I am not such a shopping guru. But since LiLiaN tagged me for this, I will try to answer

~ Start copy ~

It’s very simple. When you receive this tag, copy the whole list and add your own shopping tip to the bottom and pass it on.

1. Wear comfy clothing when you’re shopping. You don’t wanna fuss with too many laces and buttons when you’re trying clothes on. http://rinnah-marketplace.blogspot.com
2. Choose stores offering some kind of reward program, e.g. purchase points, rebates or store coupons. Knowing how the program works and when to use them will save you a lot of money in the long run. http://kakishopping.giddytigers.com
3. Always ask for a discount or bargain, especially when you pay cash for big purchase like furniture and electrical items, you will be surprised how much lesser you have to pay. http://leahschrader.com
4. Kids is a no-no when come to shopping. http://jessieling.com
5. If you’re shopping to match something in particular, bring that item with you instead of imagining if the new purchase will look good with it. Try them together to ensure you like the combination. http://www.ifantabulous.com
6. Don’t just concentrate on those big name stores. There are treasures in those tiny boutiques too!! http://groovy-olives.com/blog

~ End copy

Sigh I am only in my 4th week of lecture already got to start doing my assignment.

The subject is business economy. We are suppose to read this article  by Jeffery Trachtenberg, From Hardcover to Paper, How a Blockbuster was Born. Using the skills we’ve learnt so far, analyse it and do a presentation. Easy peasy, isn’t?

Well, it’s rather easy when you look at it, however, with just one week, and it being a group assignment, coordination is a bit of a problem. So let’s hope I can manage to pull it off.

 Anyone familiar with Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir , “Eat, Pray Love” ? Would love to hear what you think of this piece!

We stopped by our friendly neighbourhood store for our weekly stock-up of the latest titles to hit the silver screen. Our store is manned by this dude who is a Foochow and apparently same year with me when I was in school!

Usually he speaks in Hokkein and Cantonese with me since I am not from Sitiawan! (kekeke). Out of a sudden, he decides to start conversing in Foochow. From that moment on, Alex did all the talking and chatting with him. I was just like a wallflower shifting through the available titles. 

Don’t know what happened, Alex decides to buy two seasons of ROME. Box sets. We have heard of this amazing series but never really gotten to buying it since there are lots of action still from the summer season. But what to do, when that man gets in the mood, there ain’t no stopping him.

Remember the two balls of yarn I bought on the impulse? Finally decided to make it into a giant rectangular granny afghan. And no, this afghan is not from Afghanistan.

It was rather odd for me at first when I heard of the term. I was thinking what has crocheting got to do with Afghanistan. Originally, crocheted or knitted blankets was made by Afghanis (the people of Afghanistan). Slowly through the years, people has gotten used to just calling these blankets as afghan. Therefore, we now use it as such!

Enough of such history lessons, back to the story of how I did this piece. Although I started out by buying two balls only, but as I progress, I found out to make an afghan big enough for a normal adult, it would need a tremendous amount of yarn. This particular yarn is from Italy (read: dem pricey), so I decided to stopped when it reached a reasonable size enough for a baby’s use.

You’re looking at a piece of work that is going to be used by the future Baby Diong!

Woke up around half past nine and  breakfast was ready. This is a great way to start the day. Usually, when we get up in the weekends, either have to cook our own breakfast and go out for breakfast. MIL (mother-in-law) had some nice eggs fried sunny side up and some chicken ham to go with wholemeal bread. To wash all that down, MIL even made some soymilk! Home made. Fresh. AAaah…bliss! Wish I had remembered to bring back the camera to take photos of these. This is truly the classic lady of leisure lifestyle.

So after the meal, it is time to work for breakfast. Kekeke. Just joking. What happened was last night right after I came back from my yakking session with the girls, Alex drove roughly 2 minutes after me and the automatic gate couldn’t swing open. In the end, he just parked the car right at the gate and walked in through the side gate. Therefore in the morning itself MIL called the gate dude to come over to fix it. Unfortunately, the dude’s in Teluk Intan and told MIL that he’s only going to come to Sitiawan if there are a minimum of 3 clients.

The engineer in the me just couldn’t resist. I had to help! Talk about obsession. I noticed that the only thing wrong with the gate was that the power cord was severed. Then I asked MIL what does the gate dude do when he’s here. She mentioned, it takes him only 10 minutes to repair and he doesn’t have any special tools.  No wonder-lah. That fella just connect back and charge my in laws. Eesh eesh. Ini orang tarak baik.

After I explained the situation to MIL, she and I went to an electrical store to get the wires and some other small things to fix it. What the gate dude did was twist back the wires and tape it. He did not even lengthen the wire so that each time the gate swing it would tug the cord thus weakening it. The remedy was simply to strengthen the old location and lengthen the cord so that the tugging doesn’t happen again.

Since that would take some time to complete, we postponed it till after lunch. Lunch was a date at a friend’s of FIL (father-in-law). Classic raya fare. Beef rendang, chicken rendang, spicy prawns, nasi empit, lemang, nasi minyak, and not to mention the endless jars of cookies and kueh-mueh. We had cookies with chocolate toppings, cookies with colourful sugar toppings, cookies with almonds in them, cookies with walnuts. Yum yum. As I write this, I can just imagine those lovely air tight jars with beautiful laces trimmings.

Upon returning, we had to get the gate fixed since the sky was threatening to pour on us. Took three of us, me, Alex and little brother about half an hour to get the job done. Of course, this included inspection and some testing to ensure that the tugging doesn’t happen.

Then it was back to lazing the afternoon away. Don’t know what happened to me, I managed to cajol Little Brother to learn up crochet. Not much cajoling needed really since he saw the cute amigurumi in the room. So we sat down there, I handed him the biggest needle I have and some Knit Picks yarn since those are the thickest yarn I have at the moment. After practising a few chains, we proceeded on with creating his first piece. A granny square. I cheated a bit here by helping him start. Basically it is the simpliest pattern to start with. You only need to know two stitches and you’re good. Plus point is also you don’t really need to control your tension to well either. If the piece looks a bit out of place just pull it and shape it back. Meanwhile, I made another white totoro to give to him. By the end of the afternoon, Little Brother finished his piece, I too finished the totoro. So now, the totoro is sitting on a nice granny square mat

Received my yarn my Knitpicks and decided to do a striped blanket instead of the original idea of granny square one. This is my work in progress!

The yarn is Shine Worsted in colours as follows. I am still undecided what is the exact colour sequence. Most probably I’ll just make it up as I go along!

Phew, what a tiring weekend!

 Alex and I wanted back to Sitiawan for Hari Raya (see, the truly muhibbah spirit. Tak kira what raya also we celebrate a.k.a guilt-free eating spree). Little brother is due for his 1 week break. So we picked him up on Thursday evening right after work. Promptly after dinner, we announced to him that we’re going to leave the house at the ungodly hour of three in the morning. To our surprise, he answered us ,  ” No problem. But I need to use the broadband just before we leave to send out my assignment! ”

 Wow, that totally caught us off guard. Not only he’s smiling at the fact of waking up at that insane hour, he’s actually going to stay up to complete his assignment and email it! Imagine his lecturer seeing the timestamp of the mail!

Anyway, the journey back was rather jam-free except for one stretch near Tanjung Malim where they were still doing the construction works for expanding the 3-lane into 5-lane. We reached about 6:30am and straight away, we plonked ourselves onto the bed and drift off to a deep slumber!

Woke up in time for a quick breakfast at 9:30am. At that time, I think I started SMS-ing Andrea and Sarah (who’s back from Australia for a short holiday here) to make arrangement for supper! Throughout the whole morning, I tried to study a bit here and there. But of course, I was distracted with the lovely bag of yarn which arrived from Knitpicks! I studied probably half a chapter and then started playing with the yarn.

After lunch, Alex sat down with me in the living room and forced me to study. Everytime I got distracted he was like a old school headmaster and glared at me with eyes so piercing that could kill you on the spot. Needless to say, after the first hour, I built up immunity towards the deadly glare and once again, attention span has tremendously shortened to 5 minutes. As Alex calls it, if the negative consequence  is not working, he will try the positive consequence method. “If you can finish this chapter and can produce a short summary to me, accurately, I’ll bring you out for a nice bowl of James’ Cendol,” he said. Fuhyoh! That did the trick, I was conscientiously read the chapter page by page and made sure I understood it. At the end of the chapter, Alex didn’t even have to test me and straight away brought me out for the treat! Whoopee!!!

In the evening, met up with Andrea and Sarah. Sarah lost a bit of weight since the last time I saw here and she was looking good. Andrea too. All of them seem to be losing weight except me. *sob* We chatted a while at a local kopitiam and then adjourned to Andrea’s house to keep on yakking till 1 am! There is so little time and so much to catch up. Enjoyed it so much to catch up with the girls.

So that’s about it, my first day of the holidays. Wait up for Day 2

Last night a group of us from work (various departments) decided to go for rock climbing. The time to meet was 7 pm in Summit, therefore I decided to go home early to pick Alex up and then adjourn to the venue.

We met up at an eatery in the shopping complex first. One, it makes it easier for everyone to assemble at a familiar location. Second, we really need the energy for the activity! However, we had to be careful not to eat too much, otherwise with the extra weight will make it harder to climb! (ok, that bit I just added in for fun!)  

Total, there were eight of us. 5 guys and 3 girls. Among the eight, me, Alex and Angelynn were the first-timers to this sport. Lucky for us, the rest of the guys were pro. For rock climbing, it is always best if you have even number of people because this sport requires two to perform. One to climb and one to belay. 

First thing to get over is the fear of falling over and having the confidence to your belayer that he/she won’t let you down. Next of course, you need to make sure that the knots tied are all tight.  I started off with the simpliest wall. Slanting wall (towards our advantage) , many grips. After accomplishing the simple wall, it does wonders to your confidence for your next climb! We started progressing one by one. The more experienced climbers in the group, showed us noobs how to conserve energy while ascending. How to grip without taxing too much on the forearms and also how to maneurver to reach a far off rock.

We climbed from 8pm till 10pm when the center closed. My total climbs were 8. I managed to climb till the grade of 5C+. (Don’t ask me about the grading, but this grade is damn hard already! ) The satisfaction derived is simple amazing. Not sure when I will do it again, but definitely I will do it when the gang have another of such outing!

when it rains, everyone in the Klang Valley gets so excited and causes this HUGE traffic congestion everytime. I think it’s safe for me to say that 100% of the time it rains, things go totally chaotic in road sense.

Yesterday I left my office at 4:30pm (the usual time I leave if it is a class day) and got stuck in the Federal Highway jam. Usually this doesn’t happen at this time. Nevermind, I heard over the radio there was a stalled lorry near the Midvalley turn off. But the jam started right at AVON!  That’s a good 10km away!  My goodness! At that time, I was still doing alright. Eating what ever I had packed for dinner from the canteen, it takes away a bit of the stress.

 Then I reached Jalan Tun Razak(@6pm), there again, for no apparent reason (none reported) the whole blardy road looks like some car park. I measured using my odometer, we only managed to move 1km in 30 mins. Fantastic isn’t?

 Conclusion, I was late for class. Didn’t feel bad about it though because there were two other guys later than me!