We didn’t make it to Singapore over the weekend. The Soul Doctor was busy, so it was just going to be the two of us. My wife still wanted the furniture and I still wanted my to maintain my 100% positive ebay feedback. Then we realised my passport was expiring in less than six months, so I couldn’t have made it across the border. I tried to renew my passport on Friday but it takes a whole work day to get it back so I only picked it up on Monday. I’d like to take credit for this clever little twist in our story but the honest truth was I forgot. In short - no passport, no me, no driver, no trip, and ultimately no sale. Even though my wife has postponed the transaction to Thursday night and the seller has accepted that, it looks very unlikely that either of us is going to have the time to honour that as well. So I’m finally going to be getting my first bad feedback on ebay and there is nothing I can do about it.
It’s easy to accept a situation when I can say there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s kind of liberating, really. I know I sound like a quitter, but I like it this way because I get to be the victim. I hate it when I have a choice between two or more crappy situations because I know that whichever one I pick, I'll end up as the villain.
So here I was thinking how I’m finally getting my first bad feedback on ebay when suddenly, it occurred to me that I’ve been going about the whole thing the wrong way. All along, I’ve been trying to do the right thing and be a good buyer and a good husband, which is why I offered to drive ten hours to complete a transaction that was done behind my back (speaking of which, I doubt my back would have survived the journey).
Now that I’ve had some time to think it through, I think I was looking at the whole thing from the wrong perspective. I'm such an idiot. I can't believe I couldn't see this before. It’ll do me good to have some bad feedback on my ebay account. In fact, instead of waiting for my wife to bring my reputation down, maybe I should take the proactive approach and do a little dishonourable shopping myself. I figure by the time I get up to about 40% negative feedback, people should more or less stop wanting to sell things to us.
That would be good.
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Good news for people who use lots of AA batteries.
I first saw these GAIA and Eneloop advertisements on billboards and posters in Japan in June but did not realise what they were. I thought it was just the Sanyo marketing department highlighting the environmental advantages of rechargeable batteries. As it turns out, Sanyo has come out with a new type of rechargeable battery that is actually easier to use.
These new batteries can keep 85% of their charge after a year of storage at 20 Celsius. At higher temperatures, they lose their charge faster, but still a lot slower than current NiMH batteries. This translates to less time fiddling with chargers and more actual usage.
Also, if you need some batteries in a hurry but don't want to buy non-rechargeables, you can just buy a pack and start using them as soon as you open the package because they've already been charged up at the factory.
Read about them at http://www.sanyo.co.jp/koho/hypertext4- ... 01-2e.html
Sweet!
Edit: Okay, I just realised this battery was released last November and that I'm one Christmas behind in terms of shopping trends. You can safely ignore this post.
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Some days, I feel like I don't know who this person is that I married.
Before we were hitched she would say, "I don't need any money. I can live on very little."
Today, she would say the same thing, followed by "I just want the best for us."
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I love my wife.
Here's the proof...
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(The honeymooners)I used to think of myself as a “man of the world”, partly because of all those James Bond movies and partly because I would occasionally get bored of my environment and go abroad to stay in a clean motel room, and to have toast and tea for breakfast (at home, we would have milo and roti canai). Then my dad had satellite television installed in the house and I started watching all these people going on safaris, jumping out of planes and eating live octopuses and I thought – gee, maybe I’m not all that much of a traveller after all.
My wife is a traveller.
You probably cannot tell from the lack of content from the main page but together, we have been doing quite a bit of travelling over the past two years – we’ve been to Thailand, Iceland, Cambodia, Japan, Australia, East Malaysia and Singapore. By herself, she has been to Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Indonesia and Thailand in the past few months. Her job requires quite a bit of travelling and fortunately she doesn’t need a long recovery period between trips – unlike me. I need to stay put and think about where we’ve been, talk about what happened, decide if I want to write about each trip and let the laundry settle back into some state of normalcy before I can even start thinking about the next destination.
A few days ago, I discovered something more challenging than travelling abroad, and that is travelling in our home city. For the past few days, a couple of our friends from Australia were here in Kuala Lumpur on their honeymoon. We tried to figure out what they would want to see and what they could do as visitors. I was hopelessly stuck. They would want to see KLCC for sure, and maybe KL Tower, but what else? They said they wanted to do some shopping and see Chinatown, which would take up one day, but that still left a few empty days to fill. See Ming had the brilliant idea of eating seafood and seeing fireflies in Kuala Selangor, so we took them there as well. One morning, we took them out to breakfast at a coffee shop in the Bukit Bintang market. That was about all the places we could think of. To add to the dilemma, we were also trying to find the balance between being a good host and intruding on their privacy. Sad to say, I think I failed miserably in that endeavour when I coerced the groom into leaving the bride at the hotel one night when she was feeling tired. We had dinner, bought some Magic: The Gathering(tm) cards and reminisced our geeky university days over a few games that lasted past midnight. That night, I dreamt that I had put his marriage off to a bad start, although they assured me that I had not.
The night after that, we took them out to dinner and to see our apartment partly because we didn't know where else to take them, but largely because we spent all of the previous Saturday cleaning it. Just outside our apartments, there are some mamak stalls, and the honeymooners wanted to see some teh tarik being pulled, so we stopped for supper. And that really was all we came up with.
I think we need to put our heads together and come up with a list of things to do and places to go in and around Kuala Lumpur. What do you guys think?
Eldo and Leng, if you are reading this, once again, congratulations! The MTG cards were not Eldo’s fault. That was my dumb idea.
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