I Quit!!! I Quit… April 29, 2012

Anyone remember Hepburn? Their song played on my mp3, and I was hit with a wave of nostalgia. For some reason, I never managed to download the actual mp3, so all I have is a karaoke version with no lyrics, just background music. Anyway, I searched for them on Youtube and followed up on “where are they now”. Seems like they have all disappeared after the success of their first (and only) album.

Sigh, maybe I’m just too old to be able to remember them, and how I used to follow Buffy, the Vampire Slayer religiously. Sarah Michelle Gellar was so awesome. *_*

Whirlwind Trip Down South October 30, 2011

So, I went to Singapore on Saturday, and I was back by 2pm this afternoon. It was quite a spontaneous decision to go down for a 1 nighter as Tron and I already had plans to go to Singapore in December. The reason? Well, the main reason why we were even going down in December, and why we would be DRIVING DOWN is because he bought a guitar from a friend there. And transporting a guitar by car seems much more convenient than by plane / bus. However, even after we had booked everything for December, he suddenly got an itchy butt and decided that he wanted the guitar right away. Can’t wait to hold it in his hands. Can’t wait to caress its body every night. -___- So we just went for a random trip this weekend!

Apologies to my friends in Sg for not meeting up (actually, only one friend lololol), but we shall catch up in December, k? I really don’t remember what we did in Singapore. Seemed like quite a long trip, and yet, also a really short one!

We left Subang at 5:10am in the morning in order to reach Singapore by 9:30am! It was crazy! I also stayed up late the night before to create a compilation of songs to play on the way there. One folder was the latest hits (stuff I like), and the other folder was this 500 oldies songs that Tron had passed to me. When we were listening to the latest hits, he kept switching off / turning down the volume of the songs, saying it’s too noisy. -__-” And then asked me why I like songs like that. T___T By “like that”, he meant stuff like : Turbulence (Lil Jon, Steve Aoki, Laidback Luke), Freak (Klaas ft Bodybangers), everything by LMFAO, Carte Blanche, Kaskade, David Guetta err…. basically a lot of dance music lah. The only stuff that he didn’t turn down was Selena Gomez (lololol) and Demi Lovato (incidentally, it was a song he told me to download). -___-

On the second link to Singapore.

When I was playing the dance music and dancing in the car, he would comment :
a. “Eh please lah! After the police will stop me cos they think I fed you ecstasy pill.”
b. “Why are you dancing like a bengali?”
Me : “What you mean? I am not doing the ‘screwing a lightbulb while patting a dog dance’.
Him : “WTF, where you learn such things wan.”
c. “Were you born a guy or a girl?” (most wtf statement)

Totally useless as a navigator (I just brought along the GPS), totally crap at song selection (apparently) and totally crap at staying awake to talk to the driver.

Anyway, on the way home I was fed up with getting my taste in music shat upon, so I said, “fine!! we will listen to the 500 oldies songs you passed to me.” FYI, he totally forgot he even gave me those tracks, and at first was asking me what songs were being played. Then, I fell asleep so I didn’t need to hear more of his complaints. When I woke up, he switched over to some Hillsongs or something, so I guess we had Sunday worship after all. Lolol.

K, enough about the road trip part, which was actually filled with tears, pain, sweat, grime, etc. When we arrived at Sg, it was obviously too early to check-in, so we went to Raffles Shopping Center to have breakfast. Guess where?

It’s like wherever we go, we have to eat MOS burger… -__-”

This is where we stayed.

We waited at the hotel lobby for Jen (Tron’s friend who he bought the guitar from) to pick us up. We were trading stories about how we first met and how far we’ve come from the “courting” days. I still keep the “courting” SMS-es, messages, etc that he sent me from way back when. When I showed it back to Tron, he said that he cannot believe that he used to write such cheesy things. Aww.. but I thought he was really sweet. (Of course lah, otherwise won’t end up dating him.)

Jen is one cool guy, but dunno whether Tron will allow me to blog more about the next 1.5 hours of when we picked up the guitar. Just that we wound up ….

Safely with the guitar in hotel room!

I was really tired after all the travelling, and I honestly do not know how Tron had the energy to still spring around everywhere. After a shower, I took a nap, while he went out to pick out more guitar related stuff and computer stuff. When he came back, he woke me up and said we couldn’t waste our time in Sg sleeping. *yawn* When I checked the time, it’s like he just gave me 1 hour to nap! Anyway, I agreed with him, so we went to have lunch first… and he took me to this awesome place in Raffles Shopping Center called Sho Teppan.

For SGD11.90, we got the teppanyaki marbled pork set, which looks like this :

Rice + salad + miso soup

The pork + mushrooms + veggies in a pan, to be cooked.

How it looks like after cooking.

Usually I’m not a fan of places that require you to cook your own food, especially when you’re already hungry and you just want the food to be in your belly already! However, this place is reallllllly good. The fried pork tastes great with the teppanyaki dip that they provide. It’s so flavorful! Words just fail to describe it. I whacked down everything, down to the last slice of mushroom, the last bit of fried onion. *burp* So, so good. And the service is great as well. =)

((On the way back from Sg, I told Tron that we *have* to go back to Sho Teppan in December… which shouldn’t be a problem if we stay at Carlton again!))

Went to Orchard Road, checked out H&M… if you wanna see my hauls just head over to my my beauty blog. Had no time for dinner, so we just grabbed a bunch of buns from Bread Talk and drinks from 7-11.

Lastly, what animal do you think it is? Couldn’t see the head, but I think it’s a buffalo. From the back, Tron said it is an elephant!

Blast From The Past July 17, 2011

Some yummy food from around that I haven’t gotten to posting. =) I know I’m lagging on this blog, and I don’t really blog much heart-felt stuff anymore. Maybe I’m finally losing the need to blog? Anyway, I also recently stumbled across some Juliet The Orange videos on Youtube and I was just hit with a wave of nostalgia. It was so long ago when I first heard their hits like Eyelash and Quizzical. Why didn’t they continue in the Malaysian music scene? I carried my nostalgia with me, and when I saw Tron today, I said, “I wanna go back to my high school days.”

Tron : “Huh? Why?”

Me : ” I wanna be young again. I don’t wanna have worries in my life.”

Tron : “When you young, you donno me wor.”

Me : “Hmm.. why don’t I go back to when I’m young and then I go and find you! That’ll be even more fun.”

Tron disagreed and said you don’t know, go back in time and don’t know what happens to you in the future. Hahaha. Well, I guess sometimes we aren’t happy with the present and we keep thinking about the good “old” times that you end up not appreciating what is in the NOW. I want to appreciate every single day from now onwards, not just the weekends. I want to look forward to Monday. I want to look forward to Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday as well as Saturday & Sunday! Every single day is a joy and my best days are not behind me.

However, just for “old” times sake, here’s Quizzical by Juliet The Orange. I used to think that it’s sooooo me, especially the first paragraph of the song :

And this is Eyelash. I didn’t like it when I first heard it, but it really grows on me. Thanks to my sister who introduced this duo to me last time…

Crazy Little Thing Called Work June 1, 2011

Today is the implementation of this huge project that has been a monkey on my back for the past year or so… I’m praying it will go well. I’m on standby, hence, staying up to blog while waiting for potential midnight calls from the IT support in another country. I am a nervous wreck. While I drove home after the final, final, last, last, LAST, ultimate LAST round of testing had been done, I just kept running through the stuff I had to do. Suddenly thought of something that I wasn’t sure about. I tried to turn back to the office, but made a wrong turn.. and wound up on the road to KLIA! I was so freaking scared because the road lights were OUT, so I was driving in darkness. Well, I drove with the high beam on lah. -___- Thankfully managed to find my way back to the office, but I wasted 30 minutes driving around. Anyway, was relieved that I did turn around to check. Thank God….

I didn’t officially blog about this, neither did I feel the need to announce it, but I suddenly feel so overwhelmed. This is actually my last 2 weeks in XYZ Bank. I served a 2 months notice somewhere in April … and I never imagined that time would fly by so fast. In case you’re wondering, YES it is very difficult for me to tender my resignation. This is a place that I have been for 7 years. Heck, 1st of June is EXACTLY 7 years to the day I started work here. I read through my blog entries when I first joined XYZ Bank, and I was filled with such hope and love for this place. I was overwhelmed with gratitude that such an awesome place would hire someone like me, would give me a chance. It has been extremely exciting working here. Who else could say that they started out in treasury and telebanking, using Cobol on an AS400 server. Then developed a treasury & accounting software from scratch for an offshore subsidiary using Java & JSP. Then revamped a retail banking system for our overseas subsidiaries using Visual Basic? Every few years our team were faced with new challenges. From learning about money markets & placements, then to how interactive voice response systems work. Then went 180 degrees to web applications and even dabbled with e-Banking, and then to COM+ technology for retail banking. Switched to learn about frontline operations, loans, general ledgers, demand deposits and such. Spent 2 months in Cambodia. Went to Laos twice, each time for a one month stretch. It’s insane. But it was a good run.

I know the typical response to my positivity would be — so why would you want to leave if you had such a good time in XYZ Bank? I just felt that there are more avenues that could be explored that I couldn’t do when I’m in XYZ Bank. Can I just leave it as that? Just that I want to give myself a chance to explore the aforementioned avenues, and not be placid. Plus, one day I will tell you how I came to join ABC Bank, and it is truly something God-send. It is an awesome testimony… which I will save for another day. =) Or you can ask me in person, cos as always, with stuff about companies, can’t talk about it so openly.

So in the next few weeks or so, I’ll be blogging about farewell lunches and all that… I can’t say I’m a super sociable person, but I guess when you’ve been in one place for 7 years, there are people who know who you are. =)

Anyway! In the spirit of randomness, let me continue my entry with something totally different.  I won two tickets to watch Magical Musicals in the Sunway Lagoon Amphiteather on the 10th of June thanks to All Malaysian Bloggers. If you wanna read my raves about the musical (note: advert-worthy…! And since I am anti-advertising, maybe you shouldn’t read it… but I felt that it was well-written and truly shows my love for musicals… *self praise) : click here

I also managed to get my grubby hands on Mariah Carey’s entire discography. I really love her songs so much, though there was one time in my life when I was being all judgemental and I couldn’t accept how sluttily she suddenly dressed. Hahahha. Actually, I find her quite an enigma – she has a fantastic voice, so she definitely doesn’t need to show so much T&A to sell records. So why does she do it? As a Youtube fan wrote – as hard as it is to believe, Mariah loves and is comfortable with dressing trashily. Anyway, as long as she keeps belting out amazing #1s, I will remain a fan. Loved her from her Emotions, Fantasy, One Sweet Day, Always Be My Baby (no matter what you say, David Cook’s version is TERRIBLE and does NOT deserve the praise it got on American Idol. It was a bastardisation, and Mariah was right to NOT be impressed by it [Edited on 3/6/2011 : According to someone in my comments box, Mariah Carey was actually impressed with his version and I was misinformed about it (yup yup, I didn't do my homework, shouldn't deserve to even blog because I didn't do my homework, etc). To be honest, I didn't watch the AI episode where he sang it, I only heard it on the radio... someone else told me MC didn't like it and I found that more believable than her saying it's haunting and what not. Oh well. BTW, I don't hate David Cook, I just hate this particular song he did.]  ) and Dreamlover days. Even when she was supposedly “going cuckoo”, there were some gems in her albums, like Heartbreaker, Honey, My All, Breakdown, Butterfly. Then when she made her comeback, I wasn’t impressed with Say Something’ and It’s Like That, but was drawn in to her songs like Through the Rain, Touch My Body, I’ll Be Loving You Long Time, We Belong Together, Don’t Forget About Us, I Stay In Love and Bye Bye. She’s definitely THE diva that I like the most … sorry Whitney Houston (my bf likes her) and Celine Dion…

She also has a duet with Nicki Minaj… surprise surprise. But it’s not one of my favorites. It’s still pretty catchy…

Oh, and this is the I’ll Be Loving You Long Time video with T.I. I told Raymond about this video and I said it’s so funny how T.I is all pimped out in the middle of a jungle, while Mariah just *has* to be wearing a very sexy swimsuit lah. Hehe. Sometimes, it’s interesting to see just how she can top herself in each video. There was one where she was dressed as a Vegas dancer… very random. And if it’s a ballad, then she will be rather covered up, but still have a lot of cleavage, and the outfit must be skintight. Haih.. Mariah, you crazy but you’re also crazy sexy and I <3 you.

Sigh… why can’t the Shiseido workshop be on any other day but the 18th!!