parent’s place

miss the feeling of having a parent's place to go home to, for dinner, for a rest, to be taken care of and a place where i can savour the familiar surroundings and smell of my childhood...

donations

have you ever experienced moments where you really want to help people? and i am not referring to those acts of kindness when you see people in difficult situations such as when they tripped, or when they dropped something. i am referring to moments where you felt the need to give back, be it in donations or in volunteering of your services, etc. i have.

i received a neck massager as a birthday gift two years ago from my ex colleagues. while i thanked them for it, the first thought that came to my mind was that elderly people in the rehabilitation center would probably need it more than me. i had wanted to donate this to the center since but had been too lazy to make the trip. couple with the fact that i had not made any donations lately, i felt the need to do it for the lunar new year, although admittedly it is a little late. but i supposed it’s better late than never. so i made a trip to the elderly rehabilitation center this week. felt good to be back there. this was the center that mum visited daily for 3 years before she passed on. it was nice that quite a few of the staff remembered me and called out to me. i called on the center manager and made a donation as well as handed over the neck massager. we chatted and i learned that the center's enrolment had increased. 

felt good to be able to help them. most importantly, i hope my little contribution can help improve the care for the elderlies.

car servicing

i send my car for servicing last weekend. i had kept to the same service center since i bought this second hand car 3 years ago. thing is - in the first year, due to insurance obligations, i had to use this service company. it is no longer an obligation now but i continued going back to the same center out of habit. while the service is generally ok, i did notice that my car tend to have some form of issues after each servicing. it's almost like the issue was planted so that i need to go back for some follow up. and this was what happened last week.

it was a normal routine servicing - change filter, check oil, change oil if need be, etc. i had also asked for a tyre rotation and a top up of the air con gas. as usual, i got a call from the service agent informing me of additional things. this time round he said that to top up the air con gas, they need to dismantle this and that and thus would incur extra cost. it amazed me why they needed to dismantle the air con unit but told him to proceed nonetheless after he explained all sorts of things that i didn't understand. when i arrived at the service center, the agent told me that my spark plugs were wet and said that the xxx and yyy of the engine (technical terms are beyond me) were leaking and needed to be changed. the implication of not changing would be that eventually my car will have a lot of vibrations and would eventually breakdown. nonetheless, he added that he needed to order the spare parts and time was needed. he suggested i could either leave the car for the repairs or i could return another day for the repairs to be done. i told him to go ahead and place the order and i'll return at a more convenient time.

since that day, my car started experiencing vibrations - something that i never have before that servicing. i ignored it and told myself i'll head back to the service center when appropriate. then yesterday, as i drove home from work, my car stalled when i braked at a junction near my place. while i managed to start the car and drove on, the stalling repeated whenever i braked, with the last happening when i parked my car in my residence car park.

this morning i decided to have my car towed to another service center for an assessment. i explained to the agent what happened and added all the things the previous service center told me - spark plugs wet, possible leakage etc. this service center did a check and after about 3 hours told me they could not find any issues. i asked if the issue was related to the spark plugs or possible leakage, he said no, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the xxx and yyy of the engine. but with what i experienced, he suggested that a possible cause was 2 other smaller things (once again technical terms are beyond me). he explained that these are the key ones that mainly cause engine stalling. nonetheless, their checks suggested that these 2 parts were ok, apart from being a little old. he said that i could either leave my car as it is or to change that 2 parts. he iterated that changing the parts would be more preventive than anything else cos these items seemed ok. nonetheless, to help me decide, he will check on the pricing of the items.

after considering the fact that this car is 8 years old and had not had any issues, i told him to go ahead. what i am not pleased about was that fact that i had been advised wrongly by the first service center. won't go back to them again.

secondary smokers

the irony of restricting smokers to specific designated areas in eating places is that if the wind blows the wrong way, everyone becomes secondary smokers. i am a strong advocate of not smoking and having designated smoking areas. but i sometimes wonder the wisdom of having designated smoking areas in open spaces, if we don't supplement it with additional measures like mandating the need for such food operators to have a fan to blow the smoke away from non-smokers.

小强 (little strong)

once a blue moon, i do find one or two cockroaches in my house. usually, this happens in my bathroom. and when this happens, i will catch them and throw them out of my window. i don't ever want to harm them, much less kill them.

couple of weeks back, i saw one fully grown one in my room, just outside my toilet. it ran off when i tried to catch it and hid behind my book shelf. and since then, i had had this cockroach smell coming out of the sink in my toilet. the smell was particularly strong when i bend down to wash my face. i suspected the same cockroach had migrated (i assume it's the same one) into the toilet and now resides there. my suspicion was confirmed last week when i spotted this cockroach on my vanity top. once again, i couldn't catch it as it ran into the crevice before i could even do anything. after that, i started seeing cockroach droppings on my sink every morning.

feeling disturbed and not wanting to allow it to multiply, i decided to purchase a cockroach trap. most traps come with some sort of adhesive/ poison and work by killing them, something that goes against my principle of not killing. but there was one i found that merely trap them without killing them. it is even reuseable! of cos, i happily bought it, and set it up by placing some potato chips in the trap before deploying it on my sink. that was over the last weekend. i would excitedly check it every morning but there was none...

then this morning, to my pleasant surprise, i found one! alas, and to my worst fears, this was not the one i had hoped to catch. it has no wings - that means it is a young cockroach, not the one i saw. this could only mean my room has more than one cockroach! omg! anyway, i left it in the trap and headed off to work. let's hope its presence in the trap attracts others to come out. will continue to monitor the trap over the next couple of days. hopefully more appears.

:-)

ps: till this day, i still don't really understand why we refer to the cockroach affectionately as "小强" (little strong). 

red sparrow

omg! this must be one of my top show for 2018! 

wait, 2018 just started. anyway, yeah, i thoroughly enjoyed this show. i think i've been overdosed with cartoons and superhero movies recently, so much so that when a movie such as the red sparrow appeared, it simply blew me off! i have not watched any thrillers for a long while and truth be told, i didn't actually planned to watch this show. 

it was a sunday evening and i was bored. and i recalled receiving a text from "river" saying that i should watch it. i googled and read up a little about the storyline and that was it. i walked into the cinema, expecting a thriller about a dancer turned spy, a show with nudity, sex, violence and a lot of torture and gore. but what made me sat up through the show was the many twists and turns to the plot, all the way until the end. can't wait for the next 2 parts!

bravo!

peter rabbit

i am not too familiar with the peter rabbit story. all i know is that it is a story about a rabbit family and is written by someone in uk called beatrix potter a century ago. when i visited windermere almost 20 years ago, i was told that that was peter rabbit country as it was there that the story originated. 

so when i watched the movie last night, i didn't know what to expect. i had imagined it would be a story for kids - where everything would be very prim and proper and that there would be many moralistic lessons and kiddish jokes. it didn't turn out that way. it was a very adult show. peter rabbit could very well be another human adult in the story and the story would still developed the same. in the show, peter, as a rabbit, had very human traits and emotions, and behaved every bit like a human. we see jealousy, love, hatred, revenge, lies, death, etc... all being displayed by the rabbit. weird right? but well, as in many shows, i went with the flow and just savoured the moment. and of cos, i enjoyed the animation. it was really good to see all the details of the fur, the expressions, etc. rather well done, i thought.

and so, despite the awkward beginning, i thought the show was not that bad.