looking at happy lovey dovey couples pisses the shit out of me.

i'm going taiwan in the first week of june with yy, yt and hl. Initially, air tickets were $74 each, and amounts to just a measly $214 for a return trip (incl taxes). Then we realized we needed to leave on a weekend, so the tickets got more expensive, at $283.

then i had to leave, and when i came back from malaysia, sat down for a confirmation and itinerary meeting, F*CK! the tickets are now an abominable $450 for the same dates. and the hotel we were eyeing was fully booked.

so we hauled our sorry asses off to the NATAS fair, and spent 3 hours shopping through the various brochures, looking at annoying couples planning their happy get-aways, chatting to friendly travel agents and taiwanese/ pseudo-taiwanese people promoting the country.

apparently that miserable $450 tickets were still the cheapest around, so we're sticking to that, and only asking the tour agencies for quotations on hotel stays.

and since i really want to stay at an onsen hotel one day, and we haven't exactly decided how much we like taipei and how long we're gonna stick around there, i'm shopping around for deals online, so hopefully we can kick the tour agencies out of the picture as well.

it'll be so fun. there're many things i'll like to do there... not all of them feasible of course. onsen, street food, shopping, taking photoes, eating snake meat, making paper lanterns, going alisan, night markets, pubbing, zoo, geo-parks, smelly beancurd, buying manga...

according to my mum, taiwan's a huge eye-opener. mostly because the people are all so active and enthusiastic and competitive, so the city is always lively, and speckled with new and ingenious items.

i'm really looking forward to it.

another thing i'm looking forward to is chucking my old starhub contract and signing up with Singtel and changing my handphone. Currently eyeing the LG Secret, hopefully the phone hangs around for the next 3 weeks for me to buy it with a contract.

i might have to change my number then though. please look out for the new number on msn.

and i'd gone to cut my hair on impulse, hahaha. its now short. like ayanami rei short. not that cute though, haha. but of course by the time i see most of you, my hair would have grown out long again. or i might have grown a third eye and 15cm. :)

I'm freaking bored at home.

At least I have the Taiwan trip dirt-cheap-hotel-search activity going on for me.

If this goes on I'm gonna be joining the class of people who go to watch movies alone. boo hoo hoo.

Just broke out the jigsaw puzzle I bought in China like 6 years ago and is working on it. The fact that it is 1000 pieces but only $5 (which implies the pieces don't fit together perfectly and the colours are kind of faded) makes it a very time-consuming thing to do.

Except now I'm only left with like 400 black pieces and blue pieces and i'm freaking bored trial-ing and error-ing my way down.

Of course I can always start reading my investment books but...

I'm lazy. the worst complement to boredom.

i finally dragged yy and hl to watch slumdog with me. for a film that won so many awards, it was really cheesy and mediocre. and for a movie heralded as 'the feel good movie of the year', i sure as hell didn't feel good.

maybe i'm just naturally mean. maybe i'm just weird. but it pisses me off that some idealistic simple guy who can't even take care of himself (and most certainly can't take care of others) managed to survive to the end of the movie, and even get the girl, while the smart brainy adaptive and strong guy who takes care of his family died.

that's a happy movie?! there's something very very wrong with it, and it was a sad sad show for me. guess i'm a hardcore darwinian who believes in survival of the fittest.

I went down to the IT fair at Suntec on Sunday, queued up for 4 bloody hours and got a LG Renoir for $98. and a new handphone number.

now that i'm sane again, i keep wondering why the hell i even did that.

well, one reason was because i had a dinner appointment, and i had 5 hours to while away before that.

one reason was that stupid sure-win lucky dip. (i won a starhub handphone strap, yay me)

another reason was that the guy i was chatting with in the queue was a bloody fun guy, and it felt like betrayal to leave after we'd been in the same cauldron of soup for so long.

but still, i'm uber SORE after that, for standing around for 4 plus hours. and i couldn't eat lunch or much of breakfast due to the awkward timings. and my dinner date stood me up, so i really didn't need to while away those 5 hours.

and now that i've the phone, i'm too tired to play with it.

hell, i haven't even transferred my contacts over and mass-smsed my new number.

so tired.

for the first time ever, i had to go work at -gasp- 9am. i had to wake up at freaking 8am in the morning~!

hahahahaha. really. it was a chore. many of us couldn't wake up.

so the reason for the early work was not daylight saving time, extra work or the like. it was this new activity called 'team-building', a one-time thing.

one of the activities was to find out our personality types. i was a blue, and observer. apparently...

"Observers are precise, cautious and disciplined, and are painstaking and conscientious in work, which require attention and accuracty. Observers are objective thinkers who combine intuitive information with the facts they have gathered in a most effective way. They avoid making a fool of themselves by meticulous preparaton. They tend not to trust strangers and worry about outcomes, reputation and their job. They can read situations well and be both sensing and intuitive. They tend to be seen as unresponsive, cool and uncaring by some. They might not be good at expressing themselves at times"

putting aside my messy desktop and room and craziness around friends, its pretty much true. Especially that unresponsive and uncaring part.

so what tickled me really was that for the next part of the activity, the different personality types have to form groups and discuss their personalities.

needless to say, our group was the one with the most number of awkward silences and zero laughs.

on another note, my aunt's hamsters gave birth YET AGAIN and i'm now owning this baby black hamster (amazingly, even though the hamsters are the same species, my first is a perfect winter white with silver spots and white fur, while the new litter are all black with white socks. some really recessive genes are showing up through in-breeding)

this black hamster is barely a few weeks old, and is still badly disproportioned due to its youth. its head is almost the length of its body, and it waddles along and screeches.

for such a little thing, it sure is headstrong. the very first day it came, my fully-grown-up, 3-litters-its-senior hamster got thrown out of its home and had to sleep outside. i was really pretty worried the two of them would kill each other (or rather that baby would bully the first), but it seems like they had come to an impasse, and the two of them cuddle up to each other now.

i still get worried abt what they are doing while i'm not around though. but its overkill to set up night security cameras right? :D

Something weird happened last night.

I was sleeping with my earrings on. Its those shell butterfly earrings that i was raving about, with sharp angular edges and a fairly loose clasp. I know its fairly dangerous, 'cause they might get caught on the bed sheets and fall out, or rip my ear off while they're at it.

But i was tired, and I know I am a lucky person, so i just went to sleep with them on.

And in the middle of the night I woke up groggily for no reason. Shucks, my earrings were both gone.

Its bad news because 1. they might poke my eyes out if left lying around and 2. i'd lost a lot of earring clasps while sleeping or in the bath and i'm already short of them.

i found one near my feet. And the weirdest thing was, it was lying there neatly WITH ITS CLASP SECURELY LOCKED IN PLACE, pushed up snugly right to the earring's base.

Hmm, weird, I thought. Something like this had happened before, with this very same pair of earrings, and I had just put it on again, and woken up thinking it was a dream.

So I put it gingerly at the foot of the bed, gave up looking for the other earring, and went back to sleep.

In the morning I found the second earring near my pillow. and its clasp was securely locked in place, just like the first.

Whatever the reason, regardless of what happened, I'm glad. But its weird.

Work is tiring.

I've been making lots of mistakes at work lately. Somehow or other, something gets missed and it just seems inevitable. and in the morning when i check the inbox, it feels like i'm diffusing a bomb, red wire, green wire, 50-50 chance that i'll get a bomb that says "FEEDBACK: Missing blah blah and blah".

And there'd been lots of system issues recently as well, such that for the past one week i'd been reaching home for dinner at 9+pm. I'm pretty sure that a few years down the road, i'm gonna get a hole in the stomach, stomach ulcer, or stomach cancer for sure.

so every morning i hope and i wish and i wish and i hope i don't get an email titled "FEEDBACK" and that it'll be a smooth smooth day.

...and wishing and hoping doesn't do a thing, else the world would be full of fools and mankind wouldn't progress lol.

i'd better buck up.

look for alternative sources of income, learn about investing, start planting my own fruits and veggies and keep a few hens.

on another note i'd bought tickets for CATS for the last show. booking tickets through sistic is such a bitch, i wish they'd let us choose our own seats. like, why not?

i just bought my new LG renoir phone, which can take photos, play music and videos, and wifi.

so i gave my cute samsung mp3 player to my mother... and when she switched it on, its battery-less. nadah, no bat.

well, duh, we haven't used it for like 2 weeks.

and i charged it for 3 freaking days, the computer doesn't recognise it as a remote memory device, and its still battery-less.

so there's something wrong~

and of course i can't find the confounded warranty card.

i found another warranty card though... the LG renoir one, unmailed. ha ha ha ha...

and LG renoir really isn't that good. photos aren't that good in bad lighting (meaning my bedroom at night with the lights on) and the phone just DIES quietly every so often from lack of power.

just realized i hadn't received any smses for the past few days, and decided to check it, when, you've got it, i found out its actually not in battery-saving mode (which is really useless) but dead. sorry everyone for the late replies.