I was black once, and I've just turned white

Before I erased the old template from the blogger settings, took one screen shot of it for the last time. I'm glad that so far I've gotten all positive comments for my new skin, all of you are my friends! =)

Well, it's either that or those who dislike it are keeping their mouths shut. In any case, it'll do me (and us) good to keep things that way as I have no intention of reviving the old skin. (Unless something goes wrong to my blog and I lost the new code, choy!) As some had pointed out, I've removed the picture of the "Yurong Street" (in Sydney) from the top of my blog as I've decided that it takes too long to load for new visitors and I'm also quite tired of it after staring at the same pic for a year. Maybe will put up something else if I can find something good. Meanwhile, I'll just try to keep things simple and neat. 

Tree Top Trail Adventure

Some of you may have heard of a new hiking route in Macritchie that involves a 250m suspension bridge across the canopy of trees. Well, even my Mum had actually read about it in the newspaper, so if you are one of those with low SA (situational awareness), you can find out more about it here.

On Good Friday, me and gang were adventurous enough to venture onto it and carried out our hike successfully. It involves a 4.5km hike from Macritchie to the suspension bridge, and after crossing it you can either loop back to the start point or proceeds to somewhere in Bukit Timah Reserve. We chose the latter, with the intention of going for prata at those shops across Beauty World after our hike. That was what kept us, and our legs walking the whole morning. =)


The babes taking a shot at the start point (Macritchie Reservoir) while waiting for Nic and her beau.  

Danping (my favourite roomie) with her fantastic way of twirling up her hair using my maroon pen. =) 

Me and Shumin waiting to get onto the suspension bridge and you can actually see the long queue of people behind us. We were in the middle of a crowd of people right from the start, and I almost thought they were giving out Hello Kitty at the start of the Tree Top Walk or something, but nothing of that sort happened.

Well, it's either Singaporeans are getting healthier, or there's really nothing much we can do here on a holiday. Boring boring.. It's either catching a movie, shopping, KTV and hanging out somewhere or occasionally you can discover new places like this one. Lots of people skip town on a long weekend like this, at least there's something new somewhere else. 

As there were really lots of people going for the Tree Top trail on a public holiday, I couldn't really stop to take nice photos. Only could get a few shots like this one, during the 250m walk across the bridge. (There was an auntie behind screaming for her life when the bridge was actually quite stable, disturbing my peaceful walk.) 

Down and up many flights of stairs like this.. as we walked and walked and walked.  

We actually ended up at Bukit Timah Hill after the Tree Top Trail. Can't believe that we covered around 11km during the 3 hours trek. Haven't walked like this for so long, and I don't even jog for such a long distance.. Was really quite tired at the end of it. Those were the days when we often hike from Macritchie to Bukit Timah (this is my fifth time), we kept reminiscening about those times during our walk, and realised that we are all getting quite unfit now as age catches up and exercise loses us!  

Blog makeover

If you can't see what's the makeover about, there's 2 possiblities:

1. You're blind (or, colour-blind)
2. This is the first time you're at my blog.

Anyway, I've finally decided to change the template of my blog, and today is the day when I'm boh liao (note: nothing better to do) enough to do it. It should be pretty obvious that the colour scheme is reversed now, hopefully black words on white background will be better for friends who are getting old and with their eyesight failing, ha! =P I also hope that I won't be getting anymore script problems, esp with the long long archives, now that the HTML is straightened out. Comments and blog titles for individual blogs are finally working too. Hurray!

I'm too Sexy for my blog

Nono.. I'm not trying to copy Xiaxue whose popularity had really shot up recently, being the ambassador for Localbrand. I'm just looking like a dead fish after a typical day's work! Hahaha.. this must be my ugliest photo posted to date. =P 

Anyway, I must admit I'm inspired by Mr Brown's "I'm too sexy for my blog" campaign, it's really hilarious!! Take a look at all those shots, man!

A Day In the Life Of Poor Me

Actually the previous post was written just now (23rd March) but saved as a draft on Tuesday evening (if you checked the timestamp) while I was surfing the net, chatting with Antz and Peiling, and more importantly in the midst of rushing my lesson plans and PowerPoint slides for observation. I had decided that I couldn't afford to get down and blog properly, so typed a few lines then saved it. Ahh..that's the good thing about the 'Save as Draft' function..

What am I talking about? Just feel like blogging more tonight, as having been through 2 observations this week, I'm in the holiday mood!! Extended long weekend! Yeah, decided not to do anything really contributing to work tonight.

Just realised that a typical day for me (on a weekday) is something like this:

7am: Arrive in school, "stone", arrange table for a while, make hot drinks at pantry
7.20am: Go to hall for morning assembly
7.35am: Stone, stone, stone somemore (before I realised with a snap that my lesson plans needs to be done *quickly proceeds to lab*)
8am: Frantic editing of lesson plans, editing of PowerPoint (till eyes are crossed)
1020-1pm: Teaching time (with maybe a break in between?)
1pm: Sit down, relieved, stomach growling
2pm: Lunchtime over/ Marking time starts ('Zzz' Monster may hit anytime now)
3pm: Brainstorm for next day's or next next day's lessons!
4pm/5pm: Type, type, type lesson plans till I'm too tired to move my fingers

-Home Sweet Home-
8pm: Nap time over/ Powerpoint time again!
9pm-12midnight: Powerpoint or worksheets making/ surfing net for relevant stuff (most toiling part of the day)
1am: Print out lesson plans (if I'm lucky)/ Get ready to sleep
5.45am: Waking up and wondering if my head had really touched the pillow at all

And it goes all over again..

Yeah, it's boring reading about the life of a bore. I'm just a lesson planner and PowerPoint generator most of the times nowadays. What's best is the fact that I know I'm not going to do all these when the real teaching life begins.. *grump*

Labeled as a "Bond-breaker"?

Peiling was quite excited and showed me an interesting article in The New Paper about an 'automatic' mahjong table that can shuffle and stack tiles for players, wooow!! We even set up a mahjong session for this weekend, going to meet up with the mahjong king and queen of my class soon! Hahaha..

What was even more exciting, I surfed around the links and came across another article in yesterday's online version of The New Paper that can be found here with these headlines:

Bond-breaker: Can i pay $200 a month for 40 years?
O-level holder fails trainee teacher exam twice. Her 4-year bond of $77,000 is deemed broken

It's quite a morbid set of news to read in the midst of practicum (don't blame me if you already clicked on the link) and I was quite dejected yesterday when reading it, just a day before my supervisor was coming to observe my lesson.

Recently, there's quite a few such 'bond-breakers' who wrote in to newspapers and MOE also gave an response earlier. Quotations below:

MOE: Those who fail get more chances to pass

TRAINEE teachers who do not pass the practice teaching module are counselled on the areas for improvement, says MOE.

They are then given another opportunity to repeat the module at a different school with different supervisors.

Those who fail this repeat attempt are refused re-admission by NIE.

What's debatable is the kind of chances given to people who are not cut out to be a teacher. Counselling? Opportunity? Is it really enough to make pple possess qualities like patience, management skills, correct attitude?? It's kind of strange that the selection procedure for teachers only involves one interview, and the panel can decide whether you can/ cannot teach just based on that ONE interview. And if they had make the wrong choice? Sorry, you pay for their mistakes.

Paying back this kind of loan for 40 years is simply a burden for someone who is out of job, and personally I feel that it's really unfair.

Phew, hopefully I don't sound like I'm going to fail practicum. In fact, I've just got over and done with half of my observations (4 by CTs and 1 by supervisor).. 5 more to go! Yeah.. =P

A word or two from me, once again

Realised that nowadays most of my blogs are full of pictures, with very few words other than the captions. I guess after getting a camera, I'm quite used to taking photos everywhere I go and these photos become an important source of inspiration for blogging. Well, of course the ease of using 'Hello' is another culprit for making my face appearing all over the place. =P

Decided to drop in a paragraph or two with just words and no photos for a change. Sometimes, find it hard to express myself in words anymore, even if I write in Chinese. People experiences situations of being tongue-tied during conversations and that's the same feeling I got whenever I want to write about something. Hmm.. it's like mind block when the words just don't flow, and whatever I'm writing, it doesn't accurately expresses my thoughts.

Well, anyway, haven't update much about Practicum. I must say that I'm one of those few lucky ones who only have minimum no. of 20 periods per week and I haven't been activated for any relief teaching yet. So far so good.. what else can I say? I think if there's anymore complaints from me, people will want to hantum me when I'm not looking. It's relaxing, yet stressful.. cos you know the quality of work just have to be better since you have so much time on hand. Well well well.. Hopefully the next 6 weeks will pass just as easily. I'm counting down. =)

Diving.. Tioman

The March holidays are coming to an end, unfortunately. And the most unfortunate thing of all is that I've spent most of it in enrichment lessons and its exams. The module had just ended today, phew!

Well, other than having lessons, I've managed to spend some time with the sun, the sand and the sea, once again!! Hahaha, sneaked off to Tioman last weekend, right after my work ended.. for a long awaited dive trip. =)

To be frank, I'm a person who's more holiday-minded than career-minded, holidays are a motivation for my career!!! Hahaha..even though the March holidays are hardly over, I'm planning for my June break just to motivate myself. Hmm, shall I plan for another dive trip? Or go Shanghai and then Taipei with my friends?

Setting off with the dark eye rings that I had been wearing since Practicum started.. =P 

Me and the dive gang (plus NSK)

My dive kakis, plus Sae Kiat the cameraman for this shot...  

The beaming us

Yeah, we managed to get away during Practicum! But it's back to reality very soon.. sighz..  

Finding Nemo?

Saw lots of Nemo and its cousins, aunties, uncles, brothers, sister, grand-relatives.. you get the idea, it's in abundance in the sea. =) 

Both Teck Wee and Danping brought their cameras into the sea, equipped with underwater-casing. I must say that the greatest difference between photos taken by them is that Danping's photos are mostly those of her and her dive buddy (Shumin) posing in different awkward positions; whereas, Teck Wee's photos are those of the corals, turtles, stingrays that we saw. Unfortunately, I was diving with him, so didn't get to have my shots taken when I was diving.

But as you can see, I still manage to post up lots of human pictures in my blog..typical of a girl yah? Hahahaha..

The Wedding of the Century

Finally, the wedding of Casey and Zhirong had arrived and taken place more than 2 weeks ago. We had a lot of fun playing a role in it, even though all of us were as tired as the couple at the end of the day (I'd even developed some kind of post-wedding syndrome). I had actually wanted to post up the photos earlier, but didn't have time to pick out the better photos till now.

These are only some of the shots taken out of the many hundreds, but of course most of photos are those of the newly-weds, and not me. I must say that they looked exceptionally good and glowing on the day of their wedding, maybe this is why people always say that girls are the most beautiful on the day they get married.


Me with the bride before she finally got married off! 

Smiling Bridemaids in White @ 7am

In the morning, all the bridemaids in white. We're all ready, awaiting for the groom's arrival, and I can tell you he had an 'enjoyable' time completing tasks we planned for him. =P  

Smiling Bridemaids with Groom Behind @ 12pm

Another shot when we reached the couple's nest in Sembawang (with the groom sneaking into the photo from behind). 

Reception Table @ 6pm.. tired

By the time we get to the hotel for the wedding dinner in the evening, we're already so tired and the smiles are all pasted on our face.. 

Anyway, that was the first wedding of our group, so we were really even more excited about the whole event than the newly-weds! Wishing them a very blissful marriage, and since they're enjoying their honey-moon at Gold Coast at the moment.. have a very happy trip!

Zen Micro - Sporty Stud

The newest gadget to add to my collection! Light blue Zen Micro from Creative..  

Rushed off from school rather early today to get the mp3 player that had been on my wish list for months. And I must say that the whole place was quite crowded even though it was 3pm on a Thursday afternoon. On my way up, there's already strings of people leaving with their buys. Doesn't anyone has to work? Or, are they all teachers? Wondering what it'll be like during weekends, I can imagine people jostling around and elbowing others for the super good bargains. =P

Anyway, was intending to get the 4GB Zen Micro that was luanched exclusively for this IT fair, but was surprised to know that it'll only be available on Sat, at a very cheap price of $299! Go get it! Can't help but suspect that its a sales gimmick to get pple to buy the 5GB version at a higher price since they've already went all the way to Suntec. Anyway, I was one of those who couldn't wait and fall for the gimmick, getting the original 5GB player. It's light blue!! (pink was sold out)

Be Nocturnal, it's Normal

These headlines caught my attention when I was browsing through the STI:

Sleepless in Singapore

54% of Singaporeans turn in only after midnight, making the country seventh in the top 10 night owls' list

Over a third (37 per cent) of the 500 polled rise between 6am and 7am. Another 31 per cent get up between 7am and 8am.

Hardly surprising then, that six out of 10 Singaporeans don't get the recommended eight hours of shut-eye.

The survey also found that globally, people in their 20s tend to be owls.

Okay, it comforts me in knowing that I'm normal, as pple my age are owls just like myself. Not that I'm really privileged to be norturnal nowadays. Teaching in the morning session, I try hard to finish everything and jump into bed by 1am; I'm also part of the unlucky one third who rises even before 6am. No wonder I keep feeling the lack of sleep recently.. my usual morning routine includes stoning at my table before and after the morning assembly.

So wearing dark eye rings is a fashion statement, cool!!

A Birthday Wish Came True with Friends' Fossil

Thanks to my friends who gave me this watch as birthday present. (Heehee, though I was the one who hinted them months ago.) How I just love the motion dial with animation of growing flowers!! =)

Also thanks to Aileen who gave me a cute little blackboard that's quite posh for a blackboard, although it reminded me painfully of my job. Hahaha..

I had Fish & Co with Huiyi and Peiling after we went to school to hand in our reports yesterday, then we had another shopping spree at Dbl Index! Wonderful wonderful weekend.. (minus the part about rushing reports) =)

Happy 24th Birthday!! (to myself..) =)