The party’s over…

My girl’s school took the day off on Monday for Chap Goh Meh – in fact, if I am not wrong, all the schools here had their cuti peristiwa (occasional holiday) on that day. No, they would not need to replace it on a Saturday. Every school is given four occasional holidays and they can use them for some cultural or religious festivals or events that is not a public holiday…and this was one of them for the year. I hear the next one will be on Easter Monday and Good Friday being a holiday here, it will be an extra long long weekend.

However, classes would resume the very next day so we had no choice but to send my girl back to her school on that very day which meant that we could not have our dinner on the actual night. She probably could have applied for one day cuti rehat khas (some special leave, not too sure what they call it in English now) – every officer is entitled to seven days in a year and may apply in the event of a marriage, a convocation or death in the immediate family and things like that but that girl of mine would not hear of it! She is always so serious in her work so taking leave is out of the question, even when she is sick. Tsk! Tsk!

That was why we had our Chap Goh Meh dinner a day earlier on Sunday night instead. No, we did not have anything special – just a simple steamboat dinner…

…at home with all the usual stuff – fresh meat balls, fish balls, sweet corn on the cob, green vegetables and baby corn, quail eggs and so on…but I did go and get those big prawns to go into the soup. My missus also went and got some crabs…

– RM40.oo a kg for these small ones and some scallops and sotong (squid) as well and I did get a box of New Zealand mussels and a bit of salmon too…

My girl loves those imitation crab sticks which are definitely not my favourite, so the mum went and bought a packet. I think this was a wrong brand, not the kind that my girl enjoys so we ended up throwing all of them away.

It was raining all day that day but luckily, it stopped towards evening so I was able to catch a glimpse of the full moon that night…

…or almost. The next day was fine and sunny, lucky us, so it was a pleasant and enjoyable drive all the way to my girl’s school and back…and good grief! The firecrackers and fireworks started around mid-afternoon and went on and on and on into the night.

So Chinese New Year came and went and it was time to take down the decorations…

Somehow it was so much fun putting them up while taking down could be so very tedious and tiring. Thankfully, it would be one whole year, more or less, before I would have to go through all of that again.