Alex's 10th birthday

Seems like only yesterday that Alex came into our life and in a blink of an eye, 10 years have passed. Today, we decided NOT to celebrate his birthday. We had celebrated his birthday every year without fail and this year, decided to give it a rest.

Madeline and Vincent showed up unexpectedly this morning as Madeline had urinary problems due to her pregnancy. They got that sorted out in the early morning and decided to check in on us if we were available for breakfast.

So we went for breakfast, then decided to go to Denai Alam to have a peek at my house. Shirley had assured me that the ground floor had been cleared and washed. Only yesterday I was there and could only sweep and clean the upstairs portion. Sure enough, everything looked spic and span!.

After that we dropped in on 1 Utama. As we passed by Chilli's Alex asked if we could take lunch there and so it came to pass that his birthday lunch was at Chilli's (unplanned), together with Madeline and Vincent. We also asked Alicia, the girl serving us if they could have anything special for the birthday boy. Chilli's did have something for him - a brownie with ice cream on top.

Together with another transformer figurine from Anime Tech, Alex was happy and contented as we headed home.

Meeting of body parts and reminiscing

Yesterday, there was a meeting of body parts at the Curve. There were also honorary guests present.These body parts had known each other for coming to 27 years!!

At the top is Khoo TL, who does not seem to have aged!! Now, how can a Khoo be a body part. Well... in Cantonese, Khoo is part of the male anatomy - as in ku ku jiao! Khoo interviewed me for a position in HP in 1981 as a Customer Engineer. I must have exceeded his expectations when I was posted in Singapore for a month, one month after I had joined HP. I was there to back up the CE there who was on national Service (reservist training). With no training (and often no initial understanding of the instruments), I managed to attend to a majority of service calls and installations for both Medical and Analytical products. On my third month with HP, Khoo gave me a 25% pay increment - that was RM300 extra!!

Lip WT was the Sales Engineer for Analytical products. How appropriate - he pays LIP service to customers to get them to purchase our products. His hair is silvery grey now and thinning. He used to say that a sign of success of a man is that he either lose his hair by 30 or have his hair turn grey.

Toh HK was my senior in Support. He used to be a sanitation engineer when he was studying in the UK. Over here, we call them the rubbish collector la!! Toh uses his TOE to prod customers. Kicks them if they don't behave. And he has very strong political views. Here is a classic shot of the TOE and THUMB

and I am the THUMB who gives the thumbs up whenever I complete my assignments.

And hence we were parts of the body!!!

Honorary guests for the night were Kong PH, Tai Hooi Lin (I guess he also qualifies as the THIGH - though I am not sure how that fits into operations) and a long time customer Jaya from PORIM.

We had dinner at the Bavarian Bierhaus at the Curve - ordered a couple of pork knuckles (delicious but pricey), a bunch of sausages and I lost count of the number of jugs of beer that flowed till 11pm.

Picture above was taken in Oct 1984 when yours truly was only 26 years young! We had the Sales Engineer for medical products (Goh), the admin (Siti), the Medical Support CE (James) and the 2 parts of the body.

There is talk of a arranging a major gathering of all ex HP staff in mid October!. Sure like to see that happen. The photo above is just about ALL of HP Sales Malaysia in early 80s!! Only 2 of those people are still in Agilent - Khor AK (in black standing behind me) and of course me!. The next photo was taken on a company outing to Fraser's Hill. Nobody believes that I was ever THIN in my life!!

And this next visual here has Siti (the one in Yellow)- our admin for a number of years. She was from Penang and spoke Mandarin Chinese, English and Malaylast but not least is the Far East management team for Analytical back in the 80s!! Back then Dick Aal had mgmt responsibilities for the Intercon region (which was Latin Americas, Canada, Japan and Far East Asia).

I can't for the life of me remember the names of those 3 at the back row!!

Internal Security Act of Malaysia (ISA)

Reading a recent post and the interview with a possible UMNO president candidate Ku Li, looks like I can also be a candidate for ISA!!

Ku Li: No. We must review it so that it cannot be abused to detain people whom they don't like. Currently. they can detain you because they don't like your long hair or another person who is fat.

Ha ha!!

15th Sept - a tiring week

On the political front, 16th Sept came and went without much happening, though 17th was a lot more interesting! Despite the misgivings of many of the real Anwar, I think it is still worth a gamble to have his party and coalition take over the Government as soon as possible. The current corrupt, racist Government has to go!!!

Spent 3.5 days at my Denai Alam house doing up the electricals. Added lights, fans, and also corrected a faulty wiring. The wireman had switched a wire in one of the panels resulting in one light point with no power whatever you do and another light point having power all the time no matter what you do. Luckily the logical technical me is still there despite the years of doing management!!

Had neglected to wash my cars for the past 2 weeks due to one reason or another and so I decided to wash both of them and wax and polished them after. Took me almost 3 hours doing both cars by myself. Not sure if it was all my sweat on the tee shirt (totally soaked) or water from the wash. I would think it was sweat with just a little from the wash.

Together with the sweat from doing the electricals in my Denai Alam house, I must have sweated a bucket for the week!

Mid Autumn Festival 2008

Mid Autumn Festival is celebrated by Chinese everywhere. In China, it is also a public holiday. It falls on the 15th day of the 8th Lunar Month (which means that if one follows the Gregorian calendar, it kinda move around). This year, the festival falls on 14th Sept 2008. For the sake of convenience, most people celebrated the day on Saturday (13th), because if one were to celebrate it on 14th, you would have to wrap up earlier as the following day is a working day.

For me, this year's celebration was on a very much smaller scale. Only 7th Aunt, Wendy and my brother Danny Kit were invited for dinner. Everyone else has their own families and dinners to attend to. Mum prepared steamed chicken, roast pork , soup (made from dried vegetables - not preserved vegetables) and a vegetable dish of sweet peas, mushrooms, bean curd and other stuff. She had also bought 6 crabs from the market earlier in the morning. So I had to abandon any thoughts of starting on the electrical works in my Denai Alam house as I was expected to prepare the crabs and serve up black pepper crabs. Sorry - no photos taken. Busy day.

After our dinner, My wife, Alex and I dropped Danny back in the center of town - he had his own activities for a Saturday night. And we skedaddled to Vincent's parents house. Alex had wanted to light up lanterns with Madeline. She had agreed and also told us that BBQ would be available!!. By the way, Mid Autumn festival is also known as Lantern festival or mooncake festival. The festival has a story behind it. See here for the details.

We started the night with Alex, Madeline and my wife preparing the lanterns. Once those were up, the BBQ pit was fired up. Took quite a while to get that fired up - and Vincent's dad did all the work. I think I ate too much for dinner. I was feeling lethargic throughout the night (lazy lah!!). There were 2 dogs in the compound - both are NOT friendly to strangers. But Rocky was the fiercer one. Everytime Alex made sudden movements - he would growled and bark at him, I had to remind Alex to walk and talk normally and not act hyper as he is apt to do sometimes.

One thing we learn very fast was that paper lanterns burns and they burn very fast. throughout the night, lanterns just went up in flames in a very sudden manner. So much so, I was waiting with my camera - ready to take a shot of a burning lantern. No such luck.

The nearest I got was seeing smoke from a couple of the lanterns. Took some shots and then the smoke fizzled out. Still, as you can see, the bottom of the lanterns have been burnt. We must have lost at least 5 lanterns that night.

Luckily we celebrated on 13th. Tonight is the 14th as I make this entry and it has been raining since 5pm!!