I am Back!!! :)

It's been a long hiatus since the last blog entry.

2 days ago, at the demise of my good friend, I decided to reactivate my blogging :)

This is for you, Alam! May Allah grant you Jannah!

The above photo was taken with arwah Alam and his wife, Dr Rose, when I visited them in 2015. The other photo was of us during a trip to a batik factory in Kota Bhari in 1975. alas was in form 2, I was in form 1. He's the one standing between the lady and male teachers. Behind his is Mrs Merican, our Home Science teacher. I'm the one with the long braids :)

MY BLOG HAS MOVED

I noticed that people still come to visit this page.

This blog has moved!!

Please visit my new blog at:
www.mama.nuraina.com

which looks like this:
(You can click on the banner to go there)


The banner is a pic of the lake formed by the Selangor Dam in Kuala Kubu Baru on the way to Fraser's Hill.

Leap Year 2008

The look of my new blog site

Yes, today is a leap day, 29th February.

Anything interesting from me? I guess not.. I am spending the whole day at home.

Except that I've finally decided to move my blog to www.mama.nuraina.com.

Old postings will be left here, but new ones are there.

GE 12

That's "12th General Election" for Malaysia. I am proud to say that out of the previous 11, I've voted 4 times :-)
This time round, it'll be my 5th.

But I am not proud to say that the coverage given to all parties is far from fair :-(

Try reading at www.bernama.com.my or any of the main stream newspapers or watch the tv channels, what do you get? Biased coverage, of course! And the government had the cheek to say that there is no unfair playing field? My f**t!!

It's only 9 days to the polling day, and what do I see most, along the streets? These faces (as if we don't know them!):

A close-up:


Don't we all know them? Why must their pix be put up all around the neighbourhood? I guess the pix of the candidates for the parliamentary as well as the state seats are still not out of the printing house?

Talking about the posters, I think they are unnecessary, not-environmental-friendly and really a waste of money! 30 or so years ago, I can understand the function of the posters, as many eligible voters then were illiterate. They need to know which symbol to vote for, and some of the old folks then relate the presence of the posters as the indicator of the popularity of the party, i.e. the more posters they have, the more popular they are.

But now? When most of the voters are literate, with quite a huge percentage of them are professionals (at least here in Shah Alam), why do we need all these posters? We want to hear facts and figures, and real issues too!

I suddenly am reminded of the general election in Adelaide in the 1980s when I was a student there. There were very few posters, and almost all of them are pictures of the candidates who were running for the election - at least the posters helped the locals to recognize the faces of the people they were going to vote!

Today I'm still at this old blog :-(

When I was ready to move to the new "home", last night (after a couple of test posts), the site www.nuraina.com had some problem (while I was sleeping lat night), and kaboom! My new page is gone.

So, until the problem is rectified by the system_admin (that's DH), I will still be posting from here.

My New Blog Site

Initial top panel of the new blog site. I hope to be able to edit it later..

Yes, friends, I've finally decided to move to a more permanent "house" at www.mama.nuraina.com

Only new posts will be put there. Old ones will remain here.
I still intend to update some of the current pages which I promised to add more stories/pix.
I hope tomorrow and Friday will see me doing just that ;-)

As for now.... Good night...

SMZ is back to Work, Though not Fulltime

For those who have not been told, I have recently started work again :-)

I am now working from Monday-Wednesday as a consultant to a local IT company in Shah Alam. The view from the lift lobby (from the 8th floor):

UiTM Tower in the background.

So, to all regular-visitors to this blog, you can expect more postings between Thursday and Sunday (provided we are not traveling during the weekend).

A Wedding in Singapore - M & M

M&M stands for Mariani & Mono, the bride and groom :-)

Last Friday we drove down to Singapore to attend a cousin's daughter's wedding. We've not driven there since 1998! The last time I went there was in Dec 2004, but I took the bus instead.

This cousin is not just any ordinary cousin. She's like my sister. She was staying with my parents in Geylang in the late 1960s when I was in my pre-school days until she got married. Her (late) usband was a sailor, so when he was not around, she used to take me to stay with her (I never attended kindegarten - we were too poor to have such luxury). Or, maybe I leave this part of the story for later and just focus on the wedding :-)

Anyway, the wedding was the 2nd marriage for both bride and groom, but that didn't stop us from celebrating it as merry as we could.

The "akad nikah" (solemnisation of the marriage according to the Islamic rites) was conducted at 8.30pm last Friday nigt. We only arrived at their place at 10pm. No problem, there was still food around :-)

That nigt stayed up to catch up with stories as well as (most of the time pretended to) help in te kitchen. I know I peeled so much potatoes, carrots and sengkuang. I also de-skinned several pineapples. Helped to stir the mixture in the pot while it was simmering, etc..etc...

I had a short nap at 4am and woke up at 6am. After the morning prayers (subuh) and a shower, we continued with our cooking. All was ready by 1pm.

Guests started to arrive at 2pm. I took some pix, but soon after I was too sleepy. Furthermore most of the guests are strangers to us (us being the relatives from Malaysia), we ended up taking naps whenever we could!