How long do you take to get ready?

I pride myself on being pretty efficient in getting ready, not just in the morning but any time of the day. I distinctly remember one time where I went from nursing Aaron to being dressed for an evening out in about 10 minutes. I thought I looked decent.

This guy has a few tricks to make anybody super efficient in the morning. Guys, the way he puts on his pants and tie are particularly impressive.

Telephone Porridge Anyone?

It must be because my mom is staying with us but here is another Cantonese saying, "To make telephone porridge". The porridge here is rice porridge. It usually takes several hours of slow cooking to make the perfect bowl. So, making telephone porridge means to have those long loooooooong telephone conversations.

I used to be an expert at telephone porridge and of course refined the art during my teenage years. I have a distinct memory of being in the 9th Grade, arriving home from school at about 3.45pm and then jumping on the the phone with my best friend (who I would have said goodbye to less than an hour earlier) from about 4pm onwards until my mom got home at 5pm. We had a brown, dial phone that was attached to the kitchen. UGLY. THING.

By the time I was in university, I would be on the phone for 2, 3, even 4 hours! I can't believe it thinking back now. But, in those days, before email and online chats, I couldn't last a day without a phone call to somebody. I don't know how my mother put up with it because I don't really remember getting in all that much trouble for it.

This all died down once I started work. I found something new - online chatting. I don't go to any chat rooms or chat with strangers. Its just the medium I use now to keep in touch with all my family and friends. So, these days, I make IM porridges and they can take as long as a day to complete. I know that I prefer it to using the phone because you can do so many other things at the same time (blog, surf the internet, watch TV, have dinner etc). But, that means you're not always giving the other person your full attention.

Just as Bilbo often writes about the lost art of letter writing, I now find that I have lost the art of chatting on the phone. I just don't like doing it anymore. And, even if the other person is a close friend that I haven't been in touch with for awhile, I find that I get uncomfortable being on the phone after the initial 15 mins of small talk. And if its the cell phone that I'm on, I get off even quicker because my ear always gets so hot.

No matter how many emoticons they come up with, IM-ing is cold and sentiments often lost. I believe that it is a warm gesture to sometimes give a person a call to speak with them. And these days, we can go a step further and use video in our calls too. I'm going to make an effort here. First, I need to try to look decent for cameras that always give me a big bald forehead! So, don't anybody call me yet :)

Baby-less Holidays

In the past 2 days, I've had 2 friends tell me that they are going on holidays without their babies. My immediate thought was "WOW! That would be fantastic."

However, upon giving it further thought, I don't think I would do it. Not right now. After all, my mother is constantly asking me if she could take Aaron back to Australia for a holiday and, I always refuse. Its not that I don't have moments where I don't wish that the little guy was somewhere else. I do. And I usually regret the thought seconds after thinking it.

My mother's reasons are that Aaron is too attached to me and that he needs to learn some independence. The longest that he and I have been apart is 6 hours when I went for a day of sight seeing in the north of Cairns with my brother. I was still back in time to put him to bed that night.

Of course, I do think that a baby-less holiday would be thoroughly relaxing and we could probably go on some holiday that we couldn't take Aaron on. For example, the diving holiday to Sipadan that Richard and I had planned for 4 years ago but never happened. *let me spend a few seconds in dream land here.....sigh*

So, why don't I just accept my mother's offer? Partly, its because I know he can be such a handful and I don't want my mother to get all worn out because of him. The other part is just because I can't. I don't feel comfortable doing it.

I can just hear some people saying "Oh don't be one of those moms that can't let go". Honestly though, I am one of those moms at the moment. Perhaps this is my own fault but I don't think I've prepared him adequately to be away from me long enough for me to go on a holiday. I am doing a lot more of it now as he starts to find his own independence even without me prompting him. More experienced parents tell me that one day, he'll be begging me not to go places with him anyway. I'm not really in a rush for that day.

For now, I wish my two friends a fantastically romantic time away. Maybe I'll ask my mother to watch Aaron for a couple of hours this weekend while Richard and I go get a massage.

Perumnas Market Seems To Have Exploded

Its been about two months since my last visit to the Perumnas Market. The place seems to have exploded with extra stalls everywhere. I think the vegetable sellers are more or less the same people but there are all these new food, toys and jewelery stores. Yes, jewelery in the market!

You can see one of the stalls here, in between two fruit stalls.



Unfortunately, I don't have a photo for comparison but here is what the main street of the market now looks like.



Walking through the various stalls took me a lot longer this morning because there were so many new toy stalls and of course, Aaron had to stop and look at each one.



We came across this extremely cute little girl. She's about 14 months old and was very contentedly helping her mother put various items into bags to be weighed. The beanie you see on her is an extremely common sight. It doesn't matter that the weather is around 30 degrees Celsius daily, all babies and toddlers will have one of those on their heads.



Palembang (not just the market) is really changing and growing so rapidly. In the two years that we've been here, I think it has grown more than Ipoh has in the past ten years! I should make a point to take even more photos of the place.

Varieties of Stupid

I have a bit of a language lesson today. We have been watching a Mandarin drama series these past few nights and there is a character in there called "Da Sha". A direct translation is "Big Stupid".

That name, "Big Stupid", reminded me of a term that was one of my favorites when I was trying to pick up Mandarin from my colleagues at work - "Sha Qua" meaning "Stupid Melon". No, I don't think they called me that (or maybe they did behind my back), but it was a term that one particular girl would throw out every hour or so. I don't know why, I just liked the sound of it.

So now, we have Big Stupid and Stupid Melon. Another very common one that I hear in Mandarin TV shows is "Ben Dan" meaning "Stupid Egg". Or sometimes, "Da Ben Dan". You guessed it, "Big Stupid Egg". Obviously, with the references to melons and eggs, these aren't really used for malicious name calling purposes. I wouldn't know how to give a lesson on that. Supposedly, the swearing that goes on in Mandarin or Cantonese can be extremely colorful but unfortunately, I don't understand one bit of it.

Off on a tangent but still on the topic of eggs: Richard, who is only allowed to speak Mandarin to Aaron, often says "Pu Yao Huai Dan", meaning "Don't be a rotten egg!"

I wonder what the history is behind using melons and eggs. I'll update this list if I come across more varieties of stupid.

The 101 Things To Do List

Last year, I came to know about the 101 things in 1001 days from zero_zero_one's blog. The idea immediately appealed to me and I started work on my list. Making the list was much harder than I thought it would be and I actually took a couple of months to complete it. It really made me think that all this staying at home had made me into a lazy bum for not having anything that I wanted to do. I felt good when it was done and I looked forward to crossing things off. Bad luck! Our hard disk crashed and I lost everything! I backed up things like photos but this list was on the desktop....and alone. Somehow, I just didn't have the motivation to make another list and I left it.

Recently I started reading "How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be" by Jack Canfield. He's the guy that wrote the "Chicken Soup For The Soul" series (which I really really did not enjoy). Every so often, I enjoy reading one of those books that tells you about focusing and getting your life on track (and then I forget LOL!).

Anyway, once again, this book suggested a list of 101 things. This time, the time frame was much longer - you have until death to do them. So, I started working on that list last week. I'm only up to item 64!!! I'm starting to wonder whats wrong with me. The list has a lot of places that I want to visit, several things I want to learn how to do (including make shoes), a few materialistic things and a few of those ideas I had for helping the underprivileged. I didn't want to put down simply anything just to make up the list. For example, I had the fleeting thought of sky diving but then I thought about it again and I don't really want to do it. I also don't want to put down some of the "smaller" things like "read The Kite Runner", which I had on my 101 things in 1001 days list.

Have I become so unambitious? Am I so complacent in life that I can't even think of things that I want to do before I die? Or have I just become boring? Older? Unimaginative? Narrow minded? Maybe I've lost some brain cells and I just can't think anymore?

Anyway, this has been frustrating me today. I'm giving myself a couple more days and then I'm moving forward with the book. So be it if I only have a list of 64 things!

Another Sign From Palembang

First of all, the Annual Dinner I mentioned in the last post was as dull as dull can be. I don't have much to report from there. I made small talk with the big boss's wife. It wasn't too uncomfortable. Most of the time was spent telling her that first impressions of Palembang are deceiving and that its not just an overgrown village.

I left after the dinner but Richard had to stay back for a meeting with all the bosses. After that meeting, the big boss went off to bed but those middle bosses went for their usual drinking and karaoke-ing so Richard didn't get to come home to nearly 2am. That was expected I guess.

Anyway, at least they all left the next day and our lives are back to normal.

I came across an interesting sign today. It is not as "exhaustive" as the one at the Ipoh library but it was still interesting. This was hanging outside the entrance to the foot reflexology place I took my mother to this afternoon.



My mother and I had such an amazingly relaxing time there just now. I can't stop raving about it each time I have an afternoon like this come home to tell any of my friends that are online. Regular readers, you're all like friends to me too, if you somehow manage to find your way to Palembang, I'll definitely treat you to an afternoon of foot reflexology with the head/neck/shoulder massage. Anyone?