Water tales

Penang had a water crisis starting on Wednesday. On that day I was lining up at the supermarket checkout when the lady in front of me turned around and suddenly asked me, "Where do you stay?"

I went blank because I didn't know how to react to a total stranger asking me something like that...and part of me was wondering whether it was someone I knew and didn't recognize with the mask on.

It turned out she noticed I wasn't buying water and wanted to warn me about the water shortage. (At that time I hadn't heard the news yet.) She was buying I think three tubs of mineral water (not sure what we call those big bottles? The biggest ones available for mineral water), and some people were buying a whole trolleyful...I had actually been wondering why so many people were buying water!

Initially PBA announced that the water supply should return to normal by 12pm on Thursday. But it didn't happen everywhere...and up till today my neighbourhood still does not have water supply!

Yesterday MBPP and a volunteer firefighter group from Sungai Petani came to distribute water.

MBPP to the rescue!

As we were waiting for the tanker to come down to our houses, the tanker from SP came, complete with the Kedah flag (that was what made me notice it was from SP).

At this point, the MBPP tanker was still further up the road.

Received water

As I was writing this post, the MBPP tanker came again, and I just refilled my pails. Hopefully the water supply will be restored and we won't need it again...the person distributing it was saying that they were reconnecting the supply. The question, though, is when?

One thing to note: In the photo of the SP tanker above, we can see that they have four taps to fill up our buckets. I didn't see how the MBPP tanker distributed water yesterday, but today there was one person spraying a huge hose into our buckets. Quite a waste of water if you ask me...quite a lot of water tends to splash out of the containers when they are still empty (or when the containers are shallow).

Edit (Monday 11 July): This morning our water supply was back! Now let's hope it stays... *fingers crossed*

Pancetta at The Butcher’s Table

I tried grilled pancetta at The Butcher’s Table the other day. In case you don’t know what pancetta is, it is a type of cured pork belly.

Knowing that it was on the salty side, I selected a side dish of coleslaw.

The pancetta was really quite salty, but it tasted good. They brought plain water to the table once I sat down, so I didn't order any drinks.

Here's the menu (there are more pages to it) :

They also sell pork items for us to cook ourselves at home. I didn't look much at them because I wasn't going to buy any...

An abstract design

This week's theme is abstract.

I was thinking that I may have to draw some kind of abstract art on my own...then one morning I suddenly noticed this strangely shaped shadow on the wall.

I couldn't even figure out where the light was coming from at first...but when I got my phone and came back to take the photo, it had changed - there was a huge shadow in the middle! I realized that the shadow came from me putting down the item I was holding...on the kitchen top. This light was actually reflected from the kitchen top.

In any case, I think it looks abstract enough!

Weird decorations

So these decorations have been around for a while... definitely more than a year, most likely two, because who was gonna decorate the office during MCO?

But since this week's theme is weird, it made me think: Isn't it weird to have Christmas and Chinese New Year decorations together...and what's more, in June?

Psst...actually it's normal...why waste decorations by taking them down? :P

Wearing Stitch

The other day I saw this motorcyclist wearing this helmet. 

We were at a traffic light and we both turned right. When he turned the corner, I saw the ears flap, and the insides of the ears were pinkish-orangish. So I think it was Stitch!

At the next traffic light, I managed to snap this photo since he was right in front of me. When the light turned green, he moved off and again, the ears flapped in the wind! ♥

Edit 28th June:
I saw the motorcyclist again! This time I managed to get a photo that shows a bit of the inner ear.

Doesn't it look like Stitch?

The sea's surface on a cloudy day

This week's theme was surface.

So here's the view from my office.

Hi = wave

At work, there are people who ping others with just a “hi”, and wait for them to respond before asking their question. I can’t remember whether I have written about this before, but I always feel that it is a waste of time…it takes an extra exchange to get to the actual message!

Then Google Chat (which we are using at work) added reactions to messages. So when someone pings me with only a "hi", I am always tempted to just respond with a "wave" reaction. But that would not give them a message notification, and they wouldn’t know that I have “responded” until they come back and check our chat. So it’s not a good thing to do…

However, the other day someone pinged me at night with just a “hi”. This one I can understand… he was in a different time zone, and on that day I had been doing some night work to support that time zone. So it was to check whether I was still there or whether I had logged off for the night, in which case, further messages would likely be unnecessary.

As it was, I had logged off and only saw the message in the morning. This time, I decided it wouldn't be too bad to respond with only a wave, since they wouldn’t be waiting for my response anyway. But I didn't want them to think that I sent the wave right after they sent their message, so...

"Sleep" -> "sunrise" -> "wave"

Clear enough? :P

If it's not me now

So after posting about  911’s song yesterday, I listened to their other new songs. I found a few good ones, such as In Another Life, Light Me Up, and Alive.

I couldn’t find the lyrics to In Another Life, and somehow I managed to write them out myself. (I don’t even know why I wanted the lyrics so much, probably because it sounded like a story and I wanted to know what “in another life” had to do with it?)

So here are the lyrics (as best I heard, but I think I got most of them right because the words were quite clear), without the repeated parts:

I gotta bite the bullet
I can’t just stand this side of the glass
I know I can’t keep looking through it
I gotta build my courage up and open the door and walk up to the counter and say
Hey what’s your name
How’s your day been
I wanna know when you’re on a break
Can we pull up a chair and sit down
Throw a little conversation around

Chorus:
‘Cause you know you know when something is right
It’s a perfect night when the stars are in line
I don’t care about time
‘Cause if it’s not me now, then it’s me in another life

Three weeks later, it’s going all good
Lucky for me I was your type
Now I can’t get you out of my head
Everything about your smile and your hair

Now you said you’ve been hurt before but it don’t matter
If your heart’s too high then throw me down a ladder
Gonna do whatever it takes
Step by step I’ll find a way

[chorus]

No matter what it takes
We will find a way
I will find the way to your heart

[chorus]

I love this line: If your heart’s too high then throw me down a ladder. Nicely figurative. :D

911 has a new song?!

I heard this song a long time ago on the radio and loved it, but didn't look it up. Recently I heard it again and finally did look it up…and was stunned to find out that it was by 911. I did some research and found out that they released a new album in 2014 called Illuminate… The Hits & More, which contains some of their hits plus a few new tracks.

So here I present you I Do:

Broken things and breaking things

There are some things that are only broken at night.

Such as the name of this sports complex here. In the daytime, the lights are not needed and everything looks fine. But at night, the name cannot be read any more! (especially from further away)

This whole week, because of this photo theme, I kept an eye out for broken things or things that I could break to make a photo opportunity. Never have I wanted to break things so much! :P (I even took a photo of the shells of an egg that I had broken to make bread, as a backup photo in case I didn’t find anything else for the photo theme)

At the end of the week, I finally broke something!

(this wasn’t done on purpose…)

In the middle of a game, I suddenly noticed a plastic piece on the floor, which I recognized as the end of my badminton racquet! I’m not sure whether it had just fallen off when I noticed it, or whether it had been a while. Anyway, there were just a few points left in the game, so I picked it up and held it in my hand till the game was over. It’s not like this affects the functionality of the racquet… right?? (dunno whether there’s some hidden balancing usage that I am unaware of? :P )

I’ve glued back the piece now, but I noticed that there are other crack lines on the plastic piece. So I wonder whether something will break off again…

(The actual Photo Friday pic is of course the first one… the scene looks prettier, and it has a better caption ;) )