Flowers Not For Mom

Yesterday our Pastor preached a sermon about being grateful and she encouraged husbands to show appreciation for their wives by perhaps surprising them with some flowers.

On the way home, my kids were talking in the car when Miss PreTeen brought up the subject about buying flowers because we had been shopping and my husband bought some plastic flowers at the Living Cabin shop.

Miss PreTeen: You know, Pastor talked about daddies giving flowers to mommies. Dad bought flowers yesterday, but they weren't for mom.

And we all burst out laughing... because hubby had bought the flowers as decoration for the toilet in his office! hmm....

Busy But Fun Week

It's been a really hectic week. I didn't even have time to use the PC for the last 7 days! Organized a Line Dance party on the 19th. It was a small tea party this year...we had about 15 people. Everyone chipped in and brought some food...ate until we were all full and still there was food left to ta pau.

Had guests over for dinner on the 22nd...about 60 of them! The students from the Uniten Christian Fellowship came over for their annual Christmas Night Thanksgiving Dinner. Thankfully they also brought most of the food :)

Also organized our annual caroling where a group of the church members would go from home to home singing Christmas carols. We went caroling on the 23rd. This year we sang at 3 locations, in previous years we would try to visit at least 4 homes, so it was quite relaxing and we had more time to spend at each place, mingling around and sampling yummy food prepared for us by the gracious hosts of each place :) Reached home around 12 midnight.

Did some last minute shopping the next day at MidValley Megamall and Sungei Wang Plaza. I had bought everyone's presents except CoolTeen's. Now that he's outgrown toys, it's quite difficult to buy gifts for him. Finally found something at ROOM, a gift shop at MidValley. Had dinner at The Ship just across the road from Bukit Bintang Plaza. I haven't been there in more than 10 years, I think! Went home and sat down at the PC to prepare a video presentation of all the church activities in the month of December for our Christmas Service the next day...finished at 1 am (yawn).

Our Christmas Service began at 10 am. We had a group of ladies doing a very graceful Praise Dance, followed by a mime to the song "Do You Hear What I Hear?" by the kids from the Children Church and then my video presentation. Glad that everything went well, except that I was playing piano that morning and there was no volume coming out from the main speakers. My very creative musicians decided to turn the monitor speakers towards the congregation as a temporary measure and I relied solely on the PA man to signal to me how loudly or softly to play the piano. Thank God for a good and reliable team!

Exchanged gifts and had some makan before going home. My kids could hardly wait to open their presents, and did so as soon as we reached home. Had an enjoyable Christmas family dinner at my sis-in-law's place. My kids brought the Wii game over to her place and CoolTeen accidentally knocked over her Christmas tree as he was unplugging the machine just before we left for home...oops!

Went to watch "Alvin and The Chipmunks 2" on the 26th. I think the cute factor wore off in this sequel...a little too predictable - the usual slapstick humour, the singing and dancing, the mandatory heart warming scenes towards the end... after a while all the high pitched songs begin to sound quite the same, but Miss PreTeen enjoyed it thoroughly. Had dinner with my parents.

Slept in on Sunday morning....to catch up with all the sleep I missed! :D

Sin In PD Town

Was at Port Dickson town with my family and some friends when one of my friends mentioned this shop call Sinn Optical where the prices were rather cheap and he was joking about the name of the shop...



Later we went to a food court near the market to pack some food and saw this signboard...



Wah...double sin!

Selling Van Drivers

This is my favourite kind of sign...



I was driving yesterday and saw this funny sign...



Does it mean that there are van drivers for sale?

Retail Therapy

16 more days till Christmas! This year I managed to do my Christmas shopping early and not wait till the last minute like I usually do every year (trying to get rid of the procrastinator in me!). Went to a few shopping malls and couldn't resist snapping photos of their Christmas deco.



Sungei Wang Plaza



The Mines



Cheras Leisure Mall


Pavillion

Prices have gone up for most things this year, especially foodstuff, and the kids had additional tuition classes for certain subjects that they were weak in. Being in charge of the household expenditures is quite a challenge...just when I've got everything nicely planned, a sudden need will pop up (kid's shoes got holes, kid needs additional books, etc, etc) and there goes the little extra money I thought I had for the month (sigh). So a little retail therapy does wonders to soothe the 'housewife blues'...I can spend without going on a guilt trip since it's Christmas and I'm not buying stuff for myself anyway...ok, maybe just a few small items...

I remember when I was expecting my second child and it was a difficult pregnancy as I was feeling sick most of the time. The only thing that could take my mind off the nausea was retail therapy! It's strange but I never felt sick when I was at a shopping mall but I would throw up like crazy at home. Hubby used to tease me about that... and still does.

When it comes to shopping, men and women are so different. Hubby will go directly to the store, buy what he needs and go home. I would go to every shop to compare the prices and then go back to the one where there is a discount for the item I want to buy (we ladies always love a good bargain!)...which is probably one of the reasons why my son, CoolTeen, would rather stay at home on his own than go shopping with me.

I received this picture through email sometime ago, probably drawn by a very bored guy who had only one item to buy but had to wait 3 hours for his wife to do her shopping...

What Broke?

My son, CoolTeen, is thinking of joining a hiphop dance class with a few of his friends. So yesterday I took him and one of his classmates to a dance studio not too far from our home to make some enquiries. On the way home, there were quite a number of road bumps that I had to drive over and as I went over one of them there was a loud CRUNCH and my car started to sway left and right quite violently. I thought I had a tyre puncture. Being on the right lane, I switched on my hazard lights and slowly manuveured my car to a bus-stop nearby. At first my kids thought that I was making the car sway on purpose...they always say that I drive badly!

We all got down and I was quite surprised to note that all my tyres were OK...not a single puncture. I decided not to drive the car any further and called hubby. Hubby was out of town that day, so he said to call the AAM breakdown service. The AAM operator was polite but when he asked for my location I realised that I didn't know the name of the road I was on (even though I had travelled on it many times before), I only knew the name of the taman and that I was not too far from a Petronas station...great.

The mechanic had trouble locating us, until I finally saw a signboard near some houses with the road name on it, and told him. That was about 1½ hours later. I also called my friend MK who lived not too far from where I was and she came to fetch my son and his friend back to my house while I waited for the mechanic with my daughter, PreTeen. My son's classmate was supposed to be at our house and his parents had arranged to fetch him from there before 5 pm. It was already 4.30 pm. PreTeen had to miss her ballet class which started at 4 pm.

The mechanic located us at 5 pm, 2 hours after I called AAM. He took the car for a short test drive and the car swayed and strange grating sounds came from the rear left tyre. He changed the tyre, tested the car again but the problem persisted. Upon closer inspection, he realised that the mounting bar was broken at the section where it connected to the left rear wheel...!

It was almost 6 pm and the car workshop that I usually send my car to was closing at 7 pm, but it was quite a distance away and I wasn't sure whether my car could make the journey without any more damage to the mounting bar. I decided to drive home instead (just a few km away) and the AAM mechanic follwed me in his van. Had to go really, really , really slow as any faster than 20 km/h would cause the car to sway. Held up a whole queue of cars as I slowly inched my way home.



When hubby came home, he took some snapshots of the damage and printed out the photos. The next morning he went to the car workshop and showed the mechanic the problem (the wonders of modern technology) , ordered the parts and I called the AAM towtruck. Took a ride in the towtruck with PreTeen, sent the car for repair and the workshop owner said that it was quite a common occurance for that kind of car, which was why he could obtain the spare parts so quickly. All I can say is that it's a locally manufactured 1000cc car...

Thankfully the repairs only came up to only RM110...phew! (I thought it would be a few hundred Ringgit, at least)


This is how it should look like


The broken mounting bar


The brand new bar...in black

Tenacity

Tenacity...I first heard this word when I was a teenager many, many years ago in church. A leader in our church had preached on this subject during one of the Sunday Services.

tenacity = persistent determination, to stick with something even when the going gets tough, never giving up.

Today I read in the newspapers about a man in India who took 14 years using a hammer and chisel to carve a tunnel through a mountain...wow...

PATNA: An Indian villager used a hammer and chisel over the span of 14 years to carve a tunnel through a rocky mountain so that he could park his truck in front of his house.

‘I could not park my truck near my house since the mountain blocked my path,’ Ramchandra Das, 53, who lives in eastern Bihar state’s Gaya district, told Reuters.

Das said fear of thieves stealing his truck prompted him to work on the tunnel all by himself after authorities refused help.

‘I had to leave my truck miles away, so I decided to do something about it myself,’ Das said by telephone.

Local villagers, who had to trek for miles to get around the mountain are using the 14 feet wide tunnel to reach their farms, and praising Das for his work.

‘We rarely come across a man who can work so hard to achieve his goal,’ Prabhat Kumar Jha, a local government official said.

(source DAWN.COM)

This is a fine example of tenacity, a quality that I find lacking in many people today...including myself. Perhaps we have grown too accustomed to having modern appliances and machinery that help us save time and make life so much more comfortable that we miss having the sense of satisfaction that comes from perseverance and hard work.

I really do appreciate my washing machine, microwave oven, vacuum cleaner, electric mixer and everything else that help me in my housework...but the downside of it is that I notice I need to spend more time exercising to shed extra kilos that probably came from having all these appliances do the hard work for me...how ironic.

After reading the news article about the hammer-and-chisel-man, Ramchandra Das, some people commented that if he had used some kind of modern machinery he would have gotten the work done in a few weeks. But perhaps he didn't have the modern equipment needed? I would rather focus on his accomplishment. I think what he felt after completing the tunnel far outweighed all the blisters on his hands, all the sweat and frustration, all the ridicule of his neighbours...what I learn from this is that sometimes we just have to be determined and keep our eyes on our goals regardless of the obstacles and distractions that we face...Mr. Ramchandra Das, he has tenacity.