CNY day [1] (2007)

Okay, one day down, two more days to go. Today wasn’t as awful as I had predicted it to be. Firstly, I managed to get away with wearing a relatively dark coloured top-olive green to be exact-and I’ve finally made use of the trucker hat I bought some time back.



So far, my collection of red packets isn’t that bad. But I may collect $60 less this year because my mom had some falling out with her side of the family, they all have apparently, due to reasons I am not suppose to know. My family is rather screwed up if you have not realised by now, which is why I’m not close to them at all.

Visiting was MIND-NUMBINGLY BORING. I sat around and stuffed my face while attempting to entertain myself by watching soccer, of all things, on the television. I couldn’t even be bothered to gamble, I just sat around and watched the grown ups play their game of black jack.

Thank goodness for the fact that I’m actually in J1, gone are the days where I have to explain over and over again to my relatives what IP is. Now I just have to say J1 and VJC and it seems to register quite quickly.

It occurred to me that my brother and I are the only kids left who still go visiting on my dad’s side of the family. Or at least we are the ones who actually stick around until the end of the day. It’s probably because I’m the youngest and everybody else is either my brother’s age or older. Hence this equates to them either being married, engaged, dating or just too old to bother with visiting anymore. But it’s not that bad because I don’t really bother myself much to engage in a conversation with my cousins. So it eliminates any need for me to make small talk, which, FYI, I suck at.

I have two extreme types of cousins. I have cousins who were from RJC, who now have high flying careers and rake in 5 figure salaries. I also have cousins, who were from ITE, who only have O level education because they choose to pursue a career of modelling, who are older than me yet have the maturity of a 10 year old.

Honestly, I don’t understand why that cousin of mine chose to be a model. She is the typical “ah lian” who wears tons of make up and dresses to the bare minimum. But she was smart enough to top her class or school for her O levels and was able to enter a rather decent polytechnic. But instead, she chose to stop studying and be a full time model. The most interesting part is that she is short and is so not a size 2, even a size 4. Seriously, there is no shelf life to being a model in Singapore; someone should knock some sense into her.

The highlight of the day would probably be wining $70! Haha, actually I should have won $120. But my dad took $40 from me and my mom took $10. The funniest part was that I only played twice. I don’t know what the name of the game is in English, but I know it’s pronounced “nor leng” in some dialect. Basically, it is a game whereby everyone forks out a certain sum of money to form this pool of cash. Everyone gets 3 cards and they judge who wins by looking at the last digit. The smallest digit is 1 and the largest is 0. Its winner takes all so if you win, you get quite a lot.

My mom lost $10 so I gave some of my winnings to her. The other $40 that my dad took was to pay for the last round of that game, which coincidentally enough, was won by my brother-haha.

There are also my two adorable nephews and my cousin’s dog to play with. I’m dreading the time when my nephews reach the age of annoyance, namely from the age of 7 to around 11. Suddenly the prospect of looking after a dog seems more appealing than having a child next time. Haha, and now I know why Dan's dog looks so familiar. Her's is exactly the same species as the dog my cousin owns, just that my cousin's dog is black and white instead of brown and white. Funnily enough, both dogs are named after baked goods, one cookie and one oreo. Oreo seems more fitting for my cousin's dog though. Go figure.

Sighs, tomorrow is the day whereby people come by my house to do their visiting. This means more gambling, but this time round in the form of mah-jong, which by the way is strictly for grown ups only. Shucks, I hate playing host. Well at least my mom is making popiah tomorrow! :)

Hopefully day 3 would be much better, if of course the group of us actually go out to go visiting together.

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