As you know, the girls want to learn to play the guitar and we’ve been wondering if they should try to learn it on their own or go for lessons. Well, we finally got them signed up for lessons after checking out two music schools.

The first school we went to is a very small store tucked away in a corner of a mall. They have music rooms in the back where they conduct lessons.

The lady was really nice and took the trouble to explain which class the girls should take.

Classical guitar involves mostly plucking (or was it picking?) which is more technical, and the electric guitar, well, it’s not for beginners.

With the acoustic guitar, the emphasis is on rhythm and chord and involves strumming. So it’s more suited to those who are learning for fun, for singing along to and as an accompaniment to other instruments.

I’m not sure if I got all this right but I think this is roughly what she said, just before I fell asleep on my feet, she was just going on and on.

The second school is a much larger store and much more established. But they seemed more interested in getting us to sign up than to answer our questions about which course would be more suited to beginners.

The old man, who strikes me as an overzealous money-face, kept shoving the registration forms in my face and trying to elicit a response from me in Mandarin.

I tried my darnest to look intelligent but I had no idea what he was blabbing about most of the time . Sadly Mandarin isn’t my forte.

But the choice was pretty clear even from the start. We picked the first school, hands down. It’s small, it’s personal and I liked that they explained things to us and helped us decide which class to take.

So here we are, all set for the big day - first day of class !

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After I picked Raine up after her exam ended at 9:30am Friday, we headed to the mall. Just her and me. We haven’t done this girls’ day out for quite a while now so it was kinda nice.

We had Auntie Anne’s Pretzels for breakfast. Of course, we chatted non-stop . That’s really the nice thing about going out with Raine. We have so much to talk about.

We did a bit of window-shopping since we had so much time to kill before going to pick Skye up from school. But we didn’t buy anything because we wanted to wait for Skye. It’s no fun shopping without Skye.

Just before we left the mall, Raine suggested we make black pepper lamb chops again since her Daddy missed this last weekend!

You know what’s been refreshingly different about this week-long school break?

We stayed home more than we went out. On a couple of days, we only went to the gym or out for a quick breakfast, came back and didn’t go out again. This is quite strange for us.

Part of it has to do with Raine’s exams which are coming up in a week so she needs to act busy and look like she’s studying really hard so her mom won’t get all jittery and worried .

The other part has to do with me trying to impress on the kids that with the weakening economy, we must all try to cut back and be more aware of our spending. A good real life lesson for them anyways.

So what have I been up to if we haven’t been going out? Yes, cooking up a storm in the kitchen. I cooked this big pot of chicken curry to go with bread or rice.

I also made different kinds of pasta and roast chicken with potatoes and salad. Recipes are on my food blog.

I like cooking without the rush which is not something I get to do very often. I’m always putting meals together in a hurry. So this laid-back cooking was kinda nice . We must do this more often.

Me and the kids were hangin’ out at Carl’s Jr this morning, mindin’ our own business when two people walked in. We looked at them and almost simultaneously went, “is that her husband or her son?”

Thing is I couldn’t tell. Neither could my kids. Strange how, for those first few moments when they walked in, all of us had that same question running through our minds.

Steev insists it’s her husband. Raine says it’s her son. Skye says it’s her son. And I say it’s her son. There was no way her husband could look so much like a kid. On the other hand, he could well have been someone blessed with boyish looks.

We argued back and forth as they walked back and forth refilling their drinks.

Husband, son, son, son. Husband, son, son, son!

Why don’t we go ask them, Skye suggested. Kids! But there was really no way to tell. We tried not to stare. We didn’t want to be rude.

They’re about the same height. He was wearing a t-shirt and khaki shorts, and sneakers with no socks. Standard casual garb for a teenager. Yet, grown men often dress like this too.

She was wearing a t-shirt and jeans with low heels, black-rimmed glasses and barely any makeup. She did the ordering and paying. They didn’t talk much. He just followed her around quietly like a puppy dog.

We still don’t know. It was none of our business but it kept us entertained all through lunch.

McDonald’s has two new flavors of McFlurry, Mudpie and Berries. Steev was standing in line to order.

The situation was quite chaotic at the takeout counter because the two servers were temps who didn’t have a clue how to handle lines.

Finally it was our turn.

Server (signaling to Steev): Yes?

Steev (pointing to signboard): McFlurry, one of each.

Server (leaning across counter): Yes?

Steev (pointing to signboard): McFlurry, one of each.

Server: What flavor?

Steev: One of each.

By now, it’s quite obvious this very simple expression is lost on our two teenaged servers (one of the girls goes to Raine’s school)!!

Me: One Mudpie, one Berries.

That’s what they needed to hear! The exact words. No phrases, expressions or indirect references please!

And people are still fighting for less English to be used in the school curriculum!

I ran into a whole bunch of my tai-tai (aka ladies of leisure) friends while out at breakfast with my girl friend (who is not a tai-tai).

I love my tai-tai friends. They’re the ones who can tell me where to get the freshest veggies, how to brew herbal soups,  how to spy on my hubby (think I’ll wait for the book) and they can make the darnest traditional Chinese stuff like bachang (glutinous rice dumplings) and mooncakes, all from scratch.

The thing that really scares me though are their organized home invasions visits when they go through my home inch by inch, flipping every drawer and cupboard, inspecting everything that’s inside, from my crockpot to my underwear, all without a search warrant.

Back to me bumping into them at breakfast. A few of them instantly pounced on me and started interrogating me as to how I’ve managed to stay so slim even after I quit dancing (I used to be in the same dance class). As if I was ever fat before ?

But never mind that, the machine gun fire of questions has started and they’ll never let me off without answers. So I’d better start coughing some up, pronto.

So how come you’re still so slim? Um, exercise. What kind of exercise? Um, I walk. Where? Morning or evening? How many kilometers? With your kids or alone? Bang, bang, bang *shielding my head*

Gimme a break, is this the Spanish Inquisition? So many questions, so much rhetoric! *squirm* Think I should take up jogging or kungfu instead.

Over the weekend, we went to watch 2 kiddy movies, Wall-E and Star Wars. But only because we got free tickets which we weren’t allowed to give away and we didn’t want the tickets to go to waste.

So we might as well go for the hot dogs and popcorn and free aircon while hoping we might be a little entertained even if it’s just a little.

But when we got there, we were starting to get the idea that maybe, just maybe there was no one there above the age of 6 except us (and the parents, of course) !!

But who cares? I, for one, have always been a kid at heart. My kids too luckily. Although the movies were rather boring, there were a few scenes where we got some good laughs. And as we were leaving, we noticed there were actually quite a number of young-at-heart adults there as well.

It’s been a while since we went to the beach. It’s funny but the times we went to Penang for the holidays, we hardly went to the beach at all. We did more eating and shopping than bumming around on the beach .

We’re not really the types who can sit around and relax and do nothing, which is technically what vacations are supposed to be for in the first place.

But next time, I’ll try and see how well I do in ‘real’ vacation mode. I’ll grab a Beach Chair and a good book (but wait, I’m going to need a bikini to go with that) and park myself on the beach and see how long I can last before I bore myself silly !!

Like I say, sometimes you need a weekend to recover from a weekend. Well, this is exactly how I feel right now. But of course, this also means we had one blast of a weekend.

You know how we sometimes try to plan a truly family sort of weekend without someone getting uptight about impending school exams or having to sacrifice being somewhere else. Well, this weekend fell together just like a jigsaw puzzle.

First stop was the food court at Suria. This is one of the few food courts we actually like liked because it’s clean and the food is was pretty good. Well, it’s still clean but the standard of the food has dropped tremendously. Yes, even my camera lost its appetite, so no photos.

The nasi lemak lady was hostile and purposely chose the smallest pieces of chicken and omelette for us. The chicken was probably raised in a gym because it tasted like chewy muscles. DH had mushed up chee cheong fun (flat rice noodles) in curry. Raine had the beef ball noodle soup that had no taste of beef at all while Steev’s pizza was expensive but so small he finished it in a couple of mouthfuls. In fact, I never even saw his pizza. He was done by the time I came back with the nasi lemak.

Next stop, the PC Fair so the girls could buy their headphones. You know what a ridiculous sardine can of a place that is. You can’t see anything except for people’s heads and a few scantily-clad la-la girls shoving brochures in your face. Whoever thought of this grossly ineffective marketing gimmick is completely missing the point. The guys are more interested in getting their hands on the cheapest piece of computer equipment than that poor anorexic girl in the knee-high boots, brother!

After 2 hours in that stuffy place with hardly any air-con, I had developed a throbbing headache so Skye and I called it quits and headed for Suria to find a cool place to sit down.

We grabbed a cup of Kaffeefrosten and 3 bagels at Vienna Bagels. I took some photos of it with my new PDA phone but later discovered I’d had the video function turned on the whole time. Duh! So I have nothing to show for our little bagel escapade either. It sure wasn’t my day for photos.

Good morning *stretch*. I can’t believe I’ve been up all night blogging non-stop . Yes, I’m still up at 4:30 am blogging for charity. At Day of Blogs 2008, I have to blog every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. No breaks. No rest.

But it’s all for a good cause so I don’t mind. In fact, Raine (aged 16), Skye (12) and me had lots of fun laughing away and making a lot of noise last night. The girls have gone to bed but they’ll be up soon to make breakfast. We’ll be blogging kinda in shifts.

Last night, we made a half-hearted attempt to go to the Daughtry jamming session at 1 Utama. Well, we hadn’t really planned to go. And besides, we had to start our blogging marathon at 9:00 pm. So we dropped in after dinner to see what’s up.

But when we saw the smokers and the whole polluted atmosphere and the rain, we decided to give it a miss. No big deal. We’re not that crazy about Daughtry anyways. Okay, I got to go wake the girls up. I’m seriously hungry here . Haven’t eaten since dinner.