TERENGGANU SNAPSHOTS

It is nearly 4 am in the morning. My pc is acting up again and I have to spend a lot of time cleaning, replacing and restoring stuffs. In place of a decent post (I have posted indecent stuffs in the past) I give you a short Flash slide show of the snapshots I took in Terengganu recently. I have not mastered the art of photography yet so I would not call the shots photographs. I should start persuading TV Smith to be my sifu.
The background music is Inang Rodat by Habsah Jusoh, in Terengganuspeak, of course.
Click here for the slide show.

MYSTERY OF THE MISSING MOLAR

The Last of The Molar in my mouth had been a little loose for the last few months. It went wobbly during the fasting month. Being a die hard procrastinator, I naturally put off the date with a dentist with the excuse of not wanting to disrupt my puasa.

The molar was mercifully benign. It did not give me any pain or discomfort until a few weeks ago. It began to give trouble when it was bitten by one of the other tooth while I was enjoying the fried senangin smothered in Thai chilli paste in Thai Corner, PJ. I still put off going to the dentist, managing the tooth by liberal doses of Oradex. By now, the molar was hanging by a thread.

When I was brushing my remaining teeth this morning, I noticed that the offending molar was gone. There was no wound on the gum. I checked my pillow to see if it had fallen off during my sleep. I could not find any tooth let alone any evidence of the tooth fairy.

Now I have to call Pak Daud and cancel my appointment with the Kuala Terengganu dentist (I get a discount there and their overheads are lower) but I have this nagging feeling that I have swallowed the tooth.

I hope no one x-ray my stomach in the few days to come. They might be shocked to find a tooth there.

HARD HEADED WOMAN

If you ladies think you are hard-headed, see if you can beat this.

While you are perusing that remarkable news, I am on my way to Kuala Terengganu via the LCCT. It will be my first time at LCCT. What to do, times are hard.
I am also trying Best Western Suria Resort for the first time too. I have my mother's house nearby but the house does not have hot shower and my mother is no longer there. My old bones work well with hot showers, especially early in the morning. After dispensing with my business in Kampong Raja on Tuesday, I would probably move on to Kuala Terengganu until my flight back Thursday evening. Hotels in Kuala Terengganu are doing a roaring business it seems. I cannot get a room online. Are the groupies of the Monsoon Cup checking in early?
I just hope that the weather in Kuala Terengganu is much better than KL's. I hope to bring home some nice snapshots.

UNDER THE CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES

The current hot news together with the attendant speculations (and sometimes conclusions) by newspapers and bloggers made me think of a fable I read a long time ago when I was in Sekolah Melayu Paya Bunga, Kuala Terengganu.
Since I cannot remember the exact words of the story, I will give you my version of the story( artistic license used) with the salient points intact:

A village lady left her baby under the watchful eyes of her trusty and intelligent pet cat.
When she came back later, she was shocked to find the baby bloodied and dead. The cat was beside the baby, its face covered with blood. Her grief quickly turned to monumental fury and she killed the cat with her bare hands.
Much later, when she was cleaning the room, she found a dead snake. The snake was mangled by bite and scratch marks. She was stunned by the realization and later by a very deep remorse. She knew now that it was the snake that attacked her baby and her cat must have killed the snake.

Circumstantial evidence made the trusted pussy dead. Things are not always what they seem. Sooner or later, the truth will be known.

GLOOMY DAYS

This was what I saw when I looked out from my balcony this afternoon. It was about the same yesterday and on Sunday when Wan SK and I were marooned at Amcorp Mall for several hours. We could not get to my car because of the downpour.

In spite of all this much water falling down on KL, we still have to pay more beginning this month. Now I wish I was back in Merang where cool water from our telaga is free. Wishful thinking aside, I have to face the fact that I have to pay more for water. I am thankful that my backside is not that big and washing it is not as expensive as a sofa-size behind.

With rain came floods. Even in modern Kuala Lumpur, our streets are flooded with each heavy downpour. I must ask my fellow Terengganunese engineer Tan Sri Wan A. whether our engineers designed our streets with the Malaysian weather in mind. To be fair, the Federal Highway in front of my place was built by the Koreans. It got flooded after the rain too. Maybe we should blame the DID people for the clogged drains and rivers. They in turn would blame us for throwing everything, from illegitimate babies to inedible plastic bags into the drain and rivers.

Whatever it is, the days are gloomy. In Terengganu, days like these come with the monsoon. Museng kuala katop (the season when the river mouth is closed.) Some river mouth physically close with the shifting sand. Most would not be navigable. The cure for gloomy days like these would be to pull out some ubi kayu (tapioca, cassava) and roast them and enjoy them with some freshly grated coconut. Throw in some thick black kopi o (preferably kopi deka) and you can forget about the weather. The thing is, there are no ubi kayu within grabbing distance. Even if there are some, they won't taste as good microwaved.