Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to dear wife Anna

Son David is away probably celebrating his birthday with his girl friend. Daughter is away studying in the uni in Kuala Terrengganu. So just the two of us left at home.

Expresso Macchiato coffee and brownies at Secret Recipe
In the afternoon took wife out for tea at the local Secret Recipe outlet at Metro Point Kajang. Even before I uttered the word "Secret Recipe" dear wife suggested it first. Is it any wonder that after so many years of marriage and living together we have the knack of thinking the same thoughts together. Sometimes she has this uncanny ability to read my thoughts even before I could express it in words. Call it a woman's intuition if you want.

At the store I ordered walnut brownie for myself and Vienna brownie and Expresso Macchiato coffee for dear wife. As expected when the brew came in a tiny cup dear wife complained how expensive to pay and consume such a small quantity of coffee. I explained to her patiently that you were supposed to savour the brew sip by sip, just like drinking wine and not gulp it all own the throat in one go like drinking water from a glass.

She liked the Vienna brownie though not particularly impressed by the tiny weeny cup of expresso. As for the walnut brownie she was put off by the dark brown chocolate coating and opined that it was too "heaty". After taking a few sips of the brew I offered to finish the coffee for her.

We sat there and enjoyed our refreshment and a pleasant and cosy conversation for about half hour before we walked over to nearby Mydin to buy some sundry goods. Sometimes simple activities like having a warm conversation over a cup of coffee and some cakes can give more pleasure than eating a elaborate and expensive meal in a fancy restaurant.

Thuen Yuen Restaurant
7.30pm. Slight drizzle. We were cruising around the eateries at Taman Prima looking for something to eat. Then my eye caught this nondescript drab-looking Chinese restaurant located in the centre of a block of shop houses that is always packed full with customers each time I drive by the place. I had suggested to dear wife and son to try out this restaurant on a few occasions in the past but never got round to doing it. Since there was only two of us around at home tonight tonight decided to try its cooking.

Surveying the crowd I noticed most of the dinners comprised mainly of family members who opted to dine out instead of eating at home.

Knowing that I like fish Anna ordered steamed fish and stir-fried young long beans. The long beans were cooked tender and quite crunchy in the mouth. The steamed fish came in the right portion just right for two persons. The fish cooking was superb. The Poh Leh Chinese tea ordered by dear wife was pleasant enough to wash down the food. When the bill came I was almost shocked in disbelief. For a plate of steamed fish, stir-fried vegetables, rice and Poh leh tea, the restaurant charged us RM20.00 only! Have not tasted such delicious cooking at so affordable price for a long time. Now this explains why despite it's unfavourable location and shabby appearance so many customers patronise this shop.

"Let's come back to this restaurant another time with David and Amy for dinner!" dear wife enthused happily as I pulled away from the roadside kerb after the satisfying dinning experience. Obviously she was impressed with the good food and the affordable price that the restaurant charged its customers.

Liberation and release from sufferings.

My mother passed away at 10.15pm in Ipoh on this day. She was 82 years old on the day of her death.

Late night phone calls hours before her passing
7.30pm Inti College Nilai car park, minutes before I was to conduct the Wed self defence class. My third brother TM told me on the phone that Mother suffered a stroke last night and felled down on the floor bruising the temple on the right side of her head. As a result her mouth was twisted one side, lost the ability to swallow fluid, lost bodily sensation on one side of the body, her right temple was swollen due to the fall, couldn't speak. He told me that the family doctor who attended to Mother advised the family to prepare for the worse.

Immediately I told him that I would go back to Ipoh on Fri.

11.30pm. Home after returning from self defence class in INti. TM broke the sad news that Mother had passed away. Told TM not to wait for all the family members to gather in Ipoh but to take charge of the funeral arrangements.

Daughter to stay put in her uni in Kuala Terrenganu for her exams
Told wife and son that we would have to pack up and go to Ipoh tomorrow for the funeral rites. As for daughter who is currently preparing for her end of her year exams in her uni in Kuala Terrengannu we decided to bar her from going with us despite her vehement protest over the phone. Her exam is scheduled on Sun and she might not have enough time to return to her uni after the burial to get ready for the exam. We thought that the burial will not happen earlier than Sat and it would be disrespectful to leave before the burial rites.

Mother's long illness
Mother had been suffering from severe depression, hyper-tension, diabetes and other medical ailments for about 10 years since Dad passed away 20 years ago. She gradually lost her memory and also her ability to look after herself. For the last 5 years the situation had gotten so bad that she was bedridden most of the time. All this while third brother and his wife have been caring and attending to her needs.

Accepting the inevitable and letting go
Although the death of a loved one can be difficult to accept, I feel that in her case due to the long illness with no hope of cure death should be seen as a release or liberation from earthly sufferings, both for her and to the family members.

Strangely when I heard the news, I was totally calm and even felt a sense of relief that her earth-bound sufferings had finally come to an end. When I spoke to my brothers and sister on the phone, they all sound calm and normal. I guess long time ago since Mother had become bedridden and incapable of looking after herself all of us in the family had already accepted the inevitable.

Farewell dearest mother.

May you finally gain supreme liberation and be free from all human sufferings.

Hapkido on Fight Quest of Astro Discovery channel

Every Tuesday at 10pm there is a martial arts reality show on TV called Fight Quest featured on Astro's Discovery channel. This show is about two Caucasian martial arts practitioner's going around Asia learning and competing in Asian martial arts. The first episode showed the two guys going to the Phillipines learning and competing in the Filipino stick fighting martial arts called Kali/Eskrima. After the first show I missed a couple of other episodes featuring other different Asian martial arts style.

Tonight's episode was quite interesting as it featured the Korean art of Hapkido. I am always intrigued by Hapkido because some people say the Korean art share the same ancestry as the Japanese martial art of Aikido, my own martial art style. The mother of Aikido is Daito Ryu Aikidjutsu and it is said that the founder of Hapkido also studied Aikijutsu under the same teacher as O Sensei, Aikido's founder.

Although I have done some research on Hapkido and even viewed some video clips on Youtube, I have never seen a feature length TV documentary until tonight.

As I see it the main difference between the two arts is that Aikido is a defensive martial arts while Hapkido has both defensive and offensive elements. While competition is forbidden in Aikido , Hapkido actively promotes tournament fighting. While Aikido techniques are mainly confined to grappling and throwing, Hapkido techniques also includes striking, kicking and ground fighting.

Looking at the combatants bashing each other in the tournament , Hapkido looks a lot like the kick boxing styles eg. TKD , Mixed Martial Art and Sanshou with lots of emphasis on kicking, punching, clinching and takedowns.

The closest resemblance to Aikido is in the basic Hapkido kata training. I see the Aikido equivalent of throwing and projection techniques eg kokyu nage, shihonage, tenchinage, kotegaeshi, koshinage etc. In the joint manipulating training I see elements of Aikido locking techniques such as ikkyo, nikkyo, sanky0, yonkyo, etc.

The circular movements and footworks are also quite similar to Aikido's except in Hapkido they are more linear and angular.

In my opinion, the two arts were the same when they were practiced as Aikijutsu and as they evolved over the years, each developed in separate ways. While the modern incarnation of Aikido focuses more on personal , moral and spiritual development using vigorous martial arts training as a vehicle, modern Hapkido developed into a martial arts system focusing on competition and personal survival.

Pizza observations from a window-side table

Wife said she was too tired to cook dinner and daughter suggested eating out at Pizza Hut.

"Let's go to Pizza Hut for dinner. Let Amy relish her pizza before she goes back to her UMT uni in KualaTerrengganu soon," dear wife said, always thinking about the children more than herself. Surely Kuala Terengganu is not such a sleepy and economic backwater that you can't get to eat pizza there, I amused myself silently in my head.

"OK we will feast out at Pizza Hut tonight ," I answered cheerfully as dear wife and daughter cast expectant looks in my direction. Actually I am not picky about food and usually go along with the rest of the family on the choice of what and where to eat.

By the time we got to the restaurant, it was already 3/4 full. The waiter ushered the three of us to a table beside the window. After taking a long time to select the food we finally settled for a conventional combo meal, meatball spaghetti and garden salad. After ordering the food and settling down I looked around the eatery.

Most of the tables were already taken although more customers were entering the restaurant. The crowd was a good mixed of young and old, family with their children, couples , teen ages . I saw Malays, Chinese and Indians happily devouring their food oblivious of one another's presence, true muhibbah or simply minding each other's business.

With the fuel price hike I thought that people would try to save money by eating at home instead of dinning out. Daily the media reports people grouching about the escalating cost of living due to price hikes and calling for drastic changes to their customery extravagant lifestyles. Yet tonight I am witnessing the public packing a western style fast food restaurant as if the food is FOC. How odd and contradictory.

Maybe the prices of local food have risen so much that they are almost the same as what the fast food restaurants are charging. Thus instead of patronising local fare, the public is willing to pay a little bit more to eat out in the comfort of these western style eateries. Nowadays if you have a big family, it may be cheaper to eat out than to cook in as the cost of ingredients to prepare food for home cooking has skyrocketed beyond comprehension. On the other hand the flock of people may be from the upper middle class who, hurt by rising inflation and no longer able to afford the luxury of dinning out in posh hotels and fancy restaurants decides to downgrade their dinning experience to convenient foods such as those offered by Pizza Hut, KFC, Mc Donalds, Old Town Kopitiam, etc

Price hike or not, and come what may when your tummy starts to rumble it is time to eat.

The difficulties of life are. . . .

"The difficulties of life are to make you better, not bitter".

I found this message scrawled in cursive writing by hand on a white board at of all places, a mamak shop in a suburb of Rawang called Bandar Country Homes.

The mamak shop occupies a corner lot of a row of double-storey shop house . The white board is hung on the wall at the back portion of the eatery in full display for all to see. If not for the inspiration message on the board there is nothing extraordinary about this nondescript joint. What is so interesting about the phrase is that it is written in the English language, and not in Bahasa as one would expect.

Whenever I attend my weekly Rawang project meeting on Mon I normally go to this particular joint for light breakfast and refreshment before the start of the meeting. What keeps me coming back to this mamak shop is not the bland food but the white board and the inspirational messages on it. Every week I come here I would see a different message. At first I didn't pay much attention to the writing, but after a few visits I began to appreciate the subtle lessons of life that the writer of these messages are trying to convey.

On Mon 16/6/08 when this particular message appeared on the board I was struggling inside my head with some thorny engineering issues which I had to resolve at the meeting but have not yet find a solution. I was expecting to be lambasted by the client and was busy conducting trial runs of how to answer the client's questions in my head. Then looking up while sipping teh O (without the sugar) and tucking in the thosai, I saw this amazing phrase flashed before my eyes : "The difficulties of life are to make you better, not bitter"

After paying for the food and drink, I left the restaurant and headed straight for the site office where the morning's meeting was scheduled to be held with a much happier frame of mind than before. I still had not resolved the problematic issues in my head nor had I worked out a appropriate strategy to handle the demanding client. The agitation and apprehension of not being able to answer the client's questions satisfactorily did not seem too intimidating as before.

I am sure most of the locals who patronize the shop don't pay attention to the messages or are aware that the board exists at all. Even if they see the board it would be difficult to distill and comprehend the essence of the messages as the writing is in the English language.

If the reader wants to visit this particular mamak joint in Rawang, look out for Restoran Ghazali Sdn Bhd, the name of the restaurant. I wonder who is the writer of the messages on the white board. The next project meeting is scheduled on Mon 23/6/08 and I can't wait to find out what is the next message on the board.

Father's Day fuel rebate payout

Got my fuel rebate of RM625.00 in the local post office today; after waiting 4 hours, and not within 3 minutes as reported in the press. To be fair, the 4 hours were the time spent waiting for my number to be called.

I and the wife went to the post office at the Kajang Tesco Store at 11.30am. There was already a big crowd of people who was there much earlier than us. There were only two counters serving the public at the post office. There were already 174 eligible motorists in the queue ahead of me. My ticket indicated that I was the number 1223 customer and at that time the counter was serving customer no. 1049.

Filling up the money order form was quite simple. There was a policeman manning the service counter who was responsible for distributing the form. Pasted on top of the counter were some completed money order sample forms as a guide for the public to fill the forms correctly.

While the wife wandered into the store to buy the week's groceries, I headed downstairs for some light refreshment at the Uncle John cafe.

"Don't loafed in the cafe for too long as you may miss your turn at the post office", dear wife reminded me over the hand phone as I was about to sip the hot black coffee. "OK. I won't stay in the cafe longer than one hour, " I reassured her. In my mind it would be another three hours before my turn was called and there was no way that I would have stayed in the cafe for three hours.

After finishing my meals and reading the papers I went up to the first floor to check out the situation at the post office.

The big crowd of people was still there. The ticket clock showed that the the two counters were serving customers no 145 ans 146. My watch told me that the time was 1.30pm. At the rate it was going it would be another one and a half hours before my turn. Decided to joined the wife at the store. Wife was still buying groceries.

3.00pm. Checking out at the cashier's counter after finishing the purchases. The ticketing clock at the post office flashed no. 1217 and 1218. There were 5 more customers before my turn. By 3.30pm the clock flashed my number. Went to the counter. Stamped my left thumb print on the money order form, exchanged a few pleasantries with the clerk and in less than 5 minutes I received the RM625.00 fuel rebate as promised by the government.

The fuel rebate is equivalent to RM52.00 of petrol subsidy per month, surely not enough to pay the monthly petrol bill of RM400.00. Still it is better than nothing in times of runaway inflation and fuel price hikes.

Indon maid in the office

Went to the office to do some work even though today is Saturday. Have been going back to work on many Saturdays and Sundays since the beginning of the year.

As I made my way to my cubicle noticed that the light in front of the lady boss's office was lit up. Saw lots of used drawings strewn on the floor and a young girl in T shirt and shot pants was busy sorting and arrangement the papers. The girl appeared startled seeing me.

Then I heard the lady boss talking to somebody on the cell phone in her office, and short while later popped out of her room to talk to the young girl.

Now I got it. The young girl is the lady boss's Indonesian maid. The lady boss brought along her maid to help clear out some of the used accumulated junk papers and drawings in her office.

Said hello to the lady boss to acknowledge her presence and got down to work. It is the first time in many years that I see her in the office on a Saturday. Though not working on any project but still it is a Sat and usually the bosses don't show up on a weekend.

As usual I am the only staff in the structure section working today. Which is fine as during normal days I hardly get the chance to concentrate on work without the distraction of endless phone calls and other disruptions