You're shitting me right?

This morning as I was rummaging through my cupboard, the resident medic came along, passed me a piece of paper and a small bottle with what looked like a small spoon hanging from the centre of the bottle cap. "Huh?", I enquired. "This is for your stool sample, sir...", si bebudak medic tu berhujah. "My WHAT?!", I asked again, incredulous... "This bottle is to collect your shit, sir!," the medic said again trying not to smirk... Apparently, after one has reached a certain age in my organisation, one has to go through some tests to ensure one is in tip-top condition to effectively defend the nation ;) I've already done my ECG before flying off to Thailand 3 months ago. I remembered this new medic navigating...NAVIGATING (!) using his needle whilst it was IN MY ARMS!!! He was trying to find my veins but couldn't and had to turn the tip of the needle here and there in my forearms! I had to switch arms as he can't 're-use' the same one. Nasib baik gua maintain beb...sapa takut jarum confirm pengsan on the spot. But before he could DO my other arm, I hollered out to all the medics present in the room and said that whomever can draw blood from me without needing to navigate with the needle stuck inside would have free breakfast!!! So this Melayu medic came along and took over from my first medic who had been sweating profusely. He took all of 1 minute to draw blood from me for the blood test. No incident, no navigating, no sweat. Gua caya sama lu lah Melayu! I gave the first medic a choice of getting extra duties or belanja me to breakfast for his earlier jaunt into my veins. Obviously he chose the latter. And so I told the Melayu medic, there you have it...your breakfast!!!! Anyway, I really wanted to belanja the medic for doing such a professional job but as a true professional, he declined. Next was the ECG test where they stuck me with small balloon-like objects that left little red marks after it was taken out. Macam the Creature from Frankenstein dah! (BTW, contrary to most people's belief, Frankenstein is the name of the person who created the Creature and not the Creature itself.) Well, that was a couple of months back.

Back to the stool test. Hmmm...macam mana nak collect ni? Gua tanya MO dah and suggested that he come out with a Standing Instruction on how to collect one's stool! Tak kan nak let go atas botol yang kecik tu kan? Bersememeh kawan tu nanti! Anyway, I had a game of tennis with my brother, Boboy and cousin, Fauzi later that evening and asked Boboy, who was a medic in his NS days, how to collect one's stool sample. Ah...one should use the squatting toilet bowl and do it on the ceramic. Then one just scoops up one's stool and voila! stool collected! Sounds simple but nowsaday ah seldom got house got squatting toilet one... So how? Suffice to say, I managed, after much effort to collect my own stool. That has to be a defining moment in one's life!!! Nak tahu in more detail, we'll talk over breakfast, lunch or dinner?!?! ;)

P Ramlee the Musical

Once again I'm blogging this while in a queue. This time at BK ECP. Firstly, P Ramlee the Musical was FANTASTIC! It was worth every dollar paid!

(This is continued on 210508 0411hrs somewhere in Lim Chu Kang!)
Musly Ramlee was like a young P Ramlee personified! There were quite a few instances during the Musical where I thought P Ramlee had really appeared. Ternaik bulu roma ku dan bulu-bulu yang sewaktu dengannya pabila mendengar dan melihat Musly! The mannerisms, his low voice while singing and his movement were down pat! The appearance of the train stole the thunder from the performers somewhat. It was one of the better scenes IMHO. But the scene stealer has to be the flirting scenes between P Ramlee and Saloma. It was just classic!

On to the holidays...

Finally, my exam paper on Approaching Literature: The Realist Novel; Romantic Writings has been completed yesterday night! I forgot how many times I had entered The Grand Hall but it always amuses me to see students still going through their notes meters away from entering the exam hall. I mean, it's like the point of no return, you're just panicking yourselves dudes! We were told that it was full house - 850 students! - and yet it felt so cold and 'empty'! Why can't they make exam halls warm and fuzzy!?! Anyway, I had been on leave for the entire week which usually happens before I take exams! Thanx to my colleagues who have been covering for me... For the next half of the year, I'll be doing Shakespeare... exams in the 1st week of November. Once I reached home from my 3 hour paper, I went for a 6km run at about 2315hrs! It was a refreshing night run. I hadn't been running in a while partly due to studying for my exams (not a good reason right?) but mainly due to a constant cough which I had been having for the past 2 weeks. Sundown Marathon is just 2 weeks away and I had not been putting in enough mileage. My goal for my first ever Marathon is “To complete and not to compete!”...

Interspersed among my leave was the Appointment Certificate Presentation Ceremony for ADCs held at the Istana. I had taken a 'sabbatical' from my duties for my Command and Staff Course last year and it was GOOD to be back! The last time I was in the Istana was for the Graduation Ceremony for my staff course last September but that was different. Being with other ADCs from across the other services was something else! And of course, rubbing shoulders with the 'matas' is always useful (wink, wink!)! And since last year, SCDF officers have also been appointed as ADCs which is great! It was always great to see the entire big bunch together during the ACPC since for normal duties, only about 5 to 8 of us are required depending on the event.

Getting ready to take a group photo with the Man himself!

Mother's Day was celebrated last week at Sakae Sushi with the 'usual suspects'. After our usual Saturday classes, Ibu and Adik had gone to Takashimaya to see some stuff while I sent Kakak for her Math class. Kakak had secretly told me that she wanted to buy a Mother's Day cake for Ibu a few days before. So after her class, we went to the Polar stall at Lot 1 and she chose the cake! Ibu had, a few days before, bertungkus lumus membuat bookmarks for the rest of the Ibus and soon-to-be Ibus that will be at Sakae Sushi. And of course I had helped her with the pics she wanted to paste on each bookmark. Cute kan? I came slightly late for the dinner as I had gone to Al-Falah for solat Maghrib. I nearly choked when I saw that I had to pay $3.40 for 24min of parking!!! Takpe lah...ibadat kan?!? We played my favourite 'Bear Game' after we had belasah-ed the food. My French brother-in-law tercunggap-cunggap main game tu. Tapi good try lah...hopefully can have a better round soon! Surprisingly, the simple game of Charades which Boboy had suggested was played over many many rounds just outside Coffee Bean at Wheelock Place. Sampai nak tutup kedai pun kitorang masih main... That will definitely be one game we will play next Saturday...

Talking about next Saturday, I had already booked Tennis Court 2 from 1700-1800hrs and both Bowling lanes from 1800-1900hrs. We'll be adjourning back to my place after that for the subsequent activities. See our Facebook MCG Group for more info ok?

All of us are excited about the coming June holidays. I've told the girls to plan on what we'll be doing for the 3 weeks that I'll be on leave!!! I've heard that an overnight stay at ECP using our tent and hammock are on the cards! Maybe another visit to Pulau Ubin? Or to the Hay Diary Farm at LCK? Can show the girls a bit of the training area that their Ayah always disappears to when he doesn't come back at night! And of course the highlight would be Down Under in Melbourne! We're starting to dig out our luggages and 'winter clothes' for the occasion! Flight tix are ready, accommodation has been booked, car has been rented! Now to come up with the itinerary for our 9 days there!

But the event at hand has to be P Ramlee the Musical tonight! The wife and I had been eagerly looking forward to this! I think the hundred bucks tickets each will be worth it!

Weekly prata fix

Saturdays are the only days I indulge myself in a weekly ritual of having 2 kosong and 1 egg. Used to be that it was 3 kosong and 1 egg but you know, the older one gets the lesser one needs to be sated! And looking at the queue at the 2 prata stalls nearby, it seems that most Singaporeans have their prata fix on weekends too! What's making this wait bearable is that I can blog about it while waiting. I can see people getting jittery while waiting! Jangan tension beb! Bring a book next time! My turn's coming up next... Time flies when one blogs! "Kosong 6 telur 1, man!"

Happy are the kids running towards the shoreline!

And so there we were, with 4 kids on May Day. They had fun, we had fun, all of us had fun! We salute those with more than four kids!!! Click here for more pics!

Model sey...

Where were you went it happened?

The First Daughter came home from school the other day and told us about the Challenger explosion! Wow...the things they teach in school today...and at such a young age! She related to us what her teacher had told her - about there being a teacher on board, about people being sad when it happened, etc. I told her that I vividly remembered EXACTLY what I was doing when I first heard the news...I was in Sec 2 then and I was putting on my shoes just as I was going to school when I saw it on TV...I remembered being glued to the TV but was subsequently shooed away by Dad lest I was late for school. That event will be forever etched in my memory - the explosion that is, not the shooing part! Apparently, this is a common phenomena when events that are out of the ordinary happened. People remember things tied to that event....So...where were you and what were you doing when the following happened?

• Collapse of Hotel New World - it happened in the same year as the Challenger disaster. However, I can't seem to re-collect what I was doing when it happened. But I remembered trying to follow events as best as any 14 year old at that time could do!
• Hijack of SQ117 - I was just a raw recruit then and was waiting for my turn to do the SAW Technical Handling Test at the training shed and I remembered listening to the radio that one of my sergeants had brought along. 
• The day Princess D died - I just got married then and remembered watching the news with my newly-minted wife at her mom's place. (We haven't got our own place yet then!)
• Events of Sept 11 - Believe it or not, I was on a flight to New Zealand with the wife for a holiday! We didn't know about the whole thing (for obvious reason!) until we had landed. I first heard the news from the driver who drove us to our hotel! Needless to say, we were glued to CNN for the next couple of hours.
• When The Tsunami happened - It was a Sunday and we were having some family time at West Coast Park when it happened. Nary a jolt did we feel...

The sky's not the limit...165m is!

And so there we were having prata at Arena after our morning 'tekan' session by our UFO (Unit Fitness Officer) - who made us do a 2km 'warm-up' run followed by an interval training session around the 400m circumference of the parade square consisting of 3 x 1min 50sec sprint followed by another 3 continuous rounds at more or less the same speed! - when Yan said that the Singapore Flyer was having a promotion that will end soon. Pay 2 adult tix and 2 kids get in for free! Without much haste, I checked the internet using my E51 and found out that today is the last day of the promotion! If there ever was a reason to go up the Singapore Flyer, this would be it! The normal admission fee for kids 3-12 years old is about $20. So, I'm saving almost $50! Almost the price of a tin of the First Daughter's Pediasure milk! I booked through the net for a 1900hrs ride and told the wife about it! What a way to start of the May Day celebrations! But as the saying goes, "Manusia yang merancang, Tuhan yang menentukan" which roughly translates to (for my non-Malay speaking 'fans'...ahem!), "Man plans but the Almighty decides". There was a debrief session in the afternoon at work and by the time the whole thing was done, I left office only at 1810hrs!!! And according to my GPS, if I had gone straight to Marina Bay from camp, I could reach it by 1835hrs! Dang! To cut the long story short, we missed the 1900hrs 'flight' and I was left wondering what I could have bought with the $59 that was the price of the 2 tix! The good thing was that we didn't tell the girls that we're gonna take the Singapore Flyer but they kept asking what was the surprise! But of course I had a contingency plan. First was to try to reason with the ticketing people and try to get a change in time. Failing that, we could by another 2 tix and try to get a discount on the pretext that we had already paid so much. Or, we suck-thumb (Note to Stephane (I'm sure Glenn knows this right Glenn!? - this is a Singapore slang meaning bo-pian!) and just buy 2 more tix full-price! Whatever the case, we were gonna take the ride! Since we were already late, I decided to go to Fuji Xerox Tower in the CBD area to collect my D70 which was ready for collection. It was so clean and fresh. And everything worked fine! By the time we reached Marina Bay, it was already about 2000hrs! The Second Daughter had taken a nap and I was having a hard time trying to convince her to walk instead of me carrying her! The wife and FD had already gone ahead to get the tix. In the end, I had to carry the younger daughter. And the wife called to say that it was no problem changing the time on our tix! Selamat duit $60! The pix will be up later...