Yvonne Chia's Sweet 16

Just started work at Aaron’s aunt’s spa today. Basically did all the weird admin stuff, I think I was doing inventory? Like stock check or something because I was changing stuff like price of product, name of product and number of product. Staring at the screen all day can be quite boring but I think the most difficult part of it all was keeping my back from aching after all the slouching I did in front of the screen. Well, I managed to find ways to amuse myself with the task at hand though, like spotting oxymoron in the products name. I mean "intensive gentle" cleansing mask?!

I hate the host of So You Think You Can Dance. What possessed the producer to hire some British chick or some chick with a British accent?! She looks so spastic talking and hosting the damn show. I can’t exactly remember if she was the same host for the first season of So You Think You Can Dance but she seriously ruins the show for me. Hopefully they won’t get some lame ass host for Fever on the Dance Floor like how they got Daniel Ong for Singapore Idol.

I’m too lazy to wait for YH to send me the photos from Saturday so I decided to update first and perhaps maybe edit the entry when she does send me the photos. (YH if you are reading this I’m waiting for the pictures hor!)

We celebrated Yvonne’s birthday last Saturday, a really really belated birthday celebration. Her birthday was like around late September but because it was nearing the exam period, the celebration was put off until after the exams. However, with all the preparation for Velvet etc after our EOYs, we only managed to find time to finally celebrate it for her last Saturday.

We held the celebration at YY’s house. Initially, there was a lot of debate regarding where to host the party. We thought of places like her house, the zoo, sentosa and the list goes on. However, when YY discovered how some of us enjoy going to Seoul Garden to eat and invited us over to her house for a hot plate dinner, we decided that it would be best to hold the party there since everyone would be present. It’s getting quite hard to get everybody together at the same place on the same day since people are getting busier.

Anyway, I went there with Aaron in the pouring rain and luckily I was smart enough to bring a huge ass umbrella with me. To hell with tiny portable umbrellas that cover only half of me, those are for tiny/normal sized people. Huge people like me need big umbrellas to shield against torrential downpours. I think I need to get a pair of waterproof shoes though, seeing as how my flats are constantly getting soaked and when I wear flip flops out, I run the risk of breaking my back. That’s why you see me waddling like an old man when I’m walking around on a rainy day.

Well, we still managed to get to YY’s house in one piece (barely though) and by the time we had reached, the baking of Yvonne’s cake and brownies had already started. I think YY’s mom nearly threw a fit at the whole baking session. Being quite retarded when it comes to baking, I stood out of the way and attempted to cool myself down in her living room. We were supposed to have an orange theme, which is basically whereby everyone wears orange except Yvonne. Haha, however, some people didn’t have orange shirts and some people neglected to inform others to bring orange shirts (Tsk tsk tsk). Thankfully YY had enough shirts to go around and I managed to find a tiny orange shirt, which I can no longer fit into, at home to loan to Darren.




The Bakers. Not a family name but literally the people who baked the cake and brownies. YY should be in the picture too.

Yvonne arrived earlier than we would have liked or expected. I guess you could say that we weren’t entirely prepared to throw her the party yet, with minor details like the card and decorating her cake still unfinished. So we entertained and distracted her with Finding Nemo and by playing with her hair. Of course, I’m sure she knew that something was going on but haha, we somehow enjoyed pretending that she didn’t know what was going. I guess everyone enjoyed the idea of keeping her in the dark and at least she was sporting enough to go ahead and pretend that she didn’t know what was going on. OR at least I think she pretended that she didn’t know what was going on, haha.


Yvonne's new hairdo, take 1!


Yvonne's new hairdo, take 2!

So while she watched the movie, we stealthily wrote messages in her card and artistically cut up the brownies to form a heart shape for her. The original idea was to spell something like HAZARD or YVONNE or SOTONG BALL, but there was either no space on the plate or not enough brownies to form a word. At the same time, the oreo cheese-birthday-cake was being chilled in the freezer and the food for dinner was being prepared.

We finally settled down for dinner soon after the movie ended. Haha, I think we must have consumed millions of calories worth of food because there was quite a spread and the amount of butter used was insane. Dinner was fantastic and I think we got quite inventive with all the egg, tang hun and rice that seemed to have a lot left over. Personally I would have preferred if YY’s parents didn’t come home so early or would have as YY said, found some excuse to go out until we were done, at least with dinner. But, I guessed we still made the best of what we had and I enjoyed it a lot.

After dinner, we cut the cake, opened the presents and made Yvonne put on a fashion show with the clothes we got her for her birthday.


Her new look!

Haha, I think it was rather chaotic getting the atmosphere just right when we sang her the song and got her to walk into the room which was only illuminated with lights from the candles on the cake. We made her pose for a million photos as well as videos that YY and I were taking.


16 years old and 2 months!




Birthday girl with her birthday card.

The cake was delicious but there wasn’t much to go around. I guess that’s a good thing considering how much butter we ate during dinner. We were supposed to play monopoly but somehow ended up hanging out in YY’s room instead. Aaron, Nic and I left soon after with a lift from Nicole’s dad, while the rest waited for Yvonne’s dad to give them a lift. Haha, next on the agenda, Darren’s birthday! Oh oh, and Christmas party at Audrey’s house with gift exchange. Haha, the number of times we had to draw lots just so that everyone picked someone else other than themselves was amusing to say the least.


Orange overload!!!

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The Videos!

Singing happy birthday.



Cutting the cake.



Opening the presents.



Catwalk! Work it!



And of course, one of the crazy moments.


farcical-rants - 9:53 pm - Monday, November 27, 2006

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Craziness isnt a disease ;; Interview Mayhem



[Updated]
Ok, woke up really early today to get to Tanjong Pagar for some job interview. I really struggled to get out of bed because I had slept at three and had to be up by eight thirty. In the end I got up at nine instead and made my way to Tanjong Pagar. Was contemplating on whether or not I should take a cab since I was going to be late, but I knew that the others would be late too so I decided not to in the end. And thank goodness I didn’t waste money taking a cab because I ended up being the first to reach the place.

Somehow, there was some message that was supposed to get to Yu Hui and I that didn’t. So the two of us ended waiting at Tanjong Pagar for an hour before Yvonne and Audrey arrived. We went to International Plaza where the job interview was held at. Let me just say that the place has the most complicated lift system I have ever come across in my life. There were like 12 to 18 lifts and we didn’t know that each lift only went to some particular levels only until after we took the first lift we went into and realised that there was no level 33 to choose from but a level 35. So we got out at level 9 and realised that there was no button to press to go up OR down. So we were pretty much stuck on that level until a lift finally stopped at that level so that we could go down to search for the correct lift that would take us to the correct story.

When we finally got there, we filled up this application form. I’ve never really filled up much application forms before so I left quite a lot of the questions blank. In the end, the only jobs available were one as a gift wrapper at Watson and one working as something in retail at Vivo City (I don’t know how to spell the name of the shop ><’’). Both required one to work for 6 days a week and the timings were usually around 8 hours a day. The pay was pretty much quite basic, $4.50 to $5.50 an hour. Deliberated rather long over which job to choose because the one at Vivo paid more but wasn’t confirmed while the one at Watson paid less but was confirmed.

In the end, we left with their name card and headed to Sim Lim Square to check out this job that would be held at Singapore Expo for 4 days. It was a long walk to Sim Lim Square from Little India MRT and we saw this 70 year old drag queen. Haha, it was the strangest sight because from far, the persons back looked like a man while the front looked like a woman. We only found out the persons gender when we walked pass him/her and we heard a really low voice. Haha, the person was either scolding YH for running past or some motorcyclist.

The job at Expo was for selling computers at some exhibit, the pay sucks and it’s like $2 an hour and we get $20 commission for every computer we sell. The thing is that we or I know squat about selling computers so I’ll probably end up standing around looking really stupid and earning my 2 bucks an hour which doesn’t really seem worth it.

So after all that, we went to Vivo to look around for jobs because the place had just opened not too long ago and a lot of the shops there were just getting started. So we were hoping that one shop would be looking to hire and it turned out that quite a few were indeed looking to hire. The only twist to it is that they were looking for long term employees.

It was the first time that YH and I went to Vivo City so of course we were running around cam whoring at the same time. It really puzzles me why Xmas decorations are were up so early in the month of November. I guess that’s why Singaporeans are called Kiasu.








The two whom I'm taking this photo with want to watch this movie.


With the harbourfront view as our backdrop.


There's a snowman at Vivo.


Taken with the snowmen!


We don't enjoy waiting for MRTs (especially if they're crowded)

farcical-rants - 12:16 am - Thursday, November 23, 2006

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Bad Case of Insonmia

Seriously, I enjoy watching Martin Yan’s show every weekday on channel five. However, whenever I watch the show, I choose to mute it because when you can actually hear what is going on, it’s quite retarded really. I mean like, I guess he is being entertaining to some, but it’s annoying when he behaves like an idiot, making weird noises whenever he doesn’t have anything to say just to fill the silence, or when he doesn’t know what English word to use. Like he didn’t know the word of some kitchen appliance and he went this wonderful robotic AH-HA. I mean…

For someone who slept at like five yesterday, I’m surprisingly awake and energetic right now. I woke up at like 9.30 today and lazed around in bed till 11.30. I was supposed to be at Aaron’s house in the morning, but I was too lazy to crawl out of bed. Anyway, I knew that if I didn’t call him, he would still be sleeping. We went to Tampinese together to meet Cindy.

The trip to Somerset was definitely not without funny moments. I can’t get over the fact that Aaron was actually bitching about Xiaxue and when he suddenly saw this woman with Xiaxue like hair, body shape and height, he turned to her and asked are you Xiaxue! I mean who does that!!! Haha, I think I almost died from laughing so hard. We arrived at around two thirty at Heeren and wandered around waiting for Sakae to allow us in for the students buffet. Some nice lady there allowed us to reserves seats first. We managed to kill time at HMV with Cindy and Aaron debating over which was Jolin Tsai’s latest album (wasn’t really interested).





Haha, the two neoprints are hilarious. Apparently the neoprint shop in Heeren had some neoprint contest and this two were runner up and first prize winner of the competition. To be honest, they look really ugly in the picture and I have no idea how they won. Maybe the judges were judging the picture on creativity or something.

Thank goodness we reserved seats at Sakae because when we went up after that at 3.00, the place was miraculously packed compared to when we were there at 2.30. So we managed to get nice seats near the starting of the conveyer belt where all the food that were just prepared would come out. For the first time in all my visits to Sakae, we were warned about food wastage. Haha, the waitress found the pile of rice I hid underneath the stack of plates and informed her manager. Lol, of course, we managed to find other ways to hide unwanted stuff that came along with some of the sushi.

We pretty much stopped eating the rice-type sushi after the warning because it would cause us to get full faster. Instead, we ate things like chawamushi, fried crabstick, fried tofu etc. The only thing that had rice in it was the soft shell crab hand roll. Oh theres are two new types of chawamushi now available at Sakae. One is the tandoori chawamushi, the other one I can't remember the name but I know that it has pumpkin in it.


Only took a picture of the pumpkin chawamushi.

We managed to think up of a few new ways to hide food that you don’t want to it, for our case, it was the weird shredded cucumber that the chef’s put into the hand rolls, probably in an attempt to make us full faster.

Step one.
Some plates come with the cucumber as a garnish, so to get rid of the excess cucumber in the hand rolls, carefully place some strands on every plate that you have on the table, making sure that its realistic enough to show that it looks like a garnish that came with the sushi and not a pile of unwanted cucumber from the hand roll.

Step two.
If you somehow didn’t take enough plates to get rid of the cucumber or that the waitress at the particular Sakae that you go to is really efficient, make us of the small tiny plates that they provide to hold your soy sauce and wasabi. First, you place the shredded cucumber into the soy sauce. Since its transparent, make the sauce murky by putting loads of wasabi so that it looks there’s only soy sauce and lot’s of wasabi. Take it from me, this trick works like quick sand. It sucks all the cucumber in and hides it rather well. However, the only bad part about this is that the plates are really small and if you use too many plates, the restaurant staffs might get suspicious.

Ps. this works really well if you are trying to get rid of rice because the staff will just assume that your sushi fell apart when you were dipping and that it is too salty for you to eat it anymore.

Step three
If you have ordered chawamushi, keep the bowl and throw a few strands of cucumbers in. This will definitely work because it will just look like the weird stuff in the bottom of the chawamushi that reminds me of tang hun.

Ps. this works really well too if you are trying to get rid of a bit of rice.

Step four.
If you really love hand roll and have so much cucumber that step one, two and three doesn’t work, put it into the container that comes with the soba, add light sauce to better hide the cucumber because this way, the staff may think it as just little strands of left over soba noodles.

We walked off all the eating at paragon and spent one hour there playing with all the electronics stuff at Sony, walking around and pretending that we were rich, visiting Cindy’s friend who worked nearby, looking at ridiculously expensive stuff and wishing that we could afford it.



Haha, this photo is hilarious. It was at the entrance of Paragon and is actually an advertisement for hair removal, lol.

I decided to post photos of last week when we went to Audrey's house because we had nothing better to do. I managed to give Yvonne a makeover on one day and the two of us and Nicole cooked noodles on the second day. As incredibly stupid as this sounds, it was my first time cooking noodles by myself. Or maybe it was my second time, either way it was somewhat of a new experience, haha, so I got rather excited over cooking noodles. ><''


Yvonne's Makeover!!!


Waiting for the water to boil to cook Nic and my noodles.


Yvonne cooked hers in the microwave and she couldn't find the seasoning until after the noodles were cooked and she realised that they were stuck to the noodles.


Don't mess with her when she is hungry.


YAY!!!

farcical-rants - 9:55 pm - Wednesday, November 22, 2006

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Bored Stiff *Updated

Sighs, it’s Monday and I’m at home rotting. I may be rotting at home tomorrow too because the girls seem to be training at cedar a lot recently, which means both Darren and I can’t go for training. Excellent, it’s been weeks since we last touched the ball and I doubt that it will be anytime soon before we go back to training. Oh well, roll with the punches. Besides that, everybody seems to be busy this week and the only people free are Yvonne, Yu Hui and I.

Watched Step Up on Saturday, pretty good movie I guess. I still stand by what I said, and that is Channing Tatum is ugly. He dances really awkwardly too. According to Aaron, it may be because he is so tall. Haha, just as well, if I could move half as well as he could I could probably star in a movie too.

Oh haha, this just in. I guess I won’t be rotting at home for the whole of today after all. Just got an SMS to go watch Material Girls later in the evening, which means that perhaps I can have dinner out too! Haha, really getting quite sick of home cooked food. People usually say that you will miss home cooking once you go to army or when you go overseas to study. We’ll see. The saying usually varies with what kind of home cooking you’re getting, no?

I’ve recently stopped watching channel 8 drama serials. I can’t get over how terrible Alan Wu’s mandarin is. Just go watch the 9.00pm show every weekday and you’ll get what I mean. It’s positively atrocious I tell you. I can’t understand why mediacorp actually hires him to act in Chinese drama serials. I mean even I can speak better mandarin than him and everyone knows that my Chinese is BAD. I really don’t get it. If they are hiring him because he looks good than he might as well go be a porn star. Pave the way for the porn star industry if you will and before you know it, he’ll be richer than he ever was being an actor.

I’m really grateful for Youtube, without it, I think I might have gone insane by now. It is keeping me sane by providing some sort of entertainment and allowing me to kill time at night. I seem to be suffering from insomnia. Ever since velvet, my body clock has been off the chart. Sleeping at three and waking up at ten! But now, things seem to be getting better, if you consider sleeping at three and waking up at two getting better. Haha.

Material girls wasn't that great after all. I think the plot line was quite stupid and carried out in a rather slipshod manner. But hey, I'm no expert, watch it and judge for yourself if you want. The cinema was pretty empty, maybe because the movie hasn't gotten much advertising or something.

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Here are some videos of my crazy friends that I manage to capture. Hopefully this proves that I was sane enough to capture this.






farcical-rants - 4:28 pm - Monday, November 20, 2006

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Velvet 2006


Spontaneous combustion!

Bah, prom dinner and dance didn’t really meet up to my expectations, but I suppose it was because I probably had too high expectations. Anyway, as much as the food sucked and the games were lame, I guess we should be appreciative of the fact that people did put in effort to organise this event for us and they spent a lot of time planning and etc to make things run as smoothly as possible. The event pictures are on cosiety by the way.



Woke up really late in the day and spent most of the afternoon getting ready. I had to iron my clothes, polish and sun the shoes and a lot of other stuff I’m too lazy to list right now. I even U-Zapped different parts of my body, though it clearly didnt help much. I made sure the air conditioning was switched on the whole day because I just know I will start sweating once I don the clothes for prom. Aaron and I cab-ed down to Darren’s house to get a lift from his dad and even though we arrived just on time, we still had to wait for a while before we were allowed to go into the Vista room. By than i was starving because I only had brunch earlier in the day.




This was the first course.

Dinner was a huge downer, the food sounded good on the menu and it may look good too, but it tasted bad. I guess those that tasted remotely nice were the dessert(diabetically sweet mango pudding), the first course, the fish, the soup, the shrimps in one of the dishes and the mushroom in the vegetable dish. Actually now that I think about it, the only horrible foods were the super dry chicken, the weird yam thing, the rice and the vegetable. The waiters working at the Hilton seem to have this aversion to Sprite. They refilled every other drink except sprite so YY and I had to keep asking them to help refill our water goblets. And as annoying as it may have been for others, I think the Yam Seng or however you spell it my class did was fun! So screw you too bad if you think someones getting married or whatever.

The goody bag was definitely a huge disappointment. Honestly, I didn’t really know what to expect but what we got was definitely quite lousy. I mean a notebook, M&Ms, some weird book light thingy, a CD with photos from our Flickr, a gold ink pen, tissue paper and an envelope with a piece of paper in it. Maybe it would have been better if everyone paid the extra money for the thumb drive. At least there would be something good in the goody bag.


Who has the widest wrist? (The winner was ben)

I would have rather the organisers spend less time going about with the weird games and giving more time for us to take photos. However, I guess the most interesting game for my table would have to be the one where we write our confessions to our friends in a sealed envelope that was found in the goody bag. Hee hee, let’s just say we got creative with the letters.

Apparently, we were supposed to dance after dinner, but I assume that since we ended so late, everybody was more concerned with taking photos. Maybe if we had ended earlier, we would be able to dance or something. I know I wanted to maybe dance a bit, but taking photos was more important. Hell, I didn’t even have enough time to take photos with everybody and its quite depressing okay! Haha, wish I managed to take photos with more people, but oh well, the nights over.

At least I won a box of Ferrero Rocher for having the biggest mouth. I wish I won the Ipod Nano in the lucky draw though, haha, but everyone else probably wished they won that prize too.





I’m so proud of the Brownians! Personally, I thought that the performances were great with an exception of one group. I loved Sandra and Leanne’s duet and I think Brownians did a good job with the last song. The Remedy wasn't bad, its just that I've listened to it so many times that I've gotten quite sick of it. The V14 band would probably have been good if the drum wasn’t so loud and I could actually hear them sing. Haha, but I think it was quite cute seeing Wilbur up on stage singing with this piece of paper with the lyrics on it.


The Finalists!


Together with the Prom King.

Oh and congrats to the prom king and queen, Nazri and Shakura. It was pretty obvious who would win when the finalist were announced. Although there were the strangest results ever for the finalists, like Jomaine and Zong He instead of Benjamin and Jomaine or Clara and Zong He, and also Jovena and Darren instead of Jovena and Wenshu. I guess the night managed to start and end with a high note, with all the cam whoring of course! I just wish that the teachers’ message to us was in the CD and also the video Leon made for Mr. Koh, instead of another photo slideshow. Oh well, maybe I can get it from one of the juniors.

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Photos!!! [if you want the photos come to me online to ask for them]


Chinese Group! Just to note, all the really blur photos are in black and white.


Loo and I. Haha, somehow I'm still taller even though she is wearing heels.


Foo, Vanessa and I.


Yvonne and I. Intermarriage!


Darren, Yvonne, YY, Audrey and I. Hee hee, notice YY's the wallet shop plastic-bag clutch?


Maho and I.


Martin and I.


Ben, Louis and I.


Ben and I. I like the retro look, but I doubt I can pull off white.


Leon, Wing Yan and I. The two of them looked very nice.


Cheryl and I. I think cheryl looked very nice that night.


Darren and I. Haha, you can't see it but Darren has little blue snowflakes on his shirt.


Jomaine and I.


Louis and I. I wanted a hat like that from top shop!


YY!!! She looks very different right? Looks very nice.


Crazy and I. Haha, and its in black and white.


Crazy and I again.


Group shot!


Zong and I. With the toilet as our background.


Vaishalie, Jinci and I.


Si Hui and I. She looked really nice too.


Rachel and I. Baby doll dress!


Si Hui, Chun Han and I. Aiyoh, can see Si Hui's bandages, the clumsy girl. And I like Chun Han's matching blazer and pants.


Nick and I. Loves his blazer material, it's actually light and thin, like a shirt!


Tina and I.


Nic and I. Her dress looks semi brown here but it actually changes colour in the light.


Marj and I.

farcical-rants - 1:01 am - Friday, November 17, 2006

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Read about my past

February 2006
March 2006
April 2006
May 2006
June 2006
July 2006
August 2006
September 2006
October 2006
November 2006
December 2006
January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007
May 2007