Irfan's Great-grandparents' house 01

Our Grandparents’ House

By “our”, I mean Sila’s and mine, on Atok Irfan’s side. As children, when Sila and I balik kampung, one of the locations we would go to was to visit our grandparents. We would sleep over with our parents here, celebrate Hari Raya here with cousins, and it used to be surrounded by fruit trees. Coconut trees were of course plentiful, but there were mango, papaya, rambutan, jambu air and even nam-nam trees. We used to pick and eat the fruits off the trees. Some required a galah for us to reach, but some were accessible to us. Under the house, I used to fish for ant lions. Sometimes, I used tall grass or weeds. But sometimes, I used an actual live kerangga. There used to be a well behind the house, but early on when I was still a youngling, they built a proper bathroom. They also reared chickens and […]

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Purple voting finger

Purplish Finger

According to the online system, Irfan is registered to vote in Pandan Indah, Ain in Pasir Mas and I in Sitiawan. It appears they set our locations to default to the addresses on our identity cars. This is after I have changed my voting location to Perlis over the counter several years ago. In any case, we will need to change or addresses before the next General Elections. Later that day Ain and I caught up with our old friend Mei, who also returned to Sitiawan to vote. We saw Eva (and her little brother Connor) who last appeared in this blog when she was a little baby. At the time Eva had yet to develop locomotion. Then later that night we continued our gossiping at Chicketory. Why Chicketory? Because its name was Chicketory. We talked about the General Elections of Malaysia, old times, new times, a better Malaysia and […]

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FTK1 and FTK12 together again for the first time

First Face-to-Face Class Since March 2020

The last time I taught a class face-to-face in a classroom was March 2020. It is now November 2022, almost three years later. In the interim, I have had the Remote Teaching tag for all the online teaching posts in my blog. I cannot believe it had been so long. It was good to meet students face-to-face in class. For the longest time, I thought perhaps the students were all AGIs designed to fool teachers into thinking students existed (just kidding, my students reading this!) Click on the image below to expand it. We are still in blended teaching mode, so only 50% face-to-face. Most of the classroom teaching are weighted towards the end of the semester. But it is a start!

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Terry McAllister

A Vampire Librarian Named Terry

After the end of our mini Vampire the Requiem RPG campaign, in which our pregenerated characters won the civil war in Atlanta, we started making new characters for a new campaign. It is now 2032, 10 years after the Vampire revolution that overthrew the old blood… I now play Terry McAllister, a Mekhet librarian. He hails from Perthshire, Scotland but was turned while he was on a vacation to the United States. It sucks for him that he cannot return to his homeland… for now. But for the time being, he has a job with the library at Georgia State. Loads of students burning the midnight oil there, easily charmed for nourishment. He does not leave bodies as the victims are not killed. He sucks enough blood to survive, but leaves the students alive though dazed and charmed. Sometimes, he also helps them to study for their exams by pointing […]

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