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-Is an English Language major undergraduate who likes to Take It Easy.

Words and languages, Jane Austen, period dramas/films, Vitagen, Korean dramas, good songs, better books, Green, wanderlusting, Culture, writing, Experimenting

Things I'd Like

- A Nitendo Wii gaming console
- My own set of rollerblades
- More nail polish (bought just one, neon pink in colour)
- Concert DVDs! (Back to Basics: Live & Down Under by Christina Aguilera, The Black Parade Is Dead by My Chemical Romance , Mika: Live In Cartoon Motion, Where The Light Is: John Mayer Live In Los Angeles )
- A cat

Old Stories

Deep-night
Day 4 @ the canyon
Day 3 @ Grand Canyon
Day 2 @ Flagstaff
To dad: Day 1 @ Phoenix
I feel like I should change my blogskin, as it's b...
A park affair
The real importance of being earnest
Firstly, let me get this announcement off my chest...
I've got a secret

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Designer: fedora_girl :)
Image: Pride & Prejudice (2005) screencaps
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I spent a good lot of my day tidying up my walk-in wadrobe (which I share with my youngest brother) today. I had got a visual idea (when I exchanged rooms with my other brother) that place was a filthy mess. And I had resolved to quick do something about it before school starts. I managed to clear away like, piles and hundreds of my brother's old kiddy tshirts and school uniforms. My mother now has a new stock of 'rags' handy until the end of the year.

And oh god, there were all those coloured Taekwondo belts. All 3 of us took lessons together a few years ago, and learned until we earned out black belts. Well, 2 of us. And each time you pass 2 levels, you get a new & different coloured belt. So let's see, the order's like this: White, yellow, green, blue, red, and then black. So there were 3 sets of every colour lying around and coiled haphazardly in the wadrobe. I have since neatly stashed them into a luggage and stowed it in the shelf overhead.

And there were a few board games lying around in the wadrobe-scrabble, 2 versions of Monopoly (the Fifa and Singapore edition), Chinese Chess, and Battleships. It made me itch to start on them again sometime soon.

After much enduring (and lots of nonstop sneezing) of all the dust in the wadrobe, and stepping in and out to add and separate the junk to the respective piles I had created, I managed to make the place presentably normal. Yay.

And I managed to dig up some old-new unused stuff like Hello Kitty items, Sasha bear soft toy, phonecards,etc. All of which make somewhat good items to sell on ebay or yahoo auctions. I'm trying to put my items on Yahoo now but realise the hard way that there's something really fucked up about the system at the moment. And for ebay, apparently, one HAS to have a paypal account & a credit card (which I'm borrowing from my dad). So...I can only confirm my paypal account number 2 to 3 working days later, I'm told.

What about all MY unused clothes? Well, I had the sense to bring them out to an outing (where all my friends happened to be smaller-sized than me)2 weeks ago, and threatened, entreated, bribed, flattered and whathaveyou, including a fashion show in the toilet somewhere in Orchard I must add. Basically, my load of 'charity-to-friends clothes' were made lighter at the end of the day.

So, today's Superband night.

My thoughts:

My friend sounded rrreally good on the drums on that Superband show. Though she's a chilled kind of person, she sizzles on the drumset. Actually, I think she is capable of rocking out on any musical instrument you give her. I've seen her had a go at the classical guitar during CCA sessions in my JC days. She's one of those people who has a real passion in music, and would train all her little kids to be music prodigies (she shared this with me while we were at a concert one time, and onstage performing at that time was a classical guitar genius boy). This kind of person makes me ashamed at how lazy I am with practising the guitar and not being more fired up about (self)-learning theory lessons for the piano. Siggh

And then later on, I caught (the encore telecast) of Live from Abbey Road (studios) on Arts Central with 1) John Mayer- That guy's music is sooo good. I can't wait to get his new concert DVD...in future when prices drop.

2) Norah Jones- her voice is jazzy perfect. tone perfect, pitch perfect. She just sings so well, her voice flows and ebbs at all the right parts. Her music may be slow and even boring, but her voice just enthralls you. Reminds me of Death Cab for Cutie's music.

3) and some guy named Richard Ashcroft-who was bugeyed and sounded so sub-standard.

QOTD: “Creative minds are rarely tidy” -Anonymous

Labels: wadrobe

I had initially planned to go to Sentosa beach today, for some sun and fun playing volleyball and Frisbee. Out of the 5 friends I asked, only 2 were free. Out of this 2, only 1 was willing to spend a morning at the beach as a trio, and so sadly, I couldn’t go on with my planned outing. Some organizer I am. I knew I couldn’t expect much, since I only started asking them to make their morning free today, yesterday evening. I myself always hate it when people ask me out at the eleventh hour because for me, it wouldn’t give me enough time to flatter and assure my mum, so to speak.

So anyway….my dad drove us out to East Coast today. I admit, I was pretty concerned about the friggin sun clearly shining down its light at that time. Ever since I was 15 and had given up on Netball, I used to hate sports because of all the sweat involved. I’ve somewhat learnt to put aside that stupid excuse now.

Today however, I was more afraid that I’d sweat profusely, because the weather has been very hot lately, one can feel the heat even when you’re shaded and just chilling under a sheltered place. Anyway, I downed a Crunch ice-cream (I got from 7-11) and was good to go. It must have been all that chocolate in my blood. Ok, the weather wasn’t bad at all. Yeah, there were sunny spots here and there down the path, but for the most part, it was shaded, because there are loads of trees lined along the paths at East Coast, AND, there was the sea breeze going on for us, so, no problemo. The problem was…me. I could hardly believe that I was actually panting and feeling breathless every 15 minutes or so. Luckily, nobody was around to witness my humiliating breathing problems (except my parents, but they were busy on their bike and always in front of me). OMG, am I really that unfit? It was a pretty weird experience for me, because I have no idea why I would feel breathless rollerblading….I have never felt that way before…maybe it was all that chocolate messing with my mind and body. I bladed while my parents shared the couple bike, awww. I went the furthest I ever went on the East Coast paths today, which was somewhere after the sports center.

While blading today, I thought to myself, “Honestly, there’s no better way to spend the weekend (especially if the weather’s great) than out, doing some sports.” Like rollerblading, hehe. To hell with staying indoors shopping and whatnot. Have some fun with nature and manmade concrete. That’s the way to spend every of my weekends if I had the choice to. Speaking of which, I read a book on happiness recently, saying that nature absorbs one’s negativity. That’s one of the reasons why people love receiving flowers, or talking to plants.

It was a little after 7pm when I returned my blades and I heard and saw 4 fighter planes, and a chopper flying pretty low, flying a huge Singapore flag. I found out that the National Day Parade folks are doing rehearsals every weekend till the actual day itself.

At night, we dropped by IMM and my parents bought like, 4 bottles of wine. Cheap wine obviously, at $11 each at Giants hypermart. Speaking of wine, I mentioned reading a book on happiness recently. Inside, they were talking about how food can maintain or elevate one’s mood and all. One of the points it mentioned was drinking a glass of wine every night does wonders, or something like that. So I’ve been doing that for two consecutive nights already, and I found out I get knocked out when I go to bed, and that I can’t hear the alarm clock and don’t have dreams at all, till morning comes. The book didn’t tell me anything about the ‘side effects’. Geez. Coming off from Giants, my brother and I had went mad. Because our parents told us to choose our breakfast items tomorrow, since my dad normally cooks breakfast on Sundays, and my mum does not cook at all for the rest of the week, so this was one of the few times we got to buy food. And today, my dad told us to walk off and choose what things we wanted him to cook tomorrow, as he was weighed down by those 4 bottles of wine and could only wait around for us, haha. So along the way to the frozen foods aisle, my bro and I had picked up chocolates, nuts and whatnot. And at the ff aisle, we put a little of everything in our basket.

Our total charges for those wines+breakfast items+snacks was: $104. Zomg. But seriously, Giants is a pretty awesome place to get goods at very decent prices. :D

PS: IMM lets cars park at their carpark for free for the first 3 hours, and they have opened so many more shops, so it’s quite a good place to go shopping, if I do say so myself.

PPS: Giants had the Coffee Prince Korean drama DVD, going for $9.90!! Woot. No more trying to load all the parts to watch at mysoju.com.

Labels: east coast, Giant's, IMM, NDP

There's no way trying to use my smarts or blackmail or reverse psychology to get my mum to agree to pay for an Akido course for me and my bro, so I guess I can look forward to continuing my guitar lessons(which falls on the same day and timeslot) sometime soon...

Today, my parents and I went to Jurong Point and we ate at the overpriced seafood-in-a-pan restaurant, Fish & Co. My few experiences with that eatery was always disgruntling because I always come away thinking their food is cooked like shit (at least, I’m talking about the outlet at Suntec City). We ordered the seafood platter for 2 (though there were the 3 of us), and managed to share it nicely among the three of us! Whee….it’s so nice to not have any leftovers or fighting over food when it’s not enough, you know? And on top of that, to get your money’s worth.

Surprisingly this time, Fish & Co’s food was not bad at all, although there was a little too much pepper sprinkled on top of everything- from the fish to the prawns (my mum told me it was highly likely to cover the fishy smell of the food), it was tasty, fresh and good. We really enjoyed the food, and luckily we did, because we waited almost ½ an hour for the food!! That’s service in Singapore for you.

The only big grouse I had at the eatery was that, like two tables behind us, we heard songs playing in that annoying frequency/sound- like when you hear songs being played on your handphone. Suddenly, all your favourite pop songs get horribly maimed and disgustingly annoying to the ear. I kept turning around trying to catch the eye and glare at the idiot who was blasting his handphone so damn loudly the whole time we were there, but I couldn’t seem to pick out who the hell was doing it. Note, we were sitting in the alfresco area. When we went back inside to pay the bill, we heard music coming from some speaker above us. It was my dad who noticed, actually, and pointed out the obvious, which I need not elaborate more on here. Anyway, all I can say is, the Fish & Co people tries too hard to liven the mood at Jurong Point’s alfresco area!

Anyway, during our meal, we had discussed some issues about investment. I was commenting to my parents that banks pretty much offer students shitty investment plan and assume we have low financial IQ. This is because, having read in the papers recently about a journalist commenting that every student should start on an investment which gave you reasonable long-term returns if you say, save $50 every month in your personal account at the bank. I went to DBS’s website and saw this plan they were offering- ‘Mysavings’, where if you saved $50-$1000 every month, you get 0.45 interest returns. You do the math, I thought I could get back about half of what I out in every month, but I was suspiciously weary that it was too good to be true. True enough, when I went down to a bank’s outlet and enquired about it, the information officer gave me these figures to calculate how much interest rates I was actually going to get= $50 x 0.45% / 365days x 31 days

Or, I could go for returns from this= $100 x 0.45 /365days x 61 days

Needless to say, the deal is shitty and not worth one second of considering. The author of Rich dad poor dad says passive income is the most rewarding (as it requires the least work, and rewards the most returns), apparently, I’ve only understood half of it.

Anyway, during our meal, my dad had suggested that he was willing to give my brother and I an initial trial amount of $500 and see how we grew that amount, within a limited given time. I was all game for it, much more so than for the above mentioned bank.

I also watched Red Cliff last night, apparently, the media is touring it as Asia’s “Lord Of The Rings”. Our seats were laughable, considering that we had initially wanted to watch the 8.30pm show but the only seats left were at the first row. So we chose the 9.10pm show instead and the next best seats were on the second row! Like, wtf. My dad was the one who did the booking of the tickets and had only related to us his smartness in choosing the later show, but he failed to mention that we were going to be seating on the second row, until we looked in horror at our tickets 2 minutes before going into the theater, which had a big (row) B printed on it.




My thoughts of the show:

-Director John Woo tried to go for an artsy feel, dragging out several scenes a little way too long. Already in the very first scene, you get hit with the draginess. We see the ruling emperor playing with a bird while waiting for his top General. You would think that the bird would be significant in some way, or that the emperor’s action would be significant, but it’s just stupid. I can see why this movie is divided into two parts (with the 2nd part going to be shown in November or something). I was pretty bored by all the long fight scenes, and like, leant over twice to tell my dad so. My dad, who I didn’t realize is a big 3 kingdoms fan and who said he enjoyed the movie very much. -_-.

-I love love love Tony Leung + Takeshi Kaneshiro here!!!! I had only watched them before in the movie Confession of Pain and thought nothing much of them, but here, they’re simply dashing, yummy creatures. Ladies, be seriously prepared to swoon. Tony Leung fits his character sooo well, being that patient, understanding music-loving navy commander, while Takeshi unexpectedly takes on a comic role as the Military Strategist, Zhu Ge-Liang (I kept sniggering at his name cuz it sounds so much like Chocolate in mandarin).

Never mind the dubbing over of Tony and Takeshi’s voices, I think the voiceovers are pretty good for once! You’ll actually love and not loathe it.
I’d give the movie 3 ½ stars out of 5- the ½ stars are for the actors, and the 3 stars for the elaborate war scenes setup, costumes, and fights.

Labels: fish and co, jurong point, red cliff movie

SO...i slept at 4.30am today as predicted, trying to interact with The Veronicas on that virtual website, Habbo.com. They only managed to talk to their fans for 15 minutes, and then they performed two songs. It was over in less than half an hour. But the thing was, A LOT of their fans waited for hours at Habbo, trying to get into the room, because they only had a limit of 100 people in the room. In the end, it worked out fine, because just as The Vs 'virtually appeared' onstage in the Star Lounge (one of the rooms), they kicked everyone in the room out!! LOLZ. At that time, I was #20 in queue outside, and then suddenly, I was #1, and in the room! Here are some screencaps (thanks to the quick-thinking fans) Their avatars are sooo cute, i bet you they chose all the clothes themselves, just like i did mine:








So...I just got off watching FIR (taiwanese band) on Channel U at around 11.45pm. Yes, they only performed one song. And oh my, Ah Qing was there! And I thought it was really weird to finally see him with the other 2 members. Because the last and only three times I went to see FIR, Ah Qing weren't there.

Anyway, this time round for their Singapore promotional concert tour, FIR is like, a 'one-song act'. From their TV appearances to their autograph session, they only sang one song everytime. I shouldn't have bothered to go see them this time.

On Saturday evening, my friend and I made, or should I say, TRIED darn hard to make our way to the bloody Mediacorp broadcasting centre to catch the taping of the Sheng Siong show where FIR was making an apperance. We got off Braddell station and then spent one hour walking to Mediacorp. We later found out on our way home that there was a busstop a little outside Mediacorp where buses passed by my friend's house at Sunset Way in 15 minutes! like, -_-.

On Sunday, FIR was one hour late for their autograph session. I had predicted they would only be latest, 1/2 hr late. They only sang one song, and auctioned off some concert tickets(for charity) after that. I felt really let down, adding the fact that it was a really hot+humid day on Sunday, and the venue was outdoors.

Anyway, I just wanna add that the Singapore FIR fanclub members are crazy/dedicated. I saw them at every FIR apparance, and they turn up really early everytime. I saw them on TV just now too. I mean, sometimes I don't understand fan behaviour like that- imagine the number of hours they spend waiting around and then only getting a glimpse of their star for what, 5 minutes. And not personally getting thanked. Just imagine the number of man hours wasted= 1 person x total no. of hours spent traveling to+for the venue, turning up early to get good spots/catch the star turning up at the studio, waiting for the whole event to end

After this whole ordeal, I feel that I'd rather save myself from all the hassle and dissatisfaction by paying for a concert ticket on 08.08.08 but I'm putting aside money for Singfest instead :(

Anyway, enjoy the pictures I took:

QOTD: “Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.” --Angela Monet

Labels: FIR