Wanted: Cure for Sore Throat

'Tis the season again.

It absolutely plagues and cripples you. You can't sleep, you don't feel like speaking, and you won't have an appetite even for the most tantalising of gastronomic feasts.

Have been drinking honey lemon (2 teaspoonfuls of Manuka honey in water, with 3 slices of lemon) the whole day and that seems to have been a great help. Well, at least the zesty lemon taste helps.

Woe to sore throats!

What's In Your Handbag?

I found out, after getting home, that I just couldn't zip my handbag close anymore. Stuff was just spilling out of it. Excuse to get new, bigger bag? Buahaha. Well, it's gotta fit:-

Phone - which is huge

Wallet - which is huge. And no, not because i have reams of currency or sacks of coins in it. More of accumulated payment receipts, actually.

Car/house keys - Kinda huge too. I don't know what half those keys do :-D

A tube of Mentos (Ice Mint flavour) - Perfect post-bakuteh fresheners, these.

Yellow Staedtler Textsurfer Classic highlighter (What's this doing here?)

Casio Scientific Calculator, Model fx-570s (What's THIS doing here?)

Laser mouse and its wireless receiver (No, I don't usually carry mice in my handbag.)

Thumbdrive, with lanyard - Nowadays, you don't leave home without your thumbdrive.

Black ballpoint pen, Cross - Someone gave me this before I left to study in the UK, all of 10 years ago. It's amazing how I haven't misplaced it yet.

Zebra Drafix Mechanical Pencil - Geeky-looking one. Had a similar one during my picture-drawing days, of course lost it along the way, and sis bought me a replacement ALL the way from the only Japanese stationery store in San Francisco, CA! :)

Lipstick - L'Oreal, Amazing Coral. Come to think of it, WHAT a name for a colour.

Minyak Angin Cap Kapak, 3 ml - Me is my name, headaches are my game. (Minyak angin is therapeutic, really.)

Piece of paper scrawled with access password to the students' common room - The lock on the door to that room used to be a little cranky. I once closed the door, from the inside, and somehow couldn't get it open again. I had to signal someone walking by (fortunately it was a glass door) to help me open the door from the outside. With the campus having just moved to new premises and all, she didn't know the password, so I had to mime the numbers to her from behind the glass, from memory, hoping that I had the correct figures, because otherwise I would be sitting on the floor throwing randomising devices (e.g. dice) hoping to obtain the correct combination out of 6.76 million possible permutations (26x10x10x10x10x26). Yup, that could easily have turned into a Really Long Day.

What's in your handbag?

2000-2005 In Retrospect

New year, new Chinese year, new clothes, new hopes, new resolutions.

And because I'm brain-dead from a designer's block on a web design job, here are 10 Milestones of the First Half-Decade of the 21st Century!

1. Learnt how to drive on KL roads

I only started driving after I graduated as I had all of 2 weeks between getting my licence and flying to the UK (and btw my driving-test session was the very last of the batch that didn't need to go thru P-licences!). My baptism of fire was having to drive from PJ to the Istana Budaya in Jalan Tun Razak, for a Carmina Burana rehearsal; my usual ride wasn't available that day. After having to go through the massive bits of construction at Jalan Damansara (the flyovers weren't ready yet!) and the even more horrible mess at the junction of Jalan Tun Razak and Jalan Ipoh, I got home with a stiff neck and even stiffer hands.. but that was it, I was a Certified KL Driver.

2. Got admitted to the bar

No, i don't mean the type that serves drinks.

3. Got a job

'Cos that's what graduates do when they come out into the job market. Doh. ;-D

4. Learnt enough about web designing (I hope!) to do it for others

Not that I felt I was so 'pro'. I was broke when I decided to give up comfortable monthly pay to do the MBA! :-D (Am still broke.)

5. Got myself a blog

The actual story (never revealed before!) was that, after a bunch of stressful months at work, I decided maybe I wanted to be an arts writer/journalist, and the idea of a blog came to mind as a means for practice. Well, I didn't become an arts journalist, but the blog stayed..

6. Wrestled enough time to take up my neglected second instrument again

And that would be the violin. And I don't pretend I can confidently say "I play the violin" without shivering in fear of someone asking for a demonstration. Whoops, I've got a class at the end of this week and I haven't practised.

7. Wrestled enough time to start tap classes

By the way, here's a recent article in The Star about the tap classes I was taking, and the instructors!

8. Dislocated a knee-cap, thus putting No. 7 on hold for more than half a year

There's something about orthopaedic injury that keeps hindering my efforts at doing something with dance. (Or maybe it's just mother nature trying to tell me that I'm clumsy :-D) Back in uni, I fractured my hip bone during a fall when practising a dance co-choreographed with Hall-mates for the Malaysian and Singaporean Society ball. I can't remember the other historical incidents but let's not bore ourselves with war-injury stories anyway..

Anyway, I'm still not sure my knee can take it yet. Dang. I wanna go back. It was the first dance of any type I attempted that I didn't have a screeching teacher yelling at me asking me to try and be more graceful. ;-D

9. Got an MBA

New knowledge, new outlook, new friends, new opportunities. Am terribly glad I did it!

10. Got married

Possibly the most significant milestone of all. And with it comes new abode, new family, new box to check on forms, new NAME :-D

(You know, the thing I like about numbered lists, apart from being structured, is that it gives the illusion that you've done a lot during the time-span under discussion..)

Anyway here's to another wonderful half-a-decade ahead (and hopefully the end of my mental block for this afternoon!)

YAAAM SENGG!!!

did you forget to feed your parking meter today?

today is a public holiday in KL.

today is NOT a public holiday in Selangor!

being PJ-dwellers and KL-workers, we forgot that the poor Selangoreans (or Selangorites, or perhaps Selangorees..) have to go to work today, and that the MPPJ officers could therefore be feeling mean today and decide to go on a parking-ticket-giving rampage on poor KLites who thought it was a holiday and forgot to put 60 cents in the pay-n-display machines. (got caught early this morning when we headed out for breakfast in Sec 14. fortunately we got the lower fine of 30 bucks as opposed to the (is it 300?) cos we happened to have a bunch of old tickets left on the windscreen - due to that the offence was categorised as "displaying expired ticket" instead of "no ticket displayed". thank God for loopholes, ha ha.)

so all ye gallavanting in merry Selangor today, DON'T FORGET to pay your parking, lah.