Three Grabs and a Good Dinner

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoHanded the driving over to someone else today, which felt like the sensible decision right up until the traffic proved it wrong. Grab in, and the roads had other plans — heavier than the app's cheerful little estimate suggested, the kind of jam that makes you grateful you're not the one gripping the wheel, even as the minutes tick past regardless. There's a particular resignation to watching traffic from the passenger seat: no control over it, and somehow still fully invested in every inch of progress.

Once in, the morning settled into its usual shape, unremarkable in the best sense, before an early afternoon round came and went without much fuss. A tidier stretch than some recent days have managed — no scrambling, no stacking sessions on top of each other, just one thing following sensibly after the last.

Then back into a Grab and out to Kota Damansara for physio, which is its own small ritual by now — the getting-worked-on, the polite wincing, the vague sense of having been improved by someone who clearly knows more about your own joints than you do. Whatever was straightened out seemed to do the trick, because the day wrapped up early enough to actually notice, home well before the evening had properly settled in, which after a run of long days felt almost indulgent.

That earliness paid off nicely. Dinner with Anita, and this time somewhere new — Coliseum at Mid Valley, tried for the first time and worth the detour, the sort of meal where the conversation and the food take turns being the main event. No agenda beyond eating well and catching up properly, which is really all a good dinner needs to be.

From there, a quick stop at Hooga to round things off — nothing elaborate, just enough to stretch the evening a little further before calling it. There's a particular pleasure in a night that ends with one more small stop rather than a straight line home, as though the day wasn't quite ready to hand itself in.

Looking back, it was a day built almost entirely out of other people's driving and other people's cooking, and there are worse ways to spend one. The traffic tested the patience early on, physio tested something else entirely, and the evening more than made up the difference. Some days earn their keep through effort; this one did it through good company, arriving home with nothing much left to complain about.

An Early Start, A Long Loop

Please click the photo above to play the daily videoThe alarm went early, before the sun had properly committed to the day, on the sensible assumption that a day this loaded needed every spare minute it could get. Physio booked for the afternoon meant the whole thing had a shape to it already — decided in advance, which is either restful or slightly ominous, depending on your outlook.

Grab was the order of the day, given the physio appointment sitting at the far end of it — no sense wrestling with parking twice over when someone else could do the wrestling instead. The morning rounds went smoothly enough to almost feel suspicious, everything ticking along without the usual small snags, which is the sort of thing you learn not to comment on too loudly in case it hears you.

Then came the virtual interview on CML — chronic myeloid leukaemia, for anyone not fluent in the acronym — which had been sitting somewhere at the back of the week with a faint hum of nerves attached. As these things so often go, the anticipation had done rather more work than the actual event required. It went better than expected, questions landing in places already comfortably familiar, the whole thing wrapping up with that particular lightness that comes from a worry proving to have been mostly imaginary.

Barely time to enjoy that before lunch, this one in honour of Prof Chan Lee Lee's retirement — a proper send-off in miniature, the kind of gathering where the conversation keeps circling back to "can you believe it's been this long," said with the specific fondness reserved for someone who's earned the right to finally stop. Quick as these things go, but warm, the sort of lunch that leaves you glad to have been in the room for it.

No pause after that, straight into a workshop on chemo prescribing, the new online module debuting with all the slightly clunky enthusiasm new systems tend to bring — a few dropped connections, a screen that froze at an inconvenient moment, the general teething of anything digital meeting real use for the first time. Got through it, though, filed away for next time.

Then Grab again, out to Kota Damansara for physio, the city sliding past the window in that unbothered way it does when you're a passenger rather than driving. By the time the session finished, tired had properly set in — the specific, bone-deep sort that a day this stacked leaves behind, no single part of it dramatic, just the accumulated weight of a great many things happening one after another without much gap.

Straight home after that, no detours, the evening arriving with the simple relief of having nowhere left to be. Dinner, then Anita needed to nip out to Mid Valley for something — one of those small errands that seems to arrive precisely when you've mentally clocked off. Went along anyway, more for the company than the errand, the day finally winding down somewhere between the car park and the walk back to it.