Today is CNY eve.
It was great to wake up in the morning without having to leave the house for work.
In conjunction with the CNY last week my boss had directed the staff to take 3 days of compulsory leave starting today and ending on the following Tuesday. This means that the company will resume normal business operation on Wednesday next week.
Taking advantage of the off day I embarked on a few chores immediately after my morning tai chi exercise and breakfast.
I swept the upstairs and downstairs floor, emptied the rubbish from all the waste bins in the house and dumped them into the outside storage bin, filled an empty container with new laundry refill and washed the family car.
Done mindfully and unhurriedly I actually enjoyed doing these mundane household chores. More than just chores, I imagine doing such tasks as exercises for my mental and physical well-being.
While I was doing these chores my wife was busy cleaning, cutting, sorting and getting ready all the meat and vegetable ingredients for tonight's reunion dinner. She had scheduled the afternoon to cook up a feast for the family reunion dinner.
It was my wife's decision that starting from this year we should cook our own food and eat at home rather than spend lots of money eating outside in a fancy restaurant. Since we already have a new daughter-in-law it was all the more meaningful to eat at home as a family unit.
Wishing everybody
Happy Chinese New Year,
Gong Xi Fa Cai.
May the year of the Horse bring good health, happiness and prosperity to all.
All I wanted to do was to google for an online tutorial on how to create column load and moment interaction charts with MS Excel for my office engineering design work, but instead I stumbled upon a tutorial about creating vector artwork using Excel.
I am sure many Excel users are aware of drawing tools in Excel for drawing common geometrical objects and shapes eg rectangles, ellipses, circles, arrows, straight and curve lines, etc.
However how to use Excel's freeform drawing tool to create all kinds of artwork is not fully explained in the program's help documentation.
The picture above is my first attempt in drawing and painting a picture of a potted plant using Excel. And I'm completely awed by this hitherto little known artistic capability of this widely used spreadsheet program.
Since the day I clocked out of my last employer's office for the last time I didn't imagine that I would ever need the use one of these any more.
Now that I am co-opted out of retirement back to work in the industry again I certainly need a writing medium for keeping track of my appointments and jotting down technical notes.
So in the morning off I went to Popular Bookstore to buy myself a 2014 diary book.
My wife asked me how come I seemed to know all the walkers and joggers who passed by us on our morning walks.
I told her that in the beginning I didn't know them but after waving and greeting each of them with a warm friendly "hello!" and a cheerful "good morning" a few times we sort of warm up to each others presence and even exchange small talks.
"I believe strangers are friends that we have yet to meet," to quote someone who wrote the above line in his blog.
Tue 31/12/2013 New Year Eve
The stunning night time view of a suburb of Kuala Lumpur seen from the balcony of Chin's apartment.
The two fingers of white light rising from the hills in the distance are the twin towers of KLCC. The glob of light on the right hand side of the twin towers is exploding fireworks display illuminating the skyline.
According to Chin this year's fireworks show is less spectacular and more subdued than previous years, a reflection of the bad time that this nation and its citizens are enduring.
