Where to find help

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of NMEDA. All opinions are 100% mine.

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you needed to find information about a certain issue but you were not too sure of where exactly to look? I  suppose most of us have, and apart from family and friends, many of us would eventually turn to the Internet. Yet, how far is what we read on the Internet reliable?

The National Mobility Equipment Dealers Association (NMEDA) is perhaps the best place to find information and advice on mobility equipment if you're looking to purchase one for a loved one with a disability. The association is strictly non-profit and it is the only association that promotes safe driving and equipment for people with disabilities. All of its members are required to adhere to the safety standards of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration so you can be assured the recommendations and advice they provide are trustworthy.

A personalized 'in-person' evaluation helps determine the best driving solution that meets a certain person's specific lifestyle and needs. If any additional refinements or training is needed, the NMEDA dealer is able to assist. And if, because of these, you think that NMEDA dealers already have a high-degree of professionalism, the NMEDA goes one better. They also have Quality Assurance Program (QAP) dealers. Dealers with this accrediation are held to extremely high standards in serving and meeting consumers' transportation needs. in case you didn't know, the Quality Assurance Program (QAP) is the only recognized accreditation program in Canada and the United States for the Adaptive Mobility Equipment Industry. It is based on the principle that in order to satisfy customers consistently, companies must have a systematic and documented approach to quality.

How's that for impeccable service and assurance of safety?

Flying time

My oh my...how time flies.

A look at my last post and it was over a month ago! I suppose that's to be expected. I have other things occupying my interest now and blogging here is not really high up on my priority list at the moment. But, for the time being I'll still leave this blog here while I sort things out with the current project that I'm working on. And when the time comes, I'll announce it here and we'll see then where we'll go from there.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to the school holidays which begin tomorrow! That's 2 weeks! That means more time to do the things that I want to do and it's a much needed reprieve from the daily grind of teaching.

The Hong Kong Children's Choir

(Last night, the Hong Kong Children's Choir performed at Star City Exhibition Hall. I'll be writing my experience of attending this show in two parts because I feel that I wouldn't be doing justice to the spectacular performance presented by them.)

The weeks before the performance of the Hong Kong Children's Choir, I got to know about their show here in Kota Kinabalu through the several banners hung around town. I had never heard of them before, but I supposed the fact that they were performing internationally at our shores meant that they were probably good enough.

I had no intention of attending the performance, but just last week my neighbour had been talking about it to my wife saying how her daughter had been wanting to go and watch the performance. At the same time, the organisers had been promoting the tickets for the show at my wife's school as well, and that sort of got my wife interested and she in turn got me interested. So, in the end we decided to go and brought along Adelle as well. Our neighbour's daughter came along as with us as well.

We arrived at the Star City Exhibition Hall just after 7 pm without having taken our dinner because we thought we were running late. We bought our tickets and proceeded to take our seats. We sat at the second row from the front so that we could have a pretty good view of the choir. But since there were no signs of the show starting yet, I took the opportunity to have a bite together with Adelle. My wife had packed some food for us to eat so Adelle and I looked for a suitable place to eat. By the time we finished about 15 minutes later, the show still hadn't started. In fact, it didn't start until it was 8 pm. That was a whole hour delay from the time printed on the tickets.

Despite the hiccup, when things started it was smooth sailing all the way. The emcee got things rolling with the usual reminders - silencing handphones, no flash photography, too keep to our seats during performance until intermission - and then invited several VIPs and their spouses to come up on stage to do a ribbon-cutting ceremony. With that out of the way, the choir came in followed by the conducting to enthusiastic applause and my surprise. The troupe is called the Hong Kong Children's Choir so I was expecting to see children. But, the first thing I noticed was that these people didn't look like children - more adolescent than primary schoolers. But it was a small matter - semantics one might say.

We were given a programme sheet for the evening's performance and it'd say we'd be treated to both English and Chinese songs with the intermission dividing the two. The first two songs were hymns and they were followed by several more secular songs. The song selection for the first part of the performance was a mixture of slow and upbeat songs which kept things interesting. But, what proved outstanding were the quality of their voices and the well-choreographed movements. No, they didn't just stand still while they sang, they were moving all parts of their bodies and at certain times, even walking about exchanging places and in what looked like utter chaos! It's a wonder they didn't bump into each other and fell onstage!

Here are some of the photos I took during the performance.

The host for the evening, a Rotarian.

The choir's opening act.

Noticed this girl crying - wonder why...

The group's largely made up of girls.

Singing and movement - perfectly synchronized.

Action during one of the more upbeat songs.

Sometimes, choir members would say something to introduce a piece or provide information about their group.

They dance as well!

Reminds me of a scene from the Sound of Music.

Awaiting their turn to come in - all eyes fixed on the conductor.

You get some really funny actions in some of the songs!

The crying girl becomes a happy, graceful girl.

Different parts of the choir would be doing different actions - all perfectly polished!

The Fourteenth Letter

So, without saying them out loud (and without using your fingers to count), tell me what's the fourteenth letter of the alphabet? Just right off the bat, what is it?

It's the letter N.

Now, why am I thinking about this particular letter? Well, it's the start to a word that perfectly describes this blog's situation right now: Neglected.

I see my last update has been over a month ago. It's been slightly over two years since I first started this blog and in that span of time I've written just over 150 entries. Not exactly a wordsmith kind of scale by any means. But, I've made a few friends along the way, and a few bucks which made for some motivation. But, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to actually sit down in front of the computer to write here. Not that I don't have anything to say, mind you. There were many times where something happened and I told myself that I'd put that up in my blog but I just never got round to doing it.

So I'm just wondering - wondering if this whole feeling of wanting to blog will actually finally leave me.  I'll leave that to time to provide the answer.