Travelling with us on board the cruise ship was a travel guide who’d give free talk and info sessions about the ports and places that we’d visit. Amongst the usual topics about the places to see, things to do, the food, the people and culture, the money and general travel tips, he’d also talked about two things that I found enlightening.

One was about how people who can afford to go on cruise holidays measure happiness and how that affects our perceptions of people who we think are poor. He said that although these people might seem poor in terms of money or material possessions, their happiness might not necessarily be tied to their level of perceived wealth.

That made sense to me. Here in our “first” world we strive for personal betterment usually in the form of a job promotion or better profits from our businesses. We do this because this gets us more money, and that allows us to buy more stuff. Sometimes this pursuit for more money and stuff makes us lose sight of the costs involved: longer hours, stress and perhaps the requiring of cold and unscrupulous, or even illegal methods, and the deterioration of personal relationships.

And are all the extra stuff that we buy necessary for true happiness and self-worth? I don’t think so.

The other thing he talked about was what constitutes a good bargain. He started out by saying that unless you have a local person with you, you will always end up paying more for the same thing than a local would, especially in shops and areas that tourists flock to. So, instead of trying to avoid being ripped off, we should first think about what’s a good price for the thing that we are buying and bargain towards that.

We should bargain, no doubt about that. But if we end up paying more or less what we thought we should be paying for it, then that’s a good bargain. And sometimes, especially when the local currency is lower than your home currency, pause and think about how much money in real terms that you are actually penny-pinching over.

Ohai. By the time this is published, I would have just got aboard one of these and will be cruising from Singapore to Macau with stops along the way for the next 14 days. Blogging may be sporadic. Not because there will be no internet (hello satellite broadband) but probably because I will be too busy stuffing my face or drinking myself silly with the family – all 22 of us!

Two Sundays ago, due to my careless mistake of not checking before opening the garage door, Snoop ran across the street and bit my neighbour’s dog. Not only was I traumatised by my neighbour and his kids screaming and shouting, and the thought of their dog suffering a serious injury, I was also worried about the incident being reported to the local council.

This was not the first time that Snoop had bit a dog – the first time was the one and only time that my mom took him for a walk in the park, when he pulled my mom onto the ground as he rushed towards the other dog. If my neighbour had reported this incident, I was afraid that the rangers might make me surrender him to be put down. I was an emotional wreck and I was feeling nauseous and couldn’t eat and sleep for the next day. At one stage, I was curled up on the floor into a foetal position.

Luckily for me and thanks to my mom smoothing things over with the neighbour, the incident was not reported after we’ve had agreed to build a fence in our garage and to pay for their dog’s medical bills. The dog underwent treatment just this weekend and we are still waiting to hear back about how much it will cost, but initial estimates are that it’s going to be about $2500 at least.

Thinking back, this has not been the first expensive incident. Due to another careless episode, Snoop chewed open a box of snail pellets and my other dog Dillon ended up eating it. That cost us around $1200 to have his stomach pumped. There was the time he got hit by a car which cost about $4000. And then there was the time he had to have his leg amputated because of a tumour which cost about $1000 all up (it wasn’t so expensive anymore because I had pet insurance by then).

A conservative estimate would bring that figure up to about $10000. I’ve had him for 10 years so a rough approximation would be that he has cost me $3 a day to keep, on top of his food and regular medicine. If I look at it as cheap therapy it was worth it but then it was not all therapy – the stress that I went through during each unpleasant episode was terrible.

Would I have prefer to have had another dog? Perhaps. One that doesn’t hate other dogs so much would have been nice but at least Snoop is really nice with people and kids. I know that there has been a lot of times that my mood is instantly lifted when I’m around my dogs, and they motivated me to exercise by running and playing with them. Having them is therapeutic but it sure wasn’t cheap.

And one last thing, pet insurance is really worth it and I should have gotten it from the beginning. At around $300-400 a year and say your dog lives for 10-12 years, you just need to have one medical emergency or accident and you would have gotten your money’s worth. But it doesn’t cover your dog biting someone or someone’s dog so learn from my mistakes – be vigilant and know your dog’s character so that you know when and how to avoid potentially nasty situations.

It’s an old camera but it still serves me well.

On the weekend, a group of us (Me, Kayo, Tham, Sel and Howe Chern) went down to Margaret River for a little getaway. I would have blogged about it by now have I not lost my camera on the way back here. I didn’t realise it on the 3 hour drive back when I was the designated driver, and I didn’t realise it when I got home and dropped my stuff on the floor and slumped down on the couch for the next few hours. I only realised it as I was falling asleep and the thoughts of how I was gonna blog the trip popped into my head.

I jumped out of bed and began to look around frantically: the front door, the kitchen and the laundry; my bags and my dirty clothes and I couldn’t find it. I then texted the group asking if they had seen it amongst their stuff or in the car. Everyone said no. I then messaged our friend CC who works at Avis where we got the rental car to see if she can look for it when she gets to work the next morning.

What bothered me most was the thought of losing the photos of the trip and not so much the camera itself. Worried but exhausted I managed to fall asleep. The next morning CC said that she looked everywhere in the car and couldn’t find it. This was when I more or less accepted and came to terms with the fact that I have probably lost it for good and I tried to not think about it anymore, even as I was looking around the house and my bags repeatedly expecting it to miraculously appear.

Then this morning as I retraced my steps one more time, I decided to call the place that I knew we last stopped at before the drive home, Simmo’s Ice Cream in Dunsborough. To my great relief, they did find a lost camera and it fits the description of my camera.

So I’m gonna be driving down south this Saturday again to pick it up – a 510km round trip. A few people asked me why I didn’t arrange it for it to be mailed back to me. One, I wanted it back as soon as possible. And two, I wanted to do the drive down (those who know me well would understand how this is a big task for me ‘cos I hate long car trips!) so that this life lesson to be less careless is strongly reaffirmed in me. Heheh.

The other lesson that I learnt: when one has a laptop whilst on holiday like I did, one should upload the photos to the laptop at the end of every day so that if the camera was truly lost, then at least one would still have the photos from the days before.

Anyway, photos and write-up of the trip will follow after I get the camera back.

1. Money can’t buy you happiness but it can buy you the company of your friends who may be too cash-strapped to hang out. I believe that money is nothing if it doesn’t bring people together in a good way. But there’s a fine line between being generous and being used.
2. My mom have told me this before: you can’t take your money with you when you die so there’s no point hoarding it. There’s a difference between saving for a rainy day and being a scrooge.

   Plus I think that making your descendants expect a big inheritance is only going to make them lazy and complacent and they would not know the true value and hard work involved in earning money.

3. Bill Gates was asked about being super-rich and he said this:
   

   “I can understand about having millions of dollars. There’s meaningful freedom that comes with that, but once you get much beyond that I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger. Dick’s (a burger joint in his neighbourhood) has not raised their prices enough,” Gates said.

   I agree with his sentiment. Once you have financially taken care of the basic things many times over, chasing for more money is just ugly and obscene if that extra money was not used to help people and advance society in meaningful ways.

   After all, the simple and important things in life cost little if anything, and those are the things that give the most long-lasting happiness.

   Bill Gates: Being very rich is ‘the same hamburger’ | Technically Incorrect – CNET News.

Today, while I was the only person on my team who was free to talk a call, a customer hung up on me three times. The first time he got offended by something that I said (I don’t know what) and just hung up abruptly. A minute later, he called and got me again. Recognising my voice, he asked for my manager immediately without even a hello and when I said that he wasn’t available to take a call, he hung up on me again. And funnily enough he called a few minutes later and got me again. He heard me introduced myself and then hung up instantly. Heheh. I would feel for him if he wasn’t so rude.

For the rest of the day I analysed my words over and over again to try and understand what I could have said differently. In the end I couldn’t so I thought, “ah fuck it, some things are not meant to be understood.”

My opinion on happiness is the same – it’s not necessary to understand why you are happy. You just are. And as long as your pursuit of happiness is not immoral or illegal and it doesn’t harm yourself or other people then you are doing fine. Even better if it is not based on arbitrary milestones or timetable, whether yours or other people’s. All of which is a long way of saying:

You are happy because you are happy.

It doesn’t have to be logical and it doesn’t need a reason. Some need a lot to be happy and some don’t. There’s no right way or wrong way about it. What works for you may not work for me and I’m not going to try your way just because you feel that there’s no possible reason that I should be happy with what I have.

And if you say that I don’t know what I’m missing out on, I’m gonna say that if I don’t know what I’m missing out on, I can’t be missing it now can I?

Ignorance is bliss. Look at how happy they are.

The past two weeks I have been doing what every single person who lives alone would have to do – buying groceries, cooking and cleaning up, vacuuming and doing the laundry. It’s tiring drudgery, especially after coming home from work and you feel like doing nothing at all.

I got thinking about how much more time and effort it is for those who are parents. Even more impressive are the single parents, those who can’t afford hired help or day care, or those who don’t have in-laws or parents near by to help out with the kids. And it must be especially hard for those who work long hours or do manual labour.

And then this is assuming that the kids that you have are healthy both physically and mentally. I can’t yet imagine myself sacrificing so much of my free time and energy, and my social life to looking after someone other than myself. So to all the parents out there, my parents and your parents, I salute thee.