Marsha Maung: I write. I love. I live

The air here is unbelievable! Everything was fine throughout the day, for most parts of the day, that is, until towards the evening when the smoke got really heavy. REALLY Heavy as in it is creeping under the door, past walls, over roofs, into homes, into nose, into lungs and tries to make you pass out just from the anxiety itself. Thankfully (me being pretty smart this time round), I ran out on Sunday and grabbed two air filters and purifiers for the homes. I was thinking it was for the rooms but during the day, I put it in the living room in hope of clearing the living room would also minimize the risk of having to inhale putrid air in the rooms. Anyway, the air purifiers are real life savers. In the evening when it was obvious that the smoky air was penetrating the home, it picked things up a notch and cleared much of the smoke that was coming in! Who would've known that such a device would be necessary in Malaysia, huh? And we all thought air was free. Nope, not here righ...

My goodness, woke up on this amazingly positive Saturday morning, walked out the room, breathed (like every other normal human beings), choked and ran back into the room. What the hell was that?! I keep the windows in the kitchen open for circulation sake during the night. As much as I dislike waking up breathing up smoke, I dislike stale air just about as much. Maybe not but close enough. So, unbeknownst to me, smoke filled the house except for the air-conditioned rooms. BAD! I went to the window and it was hazed up quite bad at around 8am in the morning but it cleared up some a little later on towards the day. I hate to say this but this is not the worst that we have seen. I remember, there was one year when our homes filled up with so much smoke that we couldn't see past the sofa and had to yell each others' names to check where we were. It's horrible, this haze thing.  Being not much of an agriculturally-educated-informed person, I don't know how no...

During the school holidays, I didn't have the time nor the inspiration to cook at home. You won't believe the astonishing amount of money I have spent on meals alone during that two weeks of school hols. Cooking at home saves us/ ME quite a bit of money, actually. For instance, on average, I spend at least RM50-RM60 for meals, for the three of us. OK, we could have gone for cheaper food, yes, but with the weather....well, fine, we wanted air-conditioning. And paid for it. But cooking is really therapeutic to me and honestly speaking, once I got the hang of it again, the inspiration came back too. Nah, who am I kidding. Actually, it's the money I save. LOL Anyway, the simple meals and ideas are slowly coming back now and they are all coming from the countless recipe books open on the table right now...all of them along the lines of 'Quick Cook....', 'One Pot....', 'Easy Cooking....', 'Crockpot Magic...' As long as we get to eat some...

Don't ever make the mistake of thinking kindness is a weakness, sometimes it takes great strength to just smile and say kind words...

We live in a frantic world where speed is everything. Combine mobility, interactivity and speed...life becomes the whirlwind that we try to avoid. I am not like others who thrive on speed and like living an adrenaline-charged life. There is simply no Yin-Yang balance in that. Try having kids and tell me you enjoy speed five years down the road. But that's the life we have to adapt, I guess. We usually take evening walks in the park nearby and that was what we, me and the boys, did yesterday but I was behind in some work so, as we walk laps on the paved path, I was on the internet on my phone looking up stuff that I can post and write later that night. I almost walked into a boy, a tree and almost tripped over an unripe starfruit that had fallen onto the path from the tree on the side of the path. I can't deny the fact that technology is amazing and this has mobilized work for me. It's incredible because with the internet, I can literally work ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD. ...

I have always had a thing for cute things, people and animals. Don't we all? When I was younger, I brought home one of the cutest puppies in the world and even had a hand in naming the pup, Nikoe. The puppy was from a friend I knew from high school, his dog just had a batch. So, when choosing the pup, I chose the nastiest, naughtiest and most rowdy one. LOL. Oh boy. Anyway, once I brought the puppy home, that was the end of the story because raising the pup-turned-dog was HARD. It was hard work because the damn dog would just run out of the house and come home with his coat of hair caked in mud and...I don't know what else. We didn't have dogs like maltese or toy poodles back then. It was either a dog....or a dog. If you have had a pet in the past, you would relate to the fact that if you found it difficult to deal with the dog's behavior, you would tune out. I did. But that was when I was a teenager when there is so much more out there to have than taking care of...

Every human has four endowments- self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom... The power to choose, to respond, to change. By : Stephen Covey

I recently experienced a very disturbing, unethical and disheartening experience with a friend. It has been more than a month now and till this day, I have great difficulty saying anything about it. Only the friends that I am close with or working with know about this and even then, I have avoided naming the person who have hurt me. I have trust issues and if there was anything I could derive out of this episode, it is that I have found a way out of this issue. This person have communicated to me that there are friends who are not friends...they are feeding their ego even when you are genuine in helping them. He was in a financial rut (so he says, I have no way to confirm this) so, I genuinely hired him. It was all genuine and I had no idea what was going through his head. In my profession, the worst thing you can ever do is to plagiarize. This is a huge NO for me! I mean, it is wrong to copy from anyone in ANY industry, no?! Please correct me if I am wrong. Unless your job is to...