A nifty kitchen tool

This mini manual chopper helped me to prepare one week's supply of chopped garlic safely for cooking and with little hassle.

The old way of doing the same job will require the use of a sharp knife and a chopping block and also mental alertness lest you accidentally cut your fingers with the blade.

Glad to give it away

Uncle Chong,the paper lama man paid RM10.00 only for about 40 kg of used papers, plastics, cans, card boards, fliers, magazines, news papers, etc. Although it is a small amount still we are happy to be able to dispose of unwanted things from cluttering the house.

After the first call in the morning it took many calls later to reach Uncle Chong. We wanted to know when he would be coming over to the house. At first we thought that Uncle Chong was not interested because he did not respond to our many calls.

Later when he came in he explained that he did not response earlier because his hand phone battery was dead and he had to run around to get a new battery replacement.

A feline companion

It was an ordinary morning on a quiet spot along a side lane if not for the presence of a feline companion.

The black and white fur street cat perched on the top of a rubble wall watched with great interest my every move as I performed the Wu style tai chi chuan routine in slow motion. 

It made no attempt to move away probably because it instinctively sensed that this human has no ill intention towards animals. It was still there sitting smugly on the ledge and gazing in my direction after I had moved on. 

I wonder how the readers here are doing this morning?

So forgetful

I left the house about 5 hours ago forgetting to take along my hand phone.

I left the phone plugged to the live charger the whole time I was away.

Some people said that if you overcharge your phone for too long the overheated battery may lead to explosion or fire. Fortunately nothing untoward has happen to either the phone, battery, charger and the house electrical system.

Lost and found

As it was getting late and dark and in my haste to get to my son's wedding dinner on time I didn't bother to note down the surroundings. 

So after the dinner had ended when it took me more than 20 minutes of walking around the block with my irate wife in tow to find the spot where I had earlier parked my car, I began to entertain the unpleasant thought that perhaps my car had been stolen.

The happy ending is that relying on my instinct I finally found the car in the vast open car park.

Selling Memories

The main entrance archway of Memory Lane

The bold capital letters "MEMORY LANE" written in English mounted at top of the quaint archway says it all. It is a street bazaar where vendors peddle second-hand and antiquated goods to the public on Sunday mornings. I suppose long ago somebody in Ipoh City Hall decided to associate the sale of old stuffs with selling memories, hence the quaint and incongruous very English phrase of "Memory Lane" superimposed against the more contemporary "Selamat Datang ke Bandaraya Ipoh banner written in Bahasa.

All kinds of old stuffs eg magazine, CD, calendar, coins, shoes, vases, knives,
watches, containers, books etc laid out on the street

My wife and her sister told me that there was nothing worth buying except junk. I suppose to their way of thinking junk is useless stuffs. To me each item on display has an intrinsic historical value, a memory of a distance past and they are definitely not discarded junk. Many of the items on display are so absolute that they no longer exist in modern time.

There were more male than women visitors. Maybe men appreciate the value of
old stuffs more than women.

While most of the vendors were peddling old items there were also clothing, herbal medicine and some food stuffs on sale. Just as most of the visitors were men most of the vendors were also men, among them I saw many retired senior citizens.

With the scorching sun overhead the iced syrupy drink looks enticing.

The wide range of old goods on sale was so fascinating that I could easily have spent three hours just browsing and going from one vendor to another. But mindful of an appointment at 10 am and other errands to run I reluctantly made my way out of the bazaar. As I was not done yet I made a mental note to visit this morning flea market the next time I come to Ipoh.

Goodbye and have a safe journey Mr Bug

Iwas sitting on a toilet bowl trying to evacuate my bowels in the bathroom when I was startled by the sight of a tiny brownish object slowly inching its way across the wet floor. Instinctively I retracted my legs a bit because I didn't want the thing to crawl up my lower limbs.

The slimy object of my fascination was a 5 cm long millipede. The bug was crawling on the floor at the junction of the floor tiles and the tiled wall in the bath room.

I noted that the millipede was crawling and stopping intermittently and turning its head left and right and top and bottom as if looking for direction with its two antennae. To my relief it made no attempt to move towards the direction of the toilet bowl where I was sitting.

My wife would have freaked out if I had mentioned there was a creepy and slimy bug in the bathroom. I would imagine that the next thing she would do would be to squash the bug with a piece of toilet paper and flushed it down the toilet bowl. No, I would not tell any body about my find. I would rather honour the right of the little fellow's existence rather than to send him to bug heaven.

After finishing my business I returned to the toilet with a plastic box to look for the millipede, half hoping that it would have crawled out of the bathroom. I found it lurking behind the bathroom broom. After gently drawing him out from the sanctuary of the plastic broom with a gentle sweeping motion of the plastic lid I coaxed it to enter the box compartment.

Once inside I closed the box with the lid and headed straight to the drying yard, which is overlooking the back lane at the back of the house. Extending my hand into the air space through the metal grills I turned the box upside down and opened the lid. With a gentle tap on the box the millipede slipped off the box and descended into the air down to the back lane below.

Goodbye Mr Bug and have a safe journey. It was all I could do for you to save you from a quick extinction of being squashed into a pulp and flushed down into the toilet bowl.