Early morning walks

I have been doing early morning walks lately - NO, the exercise bug has not come around to hit me!! HH has been away in Manila, Philippines for work for two week intervals. During this time, I need to get up early to take the doggies for their early morning walk.

I will rouse at 5:30 - very early by my standard. I get their breakfast done, feed them, then set my bread in the oven on low to toast, and head out the door by 6 for our early morning jaunt.

I have to confess - I am in my totally unwashed state. Yuck, right? Well I figured that I am going to walk and get all hot and sweaty, so I will just work up an early morning sweat. We leave home when it is quiet, and walk around the side of the blocks and past the school and to the large carpark and field. I guess the walk is about 1 km in length and it takes about 20 to 30 minutes to smell our way around depending on how hardworking we are about exercise.

The two of them will hurry to pee and smell their way along the route. Junior will then run to the bush line and do his "pang sai" thing and then become really happy to finish it. Torrent is just happy to go out for a walk and sniff around .

When we get home after our morning walk, they drink their water and I start my breakfast and newspaper routine.

Good night - need to catch my beauty sleep before we do our morning walk again before the sun rises in the east.

Wonderful service from M1

We went to the M1 shop at Paragon on Thursday. I went there to return the mobile TV trial phone that was lent to me - so that I can watch TV anywhere and everywhere under the sun (as long as I have battery power).

It was good trial - I watched the Olympics and the US Presidential elections. Also managed to catch some Brit soap drama and the History Channel that was really interesting.

We went to M1 around 6:45 pm and finally left at 9:15 - what a marathon there. First it was to return the phone and get a replacement SIM for that TV SIM chip. Then whilst we were waiting HH and my sister V went around the shop to look around and ask all sorts of questions about phones.

HH was just looking around and being kaypoh - the idea of buying a phone was not on his mind.

My sister was another story - she was also being kaypoh, but we managed to psycho her into getting a decent phone.

For the longest time ever, we have told V that her phone was horrible. Or maybe it was the human that was terrible? V would put her mobile in her handbag and then the bag is in her drawer - ON SILENT OR BUZZ MODE!!

So if you tried to get hold of V, you could never do it.

On her part, her excuse is that the service from M1 was terrible, the phone didn't ring and the SMSes came in batches.

Whatever it was - it was frustrating!!

Anyway, we told V to look for a new phone - she said I ONLY WANT A ROSE GOLD MOTOROLA.

We had no idea which model of Motorola she wanted, but M1 had some Motorola on their weekly offer at $98. We told V to go for it. She hummed, hawed and asked about the retail price of the phone - the shocker $498!!

V has this thing about her - she's so proud of the fact that she's never bought a phone in her life. She has taken all the hand me downs from everybody. She also has this thing about not wanting to sign for a plan and didn't want to be tied to a plan. Anyway, it was a no brainer - sign a plan and get a whopping 80% off.

I think the bulk of the 2 hours spent at M1 were on V trying to resolve her issues - amazingly, we managed to get her to sign for her own mobile broadband plan since she got herself a notebook 2 weeks ago.

The staff at M1 very patiently explained to V the different price plans and which one would give her the best value. That took very long because V had lots of questions and used their calculator. I think this is the product of her never having bought a phone or signed a plan with a telco. Even her present mobile line was arranged by me - I called my good friend in M1 to arrange for her to get a number similar to the one she had in Malaysia and arranged for the mobile plan for her - the cheapest possible till she could decide about what she wanted to do.

Then HH decided that he found a phone that he liked - some smartphone from Asus. A check with the girl who was doing V's sign-up, we were told that we could not upgrade for another 2 months. Then she disappeared behind and came back and said to us - OK, I will arrange for you to do the upgrade early without the $100 additional fee, we also get the $100 trade-in on the free phone from Singtel, and she did more calculations and we ended up paying $298 for the phone.

Now you know why we always say WONDERFUL SERVICE FROM M1???

Hero Husband

I have often been asked by people - how did you and HH meet? So this post is for the occasion of our wedding anniversary and to satisfy the curious people out there.

I met HH over the telephone on my first day at work - he was the first client I spoke to on my first day at work with a local accounting firm after I left a very large international accounting firm. Boss had rung me and said: someone will call you and ask you about the incorporation of companies, so please explain to him all he needs to know. He currently has a company with us, but doesn't know very much. The file is in the compactor if you need to refer to it.

I continued to talk to HH over the phone for over one year over corporate secretarial matters before we finally met. Even when we met, it was for work that I had to do for the company.

Then one day, I decided that I should get a computer and asked my colleague HY what sort of computer to buy. HY told me to look at the classified section at the computer section and see what this local company had to offer. Then HY pointed to a computer with some specifications that he said would be OK for what I wanted to do. Just after that HH walked into the office to return some audit documents. HY said - ask him, he sells computers so he should know what's a good deal. HH ointed to the list in the classifieds - buy this one; it has all the noise and lights and graphics to satisfy the girl in you. I went off to the shop and bought the one that HH told me to buy.

Shortly after that - the problems started from my own stupidity. I downloaded junk, virus and all sorts of stuff that slowed the computer, corrupted the hard disk and created havoc for me. In desperation, I asked HH for help. Told him I could not afford to pay for his services as a computer technician, but I could cook him dinner in exchange. Done deal!

I guess after that HH decided that the cooking was good and fair exchange. After that, there were more problems with his companies and I ended up doing more shit clearing work. My boss was very upset about the amount of time I was spending on the phone and told me - Please tell Mr N that we need to charge him for the extra work you are doing. When I told HH that boss wanted to charge for the additional work - he asked if he could call me at home. I said NO PROBLEM since the work was interesting.

Then Mr N would be calling me at night and asking all sorts of questions about corporate secretarial work, the intricasies of the corporate nitty gritty and mud slinging.

There was once, I was really tired of being in the office because boss was just passing all the shit for me to clear when he didn't come to the office. I had to deal with all the mess that was created by my colleagues' bad English - answer faxes, write a report, figure something for boss and answer dumb tax queries because boss wasn't answering them and when HH called, I told him that I was tired of dealing with the shit. He said that he would deal with boss - he called boss and said that his potential business partners were in town and wanted to meet with the company secretary to discuss about starting a new company and the corporate compliance. These people wanted to meet around 4 pm as it was their tea time. Boss called me and said that Mr N had called him, I should go and keep the potential clients happy by answering their questions. I escaped from the office to spend the afternoon walking around doing window shopping. Hee hee! Wow - I never thought of that creative way of getting out of the office.

After that, HH decided that he could go out with me on a regular basis since it was interesting. When we decided to get married, I quit my job to avoid any potential conflict of interest with my work,. I thought I could take a break before hunting for another job. My clients called and asked "who's going to do my work??" I told them BOSS LAH, and they said, we follow you and you do the work for us.

So that's how it started - I started a corporate secretarial practice before we got married (that's why I never assumed my married name) and we got married - satisfied now?

My new laptop

On Monday evening 27 October 2008, my trusty HP laptop developed a vertical line. HH tried to "fix" the problem by bending the LCD screen a little, hoping that we could move some liquid to cover the ones that were creating a problem. It didn't work. :-(

So I had to start looking for another laptop since I am totally distracted by that line.

On Tuesday morning, I called a good friend who used to work in HP and asked him - what sort of laptop should I get. He told me - look at the HP Compaq 6 series. So that started my quest for the new laptop.

I looked at Dell too, since they have all the pretty colours. In all honesty, I was eyeing a pink laptop but the price for the same configuration as the HP was more than double the price. The other not so attractive thing was the operating system - Windows Vista!! Having heard all the problems with Vista, I was determined to stay with trust XP!

On Wednesday morning, HH called Danny (a guy we know who works in a computer shop) and asked about the laptop I was eyeing. Danny said NO STOCK but you can have something cheaper that has a slightly older processor and has Windows XP Pro downgrade from Vista Business. Danny also promised me that it had a matt screen. Done deal - we booked the laptop and went to collect it and started the data migration.

So far so good - there are somethings from the old laptop that I miss. The old HP had 4 USB ports and a parallel printer port. This new thing only has 3 USB port and doesn't have a parallel printer port or the PCMCIA port. I cannot use the old printers that I have any more because I just cannot connect. The price of progress!

Anyway, to resolve the pink laptop I wanted - I went to http://www.garskin.com/ and selected a pink skin for my laptop for under S$50. It was delivered days later and immediately applied. I achieved my pink laptop without the hefty price that Dell demanded.

I am now content with my laptop!!