th wedding anniversary. He dropped me an e-mail this morning officially asking me out to shop for a printer on Sat evening. Yeah you read it write, shopping for a printer, you see this is the same tactic that he used more than 15 years ago to secure a so call date with me. Well, we bought no printer on that day but ended up in the cinema, shopping and dining instead. The printer was just a plain excuse from a kampung boy who wants to tackle a kampung girl... LOL. I'm not sure about this "printer" date but sure sweet of him to ask me out after 11 years of being married to this kampung boy. Kampung boy has turned into a kampung uncle now but love is still very much in the air....

Upclose with Amber Chia

Last Saturday after dinner, we hang around at Q'bay mall and happened to meet Amber Chia, our own breed of supermodel in person. She was there for a model search cum Charity event cum opening ceremony of an eatery there. We took the opportunity to snap a photo with her, aren't she glamorous? I commented that she looked wonderful, she shook my hands and said thank you. Oh yeah she also gave my ex-neighbor's son a peck on his cheek. How sweet eh...

The right words at the right time..

It's the kindy practice that whenever there's a spelling, ejaan or "ting sieh" session, the child need to obtain the parents' signature of acknowledgement as an evidence that parents are aware of their child's progress in those tested area. Below was the conversation between Emily and I one evening concerning the subject matter.

Emily: Mommy need your signature... I did not get all right for my "ting sieh"
Me: Hmm....checking and putting my signature on the page (actually no big deal, I remembered she got 4 out of 5 correct).
Emily: (Quickly keep the book and took out another, the spelling book this time). Nah you can look at this as long as you want and you'll be happy, forget how I fare for my "ting sieh".
Me: (Puzzled, I wonder whose side of genes that she got this from)


One evening, when Emily and hubby were spending some time outside the house they bumped with our neighbor Mrs.XX.

Mrs.XX: Hi Emily!
Emily: Hi Mrs. XX
Mrs.XX: Nice staying at your new house?
Emily: Yes...
Mrs.XX: Which one is better? Your old or new place?
Emily: Certainly the new place.
Mrs.XX: Why?
Emily: Because over here I can get to see you.
Mrs.XX: (The heart must have been melted by her words)

You see, my girl really knows how to position herself and makes the most out of the situation. I shall not fear for her surviving skills, as the song goes "She will survive".

As for Michelle she's the straight forward type, no twist and turn, very predictable. Both of them make a good blend.

How to make....

I was surfing the internet yesterday for some games/craft ideas to be presented in an upcoming Sunday School meeting. I was actually looking for tips on how to prepare a cardboard maze and thought of googling it. At the mean time, Michelle was seated next to me, so while I was typing the keywords to google.. Michelle was distracted and was looking on what I was typing.... I typed in the following words "how to make..." and to my surprise (google actually displayed some of the most searched phrased that match my search) "how to make love... XXXXXXX results" appeared on the screen to which Michelle says aloud ... "ha ha mummy it says how to make love".... immediately I typed something else and terminate the scene automatically... Gosh don't want to be caught in the situation where she asked me the details.... just imagine your eight-year old asking you "mummy what is making love?" LOL

What could possibly be worst?

I've been car pooling with hubby since Monday...coz his giant road bully is aging and need to be hospitalized for ?? days or weeks. So yesterday, after work he picked me up and off we went to run some errands..

1st incident:
Pick up a customized 2.5' x 6.0' mirror for our wardrobe..
After much effort by the store worker and hubby, the mirror refused to enter our car.. we have to wait for his giant bully to do the job.. mission 1 failed.

2nd incident:
Hubby went back home and started his "drilling" project, we bought some paintings from Bali last year and finally we got the chance to hang them up... Drilling done and when adjusting the painting whether to hang it vertically or horizontally, hubby broke one of our living room's light..there goes my beautiful light.....so now we have a broken light.

3rd incident:
While adjusting the hanging string at the back of the painting, he hammered his own thumb... so now we have a sore-thumb... what could be worst eh..

4th incident:
So now the lights are gone, hubby attempted to hide the defect by switching the position of the light cover and in the process, adjusted the bulb... okay he managed to sort of "hide" the defect. He switched on the lights and "plang", guess what... short-circuit, the bulbs of course went dead, so are the other associated lights/fan so now we have a broken light, a sore thumb and a short-circuit...

To stop all this from continuing... I suggested he bathed and took his dinner... I told him that I would have to take over the wheel when we go out later.. as I'm not too sure what is going to happen..

All this happens within 2 hours.. so you tell me what could be worst eh?

Poxy Club - Emily, Michelle and me

Good, the doctor extended another week of MC for me..... according to him I still have plenty of "active" pox with me and my case is consider not "that bad".. I don't know how bad is bad... I think altogether I have about 200-300 poxes with me, large and small.... on the bright side I have more time to tender to my new garden, do a lot of reading and spend time with my kids and also to watch my neighbour's DVDs! The only "reward" out of this whole episode is... hey I got life-long immunity against chicken pox.. I thank God for the poxes... as of now I'm applying heavily Vitamin-E extract on my face and hope the poxes dried up without leaving any deep scar.

For the past few days I saw myself turning from me into a witch and back to me again. I look like a teenager in her puberty with "pimples" popping out from her face, always blessed with good complexion, this whole episode really affect my self-esteem. As the poxes increases and turned into deep red swollen little volcanoes, I doubted if I ever regain my good complexion again.

Now in the 9th day, the poxes has started to dry up and I'm glad I'm beginning to look like me again. By the way the poxes has spread to Michelle and she's doing fine :)

Chicken pox

Emily is having her chicken pox now, in her 4th day and I was told it is the most contagious period as the pox dries up. Generally she's doing well, no sign of slowing down meaning she's still as active and cheerful, very discipline in controlling her food, trying very hard not to scratch them and kind of "happy" that she got it.

I'm not going to post her photos here as being so self conscious about her looks, let's spare her of the embarrassment. When I told her that she won't look nice, she abstain from her favourite food and struggling not to touch them but being so cheeky she actually threatened the sister with it and started the so call "war".

On another note, house renovation will commence next week, hubby warned that our nightmare is going to begin and by the way he bought me a new oven.. muak muak muak....

Squirel in the garden

No, not squirrel in my garden but the college's nursery. On my way to class this morning, I dropped by at the college's nursery and see what I could possibly "possessed" for my new garden, I spotted a squirrel (or it spotted me) with its long bushy tail and holding some "stolen" food leaving the nursery in a hurry. Ha ha caught it red handed. I used to spot squirrels balancing its act on the telephone cables back at my parents' house whenever I stood by the balcony to enjoy my "lau jia's" scenery. They are indeed cheeky, swift little creatures which reminded me of the Disney's character, Chip & Dale which are crazy over Donald's nuts. They are also hubby's favourite Disney characters.

Herb "Angel"

Three in the family suffered series of indigestion that resulted in vomitting,diarrhea and windy stomachs. Guess who? Answer: DEM (daddy,emily and mummy). Happened on different timing but not far from each other, 3 of us were down in bed most of the time, I slept from 3 - 6pm, then 9pm to 6am yesteray, Emily basically the same while daddy sort of recovered as he had it earlier.

On 1/2 medical leave yesterday and when I got back from class this morning, a colleague placed a container with leaves soaked in water on my desk with this note:
"Ms. E, chew this and digest it, drink the water after that , from your angel".

Earlier on this "angel" of mine was suggesting that there was this plant on the way to the library building (my college has a collection of spice garden), asked me to pluck some of the leaves, chew it, supposingly help to relieve my digestion problem. I was quite skeptical and just ignored him lar.

After lunch, he insisted that I tried the remedy, well... I suppose nature is better than swallowing some pills from the doctor eh, chew the leaves (super bitter), swallowed it and after 3 hours I'm still okay, so guess it's not poisonous. Between 12noon to 3.30 pm, I took my lunch, finished my 1/2 cup of ginger tea, ate 3 "paus" and still feel hungry. I think the leaves must be at work!!

Raya @ Taiping - Part 2

I believe for those who have been to Taiping Lake Garden would totally agreed with me that the place is a nice spot for photo shooting with its rich lush greens, ponds and well kept environment. No doubt that it is also a popular place for couples to take nice cool walks and have long conversations.

So this is what we did... (it all started by a picture that a friend took using hubby's camera, all agreed that it was a nice shot with the perfect angle). We decided to rewind 10+ years back and created below shots.

In the beginning...





Time past and soon we realized it's time to commit our lives as couple in everlasting union....


Then... time flies, soon we produced a flock of..........


Yeap, you are right 8 of us produced 9 PRINCESSES, can you guess who belongs to whom??

Ha ha ha, we had fun, hubby and I even make a shot of a romantic scene just like what you would see in a typical Bollywood movie... (I'm not releasing the version here... those who are interested may contact me personally for the copyright..)

Tricky answer..

My colleague and I were sharing on our encounters with our unpredictable batch of diploma students....

My colleague in one of her Microcomputing class...

Colleague: Tell me class, what do you know about computers?
Student1 : Ah, I use it to download songs..
Student2 : I use it to download movies...
Student3 : We use them to watch porn movies.. (my goodness)
Students : I access the facebook, friendster, twitter etc...

My colleage commented that she needs to find new ways to teach them...

In one of my class (we were discussing on some techniques that we can use to generate research idea)

Me : What do you understand by brainstorming?
Student 1: Crack our head, hit the head real hard?
Me : Err... in a way..., tell me more
Student 2: Ah, is it something to do with disturbance to the brain..
Me : Err... (you can't actually said they are wrong, right?) BUT I honestly believe they don't get it quite right, so I got to interfere to clarify their understanding on what does it really mean by "storming" the brain..

I believe we should not limit our students' answer and encourage them to be expressive and critical, but at times you do need a lot of sense of humour and patience to deal with them and be open to receive whatever answers they have for you. :D

Natural inspiration

I was preparing for lecture this morning and attempted to use this UK based company by the name of "Pret A Manger" as a case study exercise for my students. As I was exploring their website, I found below pictures from their website very naturally inspirated and hopefully will give some mothers out there some inspiration while preparing food for our kids. I extracted some information from their website (www.pret.com) - Pret opened in London in 1986 by two college friends, Sinclair and Julian, made proper sandwiches using natural, preservative-free ingredients...

You see they can turn this sandwich into a big empire today, that's call entrepreneurship, so mothers out there if you have a new way of preparing food, it might end up to be a great enterprising idea, so don't be sceptical, who knows one day your home recipe might turn out to be a multimillionaire business... :)

A great way to get our kids eat oranges...

How about using this idea to get your kids eat their vege... and also to remind them to brush their teeth after every meal..


Let's take this before we go to school and work eh...

Ah... it seems the fish is enjoying its dip....