Malacca

My prized catteleya orchids just bloomed!

I'm home today for a few hours - to check on the fish pond and the waterfall, my orchids and roses which seem okay in spite of the rain. There are more fish fry when I looked at the pond yesterday but by today most of them will be gone - eaten by the bigger fish. I didn't bother to separate them this time - there are just too many fish now. The previous batch are now at least 5in long and taking over the pond so Repin says let the law of nature play its role - survival of the fittest. At least that way we can control the population. But what I really want to do is give them away.My brothers did say they wanted some but nobody has come to collect the fish since.

Its been raining every day since November began. The skies are almost always covered by dark heavy cumulo-nimbus clouds. You can hardly see the sky actually - its all just a thick dark cloud cover. Kelantan and Terengganu as well as Kedah and Perlis have been flooded again. Year in and year out we hear the same stories - flood waters rising, people being evacuated, landslides at hill side developments. As for the monsoon, it will come and we should be prepared. But we never are. Our drains are still tiny, our rivers clogged (though they're not so bad nowadays) and most of the newer housing estates have poor drainage. I guess we'll never learn. What we need are monsoon drains to take away most of the water out to shore. At least that should contain some of the flooding.

Big bad wolf sale

We arrived very early - about 10 am and yet the crowd was full! You can hardly negotiate your way along the aisles. But there were books and more books! I'm in book heaven!! And everything was below RM20. Most of the paperbacks were about RM8 only and the children's books were mostly below RM8 - about 3-5. Imagine that. But the crowd was too big - at one point I overheard a teenager comment: "Who says Malaysians don't read?" Yes we do, and we are also very kiasu. The moment we hear there's a sale, we all turn up, grabbing books whether some of us will read them or not.

I was mostly at the fiction corner - picking up as many books as I can shove into my pink book bag. I'll go through them later and decide whether I really want them. Those I don't think I'll read I'll put back. Can't see Shasha anywhere... she too must be going crazy because I saw the fantasy and science fiction section was full to overflowing with many of her favourite writers. I got a few Nora Roberts, two Georgette Heyer, one JUlia Quinn, a number of other writers I'm trying to read and numerous chick lit stuff I think Sara might like. They were just simply irresistable - haven't seen books costing below RM10 for a long,long, long time. I also managed to get two travelogues for Repin, and a few Jeffrey Archer although I knew he has probably read them already. I think I must have easily bought over 30 books - some for Sophia and some for the family day children's prizes. And all for only about RM200. Wow... I just can't believe it. Normally we'd fork out more than RM100 for 3 books at the most. Shasha is going again tomorrow and maybe Repin will go tonight!

I managed to get a hard cover version of "Looking for Enid" by Duncan McLaren so can return Poh Lin's book which I had borrowed earlier. Enid Blyton was my favourite children's writer and my main companion throughout my growing up years. My very first books were all written by Enid Blyton and which Malaysian child growing up in the 60s doesn't know her? I found out only recently that most Americans never knew her and I was really surprised. Imagine not knowing who Enid Blyton was.Or never having read The Secret Seven stories, The Famous Five, The Chalet girls and all those other books by her. She had written easily more than 600 books by the time she passed away at the age of 71. To me the characters in her stories were as real as my friends. I knew Julian and Dick and George and Anne and even Timmy the dog. Every week I would go to the library near my house and borrow the books - all written by Enid Blyton. So to me, finding the book about her was so exciting. I had never really read anything about this woman who wrote all those wonderful books for children, never really knew much about her. This book details the author's search for the real Enid - where she lived, where she wrote her stories, the places she grew up in, the places she described in England. There are illustrations taken from the original books - mostly from the Famous Five series and they bring back memories of happy days cuddled up in bed in the attic at my grandma's, reading one of the Famous Five books. This is one book I'm really looking forward to reading!

What I'm reading now

I'm reading the second book by Tahir Shah - In Arabian Nights. The first book -The Caliph's House was about Tahir Shah buying a house in Morocco, renovating it and his problems with the contractors and repairing the house. In this book he tells us about his search for Morocco's stories and the real Moroccan. A very interesting and sometimes humorous look at life in Morocco and its tales and beliefs.

Recently also I bought a number of books from Kinokuniya and BookXcess recently. Some I've finished reading, some I'm still going through and some I'm keeping for next time. These are:

• Amanda Quick - Second Sight



• Georgette Heyer - Cotillion



• JD Robb - Strangers in Death



• JD Robb - Naked in Death



• Maryjanice Davidson - Undead and Unemployed



• Marina Lewywcka - A sort history of Tractors in Ukrainian (borrowed)

I've finished Undead and Unemployed about a young woman who died but became a vampire and is busy looking for a job even though she already has a job as queen of the vampires!