Henry Beard and Roy McKie in their “Skiing: a snowslider’s dictionary” (2002) define skiing as the art of catching cold and going broke while heading nowhere at great personal risk. They could be right. I found this irreverent albeit entertaining and informative pocket dictionary by the bedside shortly before we set off for Canada. It…
I left off in my last letter with the news that I was promoted to Level Two. I was rather pleased with myself. I had no bones broken and no tendons or muscles torn; I can now stop and turn on slopes (very mild ones) at will; I finished the three lessons that Su had…
Su said that I was rather brief in my last letter on the Gala Dinner to which she went with me. A few readers also made similar observations and one even suggested that maybe I had ordered the wrong plate for my main course. In response, I said that I was never known to be…
For many years, Wah Yan College alumni would hold their annual party today, the 23rd day of December, rain or shine. Some die hard alumni would even go as far as saying that everything else won’t matter as long as we have our Annual Ball on this day. The school has certainly produced some well…
Frank Devlyn read some of my articles on the website and thought I was writing a book or had published one. He volunteered to endorse my book which he was confident would boost sale and hence help Rotary, either in the form of donations to the Rotary Foundation or of membership development. Frank certainly has…
It could be jet lag; it could be old age; it could be last night’s dinner; it could be the rain; and it could be anything. I got up around 4am and decided to read something. I switched on my laptop and was greeted by a glaring message from the antivirus software that it had…
Today, 22nd April 2011, marks the second anniversary of my wedding with Su. Since 1970, the world has been marking this day, the twenty second day of April, with environmental issues, and in 2009, the United Nations resolved to celebrate the day as “World Earth Day” which coincided with our wedding. We should have no…
Until last week, I had logged in the inbox of my laptop over 4,000 emails, half of which were marked unread. They were there mainly because my desktop PC failed at some point or other and because I carried my laptop with me during my travels. Most if not all of the unread emails had…
I was intrigued to read about Mark Twain having his autobiography embargoed for 100 years after his death, and more intrigued that the embargo had sort of worked, so that his half a million words in 2,000 pages would only be published, or about to be published now. I find it even more interesting that…
Su and I came back last Saturday night from Tibet, thoroughly exhausted. She lost five pounds while I, eight, representing about 5% of our respective body weights. Funny, I had never had so much nibbles all my life than what I had in the two weeks, in the form of chocolates, mainly dark ones, even…
