Dear Lovely Wan Zhi & and her sweet message

I hardly log into Facebook these days and for once, I'm actually thankful that FB sent me notification emails when someone wrote on my wall. Because, Wanzhi replied my message on the wall, which brought a HUGE smile to my face.

"hey jo!! i miss u loads too. i promise u babe, i ll do all e mentioned n even more. lol. over here in sydney, i jus came to realise so many things tat we can all do together, like organising day trip or hiking etc. also, its hard to find frens w common interests, so i ll treasure u gals n def get all of u out n hav fun together.i hav actually jus return frm mel, it was really great. can giv u some ideas on where 2 go in mel for ur mel graduation trip if u need any tat is. n i read e comments on my blog too, lol. i wld def luv to hav u n ur frens here at my BIG BIG house but tat is if u guys r coming b4 in jan or feb coz my housmates r nt ard. afterwhich they ll b back so no rooms 4 all of u. but if its only u, u r always welcome at any time to 'sleep' w me, lol.hear frm u soon, or mayb i ll see u during e easter wk!!! take care n luv u!!!"


Haha. Zhi, can all of us squeeze into your room? Hopefully, its a BIG BIG room. lols.


All of us girls back home miss you like crazy! Come back to us soon to entertain and play MJ with us!

Looking forward to Kavi's dance graduation ceremony. Not only can I watch her dance (not the clubbing kinda dancing) for the first time but I finally get to see all the girlies again. Seriously, I yearn for that day to come.

My Wish List for Birthday

I shall keep this list short and attainable.


1. A new watch.

Reaction Collection - Just Stunning

Reaction Collection - Happy Hour

Old School (the cheapest USD89) But its too casual. I need a formal looking watch.

The Time is right (eh, this is the name of the model) How appropriate. =\

Tangs Vouchers would be great! I want to try out the latest Shiseido cream eyeliner =)

Short list right. No bags. No shoes.

****

Random pictures when Ellie was still in Sg. Missing her already...

Memories Tucked Away

Tucked away in some corner of my mind. I always feel that there are different types of memories. Memories you'll always want to remember and keep for life, memories not worth remembering and memories that somehow got forgotten along the years.

It was a rather odd day in school. Figuratively, I felt like I traveled back in time in school today (No, I'm not watching too much of Hiro on Heros to feel this way...) It just felt as if I traveled back to Year 1 college days. All in a day, I saw a few of my Year 1 friends whom I used to be close to and now, lost contact with as we go along our separate ways.

I saw,

Matthias - The straight As guy who was in my LTB group. Funny and relaxed when not working. Focused and direct when working during meetings. Walks from campus down the hill to the busstop talking about church stuff.

James - Studied with. Explained Stats and Financial Accounting terminology to me. Used to share our Christian walk together. Planned to learn diving together. 2 years on, I found out, he still have yet to learn it!

Year one, it feels so long ago but the memories once chucked away, seem so recent and clear now when I see my friends.

And now, we are just hi and bye friends. Changes. We started fresh in Year One, as if we just started drawing on a clean slate of paper. And now, we are really going separate ways. Used to be good friends, now, we talked like strangers. Nothing more than just polite conversations. We thought we would stay as good friends for a long time to come. But we didn't make the effort.

I don't know. This is happening all too fast.

If I want it my way, I seriously would love to find all the time in the world to make time out for each friend to maintain the friendship.

ok. Emo talk. Back to my case study.

****
Conversation of the day:
Met up with Lewyn for quick lunch and Strategy consultation.

Lewyn: When I first saw you in our Ethics class in Year 2, I thought you looked fierce. Wild partying sort.

Me: oh man, that's not a good first impression.

Lewyn: You look fierce when you don't smile.

Not the first time someone tells me that. I get stuff like I look super intimitating when I go for my first project meetings with pre-assigned group mates.

Do I look intimitating and snobbish? HAHAHA.

I'm NOT, ok, IF you know me well enough.

Anw, congrats again for graduating with a summa cum laude and nailing that StanChart job! You're easily the smartest person I know from SMU. Haha...

Pulau Dayang Coming Feb.

I'M GOING DIVING THIS TERM BREAK! HELLO, ADVANCED CERTIFICATION :):)

Destination is Pulau Dayang, Malaysia (again...) But, I don't mind as long as I get to dive again. I'm actually going with the NTU divers. Not that I want to compare, but SMU diveteam sucks in getting good deals and they are certified under NAWI. They arrange to go to the same place but charge higher prices. =\ Since I'm a PADI certified diver, I have to learn from a PADI dive centre (I prefer PADI anyway.)

Click here for PADI's official website. For the uninitiated, it stands for Professional Association of Diving Instructors. It is the world's largest and most recognized recreational diving membership and diving training centre. (Taken fr. Wikipedia) A PADI membership is for life.

Side note: (evil and biased one towards NAWI certification)
I wiki-ed NAWI and Wikipedia doesn't even recognize it! It came back with weird results. Hmm.

So, please go for PADI! It's Australian and it says alot already.

Anyway, really looking forward to it since Shao and my boyfriend will be going as well. It will just be like the old days when I went for my first diving trip.

I'm really hoping Youie can go and someone kindly be her buddy so she will want to go. Diving without a buddy sucks. Jax and I are going for the advanced lessons so we cannot dive with the leisure divers so technically speaking, we won't be diving along with Youie so it's kinda sad because I have never dived with her before.

But, fret not, once I get my advanced cert, we shall go to Sipadan for diving okies.

Talking about going for this trip. It was kinda tough convincing Jax to go... But he finally gave in. I was so desperate that I said going for diving trip shall be my birthday present. Hence, he does not need to buy me any present at all.

Honestly, I'm quite afraid of diving in certain aspects like buoyancy control (I have a tendency to go too near to the corals and get myself scratched which is super dangerous because some corals are poisonous) I got scratched really badly the last time I went diving and the wound was like bleeding quite profusely. Thankfully, it healed completely and the scar I thought would come along with the injury didn't appear. So it was really Thank God or else I think I would be sad to have a scar on my leg. Plus, I read about how divers got infected with flesh eating bacteria, which got me really worried. And I have this tendency to get lost while navigating.

Nevertheless, all that is not gonna stop me from enjoying the beautiful underwater world. I'm going to conquer my fears!!


OH, another good thing. this guy just joined my cell group and he's a divemaster! So cool. He gets to dive for free because he works for a dive mag. I want that job!

As you can read, I'm really excited over the trip :)

So dear friends or school pals I'm doing project with, I'll be away from 22 to 25 Feb (its the weekend before term break.)

Shopping Friday with Jax

We constantly read about how our partners are supposed to be our everything. Our "soul-mates", lovers, best friends, teachers and motivators. And I always thought my boyfriend however, couldn't somehow fulfill the part on shopping buddies (I would rather not use the word, girlfriends).

I was wrong... At least, he proved me wrong.

Because, we officially went for our first full-fledged shopping trip along the entire Orchard stretch. ;) Can't believe I can actually shop with him. I'm not saying this to make you guys assume that my boyfriend's a lousy shopping companion or he has lousy taste or whatever. See, when we go the malls, we usually just window shop, watch movies or hang out in coffeeshops to read and talk. So we hardly shop per se. Anyhow, he was a pretty good shopping companion and he waited PATIENTLY for me the entire time without making any complaints. If you shopped with me before, you'll know I take ages to come out of the fitting room and I'm super fussy so usually, I'll go to alot of shops before seeing something I really like. So unless I'm super comfortable with you, I think its best to not make you go through the agony of waiting for me. Haha.


But he still this really annoying habit though. The habit of pulling me away from any shoe boutique. Along comes the usual nagging. But funnily, it's nice to have someone control my spending occasionally.

And we bought what we set out to buy and the most amazing steal of all, was this squash racket he bought at Isetan. It costs 25 bucks (after discount!) for an Ashaway racket. And he used the vouchers given to him by his dad. So technically, it was free. Everything seems to be on sale these days. Blessed shopping trip with lots of discounts, extremely good deals, laughter and silly talk.


Oh Jax wanted me to blog this:

On the way home, we saw this guy with this funny icon on his shirt. Instead of iPOD, it was iPOOD (in case you didn't get it, its the farting poo-ing noise) and there's this picture of a guy pooing.

T_T!!! He found this gross humor to be super hilarious. It was hilarious for me to watch him laugh out loud, amused over such a lame joke. *shakes head* Yups, he found this worthwhile to blog about.

Oh wells, Boyfriends still pack a great deal of surprise in them. I'm still constantly amazed. =)

Shoutout: Fly Me to Paris!

Advert! Visit the following online livejournal for your daily dose of retail fix!

http://flymetoparis.livejournal.com/

Must check it out and buy stuff from there alright!

Oh another one, For all those foodies out there, check out these food blogs,

1. www.ieatishootipost.blogspot.com (my favorite, recommended by Jax)

We went to a Peranakan/Indo cuisine restaurant the blogowner recommended. And the food especially the mee siam and mango sticky rice dessert was great. Not to mention, the pictures look super mouth-watering so refrain from viewing them in the night. Right now, I have a list of food places to go.

2. http://eatlikeus.wordpress.com/ (not as good as the first one, since this person doesn't really include enough pictures to whet our appetite...) but anyhow, still pretty informative.

.Live to eat.

Sudden Realization and Movies Mania

When I woke up this morning and was lazing in bed, It suddenly dawned on me that, I'm turning 23 in less than a month!

Oh dear, age is really catching up. I want to be forever 21.

Oh well, age is just a number. Being young is not tied to a number!

***

I was looking at GV's Sneaks and Upcoming movie list and I have so many movies I want to catch!

Like this,

With one of my favorite Hollywood actors. He's easily my sister's TOP TOP favorite actor.


But I have a feeling (by reading the synopsis), it's gonna be gory and gut wrenching bloody.





And definitely this,
nothing can stop me from watching this in the cinema. Absolutely no livestreaming and no downloading please for this one.

Adaptation from the book, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. I'm going to read the book again.

And this, just because I have not seen a Brad Pitt movie for ages and I want to see how he has really aged. ok. That's quite a lame and lousy reason to watch this film. In my opinion, his best film is still Seven Years in Tibet. Not because he looks the best in that film or anything like that. Sadly, He USED to be my favorite Hollywood actor.

Random:

Dive trip to Dayang anyone? Open to SMU students. I want to dive at least once before I start work. Even if it means going back to Dayang again. I want to catch mini sharks and rays which I missed seeing the last trip. =( I was blessed to see an entire school of gi-normous bumphead parrotfish and barracudas but I didn't see the mini sharks which would have been even more awesome.

Youie, if NTU dive team goes to Dayang and nobody wants to go with me on the smu trip, I want to hitch a ride. =D But then again, I don't have a buddy unless I managed to persuade Jax to go along. I need more diver-friends.....

You can tell I'm getting desperate to dive here. The underwater world is just so amazing and beautiful that getting that dive certification is one of the best things that happened in my life. I bet you guys never know this, but Little Mermaid is my favorite Disney Fairytale and it kinda inspired me from young to explore the underwater world. Back then, when I was a kid, I don't think I ever knew such a thing called scuba diving actually existed.

And ultimately, I got my wish fulfilled, a decade later.

Under the sea, Under the sea, darling it's better.

I'm such a Disney fairytale person. Sometimes, I wish I was a little girl again.

You choose to be on the side of me.

I'm not the easiest person to love
I'm often the one who let things go unresolved

Yet you choose
To be on the side of me
On the side of me
Yeah, You choose to be on the side of me
On The side of me

I'm not too proud of some things I've done in my life
Skeletons in my closet are too big for me to hide

Yet You choose to be on the side of me
Blessed Charity
You're on the side of me
Cause everyone needs a friend to hold
When its cold outside and there's no place to go

Yeah everyone needs a friend to hold
all alone, I cry. There's no place to go

I remember when nobody cared
Nobody cared, but, You.

I'm not the easiest person to love
But You, You opened your heart to show me what I'm worth
Cause You choose to be on the side of me

You choose to be on the side of me.

A Walk to Remember.

Watched a re-run on Movie6.net. Actually, this is like my umpteenth re-run of the movie.

I love the "Love is patient, Love is Kind" scene the most. It never ever fail to make me tear (a little)

"Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous, never boastful; nor conceited. It is never rude and never selfish. It does not take offence and it is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people's sins but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes."

1 Corinthians 13

A.k.a The Love Chapter

I wonder, in the world today, how many people know the full meaning of love and how many can honestly say they have experienced for themselves this full measure of agape love.

God is fully capable of agape love and the evidence, the cross.

****

It's funny. I preached to Jax about this verse before and how much I like reading it over and over again. And whenever, I get alittle too impatient and grouchy with him, he'll go, "Love is patient, love is kind". Things will be ok after.

To myself: Girl, walk the talk.

Was inspired by the message in church today.

"Life is not a sprint of a race. It is a marathon. Finish well."

"Live life with certainty. Know who you are and Whose you are." A child of God, deeply loved, greatly blessed and highly favored.

Plan A and Plan B

11th Jan, Friday.

As always, Fridays are spent with Jax. Decided to go to Timbre in the night for some daiquiris, pizzas and live music. By the time we drove there, there was a long queue waiting to get in. And being a liveband place, the chances of people leaving anytime soon are pretty slim so he suggested Plan B, which is to go to Zouk where his friend can get us into the members' lounge.

Other than bumping into Derrick (the fashion designer, the one at Yuying's party), it was an uneventful night.

I would rather go to Timbre where we can talk without shouting over the music and just chill out.

Anyway, the rest of the day was rather good in a relaxing manner. Caught Darjeeling Limited which was seriously more like an art film and I fell asleep while watching it. Even Owen Wilson couldn't save the show for me.

I do not appreciate such films.

I'm learning malay now. Haha, after my last attempt at learning Japanese for an entire year, I thought that the days of eagerly learning a new language were long over. Guess I'm wrong.

And the only sentences I vaguely recall are:

Nama Saya Joanna. (My name is Joanna.)

Saya suka makan nasi ayam (I like to eat chicken rice)

Saya tinggal di Bishan (I live in Bishan).

HAHA. I feel like a primary school kid.

Oh another one,

Saya Bahasa Melayu Profesor adalah satu cheeko peh (My Malay professor is a cheeko peh.)

You read that right. He's not your subtle kind of cheeko peh, but right in your face blatant kind.

Day one he asked me in a very suggestive manner if I have a boyfriend and do I "sayang" him?

I said yes, I do have a boyfriend. And I so wanted to tell him to MYOB for that second question.

Rolls eye.

Happy 23rd Birthday, Babe!

Yuying's 23rd at Zouk...

Boyfriends were invited so Jax came along too.

The girls

(Marie, you should know the reason behind the black and white, right?) ;)

The crazy flow of drinks & Shooters.

The boyfriend who made sure I didn't drink more than I ought to. I hate to admit it, but Zouk is actually the place where I first met Jax (seriously, a club is the last place I would like to meet my other half). Haha. But who knows...

Lovely girls, Yuying and Shirong

The Fab "twins", Looking very good.

The long time ago tanning mates =X

While the rest were on the dancefloor, we chilled and took pictures. =)

He just couldn't take it without a taking a shot with the bottle of McCallan when nobody's around.

Last minute impulse buy the day before from F21.

This hilarious "fashion designer" who kinda gatecrashed the party and started dancing in front of us. Shirong, Jax and I were seriously amused and entertained by him. I jokingly asked him to pose for the camera and he sportingly did. Lol. What a character....

Marie & Kevin (another black and white) A very nice black and white. Decided to add the colour back to Marie's top.

Shirong and Qilong (the mystery guy revealed). Heh.

HAHA!

The only un-tomato-fied face. Teehee... ;)


*Just read Marie's blog, we updated the same pictures! Most of them. =D*

To Yuying! Happy Birthday! You're still as beautiful and stunning as ever! Love ya! Keep that radiant glow ;)

New Year Margaritas

HR Folks (FINALLY) gathered at Cafe Iguana for that long awaited glass(es) of Macho Margarita.

They are not called Macho for nothing. Getting the best of both the Mango and Lime Margaritas

May, all hail the Margarita Queen. ;)

Group photo (from the right, Eunice, Li Ping, Gary, Hui Xin's boyfriend,Kenny, Huixin, May and me). Missing the company of both Julez, Qiu Xin, Qihan and Ash. Drinking somehow ain't the same without them.

Desserts at Riciotto. The girls all love the Soffiato (chocolate molten souffle cake). Gary and Kenny couldn't understand why girls are so mad over chocolate. Guys... *shakes heads*

****

Cookout at Qihan's place.

I was in charge of cooking mushroom and beef pasta and mini pizzas (the same ones youie did for our cookout). It took the 6 of us 2 hours to prepare just a simple meal of pasta, potato salad, omelette and spicy steamed chicken wings. The best dish, in my opinion is Julez's steamed chicken wings. Everyone gobbled up the chicken wings first.

Movie time. We watched Shutter T_T. Which scared the crap out of me. Haha, but Qiuxin looked more terrfied than me in most of the pictures...

2008

Happy new year! May the year ahead be filled with much joy, love, peace and laughter for all of you =)

2007 came and went like the wind. Yet another wonderful year. December was a great month of chilling out, slacking, shopping, family time and partying.

Girls, we didn't spend much time during the december holidays though. A part of me misses you guys alot. We need to MJ soon. I have a 2 day school week coming up, please come over to my place to hang out ok. Do not make me feel like I planned a 2 day week for nothing. =\


Why the lack of blogging and non-presence online. Oh well, I'm getting very lazy of late. The days when I'm at home, I spend my time watching back to back episodes of Heroes on youku.com. I hardly go online to chat on MSN, Facebook or even online shop. Just a short while ago, I logged onto Facebook and I'm shocked by how much I was Superpoked! I was like, WOW, so many cool functions, and my friends are superpoking me like mad and inviting me to all these applications. So much so that my requests list on my Facebook's homepage is as long as the page itself. And I'm seriously too lazy to cancel all of them. I'm just waiting to see how long it will just go on. So friends, stop sending me invites to join applications. Haha, it's gonna be a vain attempt =\

Back to Heroes... My fave hero, HIRO NAKAMURA! He makes me laugh out loud! The scene where he stood on the rooftop facing Manhattan shouting"Don't worry NEW YORK, I'm going to save you!"in his dorkish Japanese accent is classic. He does look like a carp when he talks. Hehe...His pal, Ando is such a funny dork too. I always love watching the comic reliefs in any shows.

Ok, back to watching Heroes. Just killing time here while waiting for the show to load.