Eventful Weekend

Yesterday morning I was watching the opening ceremony of ASEAN meeting. I can see there is a lot of efforts gone into preparing for the event. We do tend to be ceremonial in many ways. Memories of staff and me involved in preparing for official events came back. Some staff went without sleep in order to make sure that everything go smoothly. We worked hard partly driven by the fear of something will go wrong. In my case, I remembered receiving a quiet scolding myself for some hiccups and the unplesant feeling of me scolding some staff. For international participants, some saw it as pompous (I had one such comment made to me) but others were happy the way it was done since it is different from what they have experienced. I'm glad such work is all over now (as they say a retiree phase of RTM- rehat tunggu mati).

I did see some hiccups in the ceremony yesterday and there were already apologies being made by the media. But overall, I still think it was impressive whether one agrees with our ceremonial culture or not. Here are the leaders that came to the meeting.

It is a huge event and hopefully there will be plenty of huge outcomes from it.

It so happened that yesterday I was also rushing to complete my blogpost on Mostaque's book. I tend to brood a lot before writing a post (even for this one), When I start to write, it tend to be spontaneous as it will go with the flow of my thinking. There will be plenty of mistakes on the initial post and I do revisit it to make sure at least all glaring mistakes are corrected. I posted it aometime at 3pm and two hours later announced it on FB. (Un)Fortunately, the announcement got drowned by social commentaries of Trump dancing and on the event itself. Some social commentaries are nasty, full of insults and foul language. I do wish they are mindful of what perception they are giving particularly to international readers. Criticisms are fine and they can be done in a respectful, graceful way. 

Anyway this morning, my son from JB came back and we almost have the full family together apart from the youngest who is now in Jasin. So family activities ahead.