Coughing, Coughing, Gone: I'm Gone, Not The Coughing. It's Still There.

... And it's really, really annoying. Cough syrup, where be thou?

Having been sick for the past four days, and making a great spectacle about it, I have since returned home after the debacle of October 19th, which led me to feel intensely sad and homesick. I don't know why, because absolutely nothing happened on October 19th. I just am, okay?

This Saturday however started brightly. I woke up early instead of my usual late morning self, with times clocked in being 4:52AM, 6:52AM, and 8.03AM. I found the Internet on and started writing the, what, ten posts I made today.

Breakfast was interesting in the sense that I have not had full, proper breakfast with the family for a long time. Years, easily. When I say family, I mean the Most Noble and Supremely Ordained House of the Ruslans, sans young Lady Seroja I, who was off enjoying her weekend with her cousin Haida. The reduced presence gave this house a strange air of quiet, which can be a good thing.

The promise of chores (Yay! chores!) were quickly superseded by invitations to far-away shopping complexes. The Curve in Damansara, if you're asking. I believe I have once before stated my desire to marry that place, even if this proposition is likely to end in rejection. While having breakfast, the parents seemed to enjoy brightening the mood with their ill-rendered off-tuned renditions of Dolly Parton songs, though I have learned much over the last seventeen years not to complain. This might very easily be me in thirty years, though I do not think I will know the words to Dolly Parton's songs.

As they sang, surely killing some poor animals somewhere in our backyard through the acoustic torture, they went through some collected old photographs and the frames they had bought earlier in the morning to frame them in. Here are some of them:

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Photographs from the 1970s all have weird colors that do not constitute sepia but somehow causes this here photo to turn sepia. Roslyn stares at her favorite photo ever.

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A rather classic photo from the mid Seventies. My father is the dashing young fellow with the long hair sitting second from left. And he berates me when I don't cut my hair! Gosh.

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My maternal grandfather, another strapping fellow, whose photograph here digitized imperfectly was taken in 1954. Among other things, he was a military officer. Us young folks refer to him as "Datuk", which is the Malay word for Grandfather, of course. Fifty-plus years on, a photo for comparison can be seen some posts back under the title "The Prerequisite Raya Family Photograph".

Well, yeah. Imitation sepia tones can be credited to my Sony Cybershot DSC-N1's capabilities, as none of the actual physical photos here lack the colors to be properly categorized as "sepia". I love the word sepia. I've said it so many times today.