Since school started, I’ve been tremendously swamped with work. I haven’t been busier, but my classes and involvement in school have never been more, well, involving and fun. Grades have sadly taken a dip, however.

One morning a few weeks ago, I hopped onto the feeder bus near my house to go to school. The bus went on its way once I got on, but 2 stops later, the driver stopped next to a small neighbourhood mall, stopped the bus engine, and sat reading a newspaper for a good 15 minutes. The driver only gingerly started the engine and continued driving us on our route when an annoyed woman told him off because she was going to be late due to his tardiness. In this way, what should’ve been a mere 10-minute bus ride took nearly half an hour. Ironically, this was the first day the 15 cent hike was implemented - which left me wondering, “Is this what I’m paying for?”

Upset by this incident, I started noticing ways in which the Toronto Transit Commission’s (TTC) policies are currently lacking, and must be dealt with if TTC management has any serious intent on improving its service and bettering its relationship with its commuters. The humble recommendations of a 3rd-year commerce student follow:

1. Improving Employee Safety:
Forget about installing protective plastic barriers. A year has passed since the 2006 wildcat strike, and employee safety remains a top employee concern. Putting a movable plastic barrier up to protect TTC employees is not only ridiculous, it is also a stupidly shortsighted stopgap measure. Instead, why doesn’t TTC management try to give commuters less reason to be frustrated at TTC employees?

Even absolute numbskulls (for lack of a better word) often need some sort of provocation to be set off and become violent. The numerous inconsistencies in TTC service quality - the frequent delays and breakdowns, the poorly maintained stations, the list goes on - give these potentially violent commuters ample excuses to unfairly vent their frustrations on poor TTC employees. Instead of posturing and making a misguided attempt at a lame preventive measure, the TTC has to look at the harsh truth that is the source of the problem: customer dissatisfaction, the direct result of a poor product.

TTC employees are, for the most part, extremely polite and courteous men and women. In my experience - I take the TTC nearly every day - they are generally helpful and patient with commuters, and smile a lot. It is therefore very, very unfortunate that the shortsightedness of management - translating to angry and dissatisfied customers - has in turn led to ground-level employees’ suffering.

2. Better Employee Management
The same article states: “Another unresolved item is the lack of a job description for drivers. Vehicle operator duties have never been formally defined, though the two sides agreed more than five years ago to do so.” Therefore, there is a lack of proper internal control procedures in place to govern TTC employees’ performance of their duties - which to begin with, aren’t clearly defined.

What does this translate to? Non-value added activities, downtime and most annoying of all, irregular service and frequent delays, which tick commuters off, leading us back to our first point about employee safety. Commuters are generally pretty understanding if TTC vehicles are slightly late, but the pervasive irregularity of the bus and streetcar services almost makes the transit schedules at TTC stops a farce.

Measures must be put in place to clearly define employee responsibilities, and to ensure that incompatible responsibilities do not lie within a single role. Objective methods to monitoring performance must also be implemented to ensure that personnel follow their roles satisfactorily. The inability to clearly define employee responsibilities, particularly in a company that so strongly depends on its personnel, creates ample opportunity for non-constructive employee behaviour and is a surefire recipe for disaster.

3. Long-Term Cost Savings
To cut a very long story short, the TTC needs more money. It suffered a net operating loss of $319.7 million in 2006 (even worse than 2005’s $260 million figure), and is only staying afloat due to huge operating subsidies.

What then is the TTC’s solution to improving operational cashflows? Yet another stopgap solution: hiking up transit fares by another 15 cents. Is the TTC losing money because it isn’t getting enough revenues from its commuters? No - the TTC is losing money because of its own lack of foresight, and commuters have been made to bear the brunt of the TTC’s rising costs.

In what ways can the TTC most easily improve, instead of making commuters pay more? For one, by investing in better internal control procedures, particularly employee safety measures. How does spending more money translate to cost savings, you may ask? Accident claims cost the TTC $21.5 million in 2006 - a figure which rose by more than $5 million, a significant 34% increase from 2005’s figure of $16 million. By making smart, longsighted investments into safety measures, the TTC can safeguard its employees, while simultaneously saving it millions of dollars in accident claims in the future. Instead, it hikes up its rates.

A second way in which the TTC can improve its cashflow is to make another long-sighted, future-oriented investment: invest in future contracts to hedge its fuel costs. Basically, this means entering pre-agreed purchase agreements in advance in order to safeguard the TTC from being at the mercy of volative fuel prices. To illustrate my point, let’s just look at its income statement: vehicle fuel expenses rose by more than 50% from $36 million in 2005 to $54 million in 2006. Did the TTC expand its routes or its fleet by 50% in 2006? No, but why then did fuel expenses skyrocket? A pure lack of foresight.

Due to its reliance on fuel, the TTC must find better ways of securing this key resource for its vehicles. A quick look at its financial statements reveals no evidence of any attempt to hedge against fuel price risk. Knowing that their operations rely so much on fuel, and that fuel prices are indeed extremely volatile, the TTC cannot continue to ignore hedging contracts as a means of protecting their future cashflows. Instead of exploring such long-term cost-savings options, the TTC merely continues to raise commuter transit fees higher. And higher.

In summary, I believe that the TTC has been too focused on short-term, stopgap solutions to its employee welfare, personnel management and operational cost problems. Worsening working conditions, inconsistent service, customer dissatisfaction and threats to employee safety form a vicious cycle that has resulted from this lack of foresight, which ultimately causes low-level TTC staff and commuters to suffer the most. By even considering my recommendations, I believe that the TTC can at least make an educated step towards improving their operational efficiency, their employee welfare and the strained relationship with their commuters.

Your friend,

Joel Ong

Charity, in my mind, starts from very basic things - and is a very simple thing to do, actually. It all stems from having very basic courtesy and empathy for other human beings, and doesn’t require one to join Doctors Without Borders or go volunteering in a less developed country halfway across the world.

What do I mean? If everyone was charitable to their family and friends around them, if we just did the tangible things we could to better the lives of our brethren, people wouldn’t need to go volunteering halfway across the world on some large-scale charity mission half as often.

Be good to your parents, and take care of them - otherwise some charitable stranger in an old folk’s home will someday have to. Don’t haphazardly throw litter on the floor when you’re out on the streets - that way road cleaners won’t have to pick it up, right? You get what I mean?

I’m not saying that large-scale, high profile charitable acts are a bad thing; no, in fact in many cases, they are very necessary and save many, many lives. What I am saying is that when we try to do good, sometimes we forget about the little, simple courtesies that we can do for people closer to us - ironically, people whose lives we can directly impact most with our actions.

Why fly to Africa to help the poor and sick when you can walk to your local mission and do the same? The same sick, the same dying, the same homeless. Toronto is filled with thousands of homeless people. So are other great metropolitan cities like New York, London and the like. They all could use a little help, too.

There are many factors, mainly economical and political reasons, why we continue to chose to help the poor and the suffering of another country rather than those close to us. On a more personal level, it is far easier for many people to donate $100 in helping some faraway AIDS victims than it is to give a $0.25 coin to a homeless man on the sidewalk, for a very simple reason: the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) rule.

A relevant example of this occurred over the last year in The Beaches, one of Toronto’s posher and “classier” neighborhoods. The residents of The Beaches were lauded when they brought forward a charitable movement where homeless people would be given free food and shelter in local churches. However, when one such shelter was planned to be set up in The Beaches itself, the residents vehemently resisted, protesting strongly against it.

For a more obvious example, look at the USA’s involvement in the Middle East. Billions of dollars have gone into rebuilding Iraq (Waitaminute… why did it need to be rebuilt in the first place?), yet hulking highway bridges in the US are crumbling from disrepair. Katrina funds, collected over the years from millions of well-meaning donors and organizations, mysteriously don’t seem to be translating to much: New Orleans is still pretty much in shambles, a shadow of what it once was. Think about it: take every dollar spent on the Green Zone in Iraq and imagine it put into actually rebuilding New Orleans: the people there would be much, much better off than how they are now.

To sum my point up: charity then, is apparently a lot easier to perform the farther away one is from the person being helped.

Which is why a man like the late Ed Mirvish is so special, and so great. To those who are unfamiliar with “Honest” Ed, Mr. Mirvish was the owner of a huge discount store in Toronto (very similar to Mustafa’s in Singapore), as well as being responsible for nearly singlehandedly revitalizing the theatrical industry in Toronto. A true man of the people, Honest Ed showed that charity is as simple as loving those who are around you, and helping them in whatever simple means available to you. He didn’t have to go jet-setting across the world to help people; Honest Ed helped the people he could see and touch. The thousands of free turkeys he’s personally given out every Christmas to anyone who’d line up for them is just one example of Honest Ed’s charity. Honest Ed is just one of many good examples of how doing the simple things in our power to help our neighbours can very tangibly better their lives.

I write this not to judge, nor to dissuade or criticize. I merely am telling all who happen to read this, myself included when I reflect upon this in the future, to look closer to us when trying to do something good for someone else, because it’s a heck of a lot harder than to just dump $100 into some charity box, feel good about ourselves and think we’ve done a great deal of good by our sacrifice.

Instead, maybe we should try and just start by simply being considerate and courteous to our neighbours, our housemates, our parents and our friends… or, before we know it, in a generation or two, some humanitarian group from halfway across the world is going to have to waltz into our homes to help us.

It’s been a week since my parents and I moved to our new place, a nice townhouse southwest of High Park, Toronto. Moving took a while, and I’ve been absolutely drained by the experience. The sheer amount of… stuff that we had to shift over in boxes is staggering. At least now school is a lot closer than it was before; I now live less than 10km from the University, where before I was nearly 30km away to the west. (In Singapore, if we also take into account the horrendous traffic that is a regular on the GTA highways, that’s like living in a hut in Lim Chu Kang and going to school in Changi…)

As usual, life is never without bumps and these past few months have been no exception. It’s not been easy, but there’s never a… “free lunch”, but that’s just how things are, I guess.

Okay. I’m too tired for any more of this. Apologies for relative uninspired-ness. To bed I go.

Hmmph. Just one thing - a random thought just crept into my mind, of incidents of about three years ago. Never, EVER trust a man who, instead of giving you facts or a strong opinion on anything, heavily relies on the use of the horrendously vague “you know what I mean”, “that kind of thing”, “something like that”. Only sorrow… can follow.

I apologize for the lack of recent posts; anyway, my summer final exam is coming up in a few weeks, and I’ll be busy til then. I’m moving house within the next month too, which is a TREMENDOUS headache in every way.

So, to anyone who reads this, until next time, be safe and happy - and take care.

It’s been nearly six years since 911, that fateful night before my Chemistry O level practical examination, where I sat in my living room in Serangoon Gardens, Singapore watching with my mom and siblings (my dad was on a flight to Canada when it happened) as reality showed it can often be far, far worse than fiction. But what reality do we see when we switch on the TV anymore?

Perhaps I may attribute this to me “growing up” in the years since, but as time has passed since I moved here to Canada, CNN has gradually lost its educational value to me, and consequently, I’ve practically ceased watching CNN altogether.

Why? The credibility of CNN’s ability to deliver objective, informative news in recent years has deteriorated, in my opinion, to near nothingness. From dedicating entire evenings, night after night, to covering the Wacko Jacko trial instead of the Iraq War a few years ago. From their non-stop coverage of Paris Hilton’s / Lindsay Lohan’s / Britney Spears’ latest shenanigans.

This may just be my viewpoint, but it seems to me that as the years since 911 have gone by, there increasingly seems to be an agenda behind CNN’s coverage. To prove a hidden-to-the-untrained-eye political point? To distract the masses from the horrors that are happening halfway across the globe - or in America’s own back yards?

When the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech happened, CNN seized its opportunity to sink its claws into it, trying to squeeze feel-good heroic stories and tear-jerking tales of the fallen alike from everyone they could get their hands on. The nadir, to me, was seeing Paula Zahn at the candlelight vigil, trying hard to fluff up the event with hyperbole and whatever dramatic emo-nonsense she could come up with. Leave the kids alone, for heaven’s sake - their friends are dead forever and they’re just trying to show them some respect, pray for them, remember them, mourn them… the last thing they want is to have some “journalist” standing there, pretending to be emotional, shoving a mic into their faces to milk another sob story.

NFL-er Michael Vick recently got into trouble for allegedly having dog fights in his house. I switched on the TV just now, and flipped past CNN. Paula Zahn was “interviewing” 2 African-American journalists regarding the issue that hip-hop music was endorsing dog fighting. They flashed a video clip of a Jay-Z music video with dogs snarling at each other. Worth noting is that one of the guests was Jason Whitlock, whose name should resonate to MANY people out there: he’s an ignorant, confused, deceitful, self-righteous and racist journalist who fancies himself the next coming of Rosa Parks. 90 percent of the CNN piece was dedicated to him shouting and waving his hands at the camera and denouncing (too) loudly the evils of hip-hop culture, yet claiming that he wasn’t “anti hip-hop” because he himself had released/produced some hip-hop music himself.

Zahn let Whitlock, who rudely interrupted and talked over both her and the other guest on numerous occasions, go on for minutes on end - while shushing the other level-headed guest every time he seemed to have a counterpoint to make. Finally, when it seemed that the other journalist was going to mount a good argument against Whitlock’s generalized damnation of all of hip-hop, Zahn declared that they were running out of time, and ended the segment, much to the dismay of the journalist, who hadn’t uttered more than a few sentences in the entire time he was on air.

Ironically, in my disgust, I flipped the channels up to TVTROPOLIS to watch Seinfeld - which had sadly just ended - then, as I flipped past MTV’s airheaded programming, I chanced on BET, which had Chamillionaire’s “EVENING NEWS” video on. I can’t find it on youtube because it’s brand new, but the video features a faux-CNN broadcast with Chamillionaire having a heated debate with “Bill O’Wiley” (played by Chamillionaire), with Cham brilliantly bringing up a number of pressing issues in his rhymes - ultimately however, when it seems Cham is about to make another good point, he is shushed as “O’Wiley’s” half of the screen devours Cham’s half, and the victorious “O’Wiley” smiles at the screen as the video ends. F*cking on point, Chamillionaire.

My purpose in recounting my views on CNN’s Michael Vick dogfighting piece here is that CNN had an agenda. They wanted to illustrate something about hip-hop and dogfighting; they played the videos that supported their point; they let a guest who they knew would obviously leap on their bandwagon and self-righteously preach away have his way; they prevented the guest who had a different point of view from what they wanted to present have a chance to air his views. Objective? No. Effective? Hell yeah, to the uninformed.

When the V-Tech massacre happened, why didn’t CNN have a feature saying that some hip-hop musicians out there are actually trying to inform, educate, and better the lives of our youths? That there are hip-hop artists who are trying to prevent things like V-Tech from happening? Why didn’t they show a clip Kelly Rowland’s “Stole” - a beautiful, melancholy song about an alienated, bullied student who shoots up his school and then turns the gun on himself? The song resonates from both the suicidal shooter’s point of view, as well as those of the poor students - an aspiring actress, a promising basketball player - whose lives were stolen; and without making any grand political point, it just mourns the senseless loss of stolen lives.

Because, as I’ve said before, CNN presents “news” with an agenda - their agenda. Not to inform, nor to educate, but to bring their point across - or, when the occasion requires it, to bludgeon our senses senseless with mindless celebrity ramblings. Is it any wonder why people young and old the world across are turning their backs on the mainstream media, and getting their news from blogs - because even though bloggers usually have a point to make, they’re at least transparent about it, and don’t masquerade their arguments as “news”?

In the last six years, CNN has played a huge part in making the world believe in the existence of WMD’s in Iraq, WMD’s which to this day, years after the US seized power there, more than half a year after Saddam’s death, have yet to be found. You cannot doubt that CNN has played a big part in that lie to the entire world, which many of us bought into. They aren’t the only media agency responsible, but their reach extends to every corner of the globe; CNN influences the viewpoints of millions.

To conclude, I would like to challenge everyone out there to watch CNN’s coverage from now on with a grain of salt. To look at other news agencies as a counterpoint, to think about current events as a backdrop, and wonder…

…What the hell is CNN trying to cram down my throat today?

I kid you not.

JR Henderson, an American forward who has been playing in Japan for the last coupla years, has not only applied for Japanese citizenship, he’s also changed his last name to SAKURAGI, and has landed a spot on the Japanese men’s basketball national team!

I love this. Anyone who knows me knows there isn’t a bigger fan of the Slamdunk manga than I am, but this guy takes the cake. Changing his last name to Sakuragi is the ultimate. Mad, mad respect.

A hot Saturday night at home, and I can do nothing it seems without getting restless and edgy. My mind’s full of stray, conflicting emotions and thoughts and more than enough things to drive a lesser man than The Joel crazy.

Canada Day came and went, but this time it was pretty fun. I went to Port Credit - “Mississauga’s Village By The Lake” - with my mom to see the fireworks, which lasted for half an hour (longer than I expected, since I expected uh, very little) and pretty much blew me away, considering I didn’t really think a bunch of shops by the lakeshore would buy so much fireworks. They were awesome, and on hindsight I should brought a camera to try and take a video of it, but it would’ve spoilt the moment in the same way silly camera-toting tourists miss the whole point of entire holidays by just madly taking photos. My mom apparently loves these… festivals, and it felt good to bring her out there and make her happy.

The last few weeks, I’ve been swimming a lot, at least twice a week - except my super-busy midterm week where I hardly went at all, but that’s understandable. Swimming is fun, and I’m brushing up on my front crawl which has always been mediocre, no thanks to me getting chickenpox in primary 2 as I was having swimming lessons, and then never really getting back into the lessons after I recovered. The swimming teacher was more interested in prolonging our lessons than in really teaching us the strokes anyway, since it took months and months of learning a teeeny bit of new material every week to learn a single stroke. At least I can do the breast stroke pretty okay, but that’s cos my parents taught me how to swim with that. Stupid swim teacher.

I’ve gone down to the basketball court near my place a few times over the summer, but it always ends up with my knee aching for the next week. I think I’m going to stay away from competitive basketball for a while. It’s just hard, and I’ve… I still want to someday play basketball the way I used to, and feel so free and able to do anything on the court, be able to take charge of a game or even contribute as much as I could the way I used to. It’s just tough. Time will tell, I guess.

I’ve… had these horrible feverish dreams lately, filled with all these faces, faces of friends and loved ones and people important to me at one stage or another. What goes on in these dreams? Many, many things, that I know - but when I wake up I forget all the content; the emotions, however, stay, which leaves me in a strangely introspective, confused daze for the entire day. I guess deep down inside, whether I like to admit it or not, whether my conscious mind admits it or not, there probably are a number of insuppressible worries and doubts that bite at my ankles incessantly, as much as I try to ignore them.

So here I go, blogging again almost to myself. Which is what blogging’s all about, isn’t it? I’m me, myself and I here on this blog, writing out of my heart and soul. Unlike many other people with a blog out there, I’m not playing some character. This is who and what I am. I’m articulate in expressing what I feel and think, even though what I feel and think may not be - heck, it isn’t; what I feel and think is a messed-up melancholy melange of gobbledegook, ricocheting unceasingly between the walls of my fragile psyche, weakening these very walls with every new unnerving ping-pong impact.

Oh f*ck it all, I’m going to go downstairs to play Winning Eleven 9 and “shooto” my troubles away. Unless I lose, of course. GOGOGOGOGOOOAALLLL…!

About 3 weeks ago, with the exams finally over and a lot on my mind, I followed my Dad on his weekly fishing trip to one of the beautiful lakes of in Milton, Ontario, about an hour’s drive to the west from my place in Mississauga.

The land there is very open, the journey relaxing and the traffic free-flowing. I had one of the better driving experiences I’ve had, and when we got there, spent an hour or so talking to my Dad and watching him fish. He caught two pikes before my eyes as we talked; one big one, which we took a picture of (I won’t show it, don’t know if he’d appreciate his mug being on this site) and one that was too small to be worth a picture, but we took a photo anyway. Dad set both free, which is his usual practice. The smallish one was dumb enough to bite too deep into the hook, making removing the hook from its mouth difficult - in the end, my Dad caused a bit of injury to the fish while removing the hook, and the fish was in an upside-down daze for a few minutes before it regained consciousness and swam off.

After a long talk with my Dad, I walked off to take a look around the hiking paths that skirted the huge lake. Here is a photo that I took of the lake; I don’t think my amateurish photography skills do its raw beauty the slightest fraction of justice.

Before I hit the dirt path, however, I had to walk through a raptor sanctuary for birds of prey who were kept in big cages, either because of physical disability, or due to the fact that they had been brought up by humans, and could never hope to survive in the wild, having spent their formative years without the proper guidance of a natural parent of their species. In a shaded woody area, where the path dipped downward, a number of these huge cages littered the left and right of the path, containing an array of owls, hawks and the like.

Of the many birds I saw, what caught my eye were a pair of snowy white owls, which stared me in the eye as I looked at them and waved, but looked away when I tried to take a photo of them, as if knowing that their photos were going to be taken, and not appreciating the prospect of showing up on someone’s blog. Looking into the eyes of an owl up close, I wondered how much wisdom lay behind those huge, orange orbs. Even in captivity, their intelligence and dignity impressed me, and I decided to heed their wishes and not take their picture.

As I proceeded down the path, which, in its shadier regions, was very -and I mean VERY - mosquito infested, I came upon two bald eagles. (By the way, I KNOW what mosquito-infested means. This was live-firing-area bad, at least in number, if not in tenacity. Thankfully not in tenacity.) These two eagles were huge, each about the size of a medium-sized dog. They stared their piercing eagle stare as I approached, one of them hopping around on a branch, the other lying down pathetically on its side, immobile except for its head and neck. The sight of these noble, powerful birds reduced to such a sad immobility tore at me. Ignoring the cloud of useless mosquitoes (Singaporean “commando” mosquitoes would have had my face for lunch by then), I walked close to the cage and read a plaque that told the story of the two birds. I have forgotten the exact facts, but one of the birds was my age, and the other was born in the late 70’s. One of the eagles was disabled due to a wing injury - presumably, the one hopping around on its perch - while the other had been born with a wing deformation, and would never fly. I think that was the bird that lay on its side, not moving at all, but still following my every movement with its steely stare. I felt amazed at the poise of these creatures, especially due to the fact that they were at least as old I am.

I felt sorry for the eagles, felt sad that they would never rise up in the air as rightful kings of their domain. At this point, the eagles seemed to have sensed my pity, and due to the pride of their noble birth, they seemed insulted that a mere human would have the cheek to pity a great eagle - even an eagle that could not fly. Their eyes seemed to widen, and they started squawking at me, a sharp and powerful cry, grand and yet sad at the same time. The cry of fallen nobility, who would rather be alone in their misery than be saddled with the company of a lowly peasant such as I. The eagle that could move hopped closer to me, and squawked louder, motioning aggressively with its head. I could not bear to torment these two by taking a photo of them, and hurt their dignity further. I truly felt sorry for the poor eagles as I turned around and followed down the path.

Beyond the raptor sanctuary, to the left of the woody path was a high fence, which bounded a grassy, sunny meadow. As I walked further down the track, I then noticed an amazing sight. Four horses stood grazing to my left, right in the middle of the big meadow. They were really tall, their shoulders easily towering above my head. Interestingly, the black horse seemed to be the dominant, protective one; as the horses moved about, the black horse was always the one that stood between the three white horses and me. It seemed to be protecting its brethren from me, as they occasionally looked up to where I was, squeezed up onto the tall fence that separated us, and then looked back down to the grass and kept grazing.

Waving goodbye to the horses, I continued down the track for a while more, eventually reaching a place where the trees around me opened up, and the path reached a big clearing, a huge field, also bounded by a tall fence, to which the path now bounded as it extended to my right, where it would continue toward the lake shore.

On this meadow, I was met with a powerful sight: a herd of bison. I thought the horses were big, but these things were HUGE. They towered over me, huge furry fuzzy brown monsters. Their sheer bulk was truly astounding, and this is one animal I do not ever want to piss off. I sat on a wooden picnic table which lay right next to the fence, and started taking photos of the bison. Amazingly, they again seemed to sense my presence. The herd of bison slowly started to mobilize, walking closer and closer to my vantage point. The biggest of them all, this mighty monstrous hulking alpha-friggin-male, came within fifteen meters of the fence, which gave me the great opportunity to run up and squeeze against the fence to get this picture of him. I was, once more, amazed by the creature’s beauty, especially its raw bulk: its head was the size of a boulder, and was about as wide as a truck tire.

Finally, at this point, I turned around and headed back on the track where I had come from, back past the carpark where my Dad’s Camry was parked, and toward my Dad’s secret fishing spot. On the way, I took a quick snap of a family of geese, which was highly interesting because it seemed to be comprised of a lottt of goslings and several adult couples, who cooperated in taking care of the little ones. They ferried the little goslings across my pathway, from their protected enclosure near a barn-like structure to the peaceful waters of the lake.

Having rejoined my Dad, who apparently did not catch any fish after I had left him more than an hour ago, we got into the car and drove off. With me driving, and him navigating, I explored the lovely roads of Milton, going up this steep, tremendous ridge that my Dad said stretched more than a hundred kilometres to the north. We drove past sunny orchards and huge grassy fields, and big farmhouses. We also passed by a number of little settlements of shophouses, which crowded along major intersections.

If I had a sporty open-top roadster or a motorbike, I could spend an entire day just zooming around those roads. When I DO get either of them in my possession, I think I will. Haha.

Anyway, with the sky darkening - it was already eight by then - and our stomaches growling, I turned the car toward the East, and we started on the long road back home.