it JUST has to happen together. WHY?

If only life were simpler. No decisions to make, no choices to make. That'd be so nice. Sometimes, we complain that we have no choice. Then, we complain when there're too many choices. haiz. I keep wondering if this is good or bad, that i have choices. If there were only 1 option, then no need to wreck my simple brain to choose. Then again, who doesn't like choices? Especially when offered all at the same time, then can take your pick. Choose the best one. BUT... then comes the worry that we might make the wrong choice, and regret later. HAIYOH. What contradictory creatures we all are. >.<

***

Geez. i so need a break from all my activities. So tired out. All of a sudden, everyone's meeting up and organizing activities. Not that i'm complaining. I LOVE going out with my friends, and i love it when everyone is so spontaneous and we can easily spend time together without going through much hassle of planning. But, i think i am taking on too much. meeting too many different groups of friends, doing too many different things, picking up too many skills, making too many commitments. Need a break. gosh. but no opportunity to. howhowhow. can't wait for dive trip at the end of may, then europe 2 weeks later! noone will be able to ask me out then, and i can enjoy life at its simplest, and maybe slowest. ^_^

Had wanted to watch with S and Wyee.. but we were unable to find a common time to go! How upsetting. Had to give up the idea of watching it. =(

Then.. TH suddenly mentioned that he also wanted to watch the musical! hahaha.. so wyee and i went to search for a new date to go... and did find one! and this time we managed to get student price summore! woohoo~ so much cheaper!

So, finally, after so much hassle, i finally watched Cats last night! ^_^ 4 months after the last musical in London... oh how i missed watching musicals. The moment the music started, i felt like i was in London again, watching my nightly musical, enjoying every moment of it. Can't wait for the next one to come to singapore!

The truth about cancer research..

This comic says it all... (taken from phdcomics.com)

Porridge steamboat!

ever heard of that? steamboat with PORRIDGE BASE. no soup, only porridge! cook ur food in the porridge! hehe.. ok maybe i am very suaku, but i only heard of it recently, and got to try it! good recommendation. it's yummy! the porridge gets yummier as u cook, coz more food then more flavour. i think one of the tricks is to add the salted egg right from the beginning! =) as usual, i forgot the name of the place ler... but it's at bugis. opposite the dessert place. haha. fine whoever wants to go jio me! i know the way. haha. and i mean it! (don't laugh. i know i'm always getting lost. but when i say i know the way, i don't bluff.)

and since i didn't take pictures yet again, i got this from sparklette.net. :)

GEYLANG!

finally made it back there again after almost 3 yrs. (oh yes, i've been in this lab that long! it was my first outing with the lab pple, for durian. 3 yrs later, we're back again, and my status has progressed from undergrad to grad! =P) This time round, instead of having durian first then dimsum, we had it the proper way. dimsum first, then durian, then rochor's beancurd! yummy. The dimsum was of course great. the chee cheong fun was nice! good recommendation by the snake-head, fangers. durian.. we had 2 different types. one cheapo and one expensive. just to see the difference. whoa.. what a great difference it was! maybe also coz the cheapo one was the sweet type, and i don't have much liking for sweet durians. Well at least one person liked the cheapo one.. haha.. so easy to please. He's a jap guy, and he says that durians make his fingers smell like sashimi+soy sauce+wasabi. Hmm. Fangers agreed that she could imagine the soy sauce. but i'm totally unable to link durians to jap food! I think they just miss jap food too much. =P

after the food, came a different highlight of the day. tour de geylang! woot! finally FINALLY got to walk around the red light district! thanks to friend who knows the way. hahahahaha. it was a wee bit early though, so we didn't see many girls. but i saw the houses. whoa, even have themes! and all pink/purple/red lights. i wonder if that really helps. hmm.

thank God for drivers, coz we got into the car (my first friend who owns a VW. and first person to choose a white car. but it's a beautiful car, i must say! wonder why noone else thinks of buying it) and went back for a drive through! it was later in the night by then, and yes, we saw many more people on the streets! all nationalities, all ages... Lor 10, 14, 16, 18, 20... yes, we did miss out 12. but it was abit messy driving thru tt area with all the guys desperate to get there. ah... there were many groups of NSmen! gosh.. with their meagerly pay still can.. and one even brought a guitar around. i wonder if it was an excuse to stay out late. then i saw something very funny. someone was zipping his pants in the middle of the streets! hahah.. we all figured he probably got a call from his wife and rushed out, forgetting to zip up his pants in the hurry. hehehehehe~

planning trips are fun~

it ain't nice to repeat the same thing everyday, hoping one day it works, but it never does.
it isn't wonderful to plan things together and someone just drops the aeroplane (backs out)
and it sure sucks to be ignored.

FORTUNATELY, there's so many more things to be happy about

• traveling is always more fun when there're more people. cheers to the new travel buddy addition!
  
• it'd be fun staying in a villa rather than the usual boring hotel.
• europe's definitely good when there's more time to travel. what's more, it's my first time there! (excluding a wee bit of UK last yr lah)
• 2 scoops of icecream to myself over lunch
• 6 bars of kinder bueno in a single afternoon
• durian outing@geylang tomorrow!

wheeeee~ so life's good. heck whatever else happened. ^_^

dreamt that i was back in tioman, together with vivi and yw. They're taking the open water course this time round (like in real life!) but i was with them in the dream. just joining them for fun. haha. and i wasn't bored at all, going through all that again! finning around in the very clear and clean pool, under the sun.. well, the pool in my dream was obviously much larger and cleaner than the one in tioman! haha.. but it was a nice dream. :)

hmm on 2nd thought maybe it was because i got ma PADI card last night. hehe~

craving..

a sudden craving today for the green tea cake from breadtalk. oh yumz. had it for the first time when we celebrated april babies' birthdays at the penang buffet. the buffet was good, we were all full, but the cake was so nice we still finished it all up. thanks to yn who bought the cake, for if i were the one who'd gone to buy the cake, i'd definitely have chosen a chocolate cake. then i wouldn't have had a chance to try this cake! oh what a loss it'd have been. so nice! yumyumyum


and talking about others making the decisions, i suddenly thought of what my sis blogged about lately. she'd mentioned it's nice to have other pple make the decisions at times. i totally agree with her. i know we live in a democratic society, and we like to open up the choices and let people have the opportunity to choose. but when choices get too vast, or when we don't even know what choices there are, it gets frustating. and when everyone around is so easy-going, no decisions are made. so it's always nice to have friends who say "ok we're doing xxx at yyy place at zzz time". fullstop. save me the trouble of thinking of what to do, where to go. coz honestly, my whole life is about planning and organizing things, i really appreciate it when i am given a break from all these, and someone else picks up the ball and makes the call. a big thank you to all who've made my life so much easier! ^_^

He is risen today! Yay! =)

Just a short note of what i heard today, which did set me thinking. It was about why people tend to doubt more readily than they believe?

1. Doubting is contagious. yeah.. we are creatures that follow our peers so easily.
   
2. Doubting is passive. don't have to do anything to doubt. so easy. (but then again, does it take much to believe?)
3. Doubting satisfies our tendency towards self-protection. I think this is so very true. We seldom choose a path that we're unsure of whether we'd be harmed in the process. When risk assessment is not available, we just play safe. this is survival's instinct.
4. Doubters are easier to find than friends of faith. I tribute this to the above 3 points.

If only believing was easier than doubting. can't we all have more faith and trust in the things around us? =)

Good Friday is so called for a reason..

From what i heard from Pastor Young's podcast, GCC, Philadelphia.

• God is always ready to show his grace and love for us. But more often than not, we're the ones not ready to receive His grace and love for us.
• God did not buy you with gold or silver (the more valuable things in this world), but with something more precious than all things. More precious than a man's reputation or power or money. He bought you and I with the blood of Jesus Christ. (1 Peter 1:18-19)
  
• God sent His Son to die for our sins. A father would rather die, than to send his son to die. But God did not do that. He could have laid down all in the world for us, he could have laid down his own life for us. But to demonstrate His tremendous love for us, He chose to lay down what He loved the most, to sacrifice what mattered to Him the most--His Son, His most valuable possession. How great is this love that we are experiencing from God?
  
• Jesus suffered all wrong accusations, all sarcasms, ridicules, spits and slaps from people, but he beared with it all. He did not call on his legion of angels that he could have done so. He just beared with it all. Because He loved us. He became the object of sin, took all the sin in the world upon himself, upon the lamb without blemish, so that he may save us from the wrath of God because of our sins. In Gethsemane, Jesus had said that if He asked His Father, more than twelve legions of angels would be at His disposal. The power to escape this dark hour was available to Him. But Jesus would not come down--He could not come down. Love held Him to the cross.
• Following Jesus, means following the way of the cross. If we are to call ourselves Christians, will we be able to live a life of love like Jesus did? When Jesus went to the cross, He suffered, but he went to it in joy. Is there self denial in our lives? When there is something we really don't want to do, do we still do it for God? Are we sacrificing anything for Jesus? When there is a sacrifice, we need the grace. May us receive the grace of God, so that we may empty the grace for others around!
  

camera dysfunction

haiz. for once, i was hardworking enough to whip out my camera to take a picture of what i was eating... but before i could take the photo, the battery went FLAT! the battery sensor had been having some weird problems, indicating low batt even when fully charged. so i retried. but really cannot turn on ler. truly flat battery. bah! so no pics again. hahaha. but i just wanted to take a picture of the gong gongs that i ate yesterday. grow so big, first time eat gong gongs. haha. after taking hepB jabs as a child, i never took anymore while in school. in JC, when my antibody levels were tested below acceptable levels, the nurse til told me no need to take booster, coz if anything happens the immune system would still be triggered and then i'd be fine. so i didn't take... until i had to go london last yr. then had to take. so until last yr, i didn't dare to take much shell-food, just in case. yes, according to facebook, i'm 100% singaporean. kiasu kiasi kia everything. bleah. but at least i've finally tried it! haha... very fun trying to get the body out... challenge wor!

and yesterday friend told me there was a new shopping centre opposite bugis, directly opposite fish n co. then i thought... isn't tt where qi2 hui4 (SWA) used to be? not like i go there anymore, but those years of visiting that place regularly were quite fond memories. geeky but fun. hehehe. just like in the comic qi2 ling2 wang2. woot~ BUT that's besides the point. the new shopping centre, whatever it is called (illuma? like illumina... hahaha) is not there lah. it's beside it. mum and i were still wondering what that new building was. ha! new shopping mall! quite big... and spacious.. nice.. but alot of shops not open. and a little bit waste of space. but it's nice having new shopping malls around. i like! hehe. can't wait for orchard central and ion to open later this year. cannot afford to buy also will be nice walking around window shopping~

despite sleeping late, my body clock made me wake up so early this morning. bleah. but good as well, coz i got to talk to my dad! and complain to him about the loss of a very important gym! that's one thing i dislike abt the management. always make funny decision without asking for the opinions of the end users. why guess everything, when they can just open their mouths and ask? survey very hard to do meh? i hope something gets done about it. brenner is a good choice! oh please... may Synapse be revived... >.<

Divas

We always hang out at Chinatown during CNY. but i've never met the divas at chinatown when it's not CNY! well, thanks to the craving for green tea shaved ice (which was out of stock during CNY), we decided to make a trip back even though it wasn't cny. And sure it was worth the trip! plus they came up with many new flavours so we just had to try some of them! =P

April Fool's, Arzhou's bdae, and a farewell

It was a not-so-common choice of dinner place, to meet at Tiong Bahru Plaza. But it's good that we seldom go there, so there's new food choices! So we tried the Indonesian-Chinese Rajah inn's buffet. Since it was a weekday, it was only about $20 per person! yummy~ and it's not just steamboat, they serve some cooked food too! and it's not too bad.. really.

My favourite chestnutties. 3 years on, and i still think they rock. ^_^

The next top model and the sexiest man alive! (ok, runner-up)
Those 2 roomies. bicker about milk and puke each time they meet, but they love each other more than anyone else. =PIt was Arzhou's bdae the next day, so we bought him a FULL cake from Bengawan Solo. We left it in the restaurant's fridge, and when we asked the waitor to bring out the cake, this is what we got:


What the?!?!!? All cut up and one tiny plate of it left!! hahahahahha tt was like the greatest joke of the day. We were having choc fondue (with fruits and cakes) before tt, so the waiter had thought we wanted more cake! The waiter was so embarrassed... hehehe

So here's Arzhou, with his real bdae cake, and the 3 gals. A picture to bless him with luck to find a rich gal in connecticut. hehehe. Arzhou jiayou!! =)

It may be another year before we meet again, given that arzhou's away across the globe. so sad. There goes my Fish&Co/clementi/sexy buddy. XD Take care dude~~

too lazy for pictures...

but Edogawa Japanese buffet was good! It's located at Central@Clarke Quay, level4. Never knew its existence because that part of the building has not many shops... so i don't usually venture there on my shopping trips. haha. Since we were early, we were seated near the windows, which gave a really great view of Clarke Quay and the Singapore river. Was even more beautiful as it got dark! =) the crowd didn't really come in til quite late, so being the only (few) customers at that time, the chefs were really quick in serving our food and the waitresses were very efficient too. The sashimi was yummy! I'm so glad i learnt to appreciate sashimi a couple of years back, but this is the first time i tried so many different varieties! The sweet shrimp and the..err.. ark shell was quite unique but absolutely delicious! We had lots of those. like... lots. hahah. The other stuff were quite nice too though a little too salty. But that didn't stop me from getting my fill of shishamo. haha. haven't had it in some time coz for some reason, the people that i go for jap food nowadays don't dare to eat shisamo. hmm. and i didn't have chawanmushi for the first time! egg overdose ler.. need to stay away for abit! Ah.. the restaruant didn't serve tempura icecream either. That's one thing i'd really have loved to have if they did. maybe tonnes of it. hehehe.

so we ate from 630pm all the way til the restaurant was ready to close. whoaaahaha. too bad for their business to have customers like us. Since the weather was good, we went up to the helipad. ah... yes, the weather was good. no stars, but no rain. haha.... the last time elly and i wanted to a make a trip up there, it poured til we were drenched. bleah.

more buffets coming up! but in the meanwhile... time for my tummy to rest. =)