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Overseas Assignments 101: When 1 is On A Critical Mission Overseas

mission

(My favourite shot – taken when I am at the departure gate, coming back home. It also means the mission completed successfully and I have 1 less thing to worry about once I am back)

Hold on for a second whilst I l take a moment to dust off the dust from this blog.

Damn, is that been that long since we last met?

My sincere apology to all those who drop by this blog to hear my usual rants. When one is on a mission, time is premium. We will only have “x” amount of hours in a day and there are times when I had gone to the bed without a shower or changing clothes.

To put it summarily, I love blogging very much but I love sleeping off my tiredness after a hard day at work even more. For now, I have no choice but to leave this blog to continue to collect dust but it does not mean it will be the end of my blogging – I assure you. At least for the next few months.

But before that…

I am still away on a work assignment and sometimes it feels like I am in a war zone with me leading a small platoon of highly specialised soldiers on a mission deep in the enemy’s territory, eating our rations on the move and sleeping out on the dirt with our fingers firmly on the trigger of our automatic assault rifles. Ya, I can almost taste it in the air.

And it was real when I was in the middle east a few years with my morning pick up consisted of a four-wheel drive and a soldier with a fully loaded AK 47 for security. And homecoming after such a “mission” is simply sweet – no moment is more memorable than seeing my kids and hugging them and then going off to sleep on my own bed.

And since I have not been at home so much this year (and last few months last year), I try to spend as much time as possible at home. The feeling to date has been very much rewarding. A trip to the beach is on my “must-do” list and I know just the place to go – one with a view facing the sea and a good spicy nasi lemak in the morning for breakfast.

Oh did I mentioned that when I was about to go back to Malaysia the last time around, my car had a problem – it refused to start bringing the bad memories when the car immobiliser had problems and I had to fork out almost RM900 for the repairs. This time it was less painful – the battery was dead and I only had to change the batteries.

It was overdue anyway. Tires would be the next on the list – since I bought the car, I am still using the same tires although it has numerous hole patchworks and it is getting noisier too. The superb Michelins again? You see, other than seeing my kids, the other thing that gives me satisfaction is driving my car around. The last thing I need to have problems with the car if you get my drift.

One new country ventured last year and I may be venturing into 2 new countries this year with even more challenging assignments. If given the choice, I wish (should be able to) to keep the same “platoon” for the next mission. It has been a winning team for the past few missions. I thank them for being a very proactive team and one takes their work very seriously and yet still have time to make good jokes at wee hours.

More missions abroad this year only means more sleepless nights and plenty of junk food and coffee. So I do expect my body and mind to take a considerable beating this year and since I am not getting any younger, I just hope that there will be some room for recovery from the madness. Perhaps it is high time for me to finally agree to my wife’s request to take her to the spa with me joining her (damn, I could use a good massage to my knees and to my right feet).

On the country front, the petrol prices have been down but I have not been around long for me to enjoy them. And with GST set to start soon, I doubt things will get cheaper to buy and use – no thanks to the short-sighted and dumb politicians at the control.

And speaking of politicians, if you had read the news, Anwar has been found guilty by the Federal Court today and will be spending 5 years behind bars. If you ask me, it is not necessarily a bad thing for Pakatan. It is not the end of the story. To some who support the opposition, Anwar has been nothing more than a liability – his Kajang Move (one of the dumbest move to date) somehow validated that point.

With Anwar out of the way, perhaps there will be greater improvement within PKR and thus Pakatan. It will be interesting to see how things form up in the next general elections. At the end of the day, we just need a Government that dislikes corruption and wastage of taxpayers and do not practise double standards.

If it is related to the politicians and the ways they take the country and its people for a ride, we can talk about it all day long and one can still have plenty to talk about and this can go on and on. So let’s keep our cool and teach them a lesson they will never forget in the next general elections. The opposition has been at it in the last 2 general elections and they have been eating up the votes from the Government bit by bit.

Anyway coming back to blogging, I wish I could do better and whenever I started to type previously, a funny thing happens – I dozed off and filled up the pages with invalid words. So, please bear with me for the time being. I have also been taking fewer photos when overseas – the Sony Xperia has a good camera but most of the time, I forget that it has one. In the meantime, please be free to roam around my previous posts. I will do up new ones when I am of the mission.

Will see you soon….

1 thought on “Overseas Assignments 101: When 1 is On A Critical Mission Overseas”

  1. take care, bro..don’t forget to take care of your health.
    even in your ‘busyness’ & high committed with your mission, u still catch up on politic issues..

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