Hockey and BBQ

Being an avid soccer player while in school, i always thought of hockey as a game for chicks or males with less male-juice in them. My school wasn't particularly good in hockey and we'd loose matches to arch enemy St. John's whose players wear skirts and lipstick on the weekends i hear. Thats how bad we were. All this was infused into me and other school buddies to thrash our hockey players whenever we saw them on class corridors or the canteen when they had their meals. I would lead in booing them whenever they walked down the lonley school corridoors.
I know i was a real rascal then, in school everybody was. The school hockey team were a disgrace and as far as me and the other lads were concerned, hockey just didn't exist for us.

It was all until the m'sian hockey team came to town to play against the national team here. I can't remember the scores but i heard the geng lost the majority of 5 matches that they played here. My bro n father were persistent in asking me to go watch the match with them. But i told them that i had more important things to do that day .. like watching paint dry. They got the idea and left without me to watch the match in town. That nite, father told us that he'd invited the entire contigent over the following nite to the house for a BBQ session. My first thoughts were .. awww man .. a bunch of sissies in skirts eating in my yard. What would the neighbors think? Man i'm roasted. Like a mainframe IBM, my mind ran a gazillion bytes of excuses to come up with so that i wouldn't have to attend. Fry my barkers, and my barkers are fried.

The following day was a tough n rough day at work. I couldn't hack the WinCE based device application to build. The scripts wouldn't run. It was even more screwed up when team lead pointed out that a directory was wrongly named and I hadn't caught it in the verbose shell script log .. but he did. I really despise it when someone else finds the solution in 10 mins when i've spent 2 hours scounging around for it. So it was a bad day for me right. I left about 7 and drove up my drive way about 20 mins later. Getting out of the car i saw a 30 sitter luxury coach pull up infront of my house and a bunch of m'sian dudes in yellow jersey come out of the bus. At first I couldn't register what was happening. Was i being invaded by m'sian embassy agents? Are they spies taking refuge in my house? What was happening?

Amidst all the de-registering confusion, i remembered father saying he'd invited m'sian hockey players over. And then it all came back to me. I proceeded top join them for the lamb BBQ and found them pretty OK to talk to. I don't know about hockey being a cool game and all, but the m'sian blokes that I spoke to were not wearing skirts. Their capt Kuhan .. was pretty knowledgeable about our ways of life here. He asked some valid questions about govt tax and the whole work culture. After about 2 hours of eating and talking, their coach excused themselves as they had another game the next day and had to retire to bed consciously early. In rows of 2x2, like they do on the hockey field .. the players walked out the side gates and onto their bus, shaking my hand as they went along. If anything, the meat they took out that nite on the BBQ pit should help them win a game or two.

Later that nite, I thought of all the snide remarks i made over the years about hockey players being sissies and all the bad mouthing i done in school about hockey. My chat with the BBQ hockey boys made me realize that they were males after all. Something new learned today.

Despite cocking up at work today, I slept with a peace of mind and a smile on my face.

You'll be 40 before you know it ....

Tuesdays have always held a special place in my heart. Always. Just like the cheerie madamuselle on a broadway theater that smiles everytime our eyes meet. They're are not as bad as mondays but not as good as Wednesdays either, which are indeed a step into the direction of the nearest weekend. And the weekends ...... ahhh ... a truly holi .. holi .. day. When u've got code to write and bugs to look at all day long , a weekend comes like the topping of a caramel that flatters the taste buds and pulls a smile on your face. I smile as i think of my long weekends and the exodus it brings after a hectic busy week for me. All is good, so hit that dial.

Still smiling away, my mind yonders about taking another holiday. Mind you i've just had one about a month ago to KL, Jakarta and Bali. Sweet as. But busy schedules and office back stabbings & kiasu bitchin' routine makes me want to take another. Is me or has my work life approached a terminal expirery stomp? I've always planned to retire at by 40, and hopefully this plan transpires and is achieved. By 40 this would be my dream life.

1. I'd be living in a neat but friendly kampung in kedah somewhere, enjoying the morning nasik lemak at the coffee stall before sipping my fresh brewed coffee while listening to the humming noises of hollow paddy stumps getting slapped by the northern winds. With some money stashed in the nearby district bank, life would be easy as they come and expenses kept at a bare minumum. No more complicated state-of-the-art product development or volatile market prediction exercises, just the plain old boring days at the coffee shops where the most mind bongling thing to think about would be who to vote in he next election. I need to retired fast.

2. Stepping into the local district bank, i walk past pak dollah the farmer and cek nab the planter who had just deposited their monthly collection into their savings. Looking around me i notice the bank filled with ordinary kampung folks doing their monthly banking do's slowly but steadily .. like everything else here in the kampung. I run a quick check of my accounts and yes .. my RM4 mil bucks that i collected from 10 years of working is still there. I look at it twice just to make sure that the all the '0's are there and that the account still has my name on it. Phew ... boy does it feel good to be living out here and spending at most 20 bucks a day going by in this kampung.

3. After lunch i finaly get a chance to retreat to my gizmo workshop at the back end of my kampung atap house just beside the fresh water pond. The view from my gizmo room is amazing. It overshoots the lonely green paddy lots with the occasional kampung children coming back from their religious classes in the evening. At am finally at peace with nature. No more road hogs on the federal highway or national express busses wedging thick balks smog in my face. I switch on my 3G intell desktop and slide my window pane shut before winding my LG air condition to full blast. Heat is something that constantly annoys me here in the kampung. On my .Net VSC++, i load my GPS/GSM path locator project solution and i'm building for the next generation mobile devices on CE. Just a bit more tweaking before i get it compiling and running for my big demo next week. But if it doesn't build, fine. After all its all just a big hobby for me now .. as opposed to a career a few years ago. I'm cool with that.

With a burning desire to retire ... i know the next couple of years would determine whether this life would really be a reality. Who knows ... after all i have seen mates making million$ over nite before. Now isn't life more interesting when u have these sort of dreams? or is it? You tell me.

The Zest of Life

As a newbie to blogging writing about my daily adventures and posting them on-line, i have come to understand that theres nothing a fresh brewed coffee and google on your browser can't do for you. Most expereinced writers often tell me that its the little things that make up for the mind-blowing creativy and sheer expressions in their writing. Something that a while-i-wait-for-my-application-to-compile writer might never understand or address for that matter. So today, begins a new chapter in my book of life ... with all its zest, loves and hates of my daily escapades.