Neverending Story ... of Problems

Last two days, our next neighbour contacted us, telling us about that some of their things in their store were damaged due to dampness and fungus growing in the store. They asked us to check our own store which is next to their store, True enough, our store had the same problem.

The suspicion is that there is an underground pipe from our side that is leaking. Why from our side? Well, the last few months we had our water bill increased from around RM20+ to RM30 to over RM50. Trying to be a good neighbour (we know that they are upset with us), we immediately decided to call a plumber to bypass the underground pipe from the main source to an external piping. So yesterday, the plumber came and did the piping bypass. It took them a whole day to do this and as a consequence, we did almost nothing yesterday. The whole external piping costs us RM1800+ which my other half helped pay. So forget beauty (with hidden wiring and piping), consider practicality instead.

Reflecting on the whole situation with previous problem of internal wiring  (see here) and now the problem of internal piping, it seems that problems come in batches. In this case, there is a natural explanation for this batchy behaviour; we did our renovations arounfd 5 years ago and nothing is build to last forever and perhaps with things deteriorating over time, these two problems come around at the same time. But we did not expect these to come that soon; the thought of our previous contractor might have used substandard materials comes to mind. That is why we prefer to call somebody else.

So today, we clear out things from the store and some of my books were damaged. They were put there ecause we do not have enough space in our book shelves and some of these books I have read and others were on the not-so-high-priority list. Thus, I decided wither to sell them or give them away; the latter is easy for me to do since in Mydin, they have some containers for the purpose of book donations. One immediate decision is to give away these journals that I have subscribed from the Islamic Foundation, name The Muslim World Book Review and their supplementary Index of Islamic Literature. I guess I was ambitious then when I subscribed them but with Part III study being so intense and one is busy with PhD research, these books were left untouched. 

I've put the 'ad' on FB, in case if anyone is interested (so far none). The issues that are with me are as follows:

• Vol. 8 No. 4 (1988)
• Vol. 9 No. 1 (1988)
• Vol. 9 No. 2 (1989)
• Vol. 9 No. 3 (1989)
• Vol. 9 No. 4 (1989)
• Vol. 10 No. 1 (1989)
• Vol. 10 No. 2 (1990)
• Vol. 10 No. 3 (1990)
• Vol. 11 No. 1 (1990)

So, if anyone from Malaysia is interested, just let me know.

Another expense for today is our Malibu car was sent for service as this is the only available day before my other half use it for work next week. The servicing plus a battery cost us RM700+. In th afternoon too, our youngest son told my other half that his money is running out as he had to buy books. With all these, I have to apologize that I will not be able to help others at all.