Too Close For Comfort…

Hi Coffee-O,

Remember my excitement over my cosy little house – a ground floor unit condo opening out to the garden that I had just moved into in August last year? Well, my excitement was short-lived thanks to my pesky neighbours. My neighbours (a “married” couple with no kids) moved in a month before me.

Let me briefly explain and give you some background. My encounter with my neighbours started out with niceties and some pleasant exchanges of words. But that was soon to change. Soon we found my neighbours infringing into our privacy and stepping beyond the boundaries of a condo-dweller. How?

· Although they have 2 clothes drying racks of their own, somehow they still see the need to use mine. Guess what they hang on my clothes rack….their underwear and boxer shorts. Yuck!
· My neighbour’s wife (let’s call her A – sounds like a Dear Thelma column now) A loves decorating. So she took it upon herself to decorate the common area outside our apartment with her Balinese style deco. I soon had a praying Buddha statue, ducks, birds, bird’s nests, peacock’s feathers, “labu” pots, teak divan, a large round rug, a coffee table, artificial flower pots and vases donning the outside of my entrance, common area and banister. For a moment I thought I had entered the wrong block. (Couldn’t recognise my house). I was so cheesed off I told her to stop decorating my area.
· Apparently her house does not get enough sunlight so there’s some damp spots and fungus. So she decides to check if I have them too by opening my shoe cupboard and running an inspection of all my shoes. How nosey can one get?
· Then for Christmas she hangs a Christmas wreath on the door with real apples stuck on it. So by the time Christmas was over you can imagine what happened to those apples – they rotted and attracted fruit flies.
· Then she lined the common staircase with flora and fauna compliments from her and her hubby. That ticked the other neighbours off and the condo management told her to remove it as it posed an obstruction to elderly folk who need the support of the banister to get up and down the stairs.
· By the way she hangs her laundry out to dry in my front lawn directly in front of my master bedroom windows (although she has a bigger lawn space in front of her house). So on Saturday mornings I wake up to the smell of her freshly laundered underwear.
· Now for her latest antics – she turns on her burglar alarm when she goes to work and everyday without fail the alarm is triggered twice. So much so that policemen on the main road conducting roadblocks ticked the building manager off about her screaming alarm. They conveyed the message to A and her hubby, so they switched it off for sometime but now its back in business, screaming at least twice a day.

Sigh…॥ that’s why I always say that my life’s full of drama EVERYDAY। Call me anti-social but my neighbour really erks me out. So much for neighbourliness.

Missy Red

The boys and girls come out to play

When the boss is not around?

A) Do the mice come out to play
B) Take MC
C) Work harder

D) Sacrifice a lamb and give thanks!

Answers:
the smaller boss picked B

the others picked D

Mind your language

Have you gone for an English class as an adult?

I have! And I had thoroughly enjoyed it just because it was competitive! Yeah I know, so kiasu right - but hey I'm attending an ENGLISH class for adults alright! It's got to make me feel the very least interested!

So, what did I get out of that session, really?

Well this can’t seem to leave my head.It cracks me up whenever I think of it.

One fine day on an airplane, the passengers were served fishballs. As part of the air stewardess's job, she had to bend down to maintain eye level with the passenger who so happened to be a 'mat salleh', to ask him which sauce he preferred to go with the fishballs.

This was how she asked while looking intensely into his eyes “Sir, may I sauce your balls?”

She lost her job the next day. Mind you it’s a true story.

“Little Jack Honor” Put In His Thumb and Pulled Out A Pink Bag

Hi Coffee-O,

Seven months ago, I bought an interesting looking handbag at Central Market for a mere RM35. It looked kind of trendy and compact, so I thought that it would be nice and handy to have. However, I forgot that I haven’t been having much luck with handbags lately. Before I got this one, I had a nice trendy black one which was on 70 percent discount. Considering the price of the bag was almost RM200 before the discount, I figured that I had myself a deal of a lifetime. Unfortunately after just 1 month, one of the handle rings got busted. I thought I could put up with it, but the following month, the other handle ring busted. So I had TWO busted handle rings and one beautiful bag. It really HURTS, to even think about it now!

Then I got the RM35 bag from Central Market, however, I guess bag handles and I don’t really get along well. This one also got busted after seven months. At least the RM35 lasted for seven months! In the light of that, I’ve been carrying around a bright pink handbag to work. How did that happen? When my bag handle broke, I was getting ready for work and my little toddler was asleep in the room, hence not to wake her up I groped around the cupboard in the dark and pulled out my little pink “plum” bag. So it had to do!

Reminds me of how “Little Jack Honor sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie, he put in his thumb and pulled out a plumb and said what a good boy am I.”

Today, I bought myself another cheapo bag for RM33. Sigh….I guess I still haven’t learnt my lesson with cheap handbags. Well at least this gives me an opportunity to change handbags every few months. Don’t know which is worse….spending a couple of hundred ringgit and getting a branded handbag which will last me 3 years or going with all these cheapo fashionable bags. Anyway like I said, I need an excuse to change handbags…. and some what penny wise pound foolish as well.

Missy Red

Who Says Toilet Bowls Can’t Be Recycled?

Hi Coffee-O,

I have been busy, or rather in a frenzy with the renovations in my house. By the way, I am renovating my bathroom and skim coating my living room walls. Why am I doing that? Ok let me get into some background info here for you.

When I bought the house I didn’t notice that the ninkampoop (is that how you spell it?) who owned it before me sandblasted the whole house with oil-based paint. So good ol’ me bought the house and planned to happily give it a new coat of paint and move in. However, when I got the keys and looked at the house again, this time in more detail, I noticed the sandblasting and boy, oh, boy have I had hell with it since then. First, my husband and I thought we can be DIY heroes and scrap off the sandblasting. We only managed to do the living room and got sick after that. Then we painted the wall but soon to our horror we noticed the walls resembled somebody with a bad case of acne. It was riddled with holes, scrapes, scars and dents. So we called several contactors to quote us on skimming work and opened ourselves up to cut throat prices.

Anyway, my mother in law recommended her contractor, to not only skim my house but also renovate my bathroom. However, I soon learned that the guy worked really slowly and tried to get my maid to elope with him. However, wonder maid turned down his advances – lucky for me. He managed to finish the one-day skimming job in five days and painted my living room. Ok, I got to admit it – he did a good job of the skimming although it was at snail’s pace.

Now let’s get to my bathroom, he ripped the bathroom apart and left it like that for 5 days – by the way it’s still bare and unusable. Then he tells us he’s not sure on fixing the plumbing and wants to charge us more for the job since it’s a big bathroom. Sometimes, I think he’s scheming with my mother-in-law to rip me off and share the loot with her.

Ok, on that note, my mother-in-law asked me if she can have my old toilet bowl and sink. I cannot fathom for the life of me how she could ask for somebody else’s poo stained toilet bowl and stained 18-year old sink. By the way my house is 18 years old! She said it can be disinfected and used in her house. She’s going to get this guy to install it for her there. She was adamant about having it even after my husband told her that more than a hundred people would have pooped in that bowl over a span of 18 years.

So ladies and gentlemen, toilet bowls can also be RE-CYCLED!

Anyway, I am going to give this guy the sack since he did not complete my bathroom and seems pretty unsure about the plumbing. Somebody pleaaaasssseee remind me never to listen to my mother-in-law again. So I am on the look out for a contractor now to fix my toilet.

If that’s not all, I also found out that my toilet is non-standard. Toilet bowls go by 10,11 or 12 inches in measurement but mine is 21 inches. Is this a test from above? I can only get one type of toilet bowl from this company called Econax, which I had to order.

Now I am afraid to renovate any other portion of my house, lest I find something odd again.

I’ll be back with part 2 of my renovation story.

Ciao!

Missy Red.

Got cheek to take!

Dear readers,

The other day, both MissyRed and I decided to have lunch at Secret Recipe and so we had lunch there. (haha I like this sentence)

The waitress gave us a cup of water each followed by our main course. Then MissyRed got a call - she was asked to do a favor. Well what kinda favor? ala you know those bulan puasa kind of favors tak kira from Adam (hehehe) or Hawa. Anyway this is not the crux of the story :)

To continue, we ate, chatted and ate till we were ready to go. So we got up and headed for the cake counter. While selecting which cake to take-away, MissyRed noticed she didn’t have her purple phone with her, so she quickly sped off to the table to check – I’ve not seen her dash off so fast! Literally at the speed of lightning!

The table was occupied.

Within 3 minutes the table was occupied.

a) Really good business at Secret Recipe

b) Secret Recipe’s staff is super efficient in clearing the table

c) There was an early Raya gift lying on the table

We looked high and low for her purple phone but to no avail.

We asked the waiters.

We asked the staff at the cashier.

We called the phone to see if it’s ringing. It was! but we couldn’t here it ringing – the place was quite noisy with the afternoon crowd coming in for lunch. AND NOBODY ANSWERED the call.

We went back to the table and uplift the cushion padding to check.

We searched the floor.

We just couldn’t find it.

So now where can her purple phone be?

We went back to the office.

Called the phone again. It was still ringing.

After 1 hour. The call went into voice mail.

So who took the purple phone? Shoot the bugger!

This post is written in remembrance of MissyRed’s purple phone - Sayonara

pinky and the brain

Dear Missy Red,

I don’t know why this song is stuck in my head. Probably it’s because of this situation I’m facing at the moment with two dumb idiots – which the song appropriately describes the two characters as “ one is an idiot, the other insane”.

Help me!

Need a cuppa coffee now