inflation! inflation!

this is a short one. it's for the benefit of people who don't normally read metro. got this in my e-mail today.

that is one hell of an increase! i am one big fan of nasi kandar myself. but people, let's not whine and ask the gomen to bring them to court etc. just exercise our consumer power and go have nasi kandar somewhere else. if you still want to eat there, then don't complain at all.

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on a lighter note (read from top to bottom):





apologies for the graphics-laden page for those on dial-ups. don't feel like writing today.

ok la what?!

after spending some time on this one, getting @-) , this entry is just to show off my not-so-impressive new design, mostly copied from the template provided by keith and with some colour adjustments here and there. the very manly man one :p

given an expert hand, i think the design could use a little borders and colour blending. could also use a nicer photo rather than a squished jupiter. but it's late so this will have to make do.

while we are at it, why not put up another song of ms kra11's.

restyle is here

to celebrate the restyle, i'm uploading the kind of song that i used to listen to a lot a long time ago. brings back some memories. also the first time i'm uploading a song and putting it in my blog.

it is the kind of song that immediately brings up the ambience of candlelight dinner in those secluded corner tables, all dressed up to impress, giving out all the cues to invite the beautiful, mesmerising lady in front of you for those meaningful and romantic dance, the noisy and crowded restaurant fading into limbo. only happens in the movies. still...

the lack (of art) of naming

being a parent without a schoolgoing children yet, i guess i have to play the part of flooding the new blog alert of which even the very busy pb is complaining that she has nothing to read for the lack of postings in the efx2 circle *points to shoutbox*.

i was tagged by both olab and theotheraj on the naming the children tag. there's not much to reveal with the names of my children because all you see is what you get. i.e. my children's names are simply what i have been putting in for the previous entries, single words of alyssa and amelya.

we only started thinking about the names as wifey approaches the 7 months of incubation period (can i use those?). not due to the sin of procrastinating but just talking it easy and not going overboard on celebrating the occasion, just in case, which alhamdulillah, never ended up with any unexpected consequences.

my primary objective is simple, one word only. while it is nice to have long-winded names with beautiful meanings to boot, people won't go through the trouble of calling those names hence it will remain as it will ever be, official names only to be used when filling up forms for added bureaucracy. then of course, the secondary objective is to have a name that does not mean anything bad, no meaning is ok and good meaning is a bonus.

how did alyssa come about? i had always pestered wifey to propose a name, which she never came out with any towards the end. so i was left to my own device.

no, i never thought of that pretty actress with a fashion capital of the world surname as well. the name started of with a pretty malay (and tall) girl that i met in uni that goes by the name allyna with the russian spelling whose good looks befittingly matched the pretty name (not too mention the yummy body :D). and then, a good friend of mine (miss klsentral) had a daughter that goes by the name of arissa and i thought that was a nice name too. so, allyssa came about within a month before she popped out in which the double l's vetoed out by wifey to finally become alyssa. alyssa is also not a tongue-twister that anybody conversant in any language would not have any problem pronouncing either. looked it up in the net and books and found no bad meanings on the name so alyssa she became.

with alyssa's name credit going under my belt, i was hoping that wifey could supply the name of the second one but again, none was forthcoming. the craze that i had in me was that i wanted to give her a classic malay name in the line of dahlia or melor. but i never got to that yuu-em bookstore that lollies said would have such books so in the end, somehow the name emilia rosemera came to mind and twisted to be amelya to have similar 'a' and 'y' convention to alyssa.

wifey had voiced out her unequivocal rights in naming the third one. if he were a boy, i had arman in mind (going by the a convention) but she already said that she is not in favour of that name (whom unfortunately was a very naughty boy during my koleq days that got expelled in the end) but hasn't offered any alternative yet. if she's a girl, i think i have run out of ideas on what to name her and maybe i should go to that yuu-emm bookshop and buy that book quickly.

so, tagging time. i am tagging four people here for their children names:

1. nectar: let's see how those arif's come about.


2. daisymalas: don't think she would be malas in naming, heheh


3. qisst: let's see how gobok baru's name come about and any planned names for unborn goboks.


4. mamarawks: urls says it all, how rawks are the juniors.

my two hearts

with this entry, i am hoping to bring up her new blog alerts to a nice round number of 210, hehehe *evil laughs*, as requested by her. there you go, nonah, for good measure :D.

it has been a while since i last wrote about my two children. and i thought the only thing that i would write about when i started this blog was them. well...

i am also giving up uploading photos into the baldigambar. their server is too slow and i just don't have the patience to wait for anything to come up into the screen after entering the address, signing in etc.

alyssa

the five-year plus (she's a january baby) old is my eldest daughter, if you don't know that already. that plastic smile would always be there if knew that she is being photographed. the wayward and the very perasan one (but both of them are, anyway).

according to my retired doctor friend, from his psychology lessons, i am harbouring a genius in the house. how he came to that conclusion from the fact that she climbed up to the roof of his 1 year old aud1 a4 within 5 minutes of us not concentrating on her while talking or from jumping on another mutual friend's brand new bed in his master bedroom on the second floor when he invited us for his house-warming party, i couldn't figure out till the end.

of course i would like to brag about my daughter but i don't have anything to brag about, unfortunately. she still needs help in her reading though the pace that she's doing it now is somewhat tolerable. she still can't converse in english properly and the absence of those 24-hour cartoon on satellite tv is not helping her either. she is still below the international standard in her kum0n exercises, those 5-minutes-maximum attention span even received special attention from her teacher that she sets out additional time limit for her "wayward" activities. she is far from imitating those strokes of van gogh or monet which i myself can't tell apart anyway. neither has she composed her first note of any sort of masterpiece.

however, i can't dispute the fact that she has a very good photographic memory. you can never promise her anything you didn't mean or she would not be reminding you all the time about it. and she is very good at rebutting what you say. for example, on one weekend morning, she was bugging me about having roti canai and i asked her to get ready so that we could have breakfast outside, not to her liking. naturally, she started giving excuses like it was a hassle to get her still-sleeping adik ready, it was difficult to wake the sleeping mother and finally when all else failed, she said that she will be coughing and panting when i would smoke at the table afterwards, totally disregarding the fact that i would purposely go to another table to smoke and they would happily come over to me.

amelya

now, this girl is the more hopeless case. she is currently the little baby in the house and she acts like one. she still has the pelat in her and speaks very very slowly even though she is going to be 4 in the coming december. in my eyes, alyssa will be the pretty one and she is the cutey, lovey dovey adorable ones. definitely not as adventurous as the elder one but a very much more amiable.

she is the type that will not ask for anything (until quite recently) when you go shopping anywhere. most of her possessions are almost always the result of guilt-stricken parents buying something for her share following the elder one's successful campaign of getting what she had wished for.

i still couldn't pique her interest beyond ba in the iqra' reading. but she loves the book nonetheless, when i am the one reading. up until october, she will still be the baby of the house and while she is happy with the fact that there is a baby (whenever we asked her, she would always say that he is a boy hehe) growing in her mama's tummy, i doubt that she understands the "impending threat" towards her baby status in the house.

while she may seem to be not as smart as her elder sister, she must have a stronger right brain. she is almost as quick as her elder sister who is 23 months older in solving puzzles. and she creates faces from those magnetised pieces that is supposed to teach her alphabets, curves and shapes.

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there you go. nothing mind-blowing or constructive in this entry. just throwing some thoughts of mine into writings that will serve as my reading pleasure on how i viewed those two little hearts of mine in the distant future as of this 29 may 2007 12:30 am. and also to rub in the fact that i would be on leave tomorrow and will have the luxury of waking up late and submitting the entry at this ungodly hour heheh.

expensive weekend affair

nope, you can wipe of those saucy imaginations of yours because this was not one of those "interesting" ones. this one was an affair that involved about 15 children, many young adults and much more grown ups. i was talking about my trip downsouth to the land of the big bats.

my cousin was getting engaged on saturday last weekend. so, we duly made our procession on saturday morning despite the horror of school holidays gridlock traffic and commotion. the weather was clear, traffic was excellent and we were on time despite the fact that i only had two hours of sleep, thanks to the first book that i finished this year, kane and abe1 the early morning before the trip. didn't i tell you that it is never for me to do 2 things that i would do compulsively if i were to start, read a good book and play video games? i would go on and on and will not bow to the pressure of sleep or lure of a warm comfy bed.

it was smooth sailing until we reached the toll exit. we had another break there to straighten up those crumpled legs, cleared up those drooping eyelids and refilled the sentuh'n'jalan card and wifey took the opportunity to change for the occasion. the 20km ride from the toll-plaza to the bat town via the dual-lane carriageway was smooth enough; until a tiny pebble from the other side of the road hit my windscreen and immediately brought about a hairline crack about half a feet in length. and i didn't opt for those daymn windshield insurance. and it has grown to about two feet in length (inwards, fortunately) for the past two days.

in addition, one of alyssa's cousin contracted conjunctivitis before the trip. since they played together a lot, when we were heading home yesterday night, alyssa unsurprisingly wore those red-yes as well. so today, wifey would have to take leave and it would be my turn tomorrow and the day after.

those two days of leave tomorrow would also render me ineligible to claim those additional allowance sitting pretty in the place of my immediate boss whom will be away for two weeks starting from last week. bah!

i am only a mortal

the other one told me that i am guilty of two mortal sins. the first one, the usual complaint that has gone all the way from the day that i dated her 8 years ago. flirtatious. TOO flirtatious. the second one, is a more recent phenomenon that comes with the benefit of blogging; not telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth by painting a picture-perfect image of a spotless son, husband and father. so what do i do about it? write an entry, naturally. with the hope of tipping the balance of the second sin.

i am guilty as charged, your honourable one.

i had a solid foundation to start my life. while i have an elder brother, the idea of an 11 year old boy befriending a 4 year-old would have been an alien concept even to me. so, the closest affiliates that i had at home would be the elder sisters that i have whom are 3, 4 and 5 years older than i am. of course i have a younger brother whom i would normally used as my experiment and sparring partner which would occasionally send him to the clinic for a proper patching-up process.

so, i learn the traits of communicating with 3 females with 3 distinct personalities and perceptions; the eldest one being the chatterbox punctuated with hearty laughs, the introverted second one whom would hide behind doors when the others were being punished for faults that could not be remotely attributed to her and the third one whom hated me for stealing the youngest child title that she had proudly held for 3 years before i came about.

however, my 5-year all boys boarding secondary school stint helped nothing in that department except for fuelling those raging and suppressed teenager boys hormone. excluding that little event which made me wonder how could a 24 year old woman be attracted to a nerdy, bespectacled and clueless 17 year old boy.

in the 10-weeks orientation program and english course (which i badly needed due to the me-speak-english-no condition of my language) after my spm result came out, i was again exposed to the myriad world of double exxes chromosomes. i was a slow starter, keeping mum and having no clue on how to communicate to the heavenly creatures. alas, owing to the solid foundation that i had that i was exposed to in my early childhood, i took in everything in leaps and bounds. at the end of the 10 weeks, i could entertain most if not all the whims and fancies of the girls (cleanly!) while keeping my ego and pride intact.

while it was all fine and dandy when i was not attached, my second nature started brewing troubles when i had a person whom called me her boyfriend. she was however, quite lucky in that sense because i was mostly interested in pursuing the perfect score and tactics in my computer games rather than a similar scoreline towards opposite sex. the greatest evil deed that i had done during that stint was writing another girl's phone number on her back in a party that she was invited to. but you could ignore that one because it was not as bad as how i made it sound like.

i would flirt with almost every other female that i come in contact with in any shapes or sizes, barring my essgeeemm (god forbid!), intentionally or unintentionally. my remarks, quips and smiles could be easily contrived as flirting even to non-observant eyes. even the males around me notice the change of tone and intonation of my speech and could easily tell if the gender of the person at the other end of the line if i were to answer that call.

but i just cannot imagine how difficult it is being my spouse. i could only guess that even the most understanding wife in the world would have trouble justifying to herself all of my actions, after pestering me for explanations that i could offer.

if somehow, you have this false impression that i could make fabio cringe out of jealousy due to my good looks, i am telling you that that is a purely an imagination of yours. you can ask theotheraj, lollies and gartblue and they will gladly concur with me on that. and if you're still not satisfied with those seasoned opinions, send a pm to olab, rotinina or dory, for brand new perspectives and reassurances.

oh! by the way, despite all the flirtations, lollies, gartblue and missklsentral had always drilled down the impression that i am "harmless" and i gladly embraced it.

so, have i tipped the balance?