I left the office early yesterday in anticipation of a short paddle; planning to take advantage of the 5.6 m King Tide at 1807 hrs for an easy launch off my jetty (I am still nursing a bad back). Yesterday was also the 1^st day of Ramadan (Muslim fasting month). As I got into my car, the sky turned dark and it started to pour, literally bucketfuls. Some of the roads were partly flooded. When I reached home, the thunderclouds and flashes of lightning in the sky put to rest any plans for a paddle! So I shifted my thoughts to a long postponed dinner plans with two old classmates of mine from St Thomas’s days.

So this morning I decided to get up early for a quick paddle before I go to the office. As I was putting my paddle into the water strokes after strokes and watching the water dripping off it, it dwelled on me that I have Sg. Stutong all to myself and I felt privileged for this and the solitude and the tranquility in the chilly morning air. Just then, the early morning sun was about to break through the heavy clouds cover and I reached for my camera to capture the moment. It was a short paddle but I felt refreshed, blessed and peaceful. “All I need is the air that I breathe and to love you …”

“I can feel guilty about the past, apprehensive about the future, but only in the present can I act. The ability to be in the present moment is a major component of mental wellness.”

Abraham Maslow
1908-1970, Psychologist

“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us really happy is something to be enthusiastic about.”

Charles Kingsley
1819-1875, Author and Clergyman

“Life is like a Box of Chocolates …”
Here’s a story that says that Life is a Bag of Frozen Peas!

Life is a Bag of Frozen Peas

A few weeks after my first wife, Georgia, was called to heaven, I was cooking dinner for my son and myself. For a vegetable, I decided on frozen peas. As I was cutting open the bag, it slipped from my hands and crashed to the floor. The peas, like marbles, rolled everywhere. I tried to use a broom, but with each swipe the peas rolled across the kitchen, bounced off the wall on the other side and rolled in another direction.

My mental state at the time was fragile. Losing a spouse is an unbearable pain. I got on my hands and knees and pulled them into a pile to dispose of, I was half laughing and half crying as I collected them. I could see the humor in what happened, but it doesn’t take much for a person dealing with grief to break down.

For the next week, every time I was in the kitchen, I would find a pea that had escaped my first cleanup. In a corner, behind a table leg, in the frays at the end of a mat, or hidden under a heater, they kept turning up. Eight months later I pulled out the refrigerator to clean, and found a dozen or so petrified peas hidden underneath.

At the time I found those few remaining peas, I was in a new relationship with a wonderful woman I met in a widow/widower support group. After we married, I was reminded of those peas under the refrigerator. I realized my life had been like that bag of frozen peas. It had shattered. My wife was gone. I was in a new city with a busy job and a son having trouble adjusting to his new surroundings and the loss of his mother. I was a wreck. I was a bag of spilled, frozen peas. My life had come apart and scattered.

When life gets you down; when everything you know comes apart; when you think you can never get through the tough times, remember, it is just a bag of scattered, frozen peas. The peas can be collected and life will move on. You will find all the peas. First the easy peas come together in a pile. You pick them up and start to move on. Later you will find the bigger and harder peas. When you pull it all together, life will be whole again.

The life you know can be scattered at any time. You will move on, but how fast you collect your peas depends on you. Will you keep scattering them around with a broom, or will you pick them up one-by-one and put your life back together?

Michael T. Smith

If you would like to email Michael, he can be reached at: mtsmith@qwestonline.com or find more of his writings and bio by going to http://heartsandhumor.com/blog/

For the uninformed (ahem), a foldable is a folding kayak.
Had just bought mine - a yellow Folbot Cooper after months of mulling over which one to get. Was attracted to the design when it first came out but the adverse comments about loose longeron tubings and a fragile skin puts me off until recently. Velcro cinch straps to keep the long tubings in place, a switch back to the proven hypalon skin instead of the TPU and the Folbot August Sale finally broke my resistance! Had been thinking of the Fujita 480 (too expensive) and the Feathercraft Java (a SOT) as well.
Was impressed that it only took a couple of days for them to send it from the US to small town Kuching by DHL. Assembly was pretty easy (but it still took me a good part of an hour on my 1st assembly) and I left it assembled in office. Why in the office and not at home? Thats another story. Had to put on the longeron padding - only did it for the bottom keel piece; and the self-adhesive keel strips to the hull - bottom and the 2 chins.
Took her (its a she?) out on a maiden paddle at a nearby beach resort - as luck would have it; the seas were rough with breaking waves on the beach. It was a different experience to be riding over on top of the waves instead of crashing through it in a hardshell. The Cooper felt tippy initially but feels stable when moving.
At my second outing, during the assembly I found to my horror that 2 screws had come off from the crossribs. The pounding surf must have loosened them. Manage to find the nuts in the bag and hand-srewed them back. That must have distressed me to the extent that I didnt quite assemble it correctly. The frame must have been out of alignment as the Cooper was veering off to one side! Overall I am happy with it and I look forward to many future adventures in the Cooper. Yahoo!

We moved into our new place yesterday and this morning I got up early.
It must have been raining as the jetty was wet. The tide was coming in at the time.
Here are some of the colours of the early morning light that I managed to capture …
25-8-05

I was lucky. I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started?

Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me - I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT.

I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple.It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking.

Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs gave this as his second story of his Commencement Address at Stanford University on June 12, 2005.

Was in Singapore for holidays with my family recently and took these shots of kids playing in the fountain at Bugis Junction Shopping Center. It was a scorching afternoon and I envy the kids who are having a whale of a time - oblivious to my photo taking and the watching crowd in the shade.

I particularly like these 2 shots and would like to share them with you. Hope you like them too.
June05

“All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.” PABLO PICASSO

“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.” THICH NHAT HANH