Love is all around

The Valentine's Day celebrations that started yesterday continued today.

Da and I had a Valentine's Day lunch, Valentine's Day tea and a Valentine's Day dinner, all with loved ones, today.

The day started with brunch at a coffeeshop at Jalan Tua Kong. This coffeeshop is located along the same row as BlooiE's Roadhouse Bar & Grill. Interestingly enough, I only noticed today that the coffee shop has no name. My brother (LG) remarked with a straight face that the coffee shop has a name - "the no-name coffeeshop". *grin*

As my brother (LB) and his wife (MF) live in Bukit Gombak, we do not meet them often for lunch/brunch on sundays. Today, however, I was pleasantly surprised when my mother told me that they will be joining us for brunch. As such, it was a family affair and we occupied 2 tables at the coffeeshop.

This coffeeshop only has three food stalls and a drink stall. The three food stalls have their own respective regular customers and they sell:-

(a) one-dish meals (eg. fried vermicelli, etc);

(b) rice with your choice of ingredients, mee siam and lontong; and

(c) fish ball noodles, yong tauhu and laksa,

respectively. Despite there being only three stalls and the fact that they are only open for breakfast and lunch, the coffeeshop is always packed with customers.

My mother and LB ordered a plate of Hong Kong mee each. For my mother's order, she requested that the Hong Kong mee be fried with bee hoon.

MF decided to order mee siam. (Hi MF, this stall also sells "curry mee siam". I have not tried it and I am curious as to how different it is from regular mee siam.)

LG's girlfriend (ZT) ordered her "usual", that is, fried mee goreng without certain types of vegetables.

Da's first choice was fried rice and he was pleased when he was told that it was available. As such, he ordered a sambal fried rice fried with pieces of chicken.

I was having a bit of the sniffles this morning and I settled for mee sua with soup.

LG ordered a plate of beef hor fun but I did not manage to take a photograph of it.

No meal at the coffee shop would be complete without side orders. As such, we ordered two pieces of fried lemon chicken to be shared.

The nasi lemak stall had run out of whole fish, so we ordered two pieces of fried batang fish and shared it.

Da and I had brought along a green tea banana and prune wholemeal cake that I baked yesterday. We gave a few slices to the one-dish meal stallholder to sample. She informed us that her husband is fond of wholemeal.

After lunch, my siblings and their respective other halves accompanied my mother to buy a mobile phone (to replace her mobile phone whose LCD screen has gone into retirement) and to buy a pair of walking shoes.

In the meantime, Da and I went to church. We met up with Da's cousin (MT) at the entrance to the church auditorium and we proceeded to the church's overflow room (as the main auditorium was full). We had an awesome time in worship. It is indeed the grace of God that provides for everything in our lives. His supply is endless and is far more abundant than our needs. He wants to bring His multiplying power on what we have and we will end up with plenty left over.

After an anointed church service, MT, Da and I proceeded to our "regular haunt" for tea-time. You guessed it! Hans Cafe & Cake House.

Today, all of us decided to order a savoury snack each, accompanied by a hot drink.

After MT left for his dinner appointment with his family, Da and I made a quick detour to a mobile phone shop in the same shopping mall. Da's existing mobile phone has also decided to go into retirement - some of the keys no longer work and you can barely hear the person on the other side of the line when you are using the phone. We requested to see some models of Nokia phone that were not slide-phone nor flip-phone as Da does not like these types of mobile phones. When we settled on a mobile phone that we both liked (a Nokia 3120) and asked the shop assistant for the cost of the mobile phone, we were pleased to be told that the mobile phone would be made available to us free of charge if we were eligible for an "upgrade". Our mobile phone subscriptions are for a term (of two years, I believe) and if we have fulfilled the contractual period, we would be eligible to obtain a new mobile phone if we were to continue the subscription for another term. Many of the new mobile phones that are part of this promotion are chargeable (although at a cheaper price than if you were to buy the phone "without contract"). However, sometimes, the promotion is such that you are eligible to get a new mobile phone free of charge if you continue the mobile phone subscription for another term. Usually, we do not fancy the mobile phones that come free of charge because they are either of a much older model or we do not like the functions of the phone. However, in this case, the mobile phone that we both happened to like was available free of charge. As such, we walked out of the mobile phone shop with a new mobile phone that we did not have to pay for. The only thing we had to do was to continue the mobile phone subscription for another term of two years. What a blessing!

Dinner was another family affair with my family. We decided to have our dinner at Hong Kong Street Family Restaurant located at Eastwood Centre in Bedok. LG and ZT initially had other dinner plans but there was a last-minute change of plans and everyone was available to have dinner together.

We ordered five dishes to be consumed by seven of us and had a most enjoyable dinner.

After dinner, Da and I adjourned to my mother's home where our little Boy-Boy decided to play "peek-a-boo" with us.

Boy-Boy was in the mood to be a model for me today and he gamely gave a little wink for my digital camera.

As Boy-Boy is still under medication for a medical condition that he currently has, he obediently allowed my mother to feed him his antibiotics and anti-itch tablet provided that she spoon-feed him his water, of course. (Do you notice the water droplet that happened to fall from his mouth in the photograph below?)

No matter what trials and tribulations we are going through and our perceived lack in our lives, we are actually very blessed. We have health, we have family and friends, we are able to live in a society that is relatively safe and we get to wake up each morning, smell the roses and go to work. The grass will always be greener on the other side and there will always be another job that may pay us a higher salary (but which may come with a price, such as more work stress). However, if we stop to count our blessings, we will realise that we have a lot to be thankful for.

Thank You, Abba Father, for blessing my family and me and setting us up for miracle after miracle after miracle.