Called to Wake

Well. It's nearly a month since the last post... and of course plenty has happened since then. Even if nothing had I would still be able to type for an hour about all the nothingness that had happened, and now I have three weeks to fill in. Not that I will, of course; but I might as well record some of the things that, hm, stand out more in my memory from the past month.

I suppose it would be a good idea to start from, let's say, about two weeks ago--the week before the Chinese New Year week-long holiday, since that was quite a time. So we'll start from that.

It wasn't a very good week; not many of the weeks preceding it had been good, either, since what with one thing and another it had always seemed like everything was a rush to get things together before the factory shut down for the week; and when your entire job scope revolves around future planning (and not very dependable a future either), having one week effectively rendered null and void is something of a handicap. The week was made slightly worse by the fact that family was coming to visit; not that the visit was a bad thing in itself, but there were a lot of things to be arranged that they hadn't, and so needed to get done on the fly. And as a result I was more or less deprived of transport that week, since they took the car to do their gallivanting, and so spent the entire week slightly sleep-deprived since I had to rely on coworkers to ferry me back and forth between house and office. And of course even before that there had been problems since the folks in So Hour didn't want to have to ferry the family around and wanted me to take leave off of work--with less than two days' notice when the normal procedure is a week--and got rather agitated when I refused. But that was worked around when the flight got diverted to KL due to morning mist, which was abnormally heavy all that week and only lasted that week. And what with rushing to get everything completed on Friday along with some rather desultory celebrations (a lucky draw and distribution of oranges) it wasn't a very nice Friday at all.

That work week ended on Friday evening, when I worked until nearly 8pm in something of a productivity frenzy (and because I had no way to get anywhere other than colleagues or public transport); eventually it ended when the parents arrived, having driven down from KL that afternoon, and fetched me from the factory to the house to pick up laundry and other necessities, and then we headed to the ancestral home, which we arrived at about two hours later, after making a detour or two to avoid the jam and consequently winding up on unfamiliar (to me) roads, which was a pity because my father was obviously tired, but I couldn't take over since the GPS was broken at the time--we found out later that it had simply gotten one of its ports messed up and a bit of tinkering with a safety pin fixed it, but that was later.

Chinese New Year was a haze of travelling and relatives and food and a toothache that began, I believe, on Tuesday and simply got worse over the next few days; not to say that I didn't have some good times, but more often there was a terrible throbbing in my lower right jaw and a sharp pain whenever I shut my mouth or bit into anything, and as a direct consequence I didn't have very much of an appetite for that entire period. An indirect consequence was that I was also constantly taking painkillers of various strengths and credibilities (I still have two sets of pills claiming to be traditional herbal extracts) and was constantly slightly doped--one of the people I met during that time told me that I seemed a very focused person, which may have had something to do with it being dinnertime--but one of the more major pleasant surprises I had was seeing that one set of my cousins have grown up, against all my expectations, into quite decent human beings--at least, for the time we spent in their house. I think I shall observe their future growth with interest. In meme-speak, faith in humanity RESTORED!

And now it's after Chinese New Year, and there's a lot to deal with; my tooth will undergo a root canal over the next few weeks, and I think I shall crown it for the sixfold improvement in prognosis, according to Wikipedia (for a total cost of about a thousand and six hundred), which will destroy nearly all my savings so far (despite my frugality, I never do manage to save up any amount worth consideration due to things like these); and what with the car needing repairs (an estimated three to four hundred, and that's just for the obvious things) and me needing new glasses (at the very least four hundred)... admittedly, my pay check comes in soon and I could pay for all of these if I live a little carefully and the Chinese New Year red packet money will help a little; but still, my life seems to be a great big ball of fixer-upper right now and certainly could do with a bit of toning down.

And I have an ulcer, too, caused by constantly over-favoring the toothache when I still had it; at least that I can deal with by application of salt water.