e-mails to my ex-wife

It was about 5.30am My alarm wasn't due to go off until 6am when it was time to wake up. Sure, my office hours only start from 8.30am but because the office was in Mutiara Damansara and my condo in Seri Kembangan, when you consider I have to take the typical Klang Valley highways before the jam becomes stupidly ridiculous  the earlier I leave the lesser my blood pressure becomes.  I get up and see my wife is also awake. She is having some stomach pains. By this time she was 8 and a half weeks pregnant and our daughter isn't due for another two weeks. I remember for the past few days she went on a "nesting phase" and was even painting the new baby's room last night.Today is the same day I scheduled my new car's first service in the service centre in Batu Caves where I had already pre-arranged a colleague to pick me up and get to work. So after careful consideration and planning we both got ready for me to first send her to Assunta Hosiptal, PJ (the same hospi

It is quite common for couples in love to have short, nama manja references for each other. I used to have one. It started one day when myself and then first only girlfriend (later my wife then later on ex-wife) and I were in our hostel room in Genting. I was telling her that I wanted to go down to KL for something and wanted to leave at 5pm sharp. She told me she had to work until 5.30pm or something along those lines but basically she couldn't get out of office any earlier and get changed in time to meet my departure time. So I just teased her and said that I could always go down alone... And then she went into the most manja fit I had ever seen. Faking a cry and then pleading for her boyfriend (then later husband then much later on despised ex-husband) to not do that. Then she closed her eyes, flattened her lips with her face to the ceiling, she let out :uhuk uhuk... Dolling......waaah waah...don't do this to me Dolling....," What did I do? I was stunned. Bec

I remember when I was a young kid that if it was a hot day, the only thing that came to mind was my mom's fridge at home. I can still remember it was a National (for those of you who are too young, it is the same company as Panasonic in Malaysia) in a pukey green colour that you will never see on any modern fridges for at least half a century from now. It was a magical thing, this. Somehow there will always be ice in it for me to make my own refreshing drink, whether a cold glass of Ais Kosong or my half-arsed attempt to replicate ice-cold Milo as dispensed from the Milo vans which I usually see at school sports events held at Stadium Larkin. Why is Milo from those vans so damn delicious??! I should have brought empty bottles to bring the good stuff home. As I achieved my pre-independence when I enrolled myself into college in Nilai after secondary school in Johor Bahru, I managed to live through those almost 3 years without my own fridge. Because in my hostel there was a cold

Of course by now we all know that modern electronics are not designed to last long. Can you imagine if your phone worked great for a decade, without slowing down or consistently able to get great software updates to keep it working like the latest model from the manufacturer, why would you decide to upgrade to a newer shinier model? Manufacturers all want to bathe in money, so they can't have you only being a return customer every five years like car buyers, no? It is for this reason that mobile phone manufacturers purposely design their phones to last on average every 2 years with a corresponding software support cycle. So at the end of the two years you would have to sucker up more cash to buy a shiny new phone and contribute more to the economy. It was 2014. My wife's crappy cheap Samsung Galaxy Y was having a mobile phone equivalent of Alzheimer's. Slow. Memory full. Keeps freezing up. We knew it was time for a change. We were discussing on changing it to a new mode

It was probably a couple of months after we moved from the 12th (or was it 10th?) floor studio unit of RSC8 to the 4th floor one-bedroom apartment. It was quite a happy move because it only was made possible as I had been promoted to a Manager's position which meant my employment benefit on on-site accommodation was about to get a big upgrade as it meant we had more space for our stuff as a married couple. Of course, that didn't really stop us from co-habitating earlier as we had more than enough mutual affection coupled with the fact she didn't really want to stay in her RSC5 room with her older roomate. So the move to the bigger unit some months before the wedding was a big boost as we had more space to cram our stuff and cook like a real couple. Plus the fact my siblings could now properly stay with us on their trips up the mountain without having to stay in a hotel room. Even the furniture and fittings provided was more than adequate. We had some kitchen cabinets, a t