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My dad spends most of his days hanging out at the shopping mall with his old cronies. I guess for seniors, it’s a pretty cool place to meet up with friends, chit-chat over lunch or tea, walk around and window-shop a little bit and call it a great day out.

And of course, what’s a few hours of idle chit-chat without recounting the old days and how much things have changed. Gone are the days of buying medicines and medical supplies from the pharmacy miles away. There’s the convenience of online shopping and products like kendall briefs which didn’t exist then.

Well, it’s all in a day’s “work” for my dad and his friends. Sometimes I run into them when I’m out shopping and it’s great to see them all happily chatting away .

At our cousin’s wedding recently, one of Hip2bDad’s aunts took one look at me and lamented loudly, “You’ve lost so much weight, my dear!”

Have I? Really? That was Friday night at the bride’s open house and it got me wondering about that scale at the gym, hmmph!

Then on Saturday morning, another aunt came up while I was talking to a cousin about what garden pond filter he uses, held me at arm’s length and exclaimed, “Oh, you look so much better now that you’ve gained weight!”

Have I? Really? I hadn’t noticed, hmmph. As far as I know, my weight has stayed the same in the past 7 years. Well, okay, maybe a pound here, a pound there. No biggie. Still. When I hear such drastically different views, it makes me wonder.

Have you ever had different people tell you different things about your weight? Who do you believe? What do you believe ?

What a great weekend! We spent the better part of it at a wedding on the in-law side. Friday night, it was raining elephants and gorillas. Visibility was poor and parts of the highway was flooded when we drove out to the bride’s open house.

As usual, each time we see the clan, there are the exclamations of how big the kids have grown and the repetitions of names, ages and school year to jolt everyone’s memories. Now that my teens are old enough to answer those questions themselves, my days as a human tape recorder may be numbered .

Saturday morning, we were off to the church wedding and reception. The bride was radiant, of course. Thankfully too the service was short and sweet, and the day got noisier as more of the clan crawled out of the woodwork whom we’ve not seen in ages.

The hotel dinner party that night was huge. There must’ve been at least 800 guests. In the midst of camera flashes and toothy hugs, Steev bumped into a guy from college that he vaguely knew. Someone he would say hi to as they passed each other in the hallway between classes.

In the small talk that followed, that guy turned out to be a cousin (?) Steev never knew he had. Can you imagine that? Right now, we still have no idea who he is but I’m sure with a little nosing around, we’ll soon find out he’s related to us. It’s the first time we’ve ever encountered something like this. Have you ever found a long-lost family member through casual conversation?

I’m up early this morning to start preparing for my Reunion Dinner which incidentally became Reunion Lunch somewhere over the course of yesterday. The story is this. I invited two of my favorite aunts to join us for our Reunion Dinner tonight.

Yesterday they got a call from my uncle (the one who excluded my kids from attending his son’s wedding dinner recently) inviting them to his Reunion Dinner. He said he’d booked his dinner reservation at a restaurant two months ago and that he’ll send his son to pick them up at 5:00pm today. When my two aunts told me about it, I said, fine I’ll reschedule my reunion to lunchtime so they can still join us.

This morning, my uncle apparently called my two aunts to say he’ll be picking them up for lunch. Er, say what? Theirs was supposed to be dinner which is why I shifted my reunion to lunchtime to accommodate them . My two aunts were surprised too and reminded him what he’d told them earlier. He brushed them aside and insisted they should’ve called him back yesterday to confirm.

I’m like, err, are we playing some sort of game here?? Am I sensing a complete lack of sincerity here in his invitation to these two old folks? So yeah, see what I mean about family politics stress and Chinese New Year? Well, whatever! I’ve got everything ready to start cooking my Reunion Lunch now and my two aunts have decided to join me. Lunch will be fairly simple so no worries about the need for stomach fat loss later . Catch you guys later.

Okay, so Chinese New Year is just around the corner and it coincides with Valentine’s Day this year. This time every year, we’d be trying to catch every lion dance performance in town. But not this year! Seems my teens have finally outgrown the obsessive lion chasing though we’ll still be picking a few spectacular ones to watch.

As usual, we won’t be traveling out of town like most folks. We prefer to avoid the rush and just visit some friends and relatives here in town. Now if we were going on vacation in Orlando, that would be a different story.

I’ll be cooking a simple reunion dinner at home on New Year’s Eve. Customarily daughters having been married out of the family are not welcome to have the reunion dinner with their side of the family because it’s believed that it’ll impoverish the family. Hahaha, I call it poppycock and fiddlesticks!!

They could, of course, ignore the superstition but my Dad celebrates it with his ‘new’ family and I’m technically an ‘orphan’ who never gets invited so… That leaves Hip2bDad’s side of the family where we’re customarily supposed to be having the reunion dinner with. But since his Dad also celebrates with his ‘new’ family, us ‘orphans’ decided to heck with all this nonsense and just have our own reunion .

On the first day of Chinese New Year, we observe a vegetarian diet. On the second day, I’ll be cooking the first meal of the year. As usual, we’ll be avoiding Chinese restaurants like the plague for the 14 days of CNY, away from the crowd and having to pay through our noses.

And that’s about it. Got a whole stash of festive cookies, mandarin oranges, drinks and flowers for the altar. Not much left to do except finalize my two menus. We don’t traditionally decorate the house with festive symbols, plants or lanterns. The kids have some new clothes which we bought over the Christmas holidays. Hip2bDad and I don’t bother with new clothes. No trips to the salon for any of us either, yay!

And we’re set for a whole week off school, that’s all we care about . Call us boring, call us weird but we’ve always done our own thang much to the horror of our extended families. We’re not your typical family. So the way we celebrate Chinese New Year shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone !!

I skipped my cousin’s wedding dinner last night. I was at the lunch reception though when he brought his bride home for the tea ceremony. Needless to say, all of our relatives were there (except for the ones who decided to boycott the event for reasons best known to themselves ).

If you ask me, the holiday season is the worst time to be meeting up with hordes of family and relatives if you don’t want to stress yourself out. But if I hadn’t gone, I swear I would never hear the end of it either. So!

At the tea ceremony, the newly-weds offer tea to the elders as a form of respect and for the elders to acknowledge the new family member. Well, I was hoping we (that’s me and Hip2bDad) wouldn’t be called up to receive the tea because I really wasn’t in the mood for this. I was there purely out of obligation, that’s all. But you guessed it, we got called up!

It’s customary to give the newly-weds an angpow (red envelope) each as a gift for their tea offering. My kids later told me one of the bridesmaids had been assigned to note down the name of each giver on the red envelope. That, I presume, was to open the envelopes later and see how much money each contained. They apparently did the same thing at dinner last night where it’s customary to give another red envelope as the dinner gift. Only Steev and Hip2bDad went as we were issued only 2 invites. I stayed home with the girls.

Weeks before we even got the invites, I offered to help my uncle and aunt with the wedding arrangements. I even offered to help cook for the lunch reception but was told they’d be hiring caterers. Anyhow, I’m still puzzled as to why my kids were excluded from the wedding dinner. Surely it can’t be because someone figured our gift wouldn’t be big enough to cover the cost of the posh dinner at the JW Marriott for our family of 5. After all, this is the uncle who recently helped his son (the groom) buy a million-dollar home.

It’s interesting though that when I got married, this uncle and his siblings came with their 11 kids to our wedding dinner. Of course, our hotel was nowhere as posh as the new downtown Marriott! And the gifts my dear uncles and aunts collectively gave us? Five items of re-gifted and outdated electrical appliances they had received at their weddings ten years before!

Back from our beach vacation and minus the usual taxi runs, these are lo-oong lazy days we’re enjoying. Waking up late. Simple lunches at home.

Me: Go to sleep, it’s very late!

Kids: Still early, Mom, we’re cultivating eyebags!

Well, I set my alarm clock last night, and Raine and I finally dragged ourselves up early enough to hit the gym which we missed for an entire week while we were away. Great to get those lazy bones moving again!

Steev, my 18-year-old who’s working part-time on a software project, came home after a half day’s work saying the office was practically deserted. Everyone’s on leave this time of year. So no work got done. Instead he snuck out for morning tea with a family friend who was in the area to meet up with some business plan writers.

I’ve pretty much decided I won’t be attending my cousin’s wedding dinner reception at the JW Marriott. We’ve been allocated only 2 seats and told point-blank my 3 teens are not invited. Now I’m not being picky, I just think it’s bad manners on their part.

Nyek, that’s my randomness for today. By the way, please go check out our holiday photos of buffet breakfast at the Hard Rock Hotel, Penang and lunch at Strada.

We had another family gathering over lunch at another cousin’s place, the one who used to help us source for life insurance quotes. SIL and hubby are back from their brief domestic holiday and will be flying home to Australia tomorrow.

Lunch was homecooked, seems to be a new trend with the in-laws these days. Well, at least, the food was much more palatable than the lunch at the other cousin’s two weeks ago. This time, my kids managed to polish off a full lunch in spite of what we’d eaten before we left - noodles and nachos with guacamole.

Before we go to any meal invitation, I always make sure I feed the kids first. While we always make it a point to respect other people’s time by arriving early/on time, it’s not a common practice here where guests rarely ever arrive on time and there’s no telling what time dinner will be served.

Also if the kids are fed, they’re less likely to make a dash for the food. Nothing’s more embarrassing than seeing my kids make a rush for the food as if they’re so deprived they’ve never seen good food before! I teach the kids to stand back and let others rush ahead if it’s a buffet-style dinner. We’re not in a hurry as we’ve already eaten.

But if it’s a sit-down Chinese meal, I encourage them to quickly take a little bit of what they want before everyone else “washes” their chopsticks in the communal dishes, and not go back for seconds no matter how good the food tastes. If they really love the food there, I will take them back another time and we can have a leisurely meal on our own, sans the saliva cocktail.

Oops, looks like I’ve digressed. Lunch today was curried jumbo prawns, fried noodles, deep-fried chicken, cauliflower mix-fry and rojak (fruit salad). Later we had walnut cake over a pot of Chinese tea. I might even say the afternoon with the in-laws was pleasant though watching reruns of the same wedding video 5 times proved a little too much .