CNY has come and gone...

... and it was very quiet indeed. The traffic during the CNY week was absolutely heavenly :-). It felt like everyone and his/her siblings had left KL - either to go on holiday elsewhere, or to return to their home town to celebrate CNY with their family. It was possible to drive anywhere in the KL / Selangor area without any fear of traffic jams, and all the usually very popular shopping malls had loads and loads of parking available at all times. This week the traffic has gone back to normal (more or less), but next week is going to be lovely and quiet again as both Monday and Tuesday are public holidays - so given a four-day weekend, a lot of people will be out of KL again. LOVELY!

You know what saddens me nowadays though? Nobody, or at least very FEW people, do open house celebrations any more. I do an Xmas or New Year open house every year. A couple of my Malay friends USED to do open house, but last year even that stopped... and most of my Indian and Chinese friends NEVER do, and have never done, open house for Deepavali or Chinese New Year! And only one other of my Christian friends actually does an Xmas open house every year! It is rather sad actually that this tradition is dying out :-(.

Of course, this does not mean we dont keep in touch or meet up - we do. But the open house used to be such a wonderful Malaysian tradition, a tradition followed by all the people of Malaysia, of whatever race or religion, and it is sad to see this tradition dying away. I know that it is getting too expensive to do on a grand scale, but, hey, you don't have to do a major meal - just some snacks, maybe a ton of roti canai and curry, and some veg. The whole purpose of the open house is just to catch up with friends whom you have not seen for a long time, not to stuff your face!

Enuff said on that subject.

So what else has been happening? Well, I've been good about my ongoing resolution to keep going to the gym - at least 3 times a week, but more often 4 or 5 times. I do a 5km jog most times, and at least once a week do a major upper body circuit training round, followed by a 10 minute FAST run. And, yes, I do get up fairly early still to do this - mainly because, if I go late to the gym, there is nowhere to PARK!! :-D Yeah, I know, it is a silly reason, but it is an incentive to get up early and go - so I don't end up going round and round the car park a dozen times looking for a place to park. SUCH a waste of time!

My lovely cousins, L&R, from the US are here for a few weeks, so we have already spent time catching up, and I hope to spend MORE time with them! There is still a lot of catching up to do! This coming weekend, we are all heading to Melaka - my beloved #1 niece is heading back to Moscow for her medical studies so we are going to be there for lunch and tea (with Opera Cake made by me :-D ), and then we ALL head to the airport, see her off, and then we come home.

My Mum, after her angioplasty, is back to her normal morning walking routine again - and she says that now she can walk much faster than before without ANY breathing difficulty, and without the dreaded "pain in the neck" manifesting itself whenever she exerts herself (and, No, the 'pain in the neck' does not refer to either my Dad or me and my siblings :-p ).

Ooooh, I made a very interesting acquisition the other day - a non-slip mat called a GEKKO, which I placed on the (very curved) dashboard of my snazzy little car. This is to put my Smart Tag unit on - because my little car has absolutely NO flat horizontal space above the dashboard to put ANYTHING on, and the normal non-slip mat just does not work. Then someone told me about the Gekko, and I ordered it, and it is BRILLIANT! I placed it on my dashboard, put the smart tag unit on it, and drove at my usual 'fast around the corner' speed, and the smart tag did not BUDGE! It stayed put! I was soooo pleased :-). You can go check out their web site at http://gekko-dnastech.webs.com/. I definitely recommend it! And, the best part, when it gets dusty (thereby losing its 'stickability') all you have to do is rinse it clean with water, let it dry, and, voila, it is as good as new!

That's it for today folks. Till next time, have a good day, every day!