Happy CNY everyone

There was a photo-shoot of everyone in my paternal grandmother's family that could have squeezed into the flat at that one time. It was only then that I noticed the excessive number of grandchildren gathered behind the sofa as we grinned at the camera. When I talk to my friends about my 'legions of cousins', I'm not kidding. My grandmother had eleven children and most of them are married with children; the youngest uncle's lovely lady has had a bun in the oven since eight months ago. (It must really be hard to be the eleventh kid.) There must have been at least twelve male giants lined up in the back row of the photo.

Why are they all so TALL.

My hongbao money was pathetic; it makes up at the very most half of my cosplay budget. I shall have to save and save and save. And I really do have to get some decent relative clothes i.e. clothes that are fit to be seen in by relatives. My inefficient mother made me wear some of her own clothes and I ended up looking exactly like her. Fat and sort of old. Okay that was mean. But I'll be grated cheese if she's ever going to choose my clothes for me again.

I pwned at a strategy board game I haven't played for years at my grandmother's house. My mother was playing another colour and kept predicting that I'd lose. HA.

I dare anyone who was there to challenge me to a game of five-in-a-row.


The highlight of the day was when a small cousin noted with perfect and unadorned honesty that I'd grown plumper (fatter) over the past year. You have to love the little guy.

The Best Pick-up Line Ever

How to snare a good-looking guy?

CCA-mate 1: Is your dad a baker? Because you've got really HOT buns.
CCA-mate 2: ...
CCA-mate 1: Can I... eat you?


By the way, they were doing a forfeit for losing one of the communal games :D. Just to set the record straight, both of them were guys.

And CCA-mate number one did it so sincerely too.

...

I have this new habit of liking to go for long walks. Hours-long walks. The last one last week lasted approximately three hours.

I thought the afternoon might be rainy so I decided to go in the morning. Grace was free in the morning as well so we arranged to go together. I told my mother I was going out walking the night before and she indicated that it was okay.

My father had his door closed for most of the morning and that usually means that he doesn't want to be disturbed, so I didn't disturb him. When he still hadn't opened the door by the time I needed to leave the house, I told my younger brother to tell him I was going out walking and would probably not be home for lunch. He told me to bring my handphone. I think he'll make a good dad when he grows up.

We walked one huge round at one end of Tampines and found a very nice fitness corner closeted between a residential area and the expressway. Then we walked to Simei and ate, and walked back to Tampines. The sun was very hot and I'd nearly lost my OBS cap. Bless the person who found it and hung it opposite the butterfly eggs in the fitness corner.

It was in overall extremely fun but my mood to describe it has been destroyed by my reception when I came home. All I encountered was this freezing silence as I stepped through the door. My parents were sitting at the opposite ends of the room, staring at each other and not saying anything. Then they both stared at the hot and sweaty me and accused me for not telling them I was going out. Hello.

My mother said, 'Next time tell us personally', 'I thought you meant DOWNSTAIRS' (excuse me) and 'Try to stay at home on Sunday.'

That last bit is reasonable until you read the next part.

After I had a very short bath I went and innocently did my homework, and it was halfway through that the blazing row began. You see, my mother can be consistently irritating and my father has a penchant for shouting at people who can't fire him. The quarrel was, this time, about the length of the extension of the showerheads in our toilets and the apparent encumberance of the spa tub in one of them, which he saw as redundant and which she saw as an absolute neccessity.

What the $*(&$^".

It's over but I have decided that it is not safe to post about my expenses after all. Suffice to say I now owe Grace $7.50.

Starvation is good for you

BY the way, I never did stick to my resolution concerning school recesses. I only started on thursday. Damn.

It should be easier next week, considering the regular stomachaches I've been getting recently.

Saturday v.2

I spent much of my day in Spotlight, looknig at fabric for my cosplay outfit. If I can get away with it I don't think I'll even draw faces on my cloak-to-be; raised floral jacquard curtain material is good enough. I think.

I didn't spend money there, but I did at everywhere else.

It is too late to blog seriously at the moment, so the next entry (tomorrow) will be all about how I keep spending money and what I spend it on. For obvious reasons, I'm not going to tell my parents about it.

Saturday v.3 will come online next saturday, for even more obvious reasons.

Saturday

It was a morning of mediocre shots. The entire pool hall was nearly empty but for us for most of the morning and the person at the counter relieved her feelings about it by blasting the despicable Chinese version of 'Dragonstea din Tei' over broadcast radio. Over and over!

On the bright side, I hit all my shots. The little balls just didn't go where I wanted them to go. Sigh.

Oh, and we went SHOPPING for stationery. I got two B5 folders and the smooth action of the opening/closing of the teeth will make any hardened large-file user cry tears of joy. I also had to get paper for the folders (blank AND lined) as well as gum tape. I was going to get compressed foam as well but they come in humongous A1-sized sheets that cost eight bucks apiece. I wasn't going to beggar myself AND have to lug home a piece of craft material with the proportions of a good table all in the same day. In any case, I'm truly broke: my mother had just put in a fifty-dollar note in my wallet and I'd already spent about twenty seven of it on the folders and the folder materials -- not counting pool expenses, arcade game expenses, travel fares, the ridiculously cheap gum tape which I am NOT going to complain about, lunch/dinner and Chinese New Year trinkets. Ugh.

I am determined to stick to my resolution not to eat outside food next week. Not in the least because I need to lose weight. I have PE first thing on Wednesday and I am not looking forward to it at all. Anyway, I have to save up AND slim down for my cosplay costume.

YES Pong thought that a sad badminton sabbatical next Saturday would be a good idea. And after that we shall commence the cramming for our A-levels. We the O-level survivors have learned our lesson well.

of Writing and Cosplay

My flu's getting better. Yay!

CCA yesterday, stayed all the way until five for it. Believe it or not, my first and last lecture of the day was at two. I got up at five thirty in the morning for a lecture at TWO. Don't you love school?

Writers' Inc. is chock-full of nice people. We spent the hour (and a half) playing silly icebreaker games and arguing about which movie which we wanted to see next week. Overwhelming concensus indicated Memoirs of the Geisha as the favoured choice, leaving a few people protesting vociferously at the injustice of democracy. One of them was the nice vice-chairman Sean, who seems to be perfectly happy at being bullied by everyone else in the society. Cheng was there and looked very stern for most of the time. I get the feeling he doesn't like me very much.

It rained again (surprise! this is, what, the fifth consecutive day?) and I had to step out of school juggling my bag and my umbrella. One of the first things I see is Sean holding his own small pink brolly over a CCAmate. Everyone say AWWWW.

Went to meet Ets for dinner after that, and she showed me the daggers-in-construction she was making for cosplay. They were made of craft foam and gum tape, and they looked fanTABULOUS. Then she showed me the roll of gum tape she'd brought along and I fell in love with it. I am prone to falling in love with art things, and am now looking forward to building my own papier-mache arsenal of weapons.

Especially since I've decided I want to cosplay this year :D :D :D I'm going as a general class character from Final Fantasy Tactics -- either summoner, chemist or oracle, but I haven't decided yet. It also depends on my budget and the availability of materials and other stuff. I mean, where on earth do I get monk trousers? : ( In terms of overall simplicity summoner would be the best choice due to the lack of any really special accessories I need (like the shoes. horror) but in terms of fabric and sewing it is probably going to be the most expensive. And I'll still need basic things, like petticoats. And monk trousers. Darn.

Oh, and we bought our first hairpins at City Hall, where they were having a Chinese Cultural festival thingy. They are utterly beautiful and were $15. Ets kindly allowed me use of her Nets card but that still means I will be poor next week. If circumstance (my throat) allows I shall eat nothing but home food, instant noodles and cereal starting 16 Jan.

I am going to be so so broke by the end of this month, even with Chinese New Year.

Random Encounters

Met a backpacker from Holland at Raffles MRT station. She had a beautiful lined face and pink caucasian skin and looked nice. Her shirt was this airy oversized yellow thing that looked a bit threadbare. We sat next to each other on the bench, I sneezed a bit and felt miserable about trying to clear my stuffed sinuses, and I have no idea how we started talking. She was headed for City Hall, which was a mere one stop away by the train. And yet in the intervening five minutes I learnt that she was a yoga instructor with an art gallery, two divorces and two sons and was taking off the next day after a four-day trip in soggy SIngapore. And she thought I was Malaysian.

This is cool stuff.

Shuttle

My bloggery is going to be erratic at best, because I shall be very very busy. The RJ campus is far away from home, but the school is surprisingly okay, although I think everyone knows at the back of their minds that it is far too big. And I've made so many new friends! And I'm not quite scared of getting pwned any more. I've got that horrific O level experience behind me, so I sort of know to mug early ^^;;

Anyway. I have joined the CCAs Writers' Inc. and Art Club. I was going to join Recreational Badminton too but the £$^"! new system has restricted us all to two CCAs maximum, and there was an impossible number of people signing up for it -- so much that I worry that I won't get my badminton playing space, because I am by default a singles player ><

Short entry, but then, it's dinnertime.

Beastly weather's making me ill. My nose is spurting organic liquids like a demented fountain.

Wallace and Gromit! I want to give them all my money!

Angsty Post, Don't Read

O levels over. By a month. I'd meant to write immediately after, but at first I was zonked to multiuniverse and then I just had to run around doing overdue stuff like tidying up my room, hanging out with my friends and reading books I've been longing to read for months, and after that I just didn't feel like blogging. You know how that goes. ><

Anyway, I've been posted to RJC O_O. My parents, brothers, and associates persuaded me to apply for it just to try it out (PAE) and hope like hell I actually get in, because I've heard tell they only had, what, 200 places for incoming lost sheep? So I put it as first choice not expecting much. And then POOF.

Darn.


***code word: DEVILLED EGGS***

The campus looks, from the road, like a block of starte-of-the-art whitewashed ice. I'm hoping the atmosphere of prisonlike studiousness I felt emanating through the car windows is lying about what it's like on the inside. Also, there is the sad fact that I'm almost certain to get pwned hard by the more experienced RI and RGS people, most of whom had had the opportunity and time from sec 3 up to specialise. It is not a good idea to get pwned in RJC, especially in my family.

***code word: DEVILLED EGGS***


Feel the full force of deadly paranoia, nervous depression and rock-hard pessimism! Otherwise known as ANGST.

One day at a time then.

Scared.