Got up really early this morning because I am one of the sisters for my good friend’s wedding. On my way there, I was tasked with getting stuffs for the door game - lemon and lime, condensed milk, bitter gourd and chilli padi. Hehe… it was meant to represent sour, sweet, bitter and hot, or in chinese, suan1 tian2 ku3 la4.

Reached the bride’s place at about 7:45am and got the jiemei team to start squeezing the lemon and lime and slicing the bitter gourds and chilli padis. Meanwhile, the rest of the other relatives helped to keep a lookout for the groom’s arrival. The chilli padi was particularly hard to slice because I am tearing away as I was cutting them. How I pity the guys.

At about 8:45am, the groom arrived and were locked outside the door, negotiating with our chief negotiator to get into the house. The sisters team tried to get the brotherhood team to do stuffs to declare his undying love for the bride, but they were so unsporting! In the end, the bride’s mother was more worried that they would miss the auspicious hour and the brotherhood team got away with just eating the suan1 tian2 ku3 la4. Hmmph!

From there, everything moved like clockwork:

9:30am - left for groom’s house

11:00am - tea ceremony for groom’s family starts

11:30am - lunch starts

12:15pm - left for new couple’s home

12:45pm - left for bride’s home

1:15pm - tea ceremony for bride’s family starts. Apparently the elder, married couples give ang baos while the younger unmarried ones got ang baos from the couple.

1:45pm - lunch part 2 starts

2:30pm - home sweet home for me

It was really a long and tiring day, but an eye opener for me, especially the part where the brotherhood team is subjected to the sister team’s whims and fancies! Haha… I’ve got another one next month, but I am just a volunteer… so there might not be so much fun. Perhaps I will post more details later. Tired… zzz…

Found this link from izreloaded, which apparent links to a site that allows you to find out your brain sex! So I went ahead to try out the test (do set aside 30 mins, and be readied with a ruler) to see if I am what I really think I am. And here’s my results:

Apparently, I am what I think I am, which is really quite a relief. Of course this really refers to what kind of brain you have and not what sex you should really belong to. “Female brains” are usually associated with behaviors that are synonymous with “empathy, care, and not being able to read maps” while “male brains” are generally associated with “map readers, engineering and losing stuffs”. So, if you happen to obtain a score that is contrary to your genetic sex, I don’t think there should be much fuss. Moreover, these kind of things are always very debatable.

Happy trying! And oh, below are the detail results of my test. Interesting stuffs!

Ed: I am having some problems posting my results online. So, I guess that means no results for display for now.

I was half thinking if this should be considered a rant, but I figured that I would like to rationalize it properly.

I had been tied down with lots of work recently to the extend that it is eating into my free time, read: after 6pm into the morning at 2am and weekends as well. But I have always believed that there is more than just work, and that is why I would like to fill my life with more things than just work. I will want to find time to slot things in - things that I would like to do or to learn, like learning to ride a bike, or play the drums, or to continue my foreign language lessons.

But someone else had a different opinion - and ticked me off! Hey, I am entitled to my own opinion and I don’t think you have any rights to impose your opinions onto me. I was asked plainly, if not shot on the face, why I would like to be jill (jack) of all trades and master of none? Why don’t I just settle on one thing and do it well. Somehow, I can’t find the logic in it. Does that mean that I can only have *1* job and *1* hobby in the future? While I think that I will be monogamous with my S.O. in the future, but I don’t think I would like to be “monogamous” to just 1 hobby. I think that is totally ridiculous.

I mean, why should I restrict myself to just doing 1 sport/hobby and “do it right” when I can do many recreational sports/hobbies and do them ALL WRONG but yet enjoy it? I guess it could be the coming of the local mentality that in whatever we do, we have to do it well. Do it otherwise and you are an outcast!

Well, I’m saying that it’s just pure BS - because that would mean that we’ll have millions of outcasts since I don’t think there are as many sports/hobbies as there are people in the country! So here’s what I am going to do. I am going to continue doing my stuffs and continue to do well in them. As for the ECAs, I am just going to do them the way I like because I want to enjoy it - as opposed to “perfecting in them” - so that I can get as much out of my life as possible. You - the propagator of perfection - keep out of my life and let me do the things I want.

If not for the fact that you are not well, I’d have made my points clearer. Oh well, you are not here to read this anyway.

Never in my life had I felt so vulnerable about walking in the open. It was 4am in the morning and I was walking back from the lab to my hall. It was a windy night - an almost definite sign of rain.

However, this night was different. The sky was occasionally illuminated with flashes of lightning. Threatening to strike at any object any time. Add that to the fact that I was like a pole sticking out from the ground, that made me a perfect target at any time. The surrounding trees didn’t seem to be able to provide any form of comfort, neither do the buildings around me. I was in the middle of the road at the carpark and I was not exactly sheltered.

For the first time in my life, I felt that I needed to get to the safety of a shelter - one that can shield me from attacks from above. However, even a race to the nearest sheltered pathway didn’t seem to provide me with the assurance that I needed. I could almost imagine the lightning bending underneathe the shelter just to strike me. It was a horrid thought and I was filled with immense fear.

I hurried my pace to the hall and even as I was climbing up the stairs, there was no safety felt. It wasn’t until I was behind locked doors that I felt the safety from the lightnings flashing across the horizons.

This was indeed a frightning experience, strangely one that is felt after years of being taught not to walk in the open when lightning threatens. I guess when you are the only soul in an open space, it gives a whole new meaning to the words safety in numbers.

Hehe… Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers, mother-wannabe, mothers to-be, and fathers who are like mothers or anyone else who acted as one!

Actually, such commemorative days seem to be getting more and more commercialized. Well, I may be getting a little cynical, but there are so many promotions out there that encourage spending. Sigh. But me, like most other people, would like to treat my mum to a good meal, but she insisted that today’s not a good day to eat out because everywhere’s so crowded.

“Why get yourself so stressed out on a crowded day? Today’s like the seventh month, where everyone seemed to be freed prisoners from hell…”

I quite agree with what my mum said though, and that was confirmed with her morning visit to pay pilgrimage to her god and goddess. Oh well. So I guess there is some truth somewhere then. Ok. Dinner’s here…

Heh heh… after spending upteem hours trying to reinstall my OS on my non-Mac laptop, I finally got everything running.

Spent almost 12 hours from midnight till noon trying to get the OS up. Then got some sleep and then spent another 6 hours trying to figure out what was wrong with the wireless adapter! Argh! At the end of the day, I still didn’t quite know what went wrong, but my laptop did manage to connect to the free wifi outside though. Hmm…

Hmm… I saw the following excerpt from the STI Digital pages:

While a laser toner cartridge costs more (around $??), it could last some (how many?) pages. Which means it provide a better cost-per-page rate at (how many cents per page?) compared to (how many cents per page?) for the inkjet cartridge.

Haha… I think it’s probably a paragraph that is WIP (work-in-progress), but it’s so funny that these WIPs are not properly established before they are being published. I wonder if this actually made it to the prints. It would be quite a good laugh if it did, although I don’t think the editor is going to be too happy about it.

I hope I didn’t just cause someone to lose his/her job/intership.

It was about 12 noon in Singapore (GMT +8) when I was sitting lazily at home with my legs on the table (heh heh… kind of a relaxed day for a school day). Then I felt it. At first I thought it was my tummy! Listen…. but no growling! Hmm.. Listen!…. Still no growling… Then I felt it again!

For a good 12 seconds, I felt that I was in the path of some harmonics. Then I felt my body on the sofa moving to the left with my legs on the table heading to the right. Then it starts alternating and alternating… Then the jingglings at home started swaying!

“Mum, do u feel anything?”

Silence.

“Sh*t! It’s an earthquake!”

And my mum scrambled to her room to get all her preciooooooooous while I went to change out into something nice. If I were to die in an earthquake, I want to die pretty and presentable.

Soon enough, the tremors stopped. Everything eventually stopped moving and I called the Met Station. Apparently there had been reports of tremors across different parts of Singapore. Even the page at the Met Station for earthquakes was down due to “server error”. Duh!

Hmm… I wonder if the bomb shelter can withstand the tremors if an earthquake indeed affected Singapore.

More updates later. Better get out of my house now.

Every trial in our daily lives is like fire and every attempt to survive through the trial is like walking through fire.