from nagaoka with love

You know what is it? it is a countdown table, made by dada purposely to indicate how many day remain until her aunt is here.  This Sunday my sister will be flying in from Malaysia and will be staying with us for 2weeks. Every morning she wakes up, "mama, lagi 6 hari kan ucu nak datang? "......the next morning, "mama, lagi 5 hari kan ucu nak datang?".......and it continues, "mama, lagi 4 hari kan ucu nak datang?"still continue until today..... and the first thing she do right after she wakes is to mark off the table and the paper by now has become like kertas bungkus nasi lemak.  I know how excited she is, so do I.  I have a few plans for them and mainly the activities has something to do with snow as that is the main reason why they come here. On the other hand, i'm thinking of a cooking day off as my brother in law is a good cook, but on top of that i'm tired of cooking and am very very tired to eat my own cooking! p/s: on the right top ...

It was like a  dream actually to have this opportunity.  I had wanted to try this out since 2 years ago and didn't get to it until last Tuesday. Together with my "housewife" friends, off we went to Echigo Hillside Park, again... but this time with a "single" tittle, as the kids were at school.  We enjoyed every little moments we had, it really nice to be given chances to do things on our own without need to chase or worries about kids. As this was my first time on it, i cannot expressed the difficulty of it but i do feel that skiing is just same as roller blading, which need a good body balancing skills and absolutely when you sliding down it was really exciting! But of course as a beginner we only tried it on the small slope. Yes, i feel so free the moment i slided over the snow and we plan to have it again next time. Perhaps someday we will get a chances to try on snowboarding?? may be...insyAllah

This is my latest project, fuji san.  Actually it is not 100% complete, but i just cant have patience to wait until it to be published here.  Because this one took me about 5 weeks time to completed, which is amongst the longest project i had so far.   To make the color of mountain and sky look like what you may see now, i myself cannot remember how many times i had layered on it.  That is what water color is, layer by layer that makes the drawing differ and lively.  My sensei told me that, it still need some touching up here and there...but then it is here to public. In English the mountain is known as Mount Fuji, but Japanese speaker refer to the mountain as Fuji-San.  This is the highest mountain in Japan, at 3776.24 m.  An active stratovolcano that last erupted in 1707-08, Mount Fuji lies about 60 miles south-west of Tokyo, and can be seen from there on clear day.  Mount Fuji exceptionally symmetrical cone is a well...

being an eldest daughter in a family bring me closer to ayah and i have to admit that ayah and me are having this strong special bond since ago.  With me, he freely talking about the past, his childhood time and all experiences he had gone through in life. Since i was kid, people and relatives used to called me 'ayah's sweetheart' and it really don't bother me at all, furthermore me myself really looks alike him a lots. as far as i remembered, ayah used to be a strict father when we were kids especially everything with connecting to school matter.  We are not allowed to take leave from school even if we got sick and for that sake i was more than once awarded a full attendance prizes at school.  We were trained to be strong and disciplines was one of his fundamental elements in raising the four of us.  There was no tv at maghrib time, we should had have finished showered before maghrib, no fireworks during raya time, getting up early during weekends, havin...

i'm so in mode of baking...but not a cake. Every time i peep at this blog,  Bisous A Toi  i feel like wanting to bake a cake, her pictures are all heaven! anyway, i made this few types of bread recently. i used the basic bread dough instead and selected filling or topping are added which vary depends on everyone's liking. Today is monday and the feeling is still there, just wonder how long will the passion last..

i think it is common for kids who live in foreign country to face this language disorder(kecelaruan bahasa). For my kids they are exposed to mainly two language, nihonggo(japanese language) and of course bahasa Melayu.  We absolutely are not speaking nihonggo at home but sometimes the conversation itself become rojak bocause of the influent of environment we live in now.  Somehow,   it sounds funny and cute especially when my kids had to mix the words from both language together (and sometimes english) when it comes to 'confusing mode'. Ari chan had been using this pattern of sentences, always... "mama, hot kunai la"(mama, tak panas la) "kore no pan, tasty kunai"(roti  ni tak sedap) OK Ari chan?..................... "OK kunai!"( tak OK) "mama, nak nasik kudasai!"(mama, nak nasik please!) adik nk brush teeth ker?................."brush teeth jyanai"(bukan brush teeth) and sometimes she called her father like this, ...