Our easter break

The golf season has begun

The golf season has begun

This is a late entry. I was supposed to post this last sunday but it got holed up on my wife's Ipad but had trouble figuring out how to post it on my blog. No excuse for my ignorance...

This morning waking up, I had this terrible pain on all of my joints from my knees, ankles and down to my toes. I had a round of golf yesterday for the first time in a very long time. As the golf season has just begun after the winter lull, I was actually looking forward to this game when one my ambassador friends invited me to join him with some others. Not to feel embarrassed by the prospect of having to play the game with a respectable crowd, I actually went to a driving range practising the golf swing a couple of times before yesterday trying to remember how golf was supposed to be played. With more than 6 months or so without touching any golf club, it did feel like I just got up from a very long comatose when I tried to swing the clubs. The muscles were just too stiff and the knees very wobbly which if you ask any golfer, not a very good thing. But the point about golf and diplomacy is if someone respectable invited you to join the crowd, you should feel very honoured as there is more to it than just the game. Diplomats often use golf to establish friendship and to discuss things in a more informal and cordial environment. After all you don't wear a three piece suit to a golf course with a gamut of entourage that follows you from behind. So I went ahead knowing full well that I wouldn't return a respectable score. With little exercise before this, walking more than 7 kilometres up and down the hilly fairways felt like the london marathon. The golf course was a walking course up and down on the hill side in a place called Bonmont about 25 Kms from Geneva. It is a beuatiful course overlooking lake Geneva which on a sunny day you can actually see Mont Blanc in the horizon.

My usual macho gait didn't quite hide the pains I had all over. I do feel like a hobbling pensioner with backbone arthritis jerkily making his way downstairs with a permanent expression of misery which is my way of telling mrs and the kids that dad's golf season has just begun...

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What your wallet says about you

Lake Geneva

Today is the first day when we have to change our clock forward to mark the end of winter and welcome the spring. The weather is a perfect 18 c with lots of sunshine.

So as usual our sunday outing is to head to the lake for a picnic...

Simple thinking

Simple thinking

History has shown that the best inventions are usually the result of simple thinking. Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably used a Post-it at least once in your life. Those handy little sticky notes actually started as a failed adhesive at 3M - the glue wasn't sticky enough. 3M's Arthur Fry began using the glue to add removable sticky notes to his reports, and fellow employees quickly started requesting them for their own use. There was also another anecdotal story that went around some years ago that NASA the US Space Agency whose annual budget surpasses many nations' spent millions of dollars trying to develop a pen that could work in zero gravity in outer space. Whilst the NASA crackerjacks were busy cracking their heads trying to figure out the solution, the Russians simply gave their cosmonauts the ordinary lead pencil that you could purchase in any stationery shops! Now whether there is a shred of truth in this story, I will leave you to figure it out but I wanted to get my point across that sometimes in life or at work, a solution for a seemingly complex issue would simply just require a simple thinking.

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14 February

14 February
Today is the third day my wife spends her night at the hospital and I am already missing her so much. I guess when people say, absence makes the heart grows fonder, it actually tells you that the person you really love is always in front of you and you will be reminded on how much she means to you if she is absent from your sight.

Last monday, mrs had to undergo a surgery to remove her gallbladder which since we came to Geneva was amongst the hardest decisions that we had to make. When she was diagnosed to have a cyst growth in her gallbladder more than a year ago, we had been monitoring on its growth in the hope that it stopped from growing. Unfortunately just before we came here, the specialist doctor at Bungrungrad, Bangkok whom we had the opportunity to meet for a second opinion advised us that the cyst was growing and advised us to remove it through a procedure known as laparoscopy or a key hole surgery. This was supposed to be a less invasive form of modern surgery. The cyst growth we were told could be cancerous if it went beyond one cm in size. But this was based on statistics and there was no way of knowing if it was cancerous or not without taking the gallbladder out as the cyst growth was inside this organ. I actually wanted my wife to do it much earlier before we came to Geneva but I got the transfer order with little choice but to delay the decision. The specialist informed us that we could perform the surgery in Switzerland as this country has amongst the best hospitals and surgeons anywhere in the world. It was three months before mrs finally took the scalpel partly because we couldn't settle down as the house hunting and registering the kids at school took us awhile and our whole container load of stuff from our previous posting did not arrive until after the new year. And of course this was made even harder as we were not able to have any maid to take care of the kids when my wife was expected to spend a couple of days at the hospital. As a minimum wage for a maid as required by Swiss law here is around chf 2600, there was no way we could afford it. So we had to decide that the best solution was for the surgery to take place when the kids were having their first break of the year when they would be at home taking care of each other. Of course daddy will now have to play the role as the supermum the kind of role that mrs has been doing over these years whose chores include preparing breakfast, dinner and tucking haziq into bed. Fortunately enough Afiqah my second daughter is already big enough to help out. Today she prepared nasi goreng for dinner as I arrived late from visiting mrs. It was tasty and I complemented her.

Absence does make the heart grow fonder and I cant wait for the supermum to come home. I love you sayang. We all wish you for a speedy recovery. Amin.

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