These are the Gabe’s baby molars.

They decided to come out a few days apart.

I guess to me they signify the next phase of his growth - into the uncharted waters of tweenhood.

Has it been 10 years? It was common practice for him to place his fallen baby teeth under

his pillow for the Tooth Angel to leave money the next day but of late, when he did not find any he would say to me, “you forgot to leave money under my pillow”.

It’s a well worn cliche but time doth fly like a G6 - and I realise that he’s grown up so fast that there

are some things that I really an’t control anymore.

He’s listening to all the hip stations like Fly FM, Mix, Red and regards Lite as a boring old fart station.

We are constantly flipping between the choice of my or his stations in the car when we drive(although I still have veto power at times). I’m appalled at today’s music and the noise that pollutes the airwaves.

Then all of the sudden I realise that....OMG, I’m that old parent complaining of the noisy music of today!

Sigh.

It’s a common sigh to see kids at the dining table in restaurants busy at their PSP or DS or iPad/phone

tapingtapping furiously away at their games and Gabe is always lamenting that he’s the most unlucky kid in his class who has neither of these devices.(ok he does play the simple games on mum’s computer sometimes)

We resist getting into that trap but I wonder for how long. Already, since getting him a Facebook account, he’s chalked up a 100 over friends and is constantly on Backyard Monsters, a hugely popular game amongst his peers. Thankfully, he still loves his evening basketball/cycling with the neighbourhood kids and we try to encourage his reading habit with the books that I get at the Big Bad Wolf sale, a fantastic annual event that I try not to miss as books for kids go for RM5-8 a pop! The other day at Borders I saw a Horrible Science book I got at the sale going at RM30 plus!

I have to face the fact that he’s beginning to form his own opinions - he’s been very fussy about food of late and not wanting to venture into the unfamiliar. I guess the next ten years will bring new challenges, new trials and new discoveries. Meanwhile he’s remarked that his incisors are a bit wobbly...

last week some of my former mia classmates decided to meet up and it was quite a good turn out.
some i hadn't seen since art school in '83! we had a great time of reminiscing and exchanging tales.
i guess when one reaches the late forties and early fifties, gatherings with old friends are something
to look forward to and cherish.
it's good to see the individuals and how life has shaped them after all these years. yet, i could tell
that their inherent character remained intact.

there was christina, or as we fondly nicknamed her 'ying char' who has dabbled at every imaginable
field. from real estate to chinese painting to massive cross stitching to selling jewellery in laos,
she now plans to do charity work in africa in the coming years! plus she has a daughter who's a
multi-gold medal swimmer destined for the uk olympics next year! chris is the ever mother hen,
calling and cajoling everyone to gather, arranging for fantastic discounts on the beer even!

then there's chee, now a white haired fine artist and rebel who'll be having an exhibit at an abandoned
warehouse in penang this coming september. his art style has somewhat evolved to twisted faces and
distorted features. "a masked political statement", he retorts, lamenting about how his art isn't for everyone.

kenneth tan, who has made his ambition out of talking, is a budding writer and strategist. we used to call
him ayam jan-tan after his ability to literally 'talk cock'. he was carrying a tummy and experiencing some
hair loss, which made everyone who saw him for the first time remark, "eh you put on weight!", not the
most flattering of comments, especially when you are in the late forties.(ok, it's never a great comment to
begin with!)
i've known him since school and one of my most vivid memories was of the time when i camped over at
his home in tiong nam, helping him draw and do visuals for his interview the next day!
today he's the proud father of 4 beautiful girls and doing what he does best. talk.

then there's hock wah, now a successful amway double diamond. i remember him as being a quiet, shy,
soft spoken lad back in art school. now he's single, balding and rolling in the moolah. good for him!
he revealed his special side to us that night - proudly flashing pictures of his beautiful garden on his
1phone.

siew kai, who's always amiable, always ready to help and never fails to raise a laugh. he's like the glue
that keeps us together. he now stays at aman suria with his wife and 3 children - 3 silky terriers!
and of course there's lok, whom i actually started out my working career with. i remember riding
pillion on his beat up motorbike to sentosa cinema in section 17 to catch a rm1 flick! those days back
at union 45 we were know as 'lok and loh', visualisers extraordinaire!
but time has been tough on him, having gone thru(and currently still entrapped in)a nasty marriage,
he's still the stubborn, always hilarious lok i hung out with back then.

the rest, well, they stayed pretty much the same as i remember them 20 plus years ago. a time when we
were art students, enamored by the grand illusion of the bright shiny diamond called advertising.
a time when we struggled with drawing figures, painting with acrylics, developing photos in the dark room
with lethal chemicals. and i remember the dinners we had some weekends. where we would share a
common purpose and dream.

now looking back, i was the only one who actually am still in advertising in the purest sense, others have
moved on to related fields or even far better ones. these were the people i identified with most, despite
having spent a little over a year with. i have attended reunions by my former colleagues of big agencies
but never felt a stronger bond than with my faithful mia mates.

travelling this path into the fifties, it's an uncertain journey - people you know and family start to get frail,
fall ill or pass on. it's not exactly the best time in one's life. but still, this late journey brings many comforting
moments like this unexpected reunion and these are the times i cherish as i witness the tenacity of my fellow
comrades as they weather this great big storm called life and emerge intact, some better off for the experience.
here's to many more gatherings to come!

i'll drink to that! cheers!

a rather poignant and apt poem from keats that i came across:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love; -- then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

i usually buy i buy a big bunch of bananas on sundays for my juices but i usually end up with unfinished bananas that are often over ripe. i chchanced upon a banana bread recipe while working on a project and decided to give it a try. a quick trip to bake with yen and gogot all the ingredients ready. i took the liberty of adding walnuts and used brown sugar instead(reduced amounts as well)

all the .

g

in

yes it has been a while since i last posted, work has been insane.

i recently recommended an ex colleague who was out of work for a bit and she got the job. she was initially, ever so grateful. after two weeks i am not sure any more, judging by the stress lines on her face! oh did i mention that work was insane? plus the fact that my couple of weeks have been turned on it’s head by major events, which are, thankfully slowly and surely returning back to normal.

but having said all this, i still feel incredibly blessed!

a few months back a friend recommended that i call up this person who was looking to fill a position in a japanese company. i did, there were chats and i was pretty sure that i was a shoe-in for the post. at the last minute i got news that they gave the job to a singaporean counterpart. i must say i was a tad disappointed

as i was eager for a change, jobwise.

then a month back, jloh was having severe cramps and pains and she finally consulted with the doctors who recommended major surgery. on the 13th of last month she underwent a 2 hr op and stayed at the hospital for 9 days.

now the company i work for had insurance coverage for spouse and children but i was not really certain how much the ceiling amount was. so you can imagine my trepidation while waiting for the bill. it didn’t help that they took forever to get it out! but when it finally did i breathe a sigh of relief as the insurance covered RM14K and the total was about RM15,600. the best part was that follow-up visits were also covered! a big PHEW!

so jloh is recuperating at home and i got to use the car. and the uncanny thing about it all was that at the very same week that she was going in for the op, a friend was wanting to have someone take over his club membership(he has had the membership for well over 8 years and have never stepped into it! and he dutifully paid the monthly fees for the entire period of time!) the club as just next to the office where i worked and i had wanted to go back to the gym for so long now. kismet? hmmm. serendipity? probably not. divine intervention? bingo!

so looking back, i guess the Big Guy has His ways and i am now so glad i did not get the job. sometimes you have to look at everything as a blessing in disguise, no matter how disappointing they may seem at that moment. and when you take time to reflect and connect the dots, you’d realise that things happen for a reason. you know that silver lining in every cloud they are always talking about?
it really exists.

'Forgive me father, for I have binged. It's been 3 days since my last char siew. I have indulged in the ways of the flesh and have succumbed to the dangers of Low-density lipoprotein."

a few weeks long ago i decided to go for the yearly free health check provided by the company. the health check comprised of the usual blood, urine, ecg and x-ray. pretty standard stuff. the results came out a week after that and here's where it got interesting. i was supposed to complete the health check with a stress test so i had my running shoes on, walked to the hospital and registered myself. a nurse came to take my bp, everything checked out, i was normal. then i waited a bit to see the doc about my results. she took my bp again and remarked that it was high!
suddenly i am hypertensive! while the other results was normal - sugar, uric acid, etc she told me that the ecg readings indicated that i had lvh or Left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH)  which is the thickening of the myocardium (muscle) of the left ventricle of the heart. wth! after that she said she did not recommend that i do the stress test as i may keel over and die. all the while i am thinking: i play badminton for 2 hrs twice a week, walk most of the time because i am carless and i can’t take a stress test? seriously?
she then recommended that i consult a cardiologist and made out a letter for the insurance and company.

ordinarily i wouldn’t even consider going but since it was all being paid for by aia, i decided to make the appointment, but with another doctor, not the one she recommended(as i heard bad reviews about). so i was set to see dr hendrick chia
at sun med on a friday.

as fate would have it, i had an evening meeting with a client at le meridien at sentral
the night before and after the meeting the client invited us for dinner at prime!

resistance was futile. i practically chucked caution to the wind and ordered a foie gras and wagyu beef! the client ordered a bottle of wine as well so at least there was some health aspect to the whole meal?
i must say, the breads were fantastic, there was a hearty walnut version and another which i could not discern coupled with a lovely selection of assorted butter.

and the foie gras and wagyu was to die for! ok probably not the best combination before seeing a cardio but what can i say, you only live once...
rather, you only get to patronise prime@le meridien once....





so came friday, with much trepidation, fear and trembling i marched on to the cardio’s. freaky as it may sound, i met not one, but two people that i knew there!
is the Big Guy trying to tell me something?
the first was a former church member, he had numbness in his right hand and discovered that he had a mild stroke. when i asked his wife how old he was, she replied.”41, like you lor”. gasp.
the second was an ex saatchi art director who had brought her mom in for a consult.
the cardio, dr hendrick, turned out pretty good. he was soft spoken, took time to explain and told me that an ecg was not the most accurate indicators of lvh.
it was, however, an indication that the hospital needed to milk more people into going for costly tests! i digress. he recommended an echocardiogram, which is a better and more accurate test. it was quite like an ultrasound, except they look at your ticker in detail, even the blood vessels going to the liver. if i passed the echo then he would have me do a stress test.

i went through the motions and the echo came out good, i did not have lvh after all!
i was primed for the stress test! so the female doc strapped what seemed like a gadzillion wires to my chest and with the bp arm thing and bp tube and ball i hopped on to the treadmill and went through all 5 levels, each level consisting of 3 mins, with a gradual incline at every level. and at each level she would take my bp to see if it was within the normal ranges. at level 4 she was asking me if i could go n, and that she could stop the machine at any time i said so. it was not that taxing really, having gone on the mill before at the gym. so i raced onto level 5, which required some brisk running. finally she said that i had reached a 100% and asked if i wanted to stop. i let out a victory woop which i am sure, echoed throughout the floor.

so 2 hours later i was back in the doc’s office and he took out the ecg from the stress test and declared me healthy - whew! however he did say that my cholesterol level from the health check was high, at 6. he then asked me to monitor my bp for 2 weeks and come back to see him again and let hm know if i want to be on cholesterol meds.
i then bought a bp monitoring gadjet from him for rm150 and have been taking down my bp at various random intervals since.
then last sunday i was at the ss2mall and they had a free blood cholesterol test and mine dropped to 5.58. that’s an improvement, no?





i guess when you are fast approaching the big five-oh there has to be certain life changing decisions that one has to make, especially concerning what one eats and exercise. which is why, through divine intervention, i managed to get a membership to the club next door and have started to go back to the gym and swim in between and am getting used to the walk to and from the office and train station daly.

gulam also recommended that i try a banana/broccoli/papaya smoothie every morning, which is what i have been consuming for the past 3 days now. i must admit that there have been times when i was on a death-wish with the types of food i was consuming but nowadays it’s mainly oats and fruit(banana and mangoes) for lunch.

jen’s going for her op this coming monday and i see dr hendrick in a week, i think that’s quite enough of hospitals to last me till the end of the year.

pixar's sequel seems like a nod to the early days of james bond. here's a collection of retro posters.

it's comic movie season, as hollywood has clearly run out of ideas. but here are some great looking poster art that begs one to wonder if the actual product would be able to deliver...

hair's the story - it all sorta began one night when i saw some commotion at the neighbour's house. there was a woman cutting hair for the family. curious, i went to kaypoh and found out that they had called their friend, a hair dresser to come cut the family member's hair. great. i thought, since getting my hair cut was never on top of my to-do list, this was fabulous! so i asked for a cut and it was nicely done, rm12 or something i can't recall.
fast forward a few months and i noticed the same thing going on at the neighbours, when i went there, the hairdresser had already finished and was on her way out. i quickly asked when she would next come, she stated a day and so i waited. and waited. she never turned up.
that was the humble and true beginnings of my foray into long haired madness(as my wife constantly nagged me about)!
it was also right about the time when i gave up the car and started to take public transport. i figured that it was kinda a plus not to look so decent at the bus stop so that one won't get mugged. excellent plan, don't you think? look like the mugger, not the muggee!
then last year, on facebook there was this movement, called the bald empathy movement. started by an extraordinary woman, who vowed to cut all her long hair in cannes this year, find a japanese wig maker and make a wig out of her hair for a cancer patient. you can find it here: http://www.facebook.com/#!/BaldEmpathyMovement
my first reaction was: wow, you can do that? sadly enough, there are no organisations here that do these things, maybe because there are no good wig makers?
fast forward many negative comments, nagging, name-calling, disgusted remarks, rolled up eyes, more nagging and head shaking to sometime late last year when i had a small reunion with my schoolmates whom i had not seen for almost 30 years! but that's another story. it was at a friend's place and something on the table caught my eye - a lock of hair in a resealable bag. probing on, i discovered that her daughter regularly (ok as long as it takes for hair to grow, at least) sends her hair to this organisation that makes wigs for children who have become bald due to chemotherapy. what a fantastic opportunity! at last i found my raison d'être! ok my hair's raison d'être. you can find it here: http://www.locksoflove.org/
ok there are some controversy surrounding locks of love and pantene does something similiar here: http://www.pantene.com/en-US/beautiful-lengths-cause/Pages/donation-guide.aspx
after much deliberation, i decided to go with the former, as i've always had a soft spot for children and pantene is a commercial product and they are owned by p&g, whose logo is designed by, you know, satan.

interesting facts about hair donation:

• Donated hair must be a minimum of 8 inches long (measure hair from just above the elastic band of the ponytail to the ends).
• Wavy/curly hair texture is fine—you may straighten hair to measure.
• Hair should be freshly washed and completely dry, without any styling products.
• Hair may be colored with vegetable dyes, rinses and semi-permanent dyes. It cannot be bleached, permanently colored or chemically treated.
• Hair may not be more than 5% gray. Here’s why:
  • It takes at least six ponytails to make a wig; in general, each ponytail comes from a different person and is a different color. Even though some hair colors may look similar, including gray hair, each is completely unique.
  • For a realistic-looking wig that has consistent color throughout, donated ponytails must be processed and then dyed to the same shade. It is critical for each ponytail to absorb dyes at the same rate in order to create wigs of consistent, natural-looking color.
  • Gray hair, as well as some chemically-treated or permanently-colored hair, does not absorb dye at the same rate as other types of hair. It is much harder to color and, once colored, fades more quickly.
  • Most permanently-colored hair, once it is processed and re-colored, is too fragile and breakable under the rigorous processing required during the production of a wig

after almost 2 years, it's 10 inches long! no more cleaning up hair from the bathtub, and floor, and all over, no more rubberbands! and most of all...no more NAGGING!

bagged and tagged, as they say....went to the post office and the postage came to rm6.70. it's going to places i've never been!

having my hair long solicited a host of comments, namely 'oh, you can tell he's in creative, ma' was one that typically came from the clients.
'you look like a crazy old man' was another favourite.
but what really amazed me were the comments i got the very next day i cut my hair. the most common of which was, 'wah, you really had the heart to cut it?'(in cantonese actually)
even the aunties at the coffeeshop where i have my daily coffee came up to me and remarked, 'wah now so leng chai(handsome) you cut your hair'! and these were people i did not even know!
apart form the predictable. 'you look so much better now' comments, it really got me to thinking: hair's a big deal to most people.
to me it was just so simple, it grows, you cut it. end of story.
it occurred to me how hair brings such dignity to some people.
especially women.
i remember a time when she-who-shall-not-be-named had a hair cut and it was not what she had hoped for, she actually bought a wig to hide her cut!
i never really grasped that until now. to me, long hair, short hair, no hair...didn't bother me at all. but to some, especially cancer patients, it must mean a lot and that made me empathise more with the cause. if having hair meant so much to someone suffering from this dreaded disease then i sincerely hope that i had a small hand, erm hair, in help in them regain that dignity.
this morning my son asked,'are you going to keep it long again?'
my honest reply was, ' i really don't know.'

tickets to ride

after giving up the car a year or so ago i started to depend on public transportation.
working in uptown, there were always buses from the kelana station. that was a
7-8 min walk - i have actually timed my walk. coming back from uptown was another
matter as the rapid bus to kelana station was not regular.
fortunately, there was a free bus that's provided by the tropicana mall to the lrt station.
that as a 12 minute walk from my then office in uptown. i had to catch the 7.30 bus or
else the next one would be at 9pm due to a dinner break.
in some ways i felt blessed because the tropicana bus driver(well one of 2 actually)
always accommodated me by dropping me at the bridge or just by the playground!
the other was a cranky old fella who would stick to only the kelana dropoffs but that
was fine as well. i did enjoy the brisk walk home in the evenings.

now that i have moved to the sunway area, things were slightly different. the 623
takes off from the kelana station to the pyramid stop every half hourly so i had to
time my departures. the cost would be unbelievably cheap, a mere ringgit! at the
pyramid station, it would be a 12 minute walk to the office. the same would happen
in the evenings if i did not get any lifts. only that it was hotter in the mornings and
the evening bus to kelana costs 90 sen more.

there has been a lot of complaints about our public transport but thankfully, i have
only experienced late buses once or twice. most of the time, the wait is bearable.
traveling on a bus brings back my school days and give me a chance to man-watch
and observe the ordinary hordes that ply the route daily. it's also quite comforting
not to be fuming behind the wheel stuck in infamous the ldp jam. though the evening
ride can take up to 40 minutes on a normally 15 minute drive, i kinda grew used to
it, besides i get some exercise walking home.

late last year, she-who-shall-not-be-named suggested that i start my own company and get it registered, in the light of some business that i could do for her. because the requirements were to have a registered company, i woke up early, sent gabe to school and took the morning train down to the mall where the
ROC was situated.
the train ride was an experience in itself, jostling & elbowing with the work
crowd. am eternally thankful for not having to work in town.
had to cross the road to change trains at the jamek station to hop on to the star line...go figure.
anyway, reached the mall at about 8am and went to the 15th floor to register.
surprisingly it was not crowded and the whole process took about half and hour!

i actually tried just 'mustardseed' but for some strange reason that's disallowed, you need something in front.
the lady did recognise the word though, she said,"ini biji sawi ke?"

i'm numbered! thing is, i need to renew this every year but i don't have to come all the way down town again.

done, for a mere rm70.

later i checked the webite:

http://www.ssm.com.my/en/namesearch.php

too many copycats!

yayy!