It's a...

BOY!!!!

It's a boy... 

Work, work, work...

I started working on this kid that came by for reasons whereby it's not good to disclose, but we took this guy in and we're trying our best to help him. And thus, my teaching career had just officially started about a few hours ago. 

I guess you really find satisfaction when you can help someone improve in their pursuit of knowledge. Just that, not everyon willingly wants to be your student. 

For the past few hours, all that was on my mind was, how to teach difficult students, especially if they're grouped into a whole classroom. One-to-one is easy. You can monitor every move he makes and correct his mistakes as he goes along. But what if an entire class of uninterested students were grouped together?

Well, that's one for the new year...

Meanwhile, eat while you can, sleep while you can, have fun while you can... The year of the ox seems to bring rather difficult times ahead. 

Life's short. Play hard...

Don't say we didn't...

I guess it's about time we let you guys in on our lives here in Tawau...

Since we're still in our half-way-house, we decided to leave everything in boxes. What we didn't expect was a couple of weeks turned into a couple of months, and a couple of months nearly took us to half a year. Yes, we've been her since September last year and we can only foresee a move in March. That's how long we're gonna stay in this half-way-house and live out of boxes.

For those who say I don't put up photos... 

This is our only form of entertainment. It's what we surf the internet with, watch sappy HongKong series, play MS Hearts and MS Freecell.
That's our loot. What we've been using daily has been extracted and hung onto the cupboards. It's not that the apartment is not decent, it just the temporary-ness of it all that's bugging us.
And this is what I usually do when the wife is on the pc.

So, that's how we've been living, surviving for the past 3 months.

Happy New Year...

Better... I hope...

We went to see another house, bigger, and definately better. The owner is a church member and he's agreed to do up the house for us. It's better designed than the previousone that we looked at, and if the owner delivers everything he promised, it'll be perfect for us to stay in. 

It's near a park, so it's not cramped up in amidst of other houses, at least the air will be fresher. The owner will renovate the house a bit, making a proper kitchen top and expanding the back with a roof whilst sealing most of the ground with cement. We'll only have a little bit of earth to grow small herbs at the back, and that makes the place a lot more managable. 

The rooms are just big enough, instead of the miserly rooms that we saw in the previous house, and the kitchen is rather huge. I can see that I'll be able to do up the house pretty nicely and hopefully, we won't need to move within the next 5 years or more. 

Ultimately, we hope to buy a house around the area so that at least, we will own something at the end of our lives instead of helping other people pay their installments, we might as well pay our own installments. But then, of course, life isn't up to us to dictate. Maybe God has His better plans. 

Now with Jr. coming out, we still don't know if it's a boy or a girl, we can't see ourselves committing to buying a second house as the one we have in Sunway needs quite a fair bit of managing financially. 

The wife has been settling down better now, and seems that she's taking up cooking as her past-time. Tummy's fairly big right now and it's amazing to see baby grow inside. Hopefully we'll be able to see if it's a boy or a girl when we visit the doctor's for our monthly check-up.

As far as work is concerned, everything's slowing down in view that we won't be able to start the school anytime soon, and anything after March is not conducive as the students would have to take their mid-year exams in May. So, even if we get anything at all from the Govt, we'll probably start in the second half of the year. 

Morale has dipped a fair bit since whatever we were rushing for now has passed and we're just settling down on doing the best we can to finish up whatever administration work that we need to prepare for a possible intake in June. 

I guess we're stuck in between things right now, and hopefully we will be able to pick up again after Chinese New Year. Last year, we didn't celebrate CNY because we didn't go back to our hometown, but this year, we hope to have some fun and excitement especially with the imminent coming of baby. It'll be weird giving out angpaus to our cousins, but I guess we'll need to get used to it. 

'Til then, if you're going to back Sandakan for CNY, give me a call...

It's just amazing...

Life is just amazing. 

The twists and turns that in turnb affect you positively and negatively are so drastic and most of the time dramatic. 

I figured that it'll do my blog no good if I continue to rant about my current predicament, which, if you still haven't guessed, is still not changing. But then, I start to feel a change in heart. It is as if suddenly, the complaints were gone, and the urge to make the most of what I have now comes.

Yes, I still live in a temporary apartment, I am still not settled, the school is still not starting, my wife is still pretty much pregnant, and we have nothing solid to base our short term plans on.

But then, suddenly, out of no where, I kind of see life through a somewhat lighter light. I am suddenly willingly cleaning the apartment, I am suddenly able to wash my clothes everyday (still by hand) and I am surviving without a tv. 

Friends are really hard to come by in this town, being one of the VERY few couples under 30 years old and English speaking. So in that sense, we are still finding it difficult. 

Church will still need a bit of getting used to, the way they do things around here is so different from what we are used to that I realise that it is indeed not easy to lead a life of being 'on-call'. I found out that although my powers of adaptibility were high, but I still missed quite a few things. 

I went to take a look at a prospective house that would be our little nesting place for our new family, and only after that reality struck me, that we have spent so much time and effort in building up our little nest in the minuscule apartment that we used to live in Sunway that now, we seem to not be able to live without the comforts of home. We have found out that Sunway was our home because we've spent so much time doing-up the place and we were so comfortable. Makes me pity the kids who have parents travelling from town to town in the course of earning their keep. 

And now I finally understand why people who get trransfered a lot spend so much time and effort to pack with them their photographs and memorabilia. It helps them make their new home feel like home. 

As for me and my house, it's going to be a good few years of re-building a little nest and hopefully, we won't need to move.