Pieces

Hai! I'm back. Just returned from a weekend trip to Kuching to settle some family matters. It's a break from the daily routine of Bintulu. John managed to borrow a friend's car and we went shopping and even visited my uncle and his family. Bought some of Ruth's favourite chocolates and Amos cookies. She loves them!

Hubby and Ruth decided to adopt a new dieting regime. Both enjoy good food and had been putting on some extra pounds recently. Ruth decided to stick on to a meal of oats instead of rice for dinner. Hubby's doing double the portion, with oats for both breakfast and dinner. It must have been real boring, having plain oats for both meals. Several times, I caught him "sneaking" in the kitchen. Ha! Ha! I do not fancy oats as the taste is rather bland and boring. Maybe, I'll try to find other ways to diet!.

Mum's back from her Philippines trip. She enjoyed the sumptuous food and sight-seeing. She will be going for another trip to China at the end of the year. She invited me along, but I had to decline as I could not stand the cold weather. During our trip to Shanghai last November, I was almost frozen despite of several layers of warm clothing.

Pickles

I am so much out of touch. Been busy with work and supervising Ruth's homework and projects. Her tuition teacher had not been feeling well lately so I had to stand in for her. It's really quite exhausting after a hard day's work at the office. Hopefully, Ruth will learn to study on her own with less supervision and coaching.
She is also slowly getting use to the medium of instruction (Bahasa Malaysia) for most of the subjects, although it will take sometime for her to use the language fluently. She loves to read English but not Bahasa Malaysia or Chinese storybooks. So, her grip on the grammar, spelling and vocabulary of both languages is still lacking.

Yesterday, I had a lunch date with an old buddy. She's in her early fifties, having enjoyed "early retirement" since the MAS rationalization exercise almost two years ago. Her children are all grown up and working elsewhere. She's got plenty of time on her hands and enjoys watching TV, surfing the net and chatting with friends over the telephone and internet. How I envied her! Here I am running from work to home, exhausted at the end of each day! We "gossiped" for almost an hour and before we knew it, it's time to go back to work at the office. Back to the deary routine of work, work, work!

Of Mountain peaks and valleys

Ruth finally got back all her school examination results. She recorded a slight improvement in her grades and managed to remain as one of the three top students in her class. But alas! She only managed a pass in her Grade 5 practical piano exams to hubby's disappointment. He had been expecting her to do better considering all his investments in tuition fees, books and the piano he bought her. Well, sometimes, one cannot have the best of both worlds, so she has to work harder the next round.

Mum and John dropped by Bintulu for an overnight stay last weekend. We intended to join them on their trip back to Mukah but did not materialised as hubby had to stay back to complete some rather urgent work. Maybe... next time, hah!

During our last trip to KL, hubby bought Ruth the whole set of the Harry Potter adventure series. As she is quite busy with her school work and monthly tests, Ruth only managed to complete reading the first book. Out of curiousity and seeing the books idle, I decided to try reading about the adventures of the boy wizard and found them imaginative, spellbinding, sometimes hilarious and "almost" magical. No wonder, children, teens and
adults alike adored the stories and just could not wait in anticipation of the next books in the series. So, this is how the author, J.K. Rowling made her millions. By writing about magic!