It was an evening of something quite unexpected. True, I did hear about the coming of the “Super Blue Blood Moon” which was talked about all throughout social media. Bu I never thought it would look breathtakingly spectacular. Ain alerted me to the start of the lunar eclipse during the full moon. It was a clear night. The stars were out. The moon was gradually and visibly being devoured by the shadow of Earth. When it was completely engulfed in shadow, the moon turned blood red. The photo I took above does not do it justice. Soon after, the light of the sun began to shine upon the moon once again, slowly revealing itself to the night sky. The evening began with me underestimating how the lunar eclipse would look like. In the end, I felt fortunate that Ain called me outside to view the phenomenon.
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Not the Tire Again
It was early in the morning when we sent Irfan to school as usual. I took the following photo of the sky in front of his school upon dropping him there. Click on it to expand. We then took the long way round back to the house. In hindsight we should have just made a u-turn and headed home the way we came. Only when the mechanic removed the tyre from the hub could we see this screwdriver shank. It had pierced the tread complete and had been rattling inside the tyre as air was escaped. Bye bye, Republic credits.
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Phoning It In
In the last month or so, the battery life of my Samsung phone which I bought over 2.5 years ago shortened and shortened. I thought it was bad when it only had an hour of energy at full charge. In the end it only had about 5 minutes of life at full charge. I had bought a fresh new battery when I was at Langkawi in July and clearly I was swindled. Physically, the phone looked like it had been beaten up by school bullies. The battery looked pretty chubby in the end. I needed to buy a new phone as mobile communications appear to be paramount at work. Thanks to Cik Ma, I finally got a new mobile phone as we rendezvoused at Pasir Mas. Even the photo quality of the phone is superb. Click on the thumbnail above to check out how luminiscent Tok Bah’s yard looks like […]
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The Star Wars Show Fan Art
The Star Wars Show crew asked for some fan art of the Star Wars Show from the Twittersphere, so being a Twitterspheroid (or a spheroid of some sort) I thought I would oblige them. So here we have Andi Gutierrez in an Imperial gunner costume, Anthony Carboni in some smuggler’s outfit with CH-33Z in his arms and Pablo Hidalgo at the back with the Star Wars Sourcebook. I tweeted the image a couple of days ago (see Appendix A below) and then it was featured (for about 2 seconds) on the latest Star Wars Show on YouTube! Here be the latest episode of the show: Don’t forget to check out the other fan art submissions (and the rest of the episode) in the episode above. Also in the original tweet was the illustration I drew laid out as the cover to one of West End Games’ old Galaxy Guides. This […]
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A Nasal Epilogue
After last week’s surgery, I had splint and padding up my nose to hold things together as the parts within healed. The doctors gave me little bottles of saline solution and a syringe to douche my nasal cavity to cleanse it of blood, snot and other assorted blood-covered snot. On Saturday, after my regular nose douche and a shower I felt something shift uncomfortably up my nose. The string taped to my nose which connected to the splint was slack. Something sharp and stinging had moved down my right nostril. More blood than usual was dripping down my nose. We went to a clinic to get it looked at, but the doctor there referred us to the ER at the hospital. There was a referral letter and all. The ER doctor who attended me called up the ENT physician on call. The ENT doctor (who correctly guessed who I was […]
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Suddenly, The Emergency Room
… but upon my return home from my three-day hospital stay, I discovered that Opah Irfan had a high fever and could not sit up. She was extremely weak from illness. So, we took her to the Klinik Kesihatan downtown before it closed, leaving Irfan alone at home to do his homework. When we arrived, Ain and Atok Irfan got a wheelchair for Opah. After a blood test, the medical personnel there discovered that Opah’s blood sugar, blood pressure and body temperature were sky high. The nurses there had to inject some insulin into her system. Then, they called an ambulance to transport her to the Emergency Room of the hospital next door – escorted by Ain – while Atok & I returned home to get her medical records. What followed was a six-hour wait at the ER for the lab to return a new blood test to see if […]
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Finally, A Surgery
Atok and Opah Irfan came to visit last Saturday for a medical reason. The photo of them above along with Irfan was taken the day they left for Sitiawan on the 12th. Several days earlier, on Monday the 7th, I was hospitalised and surgery was scheduled for the next day. There I was, once more unto the breach. This was my fourth attempt at surgery. A FESS to remove what was left of a couple of polyps and a septoplasty to fix my right air hole which was apparently too small. The first attempt back in early 2016 was postponed because of high blood pressure. The second was postponed on account of getting sick while under observation in the hospital ward, and I missed a work excursion to Terengganu in vain because of it. I was unable to go for surgery the third time earlier this year because of a […]
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One Foot In The Shoe – Not The Other
The human body is an amazing self-repairing machine. It consumes resources around it like oxygen, water and nutrients (usually shoved into pie hole) and allows me to ride this meatsack like John Cusack on John Malkovich. However, entropy has begun overtaking this unlikely biological Rube Goldberg device I wear. The years have started to reveal cracks in the system. For example, gout is pretty fricking painful. I have known from an academic standpoint that gout can be painful but to endure a whole night of one’s toe being smashed in by a sledgehammer at least three times a second is something I never thought I would experience. It took a needle with gout meds to reduce the pain to manageable levels yesterday. I am just glad to have medical coverage now and very grateful that I did not gravely and acutely require it when we were freefalling without any back […]
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Kangar Street Art Photos
I was busy all through to the end of 2016 that I was oblivious to stuff happening in Kangar. For example, I recently discovered an alley near the centre of town which had been adorned by colourful street art apparently painted by schoolchildren from all over Malaysia. I thought I would take a couple of photos for documentation’s sake, because this must have been a really fun event for the attendees.
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Postcards Beyond The Edge
“Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it, and eventually the confidence will follow.” – Carrie Fisher Carrie Fisher died earlier today. She was 60. I did not think it would, but it did hit me harder than I ever thought it could. Because I am unsure why because I did not believe she affected me much as a child despite my being a Star Wars fan. For me it was always about the universe first. The characters, who had their own great story in that universe, came second. So what did she imprint onto me at that pubescent age when I first saw Star Wars? It was probably something like this: if there was an older girl playing on the playground, I would want her to be like Princess Leia. If the boys run out […]
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The Clutch
The answer to that is the clutch disintegrated on the inside.
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The Car Exhausts Me
Usually car problems come not within a month or two of one another. For us. So far. Until now. Friday It was Friday afternoon just before Solat Jumaat when the car engine refused to start. After prayers, with the help of some colleagues, I got a nearby mechanic to see to our immobilised vehicle. It turned out that the battery – nearly two years old – was as flat as a paper miniature. Saturday Saturday was the lull in the storm. Little did we know that our car troubles for the week were not done yet. Sunday The car returned from a short jaunt to refill our potable water bottles and hissed at me. Since the thermometer was broken, we were unsure if it was the radiator. After it cooled down, I attempted to refill the radiator and reversed the car a metre or so, away from the puddle I […]
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Driveway Apam Balik Station
One Saturday, our driveway became an apam balik station. Many visitors came to obtain free apam balik as dessert to go with their meal. The driveway had been converted because of the wedding feast held by our neighbour to commemorate the wedding between his son and daughter-in-law, and his daughter and son-in-law. A twofer! The previous day both Ain and I helped out with the preparing of the food. I helped cut up the beef into small pieces while Ain had her fingertips chemically seared off when she attempted to remove the skin out of a million metric tonnes (or so it seemed) of garlic. Apparently de-skinning a large amount of garlic can be painful to your fingers. There was a meeting some weeks back and we had given them permission to set up the apam balik station here. Across the street where the food was being served, an ais […]
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And Then You Teach
When you were a child, you always imagined – no, been compelled to believe – that life is a series of consequent acts that scales up as you experience it. You would expect pieces of your future would fall into place like a linear jigsaw puzzle that solves itself as you grow older. For example if you started out as a young technician perhaps you would advance into becoming an engineer and perhaps end your professional career as a top level manager or even a CEO of an engineering consultant firm. But on the other hand here I am at 43 and my jigsaw puzzle consists of a collection of discarded pieces from a hundred totally different puzzles. Throughout my four decades (plus change) of life I have been a extremely short-lived manufacturer and seller of bookmarks, a helicopter technician, a translation company executive, an IT company marketer, a freelance […]
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Return Trip to the Hospital
After the last aborted attempt at FESS at the hospital, I have been waiting for five months for the next scheduled surgery, spraying mometasone furoate up my nose almost daily. Finally it was time to get this pair of nasal polyps out of my sinus cavity. It should have been an easy in-and-out surgery. Of course there were complications from all sides. My application for a job as a Language Tutor here was accepted and I had been scheduled to report for duty the day before the surgery. I had to call the right person at work to find out the proper procedure. Thankfully postponing reporting for duty is allowed. The Guarantee Letter (GL) that would allow me to be admitted to the hospital wards under the workplace was rejected by hospital admissions because the printout did not include my pay grade. So we had to pay first for a […]
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Selamat Hari Raya from the Department
Like last year I drew the workplace’s Aidilfitri card again! Click on the picture below to expand it: Thankfully I did not have to draw every single personnel like last year. Whew.
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