When It Rains, It Pours

Ever since Lola and I got back from Europe, things have been unbelievably hectic at the office.

There’s the usual backlog that accumulated while I was away. It took me hours to plough through hundreds of emails — both bonafide ones and spam.

Then my 3-year old Sony VAIO laptop went nuts — restarting without warning, giving me the Blue Screen of Death at the most inconvenient time, running out of memory (yes! my drive C is full!), etc. — and almost drove me insane.

A customer who has not contacted us in more than 6 months suddenly informs me that the project we’ve been working on for the past year is finally on and that they want everything concluded in June (!).

Somehow I even managed to squeeze in a quick trip to Jakarta, and then, a few days later, to Singapore. Hence, that post about flying to Singapore on AirAsia.

And to make things just a little more ‘interesting’, it’s that time of the year when school children in Malaysia have their midterm exams, so I had to find time to help MyEldest, OnlyGirl and RoundBoy work on the stuff that they’re having problems with, mostly Bahasa Malaysia (BM). It’s getting trickier now that they’ve started doing Karangan (Composition)… I’m seriously considering sending them for BM tuition next sem.

So now you all know why I haven’t posted anything about the rest of our European adventure. And why many of my dear friends have not received any email from me in a long time. I’ve been very, very busy. As in genuinely busy and not just making up excuses. And I’m so sorry, dear friends, that I haven’t been in touch :(

I’ve been so busy, I didn’t manage to book free AirAsia tickets for our holiday next year! AirAsia was giving away free seats to all of its international destinations for travel between 12 Jan and 30 Apr 2009, but booking had to be done 14-16 May. Unfortunately, by the time I was ready to find some free seats, I had internet connection problems. Grrrr!!!

I’ve been so busy that only things I’ve been able to take photos of are a couple of highway mishaps on the way to work.

Here’s one of a mysterious burning taxi (mysterious because there was no sign of any other vehicle involved)…

And here’s one of a collision between a passenger bus and a lorry carrying steel coils. This story came out in the newspaper yesterday and I was glad to know that no lives were lost that day.

Anyway, just to keep you all in suspense, you can look forward to reading, in the near future, posts with such titles as ‘Paris on a Budget‘, ‘Amsterdam’s Red Light District‘ and ‘Missing Stroopwafels.’ I’ve already started working on the drafts but haven’t had the time to refine them just yet.

But for now, I’ve got to get back to that pile of documents that I brought back from the office to work on this weekend… :(