Photo scrapbook

I have added in a new link to my photo albums on the sidebar...take a walk down memory lane or just take a look. :P More photos to be added soon. Cheers! and...

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

6 reasons why Christmas is the best time of the year

01. Christmas songs are romantic, soothing, relaxing and simply beautiful. It's the only time I can play those songs real loud without people telling me I'm nuts.

02. Christmas trees colour my days and light up my nights. I managed to take photos of as many Christmas trees that I could find when I was in Singapore last year.

03. Christmas sales are usually up to 70%!!

04. You can smell Christmas. It's an addictive smell of cookies, chocolates, candies and cakes.

05. Christmas is a time for giving, sharing and laughter. Not everybody abides by that but still, it is arguably the most wonderful time of the year.

06. Christmas is a public holiday also.

Now, you might wonder why 6 reasons, why not 10? Well, at first it was 10 but I ran out of steam midway. Errrr..... Merry Christmas!~!!

Mission : Michael Crichton

I have a mission to accomplish. It is a fun, but pricey piece of work to do. I'm going to collect all available Michael Crichton books I can find, which of course is done over a lengthy time period.
In case you didn't know, Michael Crichton is the author of many books from many famous movies as well as non-movies and my favourite author ever. I have The Lost World and have read it more than 3 times. It's so good. He's got a couple of books under his belt, Timeline, Jurassic Park, Congo and the list goes on. Right now, I'm halfway through another one of his books, Prey. Very exciting book. Can't wait to finish it. :)
My mission will start once I clear out my book shelf and dump some remaining SPM books from 7 years ago into the back of my memory(not that it isn't already there)...and into the dumpster. My Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High, Fear Street and Enid Blyton collections shall remain untouched. These are precious memories from years gone by.

The hills are alive~~!

with the sound of music.....

I cannot imagine how many times I've watched the movie : The Sound Of Music (starred by Julie Andrews as the girl-who-wants-to-be-a-nun/governess and Christopher Plummer as the dashing Captain Von Trapp). Countless times since years ago. I'm still hooked on it, yea..laugh all you want. I watched it again on Saturday afternoon with my grandpa. Excellent...the greatest movie ever made, together with my other favourites Grease and Jurassic Park. I know the latter one is a little out of place. Musicals VS dinosaurs with sharp teeth biting people's head off. Interesting perspective though. Now imagine a T-Rex walking down main street with the sounds of Staying Alive by the Bee Gees playing in the background. Whoops...that would be Saturday Night Fever. I've gotten it mixed up with Grease. Nevertheless, anything with John Travolta in it is a winner. In the words of the Von Trapp children (in case you didn't know or you have been living in a nutshell missing out on such a great movie such as Sound of Music, Von Trapp is the family name for the family portrayed in that movie) - So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu.

Hyper-deletion Syndrome

I have an uncanny pleasure of deleting emails. I would delete things the moment I read them as long as I feel it is of no significant importance to me but yet, I do occasionally make a mistake because my automatic subconcious action of clearing my deleted items box after a couple of clickings is usually followed by an exclamation of "Oh shit~!" when I realised that I have permanently removed an important email. Yet, I can't stop myself.
I seem to have a weird uneasiness when seeing mails of the same titles piling up. It's annoyingly eating away my sanity (the mails, I mean). Delete - empty deleted items - Delete - empty deleted items. This is a robotic sequence of habit that I can't kick because it's as if it's not me doing this...it's my evil imaginary twin. The bigger the mail size, the more tempted I would be to delete more mails. I feel strangely satisfied when I manage to trim down my mailbox usage into a very nice figure which I've never experienced before. Somehow I am still unable to go below 20mb yet.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to clear up my personal folders :P ...

Celebration and tribulation

Goodbye long holiday~! I''ll miss it. Well, it was really nice to have a long holiday although it's not exactly very long but just almost a week. I worked on Monday, holiday on Tuesday, back to work one day on Wednesday and holidays till end of the week. It's nice as I hardly have a chance for long breaks since leaving college. Back then, we would have long semester breaks and it would be like heaven. It's not the same anymore now, even breaks are not as relaxing as it used to be and maybe this strange occurence could be due to boredom, worry-stimulating homework coupled together with my inability to jump-start my brains due to the overwhelming feeling of hard-to-come-by-holidays, and not relaxing also because of uneasiness with the heat from the weather as opposed to our daily luxury of sitting in a fully air-conditioned office for 9 hours or so...spoiling us with artificially generated cool air. Air-conditioner is one of the greatest inventions ever...

And now, a cause for celebration as stated below :P (eventhough I also like Chelsea now but I am still a loyal, all-time favourite MU supporter)

MANCHESTER UNITED 1 : 0 CHELSEA

...after all is said and done, I'd better go study now. Cheers!

Day of Balls

Ball #1 :
It was Saturday as usual. I went to Prangin Mall and me and Ding decided to try this shop there. The food selection was pretty normal, the only thing unique to me was the chicken rice ball. I admit, it looked cute in the menu and it happens to be a popular dish in Malacca (and since I'm stuck in Penang), so I thought, no harm trying. It's not bad actually, but it's just chicken rice which I can easily find anywhere for the half the price. The only thing different is instead of 1 big ball of rice, it is just smaller, cuter balls of rice. If I jumble everything up, I get chicken rice without the balls.

Ball #2 :
As we were strolling along, we saw a JobsDB booth and some JobsDB umbrellas and a couple of smiley stress balls on their counter. Not surprisingly, someone approached us and asked us to sign up. What the heck! We might as well since we have nothing better to do while waiting for our chicken ham/sausage crepes to be ready. Thanks to Ding, he knows I like the balls and asked if we could have it too. The lady there was nice enough to give us 2 balls (well, maybe they give it to everyone anyway!). Killing 2 birds with 1 stone...isn't that great!

Ball #3 :
Football craze! MU embarassingly lost to Middlesborough. Let me emphasize the word EMBARASSINGLY. They conceded 4 goals and only got back 1 miserable goal. What's that? A consolation prize? Past champions...well, I guess every team has its downturns at some point of time. Boo...

Sizzle~sizzle!

It was a sizzling Thursday evening, what's more to top it off was that it was a cool, rainy night that makes the purpose of bbq steamboat all the more convincing, eventhough it makes no difference in a covered-up, air-conditioned restaurant. :P The place we went to was in Gurney Plaza, called Seoul...something something. (I can't remember the full name as I didn't really notice it, there were more distracting details like food) Actually that was my 3rd time to this particular chain. The 1st time was in Singapore when my colleagues brought me to the branch at Bugis Junction shopping mall for a treat. Yummy! 2nd time was with Ding for no apparent reason, it was new, we had time so why not? But it does burn a hole in the pocket!
It's quite an expensive version of steamboat bbq but nevertheless, it's something fun to do once in a while. We didn't really manage to savour anything unique to Korean food, it was pretty normal local stuff but a lot of varieties! (I assumed it should have something related to Korea since its name has the word Seoul in it, sadly no)
The good: lots of meat, szechuan chicken, garlic chicken..chicken chicken chicken, beef, fish, very nice marinated squids, balls of all kinds (of course I meant fish balls, squid balls, etc) So much so that I realised in the middle of the feast, I looked around and saw that our table seems to be emitting the most steam and smoke. I wonder why now? ;P All in all, it's good once in a blue moon...but next time, I would prefer to go to the open air steamboat bbq restaurant across the road from Gurney Plaza. It's affordable, breezy but the bad is lack of convenient parking space. Cheers!

Tribute to Tommy

The Tommy mentioned here would be none other than the talented, boyish looking, singer-songwriter of the 90s, vocally romantic, ruggedly handsome...Tommy Page!

You have got to remember him. He was one of those that filled our lives with beautiful love songs back in my...almost teenage years or should I say pre-teen years? He has so many masterpieces under his belt like I'll Be Your Everything, Paintings In My Mind, Turn On The Radio and so on so forth but my ultimate favourite of all times still is "Time". Beautiful song..what can I say, I'm a sucker for lovey-dovey ballads.

With all that said, it's kind of sad that he has stopped making albums for himself, instead he is currently focusing his career on producing songs for other people. That's why he's been missing in action for a couple of years now, working behind the scenes. His final effort before venturing into a new direction was releasing a limited album called Ten Til Midnight, back in 2000. It is soooo limited in quantity and geographically that the album has already been sold out, gone, out of reach, adios amigo...in other words, it's not for sale anymore because there is no more left. Nevertheless, to me he is one of the best I've ever heard of. To all those that still remember this guy, it's time to pop that old dusty cassette or cd of his songs into your player and re-live the good ol' memories.

Jam for breakfast??

An unexpected sight greeted me this morning when I saw the road was jam-packed! Ok...it would be unfair to say 'unexpected', this is sort of a norm to me but usually the jam doesn't occur at that time in the morning. Normally I wouldn't even whisper much complaints about this because it's just normal except for me cursing to myself in the car, but what infuriated me is the fact it was a traffic jam for...no good reason!
I thought, could it be an accident? a car broke down? a road block? Heck NO! It isn't..maybe it WAS but it isn't anymore when I passed that road. It was just jammed for no obvious reason!
I suppose it could be due to the fact that some people tend to drive slow on the fast lane and even slower on the slow lane or do you know in some other cases(which I have seen so many times), some drivers are so interested in accidents occuring in the opposite lane so much so that they will suddenly step on the brakes in the middle of the road just to see what's going on. It is dangerous and stupid to do that. If these people like to be so 'kaypo' aka nosy, please do it with some brains. That's a note for consideration. I'm not one that likes people who drive recklessly..no. Don't drive recklessly or stupidly but drive with some bit of empathy in mind here. If people are going to drive slow, move over to the slow lane, let others pass for goodness sake. A little bit of common sense would help.

Bits of Blunt

Back to Bedlam, this is James Blunt's brand new album. One word can describe it..interesting. You know, he's got this unique voice that's quite captivating. It's not the usual deep, husky, sexy voice you'd expect but instead it's different. I can't even find the right words to describe his voice. Without a doubt, it totally suits the songs that he sings. I simply love his songs and the lyrics surrounding it. Now here's the lowdown on his album. There are a couple of songs that I've been listening to over and over and over...High, You're Beautiful, Tears And Rain, Billy and Cry. I'm incurably hooked on High and not forgetting, one of the most meaningful songs would be Cry. The only reason I started listening to James Blunt was after reading an article on him in the newspaper and well, basically my first thought was..."hey, this guy looks kind of good in this photo", turned out the album is very good. Now the rest is history. So, please teach all the young kids out there that reading newspapers will ultimately bestow upon them much valuable, leisure information besides important news updates. :)

Next up is something I'm really looking forward to, The Corrs upcoming album, Home. I bet it's fantastic and I'm waiting eagerly for the CD to come out. They are my favourite band anyway, regardless of whatever.

Green is Good

Look-ie here...a pretty little plant. It just looks cute so I couldn't resist posting a photo of it for everyone to savour.
This is a very pleasant gift from my colleague a few days back and I promised to try to keep alive as long as I possibly can, so I'm taking good care of it every day. I do admit I'm not a green-finger person and usually even the better death-resistant plants would succumb fatally in my hands, but I think this little fella will come out just fine! Trust me!

From a dear friend

A perfectly wacky 'n very cute bag (you saw the movie? I love that hippo!) and a beautiful pair of dangling earrings..I'm crazy about earrings~!... from my dear friend.
Thanks...I absolutely adore them.

Land of the Dead

Land of the Dead...it really is dead. I went to watch this movie yesterday night although I'm not much of a fan of ghosts or creepy crawly movies. Somehow I'm just drawn to these movies but I never dare to watch them. Not very much afraid of watching horror movies with people slashing other people. That's fine...but movies on ghost flying around and dead corpses limping around, it does give me the creeps.
Anyway, having to choose between 2 scary movies, Land of the Dead OR The Maid. I'd rather pick zombies. Frankly, it is has a pretty meaningless storyline. I mean, the dead comes alive, learns to communicate, tries to act like humans and BOOM..go around biting people and making them dead which in less than an hour, they come back up alive...from the dead (note:they also learn to use machine guns now). Kind of lame although the lead actor does look a little cute.
OK, fast forward to the end, the hero bombs a couple of walkers(zombies) who are in the middle of munching on helpless humans, all of it comes to an abrupt end while the rest of the zombies walk off somewhere, and the hero having a soft spot for them, decides not to blow them up also because the moral of story is, just like them humans who need to run off to the land of the free, far from the land of the dead...the zombies also just want a place to go/settle down/make a living..haha...or so it seems. Then the credits start rolling. Oh help me, Ding and I were looking at each other and thinking "How stupid is this movie?"

Welcome to my new blog

Hey...I can't help 'polluting' the web with my thoughts. It helps me to release stress and gives me one extra thing to do in my otherwise, quite meaningless life.
Serious tales, sad tales, happy tales, crappier-than-crap tales, fairy tales. Life is so full of tales. Well, read on and I welcome any comments.