Parcel

Thank you very much Wenn for sending me the parcel below. If I ever go to Ipoh, I will visit your shop. :)

Tanuki

My spouse is the gardener of our place and these are his tanuki(s) (Japanese raccoon dogs). We have seen these tanuki ornaments in the gardens of Japanese houses when we were in Japan and they were just adorable so when we came across them in a local shopping mall, he bought three. Here they are:

Day 1 2013

Happy New Year everyone! How did you spend your New Year's eve?

As for me, I went down to KL town center to run some errands that needed to be done before the year 2012 is over and was caught in a traffic jam but I did not let it get me down. Instead I managed to complete all the to-do things on my list for that day in good spirits with some help.

Looking back at 2012:

I went to visit my grandmother who lives overseas. The last time I visited her was in 2006.

I resumed an activity that I performed intermittently before, on a more regular basis.

We did all the sums allowable at one go until forty-ish. Three years are finally up but the directions have changed with no confirmed plans.

That's about it. Goodbye 2012! Hello 2013!

Happy Holiday!

One more day to go and it will be Christmas. Here's wishing everyone a happy holiday and for those celebrating Christmas - a very Merry Christmas!

Christmas decorations at a mall

Eat right

My dinner these days

For the past one month, we have been going to the hospital frequently to visit my mother-in-law (71) who was admitted to the hospital 3 times for a 3-5 days stay each time due to various heart-related issues.

The first time it was due to her heart beating too fast. After she was admitted, her tachycardia turned into bradycardia (heart beating too slow) and the doctors advised her to put in a pace maker or else she may just pass away in her sleep. This of course frightened her and  without a second thought she agreed to having the pace maker which costs around RM6400 (which all four of her children share the cost equally) just for the pace maker alone.

Second stay is for the insertion of the pace maker. The procedure went well and she just stayed overnight after the procedure and was discharged on the very next day. Instead of taking warfarin where she has to avoid eating food with vitamin K, she has chosen to take pradaxa to reduce the risk of having a stroke due to atrial fibrillation.

Third stay, she was admitted again due to her heart beating too fast (tachycardia) again. The pace maker is just to ensure that her heart does not beat too slow but it does not control her heart from beating too fast (170 or above heartbeats per minute). This round the doctors gave her Digoxin to control her heart from beating too fast and then adjusted her diabetic and high blood pressure medications before sending her home after around 5 days.

She chooses to undergo medication therapy instead of CABG so the medications have to be adjusted until it is suitable for her condition. I am amazed at her inner strength and perseverance when it comes to all these hospital stays. Her health may be weak but her will to live is strong and for this, I salute her.

Rainy days

Red flowers, I like

It has been raining almost every day for the past one month. With the rain, the market is in red since the beginning of November.

Speaking of things being red, our plumeria (frangipani) tree is now in full bloom with red flowers. We waited one whole year to find out the colour of its flowers as it did not have any flowers when we first got the tree from the nursery and even the gardener at the nursery did not know the colour of its flower. We thought it has pink flowers so we were pleasantly surprise to see red flowers which is the colour that we wanted. Red is also my favourite colour but I don't like to see the market in red.

Unforgettable Tour?

I spent nearly my whole weekend reading up on nuclear energy, its discovery and current status. It all started after I watched "Decontamination: Losing the Sheltering Trees" - a NHK documentary about decontamination work in areas around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear event and how it has affected the communities there. 

The Fukushima event is one of only two nuclear events classified as a level 7 event (highest level - most serious) on the International Nuclear Event Scale. The other being the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. So that got me wondering about the current state of Chernobyl.

From my online search, I found out that work to build a new containment called "New Safe Confinement" to cover the old leaking sarcophagus (a huge concrete structure built in 1986 enveloping the destroyed Reactor 4) has started in 2012 and is expected to be completed in 2015. Now, I know that "clean-up workers" at the area are known as liquidators.

More interestingly, I read that since 2002, there were guided tours to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone which includes the ghost town of Pripyat but now the itinerary has been altered to exclude visits to the Rossokha village and the military machines graveyard as prohibited by the government.

Who would want to pay to visit this place, I asked so I looked for more information about the tour, read many articles written by people who went on this tour and browsed through their photos. Some descriptions about the tour:

- dreamlike
- eerie silence
- haunting
- unforgettable
- attracts people who like lonely, abandoned and deserted places

So would you consider going on this tour?