Sometimes I just forget

Standing behind a shop counter right now... er, long story into which I'm actively deciding not to goh into! Anyway, the strains of 80's songs playing over the speakers kinda triggered me into blog-tion. Funny how I often forget the amount of time I had spent as a teenager just memorizing and belting out songs. Then suddenly you hear a song and the lyrics just come gliding out. Always surprises me how all those lyrics are filed inside my memory somewhere, just waiting for the right musical cues to be released. That just happened again in McD's. A cover version of an old love song came on and yes, if you know me well enough, you'd know that I just couldn't help but sing along.

The strange thing was when I walked into the next place that I'm in now, the original version of that same song came on! Heh! Part of the strange poetry of life that I like musing about. How there's so much wonderful rhythmic detail woven into our daily living. Yesterday for another instance, two major things I've been working on came to their respective closing stanzas - the final exam paper (and an extra re-sit paper) for a course I'm lecturing at Life College and... the Nepal Video! Praise God! Finally, after so many months and 10 hours with Grace yesterday doing the final polishing... we actually have both long and short versions on a DVD!! Went home with that elated feeling one gets after the climax of a great symphony.

This morning as I spent some time with God and even now as I stand here behind this strangely obscure counter, I think about how He orchestrates so many things in life to marvel at... and I wonder why sometimes I just forget.

"Great are the works of the LORD; they are pondered by all who delight in them." (Psalm 111:2)

I hate to leave you but I really must say...

...goodbye wi-fi... goodbye!

I've really appreciated the time in KK. Especially my bare minimum room with maximum wi-fi!



It's been quite an eventful 3 days. Will only mention significant things that happened, otherwise it'll take too long to finish this posting.

Sunday:

First, I found the DVD that I pulled out from Alex & Grace's mailbox BROKEN! After all the trouble of bringing it over! The only reason why I didn't freak out completely about it was that the 9-hour journey here had kinda numbed my emotions to any subsequent surprises. Also Eric had warned me (post-boot incident) that a lot of obstacles had been popping up prior to the Fresh Fire rally, which is why I'm here in KK, by the way. One girl from Skyline even had a piece of flesh from her finger accidently sliced off while trimming name tags for the rally!



So anyway, I send an S.O.S. out to solve the broken DVD problem, and since then Kee Sitt has sent me a scrounged-down version of the video while Poh Sim has made and pos-laju-ed a copy of the DVD. Thank God for wonderful media buddies and mailing capabilities, virtual and physical!

Er... we're still on Sunday... Alice picks me up, listens to me wail a bit about my broken DVD and we have a fish noodle breakfast with Eric, Tracy and Mak.



Then Alice goes, "Hey, you're gonna be guest-video-mixing today at GCC!" Hahhaa - so I goh and guest-mix! It was fun! And a privilege to get to serve with the most active (if not the only) multicam crew in KK and also get re-acquainted with the first ever Videonics Mixer that DUMC acquired in 1998 before swapping it for a Videonics MXPro, which then got hooked to a MXPro DV, both of which got replaced by two linked Edirol V4s, which finally got switched out for our current Videotek Prodigy! Sorry - sudden gush of tech flashback - just had to release it!




Guest Photographer for the 2 images above: Alice Chong

Oop! Gotta goh work on something - continue this later!

It's been a long road... getting from there to here.

That's the first line from the theme song of Star Trek Enterprise series, originally written for the movie Patch Adams. And it aptly entitles this entry - first about blogging again after 3 years, then about yesterday's 9-hour journey from PJ to KK.

The first long journey... well... I got a Blogger account while I was visiting my brother in Cambridge in 2004 and had a single "test" entry which was left there all this while. It felt too daunting a task to figure out how to blog then and I resorted to sending out my travelogues in Word instead. Later that same year, I started another blog account in xanga. I wrote a grand total of 5 entries before my self-predicted writer's block came to pass. Being the sentimental archival buff that I am, I decided the other day to merge those 5 entries with that lone one as I renew my Blogger account which I must say is sooo much easier to use now. So yeah - all 6 postings now sit happily in their new home under the Blog Archive of 2004, minus the comments from the original postings. You can't take it all sometimes. Oh, and if you dare venture into another piece of my ancient history, go to http://www.mrdata.com/~gce for the website I put together before I came back from the States in 1997. Er... I must warn you though that it'll throw you into a realm of possibly intolerable outdatedness! Still, I praise God for it as it did bring me quite a number of job offers then! I've actually been kinda reluctant to update it to a more contemporary look - did I mention I'm a sentimental archival buff?

Ok - the second long journey...

Left my house to the Low Cost Carrier Terminal (LCCT) at about 3:15pm yesterday. Oh - and on the way swung by Alex & Grace's to pick up a DVD that I needed to take with me to do some work. Alex had actually taken the trouble to go all the way back from a Rendezvous event to rig up a way for me to pull out the DVD from their postbox. TQ!

Er... where was I? Oh - so my parents drove me to the LCCT to catch my 5:10pm flight to KK. When we got there at about 4:15, I jumped out the car and tried to open the boot. Ok - now have to cut the long "THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING, THE BOOT'S NOT OPENING!" story short. I tried, my mum tried, my dad tried, a policemen and three other LCCT male personnel tried and well, you know... they really made those old volvos super safe and secure lor! We even tried frantically pulling at the back seats to no avail. I did manage a frustrated peek at my luggage through that pull-down arm-rest thing though. After a bit, tension in my family was running really high. One of the men timidly asked me what time my flight was. I told him, and he timidly told me that he didn't think I'd be making it.

SO... I walked in to the check-in counter to be told that indeed I had missed the flight. I then walked out to... well... actually, I don't quite know what I walked out to do. Anyway, I walked back in again to queue up to buy a ticket for the 9:15 flight. Then I walked out to goh back into the volvo. My mum was really tired by then so I took over the wheel and drove all the way back to PJ to catch their regular mechanic next to DUMC SEA Park just before they closed for the day. The guy took 5 minutes to open the boot. I got my luggage out and put it in the back seat. Then we went to SS2 for a pre-Mother's Day dinner and coffee at Secret Recipe - hahahah, praise God for the bonus time I had bought for a RM325 one-way ticket to KK! One roasted chicken later, I drove back to LCCT, caught my breath and my plane, reached KK and got picked up by Eric who took me to a backpacker's hostel called Velvet where I checked-in at about 12:15am.

9 hours. Doorstep to doorstep. PJ to KK.