Couch Potato week

Think I haven't been a couch potato for some time. That is, of course, attributed to my work during the term. But being one for too long, also makes you feel bored...in other words, SIAAN.
Haha..ever since I came back from Ophir (somehow I still don't feel like blogging about Ophir just yet), I had been spending a lot of time at home. Over the past week, other than attending a friend's wedding on Mon, and 2-5 & 2-4's BBQs on Wed and Thurs evening, I think I spent the rest of the time being a couch potato & channel surfing at home. Heh.
Personally I consider that a good sign..because I recall that 2 years ago, during the Nov/Dec break, I was feeling stressed out every day as I was so worried about my lesson preparations for the following year. Such was the stress of being a beginning teacher with only 6 mths experience, couldn't really take a proper break even during the hols. So being able to chill out and be at peace with myself for spending time to chill, tells me that I have matured somewhat as a teacher, and able to take time to rest when I should. Afterall, like what all my more experienced counterparts say, WORK can never be finished...

During the couch-potato-week, I decided that I wanted to play the guitar and sing some songs. But, lo and behold...............Murphy's Law sets in................................














I suppose I could still play with 5 strings out of 6...but that's super irritating. So after playing for 5 minutes, I gave up.

Ended the couch-potato-week by going to one of my favourite hangouts, MusicDreamer Live! Cafe at Marina Square.

Most people will probably know this place as Ai Qin Hai, a nice little cafe tucked at one corner of marina square. I love it because of the nice ambience and 'live' singing that's available every night. The cafe opens for business from 6.30pm to about 10.30pm or 11pm..and almost every night, 2 teams of singers/musicians will sing to the audience, 'live'. The teams also take song requests from the audience, which makes it all the more interesting..always nice to hear them sing the song that you requested for. =P Local singer Cai Li Lian & her husband are regular singers at this little cafe too :)

OK, after a week of couch-potato'ing, am glad that I'm finally starting on some work after resting well for one week. Spent some time in school over the past 2 days..tidying up my table and filing up all my materials. Am proud to say I'm 95% done with packing my table!! Haha.. Managed to prepare some materials today too :)

It's currently 2.20am, and...gosh, I'm not the least bit sleepy. This is BAD, I'm tuning my body clock later and later...eeks..gonna have such a hard time tuning it back when school re-opens.

Perak Expedition (Part II - Caving experience)

On the last day of the Perak expedition, we went caving. The initial part of the caving was...very tourist-y. The guide showed us many many rocks which apparently looked like animals, people, etc. Well, some resembled what the guide said it looked like, others....just left us clueless. We walked up and down using man-made staircases and pathways, surrounded by railings that were very helpful, especially when we were walking down loong staircases. Some photos from the cave..not too clearly taken as the camera flash was not strong enough.



























Think the real fun began when we got off the man-made pathways and walked into the dark.....onto sandpaths. Our first adventure, was sliding down this slope.



Looks quite easy? Yeah, now that I look back. But when you first saw it, didn't look all that simple. But the guides made it quite safe, because there was a guide mid-way down the slope (at where the torch is in the photo) to make sure you slid down the right way, another guide at the bottom of the slope to catch you as you slide down :)










After the slide down, our next adventure was "squeezing" through this hole in the ground! Haha, thankfully all of us were slim enough to go through it. Actually, the hole is pretty deceiving...looks quite small, but actually isn't that small afterall ;)














That lead us to the next exciting part of the cave, the WATER. The water was pretty cooling, a little cold in fact...and looked pretty clean... Thankfully the people who went last year already warned us about water-proofing our torches when we went caving...so I was well-prepared with my water-proof bag for my torch and camera. OTHERWISE, both would have drowned later on..














Initially, the water level was ankle-high as seen above. As we went deeper, the water level rose to our calves..and our cave ceiling seemed to be going lower and lower..which means, after a while, the only way to continue exploring the cave, was to literally be waddling/crawling (almost swimming!!) in the water. Haha..no wonder the need for water-proofing. I remember I bumped my head once or twice while crawling in the water, because I didn't see the rock in front due to my cap *ouch*.

(Well, obviously there aren't pictures of us waddling nor crawling since my camera is safely tucked away in my waterproof bag =P )

I think we waddled and crawled for maybe...20 minutes.
Took our rest at a more open area of the cave before we headed back out into the light... :)














Exiting the cave marked the end of our expedition in Perak!
All that was left of the trip was a nice lunch waiting on the outside of the cave, as well as a nice bath at a toilet where we had to pay RM 1 to use.

More pics of the wedding

Woohoo!! My blog finally looks EXACTLY like how I want it to look like, all thanks to YH :) thanks a lot ;) My Christmas countdown timer is exactly where it should be...hee.

These pictures that you see now are all taken by one of my choirmates W's website..he happens to be and old boy of CHS! Never knew he's a great photographer until the recent spate of weddings that we started attending together.




The bunch of us choir people at the church..


















The ballroom at Goodwood Park Hotel...


















Cute little teddy sitting on top of the Ang Pao box..















This is a Q & A game session for the couple..where the ultimate goal is for the groom to do a forfeit, regardless of the outcome of the game. Haha..before you think the MCs were being evil, it was all a ploy to celebrate the groom's birthday, which was just the day before the wedding ;)










My table no. 12 :)















My choir batch..... :)

My friends' wedding

Decided to steal some of L's pics from his blog and use it to blog about my friends' wedding which I mentioned about a few days back. Am sure there'll be much more pics for me to upload later on when W gets his pictures up online..so till then, this few from L's blog will suffice ;)

S and L are my college choir friends. I've actually known L all the way since I was secondary 1..been in the same CCA all the way till we finished JC. They'd been together since the end of JC2....super long yeah?







This is L, walking down the aisle..













And this is both S and L walking down the aisle, this time as Mr and Mrs Lee ;)






Their wedding dinner was held at Goodwood Park Hotel...quite a nice cosy dinner of I think around....20 tables? I think my table was almost the youngest bunch there..since the rest were made up of relatives and perhaps, their parents' friends.

As with the tradition, both my friends sang to each other during the wedding dinner....it's always nice to hear wedding couples sing during their weddings...so sweet.....

And this is the few of us at our noisy dinner table no. 12 ;)

2 weddings down, and 5 more to go!! *hole in pocket growing as the days go by....*

Ophir (Part I)

Till I'm in the mood and have time to type out the whole Gunung Ledang expedition and my reflections on it, I shall put up pictures here and there and describe snippets of it.

Basically, this is what my Land unit, P and I scaled...

A description of Mount Ophir that we find painted on the wall of a small canteen at the foot of the mountain.

This, my friends, is a rock hill surface that we had to scale enroute to the summit. Note, there's no camera tricks in this photo. It really is quite steep.

Pretty steep wall to scale WITHOUT safety harnesses huh?

That's all for this episode of "Ophir"....till Part II.......adios amigo!

New Blogskin

Just came back from yet another wedding about an hour ago..another 2 of my peers getting married to each other after 7 years of courtship. Feel very happy for them...

Hmm..granny seems to be eating a little more..which is a comfort. But still a little on the unresponsive side...with only slight nods to indicate that she has occassionally heard me calling her (not necessarily understanding what I'm saying to her). But at least, there is that slight improvement in terms of eating. Thank God...

Just changed my blogskin today. Always wondered if I would be able to do it myself, since the previous blogskin was done up for me by an ex-student. Took about 1/3 of the day to get it up..with just one small problem..my "Countdown Timer" has gone missing. For some reason the Title for the countdown timer ("No. of days to Christmas Day") cannot be displayed. And it appears all the way at the bottom :( Just can't figure it out..what used to work on the old blogskin, doesn't work on this one anymore. Haiz. Somemore, I'm an HTML idiot..everything that appears on this blog is achieved by trial-&-error. Anyone can figure it out?

:(

Being sick is an eeky feeling. *sigh*

Upon returning from a successful Ophir trip, 2 saddening news hit me..one is, that my granny's health has suddenly deteriorated. I had only been gone for 4 days, I don't even know if she recognised me when I came home on Thursday. She had been wheelchair-bound for close to 2 years already, but throughout this whole time, she was very healthy..being able to converse simply with us, recognising us, watching TV & eating full meals. She used to love to hold onto my hands when I stretched it out to her...
But when I saw her on Thurs, she looked listless..hardly responding when I call her..not swallowing well..almost refusing to eat..slumping to one side of her wheelchair. ='( Pains my heart so much..and I can't do nuts to help. And I myself am down with flu..so I'm afraid to walk near her, for the fear that I"ll pass the flu to her, which would be disastrous. So all I can do is to pray for her...

The other news is, my HDB flat may be en-bloc'ed. Which put simply, means that it may be bought over to be re-developed. i.e. I might just be displaced from my own house soon. ='(

Feeling upset...... :(

*sick*

Too much heaty and spicy food on the trip....
*nose dripping* *COUGH COUGH* *sore throat*

*SICK*

Perak Trip, 6th - 8th Nov '06

I just came back from an NCC adventure trip to Perak. Was really fun I must say. The pic from my previous post shows the lot of us who went from the CHS Land unit, a total of 10 boys plus me. There were I think, 9 schools who went in total, and 8 officers who accompanied the whole lot. Basically, there were 3 main activities, white-water rafting, canyoning (i.e. abseiling down from a water fall!) and caving.

So we travelled for almost an entire day on the 6th to reach Perak. And to reach our campsite, we had to load up onto smaller lorries and vans coz the little roads in the village couln't take big buses. The ride in was interesting..haha..more interesting for the boys i suppose. Coz there are trees on both sides of the road, so those who were standing in the lorry were habitually getting smacked by leaves and branches that were sticking inwards towards the roads. The guys had to keep dodging and hold onto each other to maintain their balance and all... =P

The campsite was a pretty decent one, with huts for the teachers to live in, and the usual tents for the cadets to stay. There are even proper toilets and all. Nice ;) I was thinking that the officers would be sleeping in tents too..but we had little huts..though it was still sleeping on the floor, still, I was pleasantly surprised.




The cadets' tents.









See the water? That's the water that we bathe with ;)









And this is a view from the window of my little hut that we stayed in.. :)





Next morning, we set off for our water activities. Abseiling was first up. I've done abseiling more than once before, but this time round, it was going to be down a waterfall! Felt quite excited. We had to take a short ride in the lorry to get to the waterfall, and so I had a small share of being smacked by leaves and twigs along the way too..haha.

Upon reaching the waterfall, we could see that the water was quite rapid. Nice. On top of having to remember how to abseil, we also had to make sure that the gushing waters at the waterfall didn't displace our footing as we made our way down the waterfall..face being splashed by darting water. Was a really fun experience! Spent almost 80% of my time there taking pictures of my CHS cadets, using my ziplocked-bagged-camera..haha..didn't want to go home with a camera full of water you know.








My 2 boys abseiling down together.















This is me :)





As you can tell, my picture is clearer, coz the camera was out of the ziplock bag!!! *faint*
Heh, but thankfully it's more hardy than I think it is, so it's still working now. *phew*

Next up after lunch was white-water rafting. It was so fun!! The instructor just keeps giving us simple instructions and we just paddle according to what he says... "paddle forward!.....paddle backwards!....relax!...hang on!..." I must say that the particular instructor who was in my raft was a very experienced one, coz my raft hardly got stuck in our 2.5 hours journey..while other rafts were perpetually getting stuck at the rocks that were in the rapids. Think we were only stuck like...twice? ;)
But my instructor is also a tricky one..he tried to capsize our raft in the calm waters! Haha..so scheming. While we went into calm waters, he suddenly said "ok everyone go to the left side of the raft!", so my boys all gravitated to the left. And I was wondering "huh?"..coz usually we do that only when we're stuck or something. And from the corner of my eye, I can see him smiling cheekily and pulling the right side of the raft to capsize us! Haha..but we foiled his attempt...hee. BUUUT, since we foiled his attempt to capsize all of us, he decided to just yank ME (out of the whole raft of 5 BOYS and me) into the water from behind. haiz. See what it resulted in??



Scraaaaatches..got them from scraping my shin against the little rocks and pebbles at the bottom of the river when I fell in.... :|






I guess that was fun too..even though I got sabotaged....








So this is us, at the end of the rafting, all smiles :)







OK, I'm tired of typing already. I shall blog about the caving in another entry..it's now time for lunch!!!

Perak trip