ok it's finally time for me to update about our picnic @ botanics before my memory runs away with it.

it started off with me waking up at 9.30am SHARP to start preparing the food for the picnic. i started off with preparing the sandwiches by chopping up the ingredients first. there were tomatoes.. cheese.. lettuce.. mayonnaise and also turkey ham which i bought from cold storage the day before. oh yea and not forgetting my bread. i bought wholemeal bread since i tot it's sorta like healthier or something. anyway white bread are so boring haha

i had mom help slice the tomato thinly since i reckon i'll do not such a pretty job with it and concentrated on washing the lettuce instead. i chose my fav butterhead lettuce as usual cos i preferred it's texture than the normal ones. kelv recommended romaine lettuce from jacob's market. wanted to go get it but the location of the supermarkets are always in town area and it wasn't convenient for me to go down town on sat since i have a lot of errands to clear. didn't even make it to drop by bugis to say hi to my poly mates when there's supposed to be a gathering on sat. too busy being like a hsewife shopping for groceries.

haiz

i kinda regretted getting the turkey ham from cold storage instead of using the ones i bought from the meat specialty shop (Espirito Santo) in parkway basement 1. those tasted much better. nvm i shall try again since i'm having yet another picnic session this sunday (Sept 3) muahahaha!


YUMMY TURKEY HAM

i've decided to cut my sandwich into four to make it into smaller bites for easier consumption so everyone won't be too caught up in finishing one big sandwich but grabbing a bite as and when they wish to and chat while eating.


CHEF MARIA MAKING SANDWICHES WHILE ASST GU SLPS ON...

i removed the crust of the bread and then start spreading mayo on the first layer of it to have the lettuce stay more or less in place. then came the tomatoes followed by the cheese and then the ham. then my mom dug up a bread knife somewhere (amazing how my hse randomly have useful stuff) and so i started slicing my sandwiches into four and to end it off well, i broke my toothpicks into half and each half i'll insert into a sandwich bite. this shld more or less keep the sandwich in place.


HEALTHY SANDWICHES

yay!

i had to like dig up tupplewares to find the right sized ones to squeeze my sandwiches in haha

after i finished making the sandwiches i took a short break and went to the room to run a quick check on assistant gu.

snoring.

tsk. and he was supposed to help me can?
so i gave him a quick peck on the cheek and went back out.
mom sat on the stool and was announcing "HO KAR WAI!!!" lol
an attempt to wake gu up.
then voila. u see a sleepy cow walk out of the room with bleary eyes.
power mama.

besides sandwiches i prepared vege wraps as well. wad's to be wrapped?

KOREAN BEEF!

heh! i prepared the beef the night before with gu and left it in the fridge overnight.

BEFORE


AFTER


The beef turned out really well and much better than my previous attempts since i got the ingredient amount right this time round. i liked the taste but i'm always someone who prefered stronger tastes so i thought it could've tasted better but so far everyone else liked it and think it tastes just fine and now wilson labelled this as one of his fav dishes to request me to cook it again for the upcoming picnic we're havin at bedok reservoir.

gu and i arrived at the botanic gardens early so we sat around to chat and admire the view and breathe in lotsa oxygen. can't remember when's the last time i came to botanics and my memory of it is super vague. it's probably during one of those excursions. there's no familarity nor 'new' to anything i saw there since my memory is almost as good as nothing towards this place. somehow the weather was pretty humid and i kept on sweating non stop. it took awhile before the others arrived.

since yifeng and bryan is not really certain about how to come over to botanics, i had sano to go meet up with them to come together. kelvin didn't make it for the picnic after his knee injury worked up after his 21km jog marathon at camp that morning. wasted. mebbe nxt time we'll have better luck. billy's off to japan!!! lucky bxxxxxd he! LOL better bring back lotsa souvenior. immy's status was MIA.

to jump ahead of the story telling, immy was MIA cos poor girl was stuck in traffic jam over @ jb. i've long heard about the horrible jams tho not having personally experienced any. she did buy back some roadside fried dishes (MUSHROOMS!!! *hyperventilates*) for us hehe she did still bother to come meet up with us at botanic even tho it's v late already.

yifeng left early since she had church but we had our meals together first under a tree just outside the orchid garden. the food was pretty good and enough for all. sano even made roti john!! pwaaaaaar. it tasted pretty good actually haha feng can't cook for nuts but brought chin chow! shiok. one big tub can? lol eat like mad. i think i had like ard 4 bowls.


"LET'S DIG IN!"
A SCENE W SANO MAKIN VEGE WRAP.
FENG'S LEFT KNEE REVEALED IN PIC.

before we sat down to eat we actually walked around for awhile lah. but it was quite humid. then we went past the swan lake and saw a duck and some swans and lotsa lotsa lotsa turtles and fishes. some of the plants looked weird and some pretty. u get to see lotsa ppl on the grass patches spreading out their mats and just sitting there, kids running around with laughter filling the air. kites soared up in the sky, some droopy tho, or others who were kicking their soccer balls around.

then sano observed and said something quite funny.

"it's international day"

well, up to u to go figure out wad it means. lol


SWAN

these swans were bigger than i imagined. frankly speaking i've not seen one before besides those i've seen on tv. lol

then yifeng had to leave. church. so sano sent her out.

while the two of them were gone, bryan noticed an ang moh trying to take pics for a bird up in a tree then soon bryan called out and say he was trying to take the pic of a hummingbird.

hummingbird! how cool! i knew i had know chance trying to "take a pic" of hummingbirds since they flap their wings up to 80times in a sec. tsk. so i switch immed to video mode and wad luck! for a few seconds with its bright red breast, the bird flapped its wings and in stayed in the same spot in mid air! and i got all that on camera so u guys can watch it here in utube.



then i saw squirrels after sano came back. kept chasing after it wanted to take a good shot but can't it's either too high up in the tree, or it's in such a position that it blends too well with the colour of the tree bark OR the lighting's just not right. my necked cramped from looking vertically upwards all these while. then i spotted one more squirrel and yet another one. so there were like 3 of them! cute.

yifeng was devastated to know abt this. lol cos it happened only after she left. shad.

we walked to the swan lake and stayed there for most of the time looking at the turtles and such till finally, an sms from immy heh

she's comin over.

so we waited over at the foodcourt for her to reach and had some desserts in the meanwhile. there was this super long queue at one of the prata stalls that sells paper prata or something and the thing was huge! lol very exaggerating but lotsa ppl ordering it. it's like a huge paper pipe or something.

we didn't stay at the foodcourt the entire time and made our way out to walk around the park again and i got to see newer stuff and also a sundial or something.

we finally settled down with a mat at a open grass area with the singapore symphony orchestra playing or something. abit loud lah. then there's this huge group of american families on a outing together and there were lotsa good food (the spread is.. omg. got pastsa.. cookies..red wine) and kids runnin ard playing while the parents socialised and chatted. we could only look with envy frm our end lol. we were devastated to see them throw all the food away (some were barely eaten) when they were about to leave! my god! wasted! give us lar!


(CLICK TO ENLARGE)
PIC TAKEN @ CUSTOMER SERV DESK



For all the pics i've taken for the picnic, Click Here.

I have been coughin lately.. for the past week.

it usually gets worse at night where i'll keep coughin whenever my throat itches and it's not an itch you can just wish it away.

it's kinda sickening.

due to me havin acute bronchitis before (throat infection started it..) and makin my bronchus area a lil more fragile and easily injured, i have to control my cough even if it itches like hell. then i find myself occasionally in a half squat coughin like mad continuously and can't stop even if i want to. blood shoots up into my head and i find myself tearing due to the pressure of it. then i started havin a lil phlegm last night but it was a clear coloured phlegm. mom say i'm too "cooling" already. more so after she tried feeding me everyday with barley and it didn't stop my cough and so a treatment towards 'heatiness' proves to be a wrong diagnosis.

then i found slight threads of blood amidst the phlegm i spat out. no it's no v serious. pls. and NO... it's not signs of tuberculosis either (in case u watched too much tv and tot so).

like i said, slight threads of blood. it's bcos i probably coughed too much and too hard during the night and my bronchus a little injured. haiz.

mom's nxt step of treatment is to have me eat Durians.

it's one of those "last time that's how my mom treat me..." sayings.

ok wadever. better than seeing a doc and frm wad i heard... such 'cooling' cough can last up till a 100 days.

wth?! that's 3 mths can.
it's been a week i feel like shit already.

poor wilson had to wake up everytime i cough (i cough ALOT) and pat my back. sometimes he too concussed and so i had to crouch at a corner to cough. sometimes i found myself being wrapped up in his arms as if i'm a mini shrimp. even tho we slept early last night, due to my coughing spells, i think we didn't rest much.

sorry & thanks dear.

we had picnic yday at botanic gardens.

will blog abt it later tonight after i finish editing the photos. =D

Realised I havent been blogging for up to a week now cos everynight i get home i'm damn tired and yet engrossed in (abit overdue la hahaha) dabbling ard with this sony ericsson hp theme software billy sent me. quite fun la so i went crazy and experimented alot. normally i can finish about one theme per night so you see roughly how many themes below (i didn't post all lah..) you can roughly guess how many nights i spent doing all these lol.

I made a paradise kiss theme as well but i don't think i'll be posting it up.









finally after duno how many years.. I FINALLY AM THE BEARER OF THE SUBSCRIPTION OF MY OWN HP.. wah lau! lol cos when i first subscribed to this phone line of which all my friends have known for so long cos all the while i didn't change...i was still under 18 i think.

so ah, all these long while, my hp line is under my mom's name can? lol finally now since contract long over and finally a hp caught my eye, i'm thinkin abt a recontract to get the phone cheaper (i stingy lah), might as well transfer ownership also right.

and yes i called tootie up to disturb lol ask her abt hp stuff then as usual, it's the case of "after you've changed hundred over handphones already then i change one". hahaha the last time i changed my mobile was nearly 2 years ago.

picnic over the weekend.
everyone pls pray for good weather.
it's been sometime since the last gathering discounting sano's bdae.

sano tried to lure shafie over to the webcam last night over our msn chat. the boy has grown! but abit temper temper then refuse to come to pc lol so i only managed a glimpse. now sano becomes the baby sitter at home must jaga two babies lol

Today is my 1 and a half year Annivasary with Wilson.
time flies.

i'm feeling very fucked up at the moment.
a kind of overwhelmingly irrational sense of fucked-up-ness.
a sense of.. wanting to do some serious damage to something physical.
then i throw my anger inwardly and my over-imaginative mind takes over.
crowded with endless babble of inner dialogue and unreaslitic scene re-enactment
all in the mind, living out fully the anger and imagine myself thrashing things out.
a method or rather, a way I've always used to cope with anger since childhood.
on the surface it's just a unfanthomable darkened face.
then others wonder wads in the mind.
well, it's a entire actioned pack storybook that cannot be put into words.
i wanna..break a chair or something.
although i think it'll be my hand that's broken in the end.
bah.

The entry has been sitting in my blog for ages and I still haven't gotten around typing it which is bad lah. Can you imagine I drafted it since the 6th of Aug? lol

so what have I done since the 6th of Aug? well let's see...

first i made spaghetti. picture looks a little gross. the sauce is a little...sour. ok, alot sour.
so me n wilson shopped later in the week (i think, totally no sense of dates) for carbonara sauce instead. he likes it quite alot and we had it for brunch upon his request during on of the weekends. thinks was like...12th of something.


i forgot wad sauce this is

for over two weekends due to the IKEA clearance sale, wilson and i have been going down to IKEA on our sundays and first sunday we spent scouting for purchases or potential purchases. went home, mull over it, and decided to go back on the following week to get a tv stand. or rather, two of them.

on the first week ah yi went with us, and both ah yi and wilson were scouting for s ports shoes. lotsa discounts going on in queensway shopping centre. not sure if there's anymore still but if you're thinking of getting a new pair you should go check it out now. we managed to reach queensway shopping centre just in time for our big breakfast and spent quite a few hours following them around to browse for cheap and good buys. not surprisingly, most of the sport shoes are still considered expensive since wilson hasn't allocated much to his shopping budget.

on the first week:
- bought a frying pan for four bucks
- ice cube shaper (heart shape)
- 9 wooden photo frames
- 3M mini stickpads
- towels

on the second week just me and wilson went alone.

we didn't have big breakfast this time round. cant remember wad we had.
perhaps it's the sour spag. *shrugs*
made a quick purchase this time round since we already knew wad we wanted and i've made a mark on the IKEA shopping sheet which section of the shelves to collect the tv stand from. all in all i bought two tv stands, one for my dad's room and one for myself. it's pretty heavy and cumbersome so we had to take a cab home instead. due to the price hike i find myself nervously peering over the taxi driver's shoulder to see how much the taxi fare is totalling up to. haiz.

when we got home mom was home too so she hovered over us curiously and trying to make herself helpful still by sweeping the woodshavings off the ground lol but left the hammering and the fixing to us. it wasn't too difficult so we pretty much finished with everything right after a few knocks and now the tv stand is placed nicely in the respective rooms and finally! we can have our tv back in my room. we've been deprived of movies of late ever since mom decided to chuck the previous one which we bought from sea horse. it's really bad. it not only turned mouldy, it became 'home' for creepy crawlies. esp tiny ant like insects though they are not really ants but i don't know what they were either.

anyway it got onto my mom's nerves so chucked them out of the hse.


new tv stand

guess wad, i suddenly realised that i might've already blogged abt havin gone ikea the first time round cos i posted pics. oh anyway...

i decided to spray some colours one of the photo frames i have and colour it a little.



everyone was warning me not to stain the floor so i stacked LOADS of newspper around and under the paint job. mom showed me a fist to emphasize her point. O_o

had to wait for quite awhile for the spray to dry up. spray painting is fun.



i had to trim my photo a little since the frame is slightly smaller. i photoshopped to combine a black and white pic of me n wilson and developed them. when i first sprayed the photo frame i had to remove the glass panel from inside. not so easy. was afraid i'll break the metal hold accidentally since the quality wasn't fantastic to begin with.

i found some stencil ard stuff my aunt gave to me as a birthday gift donkey years ago. it's still up in my mom's closet and i realised the paint's still in very good condition.

the result wasn't too bad i guess.



friday wilson agreed to bring me to sunshine plaza to check out for Paradise Kiss dvds hehehe it's sold there! $48. need to place order and wait a month. you can't quite find it anywhere else i guess. better that an overseas purchase and somehw i'm interested in getting the original copy for this one rather than download or something. unless it's out of my means, i have a preference in getting originals for my collections. i think we kena cheated to trying out the wanton mee there. don't think it's v good plus service not v good either. wilson has been complaining non stop. oh yea i bumped into michael tong haha.

we rollerbladed on saturday night and ate at the bedok jetty hawker. is it just me or is the weather humid nowadays. i'm always sweating and it makes me grouchy. a colleague of mine lent me a japanese drama to bring home to watch over the weekend and it's named Byakuyukou. they got the two leading youngsters from sekai no chuushin, ai o sakebu's drama to come act in this Byakuyukou. i don't think singapore has it sold. it belongs to a taiwanese colleague of mine. the storyline is pretty... sad and warped. it's beautiful in a sad way. it's not like sekai no chuushin, ai o sakebu so... innocent yea. it's far from it. tho the main idealisation is towards something ironically pure.. but one lies is often covered by another lie and more lies. one crime after another crime just to cover a lie.

if you have a chance, you can try watch it.

for two nights in a row, wilson and i camped in the room early in the night. there's 3 dvds in total so each night we'll try to complete one DVD. it seems to go on forever so when we go in at about 10+, we'll finish it at around 1am.

yday wilson and i went to eat prawn mee. sat at our table for the longest time for the auntie to finally come by and clear the table. then we went to orchard to jalan aimlessly for awhile. we parked the bike at plaza sing so we shopped around inside for awhile before making our way to go explore cathay the cineplex and bumped into masayu there lol. the place's pretty empty still. lotsa shops still not opened but there is BEN & JERRY!!! pwaaaaar...! the lift is quite interesting but abit smelly. cos still new i guess. has the smell of a paintjob or something. looking at the menu it's interesting to see that they even serve pasta and salad over the food joint for bites to grab to go into the theatres. do you trust singaporeans enuff to serve them that!? lol they might just spill it over some chairs.

didn't get to complete the final disc of byakuyukou... cos there's liverpool vs chelsea last night at ard 9.50pm. quite boring but the cheers were loud o'er the goals. wilson and his friends agreed to meet up for soccer over pub where one of his friend worked in. it's a the crewroom @ prinsep road. just opposite sunshine plaza. i think ard 9 of his friends showed up altho some went to play games (which wilson and i did when the others not yet arrived.) i think i was entertained by the fact there was a kid ard to let me observe. 1 year old girl.

will be watchin An American Haunting with wilson and sano someday tho the date is not set yet. wednesday is Click with wilson and guoxi. we're supposed to bring guoxi to try out zion road nxt mth lol he's complaining that we're always sayin that we'll bring him to try good food but we never did. likewise for stonegrill hahaha

we're supposed to have picnic but i cant recall it's this or nxt weekend.. shit. better check.

i've been scouting for a simple dress and found one yesterday at centrepoint in some ulu shop. was given a discount and the plump indian lately who is pretty motherly will help alter the dress to provide more waist line. i'm to collect it tml with ching and sano hehehehe and wilson will join us later after his tuition. will post pic if possible.

another lonely night today cos wilson's going home. worse off, he banned me from watching tv. at least not byakuyukou. he wanna watch it too so i'm not allowed to be ahead of him. bleh.

Time Management

How to judge when u're life is "enriched" or "enriching".

Taking up courses? Reading book? Hobbies like... diving or wadever...? Immerse in culture related stuff like histories, politics, or an art or knowledge and then do what?

If you have the interest and the passion and most importantly, the drive to pursue all these, please do and by all means.

But when a person seems to be quite free doing random or in your perspective, "meaningless" projects having you to say "too free ah" etc is it your business?

Unless the fella has been bumming around for ages totally accomplishing nothing, you can try strangle that person.

I guess everyone has their own way of enriching their lives and how to determine whether it's "enriched" really depends on that person and what’s important to them.

I know no politics and is lousy at debates. Talk to me about politics or history or anything that involves TOO MUCH theories... I'll fall asleep.

When I have the drive and right feeling to do something, I'll make sure I do it.
When I don't, I relax.
I believe in having the right mindset and drive first before plunging myself to take up a course or something especially when I'm not prepared for it. To prepare youself allows you to better absorb what you're learning and not to forget, to make what's your money worth. You paid for the course you know? So do it right.

it's abit toots when others think u're free therefore suggest u to take up courses

wad's the deal abt havin to constantly make urself busy to justify that u're therefore enriching ur life?

I personally find it even more nonsense to go pick up some random course where the skills are pretty temporary and you'll forget it in a few years (mebbe months) time cos you don't really use it all that much but you pride yourself with the fact that you've attended its course and got urself a cert but the point is, you don't need it and u're taking it up only to fill up time. So there's no point.

soakin in freedom and slackin is also enriching in way wot? lol like being able to do random stuff.
Well, it sorta depends on how you feel inside and how impt is freedom to you and the dimension of importance it is to you. To me, if I'm cooped up, I feel immense stress and I become very irritable.

Freedom to me comes in many form. Not just time or time to do my own things. It comes in many form. Freedom of thought, freedom of speech, freedom to relax and not be so uptight... etc etc.

making urself busy doesn't guarantee enriching ur life

u'll be gasping for air in no time

and till then u realise u packed ur life so tight u can even squeeze air out of it