Friday, July 23, 2010

Lapping It Up


I received my company-ordered laptop today after a two-day delay from it's delivery date.

It's a bittersweet feeling of sorts.

One one hand, I have a totally new toy... A new i5 motherboard laptop instead of a "hand-me-down" that runs blazingly fast when compared to my old Pentium 4 desktop.

Over the many years, my desktop has developed a mind of its own, like Skynet, being self-aware in Terminator. It reboots at it's own whim and crashing some particularly an application that is crucial to my well-being at work.

So I've developed a CTRL-S trigger finger whenever I do my spreadsheets and stuff. I'd have to save it consistently while working on it to avoid the changes and updates done so far being wiped out and ending up redoing it all over again.


One the other hand, the laptop being a company's asset, I'm not at liberty to install the applications that I fancy and those that should be a given... "only authorized applications allowed." So I have a new toy but with oh, so old games.

Most of all, it being portable means I have to lug it around to and from work and eliminates my chance to state a standard reply of "I'll get right on it once I am back at the office" when I receive adhoc, work-related queries on weekends.

Staying positive, it should not hanker me down so much because, thus far, it has not been often to receive "work" on weekends; when time is dedicated to spending with my precious Wifey and Sonny as far as my priorities are concern.

On that note, staying positive still, I'll use that extra weight of two kilograms or so to do my cardio when I climb up the stairs to my fourth floor office, five times a week.

Well, I will be very busy these coming few days where I have to migrate all the work stuff from the desktop to this laptop.

IT will configure it to the work domain and install all the work applications like SAP and corporate anti-virus and then I'll be all set... Open for business, as usual.

Monday, July 19, 2010

One Moon Hiatus


It has been over a month since my last post.

I felt guilty for not updating, even more so for not blog-surfing to the places I have always been a regular visitor at.

I know I had to at least update something on my blog, just to tell those that do come in that I am alright and that I am just too swamped with so many things that I do not have enough time to do the things that I like and have always been doing... to blog and read blogs.

I am glad that I get some genuinely concerns about my well-being but I do however, apologize for the dead-silence, the non-activity all this while.

Strangely enough, I have been blogging... but offline. I wrote many posts on my iPhone Note application while I travelled to and from work this past month. Only thing is, I did not have time or simply the energy left to switch on my iMac and post them.


Believe me, the name of my blog and the slogan "picture-book" it has, have many pictures that come with the posts that I have written... I just could not find time to merge them together fast enough to post on the same day or two after I wrote my journal; however mundane or insignificant they are.

I dragged the time from one post to another, and before I know it, it has been a month since my last... I lost track of time... between work, family, my Mom and my health, I was left with none for blogging. Sigh.

I have just recovered from a bad case of flu... headache, migraine, stress, lost. Yes, I was lost for some reason. Lost as in "what the hell was I sick from!"

The doctor said I was not having flu, though the whole of my body ached. My head was throbbing and my nape was stiff and painful, but my blood pressure was normal when he checked it!


All the sickness I was feeling was intangible! Nothing to show the doctor that I was indeed in pain... except for the three large ulcers in my mouth that I am still nursing. All three, under and on the left of my tongue. The only thing that was showing for the doctor.

This has been the worst mouth ulcers I have ever experienced. It was so painful that my right ear became tender to the touch. I had lumps formed under the jawline that were tender and the tenderness stretched all the way down to my neck around the throat area.

I could not talk and screamed silently in pain whenever I drank or eat. I was on medical leave for a day and was high on Pacofen painkillers for the next three days. Till today, I am numbing my ulcers with Orased Jel before meal times.

Last weekend was the worst of weekends. I broke the record of not touching my iMac. Instead, I was in a daze for the most part of the day and night after taken my cough medicines and painkillers. It was not a pretty sight.

I braved a grocery shopping with Wifey late Saturday afternoon, I just had to get out of the house to make my weekend worthy for me but spent most of the time seated on the bench waiting for her to come back and forth, like a busy bee to its hive. Poor Wifey! She had to do all that shopping while I gave some burst of manly energy to carry the load up the bus and up to our home, where I laid flat once again and into oblivion.


Now I will have to tweak my posts because I have to backdate them... or do I? We will see.

I have to post them because they are fond memories of the good things that have happened to me and my family through the course of this past month, like our birthdays and the celebrations, our first Jasmine blooms, my first Tommy Hilfiger, our Kranji Nature Walk and many other stuff... for posterity, maybe.

Thank you SisStar Kylita and Rhiannon for coming by and giving me some energy to jolt my blog back into life.