This is my latest obsession. For the uninitiated, his name is Jeffrey, from the group Cats in the Cradle of Live the Dream fame. My closest friends know that I have the biggest thing for him. He's not conventionally good looking, but in Maya's words, he is a manimal (man+animal) He's got that raw sexiness about him. Ok, I'm gushing but it's my blog so I get to do what I want on it. :) He has the most wonderful, sexiest, edgiest voice in the competition and he's oozes sex appeal. Whenever he comes on-screen, I will get hysterical. My bf thinks (yes, De's cool. He knows about my crazed obsession over this guy, though he can't fathom why. ) that I'm pathetic. Hahahaha. So last Saturday, I know this is damn uncool, I went down to Plaza Singapura cos there was a Meet and Greet session with the remaining finalists of Live the Dream and I went down with Dev. Hee... And I saw him in cold hard flesh. And he did not disappoint. HE'S F-ING HOT!!!! I took photos of him of course. I know, I know..It's so juvenile..But I'm in total lust with this guy..Maya and I are going to watch him when he performs at IndoChine (his band's the resident band at IndoChine, Wisma). I hope I don't hyperventilate and faint. Hahahaha...Go and watch him. Every Wednesday at 8pm on Channel 5. He's so hot, hot , hot!!!! Breathe Khai, breathe...

Gorgeousness... Not Michelle Chia, him.


I didn't do much over the weekend. Spent Sat evening at my sis's place to celebrate my niece's bday and Sun was spent baking cookies. We made sugi cookies and choc chip hazelnut cookies. It turned out nice. :) I'm not in the mood to write much so I'll let the pictures do the talking.

At Plaza Singapura, where Dev had tea and I looked. Hmph.


My niece and nephew making funny faces.


Alisya, celebrating her 4th bday. We bought her a sexy 2 piece swimsuit in fuschia pink and a kid's lap top.


Dev and me at DeliFrance NorthPoint, where I bought $22 worth of tarts and eclairs for my niece's mini mday party.


My sis. I don't understand the cap. At all.


On my way to Dev's place after the bday celebration. :) I like my dress. It's cute isn't it? :)


Long week ahead. If I get through this week alive, I'll be fine for the rest of the year.

I am swamped with work. The last few weeks have been relatively low key cos Supts were busy with ranking and all so they were locked up in the conference room and left us POs pretty much on our own to clear whatever work we had to do.

Now that they are back in the office, it's full swing again. I have 2 NOMs to draft (I hate doing NOMs cos it's tedious), 2 Emcee scripts to prepare for ( I'm emceeing for Directors Meeting with Ps and VPs, and for another event involving HODs MT), collating data for my branch year end review and churn out a paper by this Friday. I have not even started on the paper. I am screwed.

And next week is going to be a killer week, with the MOE Work Plan Seminar (1 full day), and Schools Division WorkPlan Seminar (2 full days), my branch meeting...Urgh...

I met Maya on Monday for breaking of fast. We went to Vivo City and had pasta and fish a Fig & Olive. Food wasn't that great. Walked around a bit, didn't get anything (Thank God) and went for coffee at my favourite cafe in the whole world, Corduroy Cafe. Love the place. Fantastic dessert, nice ambience, cool chill out music, and not crowded. Which is very rare in Singapore. And cos the lighting was so good, Maya and I went crazy with the photos. Ha ha ha..Who am I kiddng? Even if the lighting was shit, we would still cam-whore.

Maya just discovered the beauty of curls (natural, of course) framing your face. She just had a hair cut and he told her to bun up her hair to get the curls. Her hair texture's exactly like mine and I told her how to it properly cos the 1st time she did it she said her hair was crap. So she tried out what I taught, and lo behold..Gorgeous curls... Like mine..Hee...We spent the whole night tossing our hair and gushing about how gorgeous our hair were in the pictures...Hahahaha..Maya, I'll miss perasaning with you when I'm abroad. :)

So here are the pictures. There were loads more...but these are the better ones.

Moi

Maya and me.Hee...We have the same hair...:)

I need the weekend to be here...Badly..

The weekend was pretty quiet. I spent Fri night at Mount Alvernia cos Dev's sis-in-law, Nicole, gave birth to a baby girl. They named her Sonia Sasha Menon. Beautiful name. Beautiful baby too. She's so small and pink. Time has passed by so fast. I remembered when Raj and Nicole got together (about 3 mths after Dev and I did) and I can still remember their wedding just 2 years ago.

On the couch: Dev's mom, Raj (Dev's 3rd bro), Nicole, Dev's dad.
Standing:Me, Dev, Terri (Krish's wife) and Kirsh (Dev's 2nd bro)
The picture was taken in 2005, during Raj & Nicle's wedding tea ceremony @ Sofitel Palm Resort.

And now, they are parents. They were estatic of course, though Nicole looked like she was in tremendous pain at the hospital cos she had to go through a Caesarian due to some complications. But everyone was happy cos

1. It's the first girl ever in Dev's family (His mom had 4 boys & his brother, Prakash who's living in Perth has 2 boys), and

2. It's kind of like their first niece/nephew cos Prakash is all the way in Perth and they've never seen his boys. (Once for me and Dev cos we visited them when we were in Perth in 2003).

I spent my Sat with my elder sis. She was supposed to buy foundation from MAC. She bought that as well as the loose powder and cos I hate not buying anything, I bought the MAC Studio Finish concealer. Very good coverage. Thanks to my personal make up consultant, Maya, who gave me feedback on the concealer. :) We went to my aunt's place for break fast that day. I bought 12 doughnuts from Missy's at Plaza Sing and didn't get to eat a single one of them cos my niece and nephew and cousins at my aunt's place devoured every single one of them....I so need to get more doughnuts.

The whole of Sun was spent with Dev at his place. We did nothing but watched tv, slept, laid down in bed and rested cos it was raining and we both knew it was one of the last few times we could do things like these together. He's probably leaving just before Hari Raya (Maybe 11th or 12th Oct). Thinking about it just depresses me. And he came to my place again for break fast.

The next 3 weeks are going to be crazily busy. I hope I get through it in one piece.

Oh, and the air conditioning in my office is fixed. Supt made a lot of noise and the air con men got frightened. So now, my office is as cold as an igloo. I have set the tempreature at 27 degrees, but it's still butt numbing cold. I can never be satisfied...

The air conditioning in my office broke down. It started off on Monday when the air con system was making scarily noisy noises and the Supt sitting with me decided to get people down to fix it on Wed afternoon. (The air con was still working though) The air con men came, switched off the air con and started fiddling with the air con so for 1 hr, I was sweltering in my room. But I was thinking to myself,
'Hmm...At least when they are done with it, there will not be that irritaing noise anymore...
1 hr later, the air con men said,
'Air Con spoiled. The whole system spoiled. Must get new air con. Will take a week.'
Supt and I looked at them in horror. Supt asked
' End of this week can fix right?'
The response:
'No, end of next week.'

End of next week??? This is the first day we are sitting in the non air conditioned room and it's already so stifling and unbearable. Yes, we each get our own standing fan but it doesn't work at all!!! I look so bloody auntie. In anticipation of the heat, I wore a thin t-shirt and some knee length flowy pants to work today and my hair is bunned all the way at the top of my head with pins pinning my fringe up. I'm sweating profusely and I have to keep running to the other office every half an hour to get a dosage of air conditioning. Very unglam. Colleagues who are unaware o the spoiled air con came into my office and the minute they entered, they had this look of horror on their faces ( I'm not exaggerating, the room is like a sauna. I want to lose weight, yes. But not like this!) and quickly got what they needed to get from my office and dashed out of the room...Geez...AND I AM FASTING!!!! I am not supposed to be losing any water cos none gets back in....I am so screwed...End of next week!!! I'm going to die!!!And aside from Tuesday, Im going to be in the office the whole week next week...Oh God, I hope I get my period next week so I don't have to fast and can drink water. I'm dying.........

Dev snagged the job in Melbourne. He's going there as a Lab Manager of a pharmaceautical company. The pay's pretty good and he's really psyched up. He called me from Melbourne yesterday later afternoon and he was so excited. So was I. :) He had gone through 1 overseas phone interview, then went through another round of face to face interview in Singapore where the HR manager from the company flew over to interview him, and they finally flew him to Melbourne last weekend to assess him for one last time. And yes, the job's in the bag.

What sucks though is that they want him to start on 15 October, which is 3 weeks from now. That's really, really soon. That came as a shock to me cos I've always thought they would give him some time (2 mths maybe) before making him relocate and that would give me some time to be cool about it.

Yes, even though I'm tough on the outside, I'm a softie on the inside. Why wouldn't I be sad? My bf is leaving for good to another country, which will be an 8 hr plane ride from Singapore, and he's going for good. I know I'll be in Australia studying too but I'm in Perth, which is a 4 hr plane ride away from Melbourne. I'm definitely going to miss him. But Maya told me that this would be the acid test for both of us and I guess that's true. Hopefully, the time apart wil allow both of us to grow as individuals and strengthen what we have.

I know I'm not usually sappy or nostalgic but I'm definitely sad that Dev is leaving. But I look forward to a time when both of us can be in Melbourne together. Dev said that him relocating is a start for us to start our lives together. I hope so. :)

I had a very lazy weekend. I think God knew it was the weekend so he made it rain so heavily on both Sat and Sun mornings, causing me to wake up really late (1030am for both mornings! That's late for me cos I'm a morning person). Such great weather for sleeping in!

I spent my whole Sat lazing around. I watched reruns of American Idols last season , Live the Dream, Oprah Winfrey talk show, I went to Chong Pang to have treatment done to my hair (it was damn dry and I couldn't be bothered to go all the way down to my hairdressers at Far East Plaza and I figured you can't go that wrong with treatment. The treatment went quite well), met my elder sister and my niece after my hair treatment and we drove down to Sembawang to buy ingredients for making kueh.

Dev came over to my place for breaking of fast that Saturday (not that he was fasting but my mom told me to invite him over anyway). Mom cooked up a strom: Sambal prawns, gravy chicken (kicap ayam), sambal stingray, chop chye, the works. There were 5 different kinds of kuehs ( Putri salat, lapis, dadar, curry puffs, harum manis) and muffins and fruits. Even Dev was shocked by the amount of food. Ha!

But it was nice. Dev's very adaptable and everyone was comfortable enough to speak to him and ask him a gazillion and one questions. Both my niece and nephew love him. Cos he's so strong. And he can carry them around like toys. He's like a portably merry fun fair carnival for them. :) Look at the photos below.

Both of them perched on his shoulders.


He's standing with both of them still on his shoulders. They obviously loved it.


Grabbing them like mannequins, making them both squeal in delight. Dev said they weren't heavy. He said his warm up weights were heavier than both of them combined.


I think the next 2 photos are hilarious. Both of the turned upside down. Their bodies were as straight as rods. Ha!


Funny!


My niece with 2 fake eyes in between her eyes. She was so happy!


After dinner, Dev and myself went down to NorthPoint to have coffee at DeliFrance, and get away from the noise and mayhem in my house. :)

On Sunday, I went to the airport to send Dev off. He went off to Melbourne and will be there till Friday cos he's going to meet and greet his new bosses there. So that was a bit depressing. But I'll be fine cos he'll be back soon.:)

But all in all, I had a very enjoyable weekend. So simple, but so relaxing. I love love love my family, my niece and my nephew especially, and of course, Dev.

It's the 2nd day of Ramadhan, the fasting month. I look forward to Ramadhan every year due to a few reasons.

1. I feel close to God. Most of the time, I'm too self indulgent and religion always takes a back seat. This is one month when I keep God in mind whenever I do anything.

2. I feel closer to my family. Ramadhan is the only time when everyone in the family makes a conscious effort to come back home and break fast together. It's a very nice feeling. And weekends are spent with my sister's family coming over or sometimes, we go to my aunt's place to break fast and the whole extended family will be there. And we will all eat on the floor cos there's simply too many people to eat at the dining table. Very nice.

3. It tests my patience and resilience. It might look easy, but mind you, it's not. We go without eating and drinking for almost 15 hours straight. It's no joke. It used to be really bad when I was teaching cos I had to continuously talk while in the classroom and I can't drink. And my lips get dry and chapped. And your mouth feels so dry and throat's parched. That's horrible. But I feel a sense of satisfaction when I manage to get through the day without succumbing to temptations.

4. You tend to be more appreciative of food. The simplest things like cookies, or ondeh-ondeh, or muffins make you look forward to beraking your fast.

5. Fasting month also means preparations for Hari Raya itself. This is the month the family gets together to bake cookies, (I'm making 4 kinds of cookies this year: Tarts, Cornflakes, Peanut Cookie and Cho Chip Hazelnut Cookies), spring clean the house, bring up the new curtains, bed sheets and carpet and buy Hari Raya kebayas, shoes, bags, and what- nots. Love it.

6. You cleanse and detoxify your body. My body feels light when I fast. Like I know I'm not putting in junk in them and I'm letting my body rests. Your body's like a blender. It's on working mode all year round. Fasting month is a good month to let it rest.

7. Fasting month is the one month where I feel like a real Malay. Going to Geylang is a normal thing. And being in Geylang during the fasting month is the best. The dendengs (bbqed beef strips), the flowers on sale, the baju kurong and kebaya on sale, carpets, Hari Raya cards, green packets, the various kuehs and cookies being sold. With Hari Raya songs playing in the background. I love it!!!

8. And of course, you lose a lot of weight. Ok not exactly a lot. But a fair bit. 3-4kg maybe? People always get surprised when I tell them I was fat once before, I was 17 then. So when I was in JC 1, I was really tubby. But I managed to lose so much weight during the fasting month that year and I just kept losing and losing after that till I was in uni 2nd yr. Now, my weight has stabilised. But if there was no fasting month, I will probably still be a fat slob. Urgh...

So yeah, the month might seem like a chore, but I actually enjoy fasting..Maybe except for the fact that I can't exercise...

Selamat Berpuasa people! Enjoy the month...

I've been eating so much. A lot. I've been going through my doughnuts crave for a while now. And it doesn't seem to be stopping!!! I've been having doughnuts a lot. 2 weeks ago, I had Missy Doughnuts- 2 pieces. 4 days after that, I bought another round of Missy Doughnuts, and I had 3 pieces! 3 bloody pieces!!! Last week, my niece and nephew came to my house and I used them as a pretext for buying a dozen Munchy doughnuts. It's damn goodlah! I bought the White choc coated with Oreos, Bitter chocolate, raspberry, rainbow sprinkled, strawberry, crispy crunch..The works..

The fatty doughnuts. How can anyone resist this? I can eat all of these on my own, I swear.

God, kill me. And I have been having fast food like crazy. I usually stay away from the fast food nonsense, but in the past 3 weeks, I've had Long John Silvers on 3 separate occassions & KFC twice!!!! And during my Desaru trip, I ate so many times!!! Urgh....

To make things worse, I haven't been gymming regularly these 2 weeks. When I was on leave, I gymmed once. And that was only for a yoga class. And this week, I haven't gymmed at all cos Im so caught up with work. And I don't think I can gym for the next 4 weeks cos Im going to start fasting. :(

I better watch it before I start becoming a fatty bom bom. Thank God fasting month is coming. It starts this Thursday by the way. Can control my food intake. I better find ways to exercise during the month. Maybe do yoga at home after break fast. I don't want whatever little muscles I have developed to become saggy.

Self control Khai, self control....

I went to Desaru over the weekend. Dev's going to Melbourne this 20th September to meet and greet his new bosses, after which he will probably have a month left before he leaves for good. So we decided to go off for the weekend cos it's probably one of the last few times we get to do this as he's leaving really soon. We had such a hassle trying to book a place before finally getting a room at Desaru's Pulai Resort. 4 Star hotel, $120 per night per person, inclusive of a sea view room, ferry, land transfer and breakfast. So we packed our bags and left on Sat morning. The ferry ride was about 35 minutes and then a coach ride for about 25 mintues. Pretty short journey.

We had a lot of fun. For the first time we were'nt angry at each other, or squabbling over stupid things and it felt like old times. We ate, swam, rested, held hands by the beach, had coffee at night by the resort's lounge with this lounge singer serenading us with old songs from Tracy Chapman, Bee Gees, etc. Very nice. Made me realise why I'm in so much love with Dev. :)


Pictures taken over the weekend.






In the ferry to Desaru.

The Pulai Resort @ Desaru. Very nice hotel. The room we got was huge, with a good viewof the pool and sea.

Self timed picture. I was so happy. :)

The toilet. Hahahaha...What? It was huge! Separate shower, bath tub and make up area.

The view from our room. I look like I have short hair here. I kind of like it. Might consider cutting my hair short. We'll see.

Of course, with Dev, we had to check out the gym. Pretty good gym. We 'tested' the equipment. At least I did. Dev was doing lat pull downs, as heavy as his weight. Crazy!

Me attempting to do lat pull downs. :) Compae my muscles (if you can call them muscles) next to Dev's. I'm only pulling down like 25 pounds.

Taken right after lunch, when the weather was nice and cool. :)

By the pool. I was actually in a bikini but I decided against putting up pictrues of myself half naked. I don't have a solid body, and kind of embrrassinglah..:) This is as far as it goes.

On our way home. I look crappy here. Oh well...It's the end of a holiday.

It was a short but good trip. I love spending quality time with Dev. These are the kind of moments I'll remember when Dev is gone. :)

To all, have a good week. It's back to the grinding of work again (at least for me cos I was away for a whole week last week) and I'm looking forward to my next holiday!

Quick entry. I'm on leave this whole week. Today's a holiday for all Education Officers in HQ cos of Teachers Day and I decided to take leave through the course of the week. Everyone's asking where I'm going cos I usually take holidays out of Singapore when I take such leave but not this time round. I'm just going to bum around and do things which I usually take for granted when I was a teacher on holidays.

I'm going to gym as and when I feel like it, watch reruns of FRIENDS and Oprah talk shows, meet up friends cos it's so hard to meet them up when I'm working office hours, shop, do my hair, do my nails. Basically spend time on myself. :) I miss that.

Teachers Day was a drag this year. Every year, I always get swamped with gifts and cards and flowers and cakes and surprises from my kids. It's a really fun day cos the morning is spent having a morning run with your form class, then followed by a concert. If your form class likes you, they'll have a mini party for you. And your ex students come back to see you and it's a very gratifying feeling. And of course you go back early and prepare for the Teachers Day Dinner which I absolutely love cos I get to dress up (and everyone knows how much I love dressing up) and spend the evening with all my closest friends from school. Yup, my colleagues are actually my friends. I'm lucky. :)

This year was really shitty. The only celebration we had was at HQ where we had to stand for an hour and a half at the MOE HQ courtyard while we watched a series of performances by HQ officers. That was it. I had to rush for a meeting after that, which lasted till almost 2. Then rushed back to the office and tried to get as much things done as possible as I was going on leave this week. Depressing. But my ex students wished me Happy Teachers Day and that made me feel better. And my bestest friends from school, Vidhu and Wendy knew I was feeling crappy and they came all the way down to Yishun after the Teachers Day Dinner just to have supper with me at the coffee shop near my place although they were exhausted from all the planning of the dinner. (They were both in the organising com). And Dev was the sweetest cos he knew I was unhappy and he called Vidhu up to try and plan something for me. Although it didn't work out cos of 'circumstances', he still met up with me after I went for my body combat class and we had dinner and coffee after.

Thanks Vidhu and Wendy. Appreciate all your efforts. Love you guys. And Dev, I might not show it but I appreciate what you did. I love you very much. :)

And now, I'm going to enjoy my 1 week of pure unadulterated laziness.:)

More updates later in the week....