Quiet Tuesday morning with only laughter and soft music dancing with the smell of coffee and fresh waffles.

At one of our favourite hangouts, and we brought (our) girls.

This is one of the photos Azmina used for her project -- which I was supposed to help her with.

N ended up doing a lot of the work since I made an error in the layout, and had to go away before I realised my mistake.

The kids are done for the year. No more school till January.

Taking leave soon. Will seek awesome.

Taken by a friend, 1 March 2009.

27.09.2009

I seldom have time during traveling to visit the shops. Luckily most airports have good selections of chocolates. They're not the best, but better than most supermarkets. The trouble is, most times I carry a bag that's just big enough to hold my notebook and my papers. And that bag isn't designed much of anything else.

Most times when I get home, I'll only have a piece... They're reserved for my loves. I prefer to watch them in their pretty little dresses, in quiet contemplation, talking about which piece to have next, as if it were a game of chess where no one loses.

She never told me who it was.

Now, they each have their own -- from their savings.

I told R that Lana Zaheerah would lead me out of hiatus. It took me a while -- her birthday was four weeks ago.

Happy Birthday Lana.

You sure know how to party. We should do something together for New Year's.

Austen wrote, "Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken."

Omission of words, a voice with a tone misguided, laughs that hide inconsolable sadness – they all disguise. But then there are smiles from the heart, and sighs that tell whole paragraphs…

How lucky we are to have someone from whom radiate little streams of truth, and with whom we share hope, expectations and uncertainties.

And above all else, love.

P, a friend of nearly 20 years, shared a house with four other close friends. They kept everything so tidy that I had to re-adjust my standards every time I stayed over. They scoff at the oh-so-very-clichéd ‘are you a teenager?’ theory of ‘organised chaos’. Square lines were always in parallel, or at an angle both logical and or in harmony with the qi of the house.

It was therefore illogical to lose something in the house. Being the scientists we were, everything had to be explained through theories. Being cult movie fans that we were, those theories weren’t always confined to the realms of science. P’s theory for items suddenly went missing and mysteriously reappearing was that little green men (not those ones with claws, red eyes and evil intent) had to borrow certain mugs, hairbrushes, books, microphones(!) for various reasons. Perhaps they needed an urgent hypersonic karaoke session, or perhaps they were just disorganized that they kept losing their own stuff. Those items were then duly returned when they found their own. The green men lived in another dimension and entered through small portals that appeared under beds at times when the air was still, when heartbeats were faint and the house unrealistically neat.

P’s Green Man theory withstood more challenges than the other flawed theories put forward over the years by different members of the household… and different green men continue to haunt our lives to this day.