amazing race

i thought mardy and marsio were going to win this season of amazing race asia! after watching the snow hiking episode, i was so touched by their brotherly love! mardy actually offered to help marsio carry that super heavy bag pack up the hill when he himself was on the brink of collapsing already. i was so sure that they would amaze everyone else and come in first with their intelligence. but sigh! in the end they had to lose because of some brain-eating challenge. how ironic it is that they, being the team with the most brains, had to lose at this stage!

so devastating. they were really entertaining and amusing to watch. :( no more m&m brothers for me to support now!

work

im so sick of working! argh! a few more days (if my parents decide to keep to their words) and i'll be free! my back is aching, and my arms and legs are breaking. humans are not machines. humans get tired, and humans break down much sooner than machines. sometimes when i operate that machine i really wish i can transform and become a robot and finish up with fixing all those plastic handles in the shortest time possible. everyday i just keep looking at the clock and will time to go by quickly. everyday i listen to weird chinese opera music from this cd that my fellow worker loves. and everyday he sings along to the songs. i shall not comment on how well he sings. sometimes i'll get to listen to bangla music on the radio when the bangla (or is he from sri lanka i don't know) worker takes over. i like my fellow workers because they protect me from the fearsome guard dogs at the factory. now im not so scared of those dogs because they've recognized me and have stopped barking at me like they used to. im happiest when my dad brings me to eat breakfast in the morning, during the few hours i sleep in my dad's car, and when my parents have the time to entertain me with their jokes. that day my mum told me that my dad has a secret admirer who works in the canteen! how cool! and i got to see that woman today. i didn't know my dad was so charming. the woman even confessed her love to him. hahaha. poor lady though, unrequited love.. that's sad. i love it when my dad comes along and helps me out with packing the plastic bags, but i hate it when he has to go for meetings and leave me behind on my own. working is tough, and i finally understand what it means when they say money is hard-earned. these days, i've come to feel an overwhelming sense of admiration for my parents, and their sheer determination which saw them through establishing this company and working so hard every single working day. i've not inherited their incredible passion for this job. if only i did. then i wouldn't whine and complain so much. i need to perservere..

just read huixuan's sms. yay! the dates for our wonderful stayover are finally confirmed! i can't wait! i bet she and hongzhen are on the verge of killing me already, heheheh.


i love my mushroom lamp! it's cute beyond words :)

as time goes by
suddenly, "oh why?"
another blink of the eye
67 is gone
the sun is getting high
we're moving on

update on the weekend

and so the weekend came and went like a breeze.

saturday was really eventful! met yiwen and weiche at clementi interchange before going to nus for the open pairs. and sometime before we boarded the bus, it started pouring so heavily. it was more than just cats and dogs dropping from the skies. apparently none of us had umbrellas by our side, and while we were all pondering how we were going to get to nus in one piece, we alighted one stop after the nus guild house stop. because i was the one who forgot to press the bell at the "right" stop, yiwen and i started blaming each other (as usual) while the three of us ran back in the rain to the previous stop. by then we were already completely drenched, and there was still such a long unsheltered path we had to take before we could reach the guild house! so we took a look at the map to figure out the shortest possible route we could take to reach there, and that was when weiche pointed to mpsh and asked, "i thought we're supposed to go here?"

!!! then it suddenly dawned upon all of us that the venue for the event was mpsh, and not the guild house! the mpsh was a few stops further down from the guild house stop - which meant that we ran in the rain for nothing, and that i was not wrong about not pressing the bus bell earlier! (even though at that point in time i really thought we were supposed to go to nus guild house, hahaha) how unlucky could we get! we were quite a pathetic sight, and yiwen and i were wondering how we were going to survive the competition later on, being so drenched and having this kind of luck with us. to make things worse, the two of us were simply being lame and trying to push the blame on each other. it was then that i realized that i've always spent the most horrible moments in my life with her! let me keep a record of those pathetic times:

1) going to bridge chalet from kap - it was such a long mrt journey with my injured partner
2) coming down with the pastamania flu
3) being sick during the trials
4) getting drenched in the rain for absolutely no good reason at all

im so sure there'll be more of such moments to come, because really, the unluckiest things just always manage to happen whenever i'm around her. of course i shall insist that my partner is the source of all these troubles, and not me =P hence we continued to argue senselessly over who was the one bringing all the bad luck while strolling to mpsh after we took the shuttle bus to the right stop. by then we were so wet that strolling or running wouldn't even make a difference.

i would have thought that a day that started off so badly would end badly as well! but miracles do happen :D we actually got third for the students' category! congrats to jack and jackie for getting second! yiwen and i came to a conclusion that at least we do know how to play a little bit of bridge after all. i had already forgotten the feeling of what it was like to not get last, or even second last. it was nice remembering the feeling of winning a trophy. yay!

anyway i still got to thank my partner for playing really well that day and for covering up my 4SX-3 mistake with other good boards. the 3C+1 board she made was really spectacular. hahaha, i would have been so stunned if my KJ doubleton managed to win 2 tricks. ;)

on a more unfortunate note, the only reason i can be updating on a weekday afternoon is because i came down with food poisoning that night after nus open! till now i haven't figured out what exactly it was that i ate that caused me to vomit and have diarrhoea all night. perhaps it's just that bad luck returns after i've used up all my good luck that day. first time visiting a doctor at 3.30am, and it was quite funny how the doctor looked so sleepy and groggy. he must have been secretly cursing me for disrupting his sleep la. feeling much better right now, and indeed it's a blessing in disguise! because i can finally skip a day of being free labour at my parents' workplace! the past week had been so tiring. i can't imagine if i were to get paid by my parents. that means i can't slack at all and i'll have to work non-stop! that's such a nightmare. at least now i still get to rest before my back or arm breaks. i can't wait to be free after this month of misery! for now, i shall just enjoy a day without computing accounts and stressful handling of machines..

reliving the past

i better not leave the previous post there as the most updated one for too long. far too depressing as my first post for this year. haha, shall just be like lowly and post some random photos of the past!

2001: sec 1 china trip

this was my first time taking an airplane and participating in an overseas immersion programme. we visited six provinces of china, we went through childish friendship cold wars, we did cip at a school of hope, we had midnight feasts in the hotel, and we made good friends with the teachers who accompanied us there. poor huixuan was my roommate and had to tolerate my fear of the supernatural. we watched the same "red shoes" mtv in the hotel countless times. i remember there was a particular night where lowly, huixuan, deborah and i kept ourselves occupied worrying about this drunk dubious couple we met in the lift, yet we never got down to doing anything to save the woman in the end.

2003: sec 3 end-of-year shanghai attachment programme

i was in pink bananas, the funkiest group which resembled part of the association of spastic animals. we did the craziest things - squeezed our way into this tiny telephone booth for fun's sake, flew kites in the balcony, became paranoid about this eccentric china guy for no apparent reason, imitated certain people, and laughed every single second during mealtimes.

2005: eastern europe trip in j1
eating rittersport and icecream almost every single day, having my favourite cocopops, playing cards every single night, inventing our own super exciting card game, experiencing the traumatizing incident at the sauna, visiting germany's castles, shopping in czech republic, loving the cold breezes in eastern europe, taking datou and xiaotou photos with my datou, chatting with cihan in the dead of the night.. wonderful memories of a lifetime.

my favourite birthday present this year!

im glad i managed to unravel the mystery within the broken cd :)

you'll miss the old, but you'll grow to like the new. - rare words of wisdom from my bro

greatest buddies

the sweetest christmas present ever. thank you ying2 and grace. somehow the sepia photo reminds me of vree!

view from genting hotel. look how fun the theme park is! and i only managed to play with bumper cars the whole time i was there.

happy photo. i miss our class bench.



it's scary how two years of jc life had just flown past like that. i wonder how much everyone will have changed by the time we take our third class photo..

***

pabf trials

because some random person decided to leave his virus-infected tissue in a cup of drink at pastamania, i've been down with a horrible flu for the past week or so. it was that day after the hari raya pairs - second day of this brand new year - that we went there to have lunch. and i was not the only unlucky one who fiddled with that cup and landed myself in such a sorry state, as evident from how yiwen and zhibang caught the flu too. it was actually quite funny when i found out that yiwen came down with flu the exact same time i did. partnership agreement indeed, and to think that we still had so much fun playing with that cup of drink that fateful day. oh well, there're always clear skies before a storm brews over. i think my partner is still currently struggling to recover from this deadly virus. sigh, what a nice way to start off 2007.

the past week was entirely devoted to blowing my nose and playing bridge. i seriously have no recollection of what else i did besides going to yiwen's house and playing bbo with her, all in the name of training for the pabf trials last weekend. i don't know why im still feeling so down now over the trials, when it was apparent that we didn't have a chance in the first place. im just feeling so sorry that i wasted so much of my partner's time (and money) when she would be much better off with any other partner. anyway, to yiwen, if you happen to be lurking around here, i just want to say that im really sorry, p. im sorry for so many things that i've lost track of where to start from. i suppose if i think chronologically and recall back to the very first round against kenny and elon, i can already list down so many errors that i made. i can't believe i actually made my partner declare some ridiculous 3NTX-4 for the very first board that we played. and this was not all. i let opponents make unmakeable contracts, gave away free overtricks, declared dangerously, and bidded blindly, rendering our week of bbo training totally futile.

last golden harvest, the two of us were feeling really guilty that we dragged our teammates down with us and caused them to lose. yes, they should have won, if not for us (actually it's just me). so we thought we would be better off playing pairs events and not having to be answerable to whoever who would be unlucky enough to be our teammates. yet now i feel even worse than i had felt for nuss and golden harvest. being sick isn't even an excuse for bad play. i could see that yiwen was really trying her best to earn good boards for us, and the least i could do would be to just play normally. perhaps i can't even play normally. i just had to be stupid and give away imps even more generously than santa claus.

at the very least, i don't regret training for the past week because i did have fun being lame at yiwen's house. the trials itself was good fun too, but things should have been much better. i don't know which is worse - letting yourself down, or making an innocent party suffer with you. i know that "sorry" will never suffice, but at this moment, i really do not know what else i can offer but apologies.

i am really better off just being a dummy.