*604 - i love fridays

It's drizzling and the worms are surfacing for air (omg omg omg omg omg) but it's kind of okay, because the weekend is here! :) Technically, my weekend begins on Thursday night (which included too much eggplant, big comfy couches, and great girly talk), the thought of which cheers me up considerably.

Revisiting the past again: photos from when we lived in San Francisco.

Fat Evelyn going down the slide


Peach-picking
(something I always planned to do in Ithaca but never got around to)


Fat Evelyn biting into a peach
& everyone else making the 'open your mouth' face


Retro mom


My favourite sis <3


Hand's up!!


Contrary to what the photos suggest, I think I was one of those annoying babies who cried a lot, and very loudly. I was fat and cute, though, in my absolutely biased opinion. ;)

*603 - then and now

My heart breaks a little bit every time I think about the things we used to do here, and there. My here and your there. My there and your here.

(This means that my heart is now in little bitty pieces everywhere.)

The cold and dreary (and wildly life-threatening) hike during winter down to VP used to fill my tummy with warm bubbles of bliss. Now it's just a cold and dreary hike down to VP.

The love-shaped maple-drizzled pancakes, the honey chrysanthemum chicken, the accidental bah kwa (bacon + brown sugar + syrup + oven baked), the heart shaped stobeli muffins. Now the best I can muster is pasta with ready-made sauce from a bottle.

The motion-sickness from the 1 hour bus ride to meet you after work at Bugis made worse by smelly boys who always choose to sit next to me and fall asleep violently on my shoulder. Now I'm 41209098124 hours of travelling and $2000 and half a world away from you, and I would give anything to be back on that smelly bus.

4213, and 136B. Springside, and Paya Lebar. Now Ithaca, and Singapore.

I'm sad. Sometimes I hug Toby real tight and cry till my pillow gets soggy and wish really hard that I were home (but it's never worked). I hate being here and I just want to be where you are.

*602 - stuck in a rut

I've been busy. Being thoroughly homesick and lovesick. To be honest, I'm hating the fact that I'm back again, and you wouldn't think so because I'm already a sophomore and I've been through a year of this, but so many things have changed now. And that's depressing.

But go me, everything will be ok in time, right right right? Leave it in God's hands.

Well, at least I'm mature enough to recognise that I'm being a kid about this. And at least I've Inshi, who's one of the few who actually understands. And at least I've Nuf who makes me feel better every single time.

-

Hongkong (again) was great. I miss these kids - wish we were back in Cornell, happy and carefree, back then in semester 1!











3 hours of sleep and bawling at the airport;
Strangers helping me with my luggage;
Excellent dim sum with Katie, Nick, Alison;
Extreme, unexplainable onset of fatigue upon all of us;
Shopping with 1 hour queues;
Health food dinner with Dickson & gf;
More shopping in dizzying Mongkok;
Sleeping briefly before catching the flight to New York the next morning.

And from the last time:



Crazy times. I actually think Katie's the funniest.

*601 - school starts ...

... today. In 2 hours. I'm not ready, I'm never ready for school. I do NOT enjoy studying.

Plus, I'm not quite done with my jetlag, and I'm still sick, and today's a long day. 10.10 am to 6.20 pm without a break for lunch. Running from Statler to Schwartz to Statler to Schwartz. But it's entirely my own fault for scheduling 2 dance classes in the middle of school.

Glum. I've been zombie-ing around the past few days, because I don't know what to do without you.

*600 - back in ithaca!

The best way to get over jet lag is NOT to:

Go partying, take too too many jello shots, get happily and clumsily tipsy, running away from the friend puking into his trashcan, oops I think my tenses just changed, discover a huge amount of photos of drunk people you don't even know in your own camera, sget locked out of your house ad wake up your housemate to open the door for you, and finally settle down to spill scalding beef stew soup across your desk and self (which happens to be your first proper meal in a few days).

The irony was that minutes before, I was sitting at Hei's place and sympathising with her cos of the extremely lo0ud music that was coming from the house next door that was vibrating Hei's house.

I'm not actually drunk, I'm not even pink! Just indifferent of typos for once, because they don't matter, right? :D

Welcome back to campus life.

11 degrees tonight. I don't recall it being so cold during summer/fall.

Not looking forward to school because everything without you is not the same.

*599 - love story

With mummy's help, I dug out a couple of old photo albums and found the cutest pictures of the parents ever! They were sweet.

They started dating in school when they were 19 ...



Gotta love their matchy matchy spectacles!
They're even younger than I am now :D



Then daddy went to the UK for 4 years to study
No money to fly back, no telephone, certainly no skype
So he mailed mummy photographs like these
With little love notes written in cursive on the backs
Which began with "Dear, ..." and ended with "Love, Mun"



When daddy finally came back after 4 years of being apart,
They got married at long last :)



And it's been a happy story ever since!

If they could do it, why not us? :)
2 years till I'm back for good.
We'll be okay :)

*598 - the chan farmers

It's harvesting season over here. We've been eating kangkong, kailan, ginger, and long beans that mummy grows. And of course, fresh basil and rosemary whenever we need it. Yum.

The Chan farmers hard at work!

Mummy with her huge straw hat & an armful of kangkong


Tackling the kangkong


Cute Ipa having fun with the long beans


Love,
Little Farmer Chan

*597 - back from batam!

I'm back! Batam is kind of unimpressive, but with impressive company, it was the best vacation ever :)

Swimming everyday, learning table tennis, claustrophobic canoeing, cycling, motorized skate scootering, buffets, silly instant noodle dinner with tim tams, seafood at the kelong, bottled water and no ice, lots of olympics, steaming hot showers and drawing on mirrors, constipation, interpretive pillow dances, interpretive pool dances,

... and a lot of quality time :)

-

Going to miss Sam, Weicheng, Mel, Aster, Yihui, and Adeline (!) at Jitterbugs! Managed to dance a little over the 3 months here. Looking forward to more dancing in Cornell ... and Beginner Figure Skating, haha!! I still have the matchy matchy scar that Joel & I both got from trying to do crossovers back in Sem 1. Wow.

Anyway. Jitterbugs!







I'll be back!! ;)

-

I'm feeling rather domesticated, after spending a few exciting hours pouring over queen-sized bedsheets, silver flatware, mirrors, lighting, etc on target.com, in preparation for moving into the apartment. Excellent. Jon and his rice cooker - big enough to feed 8! - are already awaiting the rest of us.

Part of me is actually excited to go back to Cornell, but part of me is dying at the thought.

-

Our atas lunch ;) We were surrounded by ang moh tai tais with cute babies! Aww.

The sticky date pudding I've been dreaming about


Dum dum dum dum, snap snap - guess the song!
(Addam's family. Heh.)


Bought a silver love balloon on a whim.
It makes a decent mirror!


The balloon, in its full glory.
Evelyn & xY, also in their fully glory.


Nice catching up with you, xY :) We've come a long way, haven't we, from those lying-on-the-green-furry-mat-and-gossiping-while-stretching-occasionally days? <3

-

Anyone in Ithaca should visit the Farmer's Market - I've been there once in winter and once in spring, and both experiences were wildly different, but wildly Ithacan! Yummy eats, homemade wine and cider, pretty plants and herbs, quaint handicrafts and art, rollicking live music, alcapas and squash in winter, cinnamon buns and sorbets in spring. It's like a little festival every time. Love it!

Flowers in a bottle


Reminds me of ... ear fur.


Reminder to self: buy a pot or two of fresh herbs :)


Bleeding hearts.
How in the world did they decide to look like this?? Heart-shaped flowers?? Amazing!
God, you're way too cool :)


"Elephant ears" - we bought this!


Chocolate sorbet - we bought this too!


3D wood art. Very nifty. - we didn't buy this!


Aubergine undies, anyone?


Cute butt!


Cute dancing kid!


Cute guitarist!


Cute monkey!


... cute me?


We also bought maple syrup to go with our breakfast pancakes :)
We're the pancake experts :)
Look how pretty they are!

*596 - family

Three of us, in Joel's lil red car, doing groceries, without the parents. It's weird how we were kiddos just a while back, and now we're all grown up, doing grown up things like buying cars, choosing prawns, selecting alcohol ... of course, I'm still the baby of the family - Joel gave me $2.40 to buy yam puffs, heh ;)

So that was National Day for us: a massive BBQ with what initially seemed like too much food, punctuated with extremely passionate sing along sessions with the NDP broadcast on TV (WE ARE SINGAPORE, SINGAPOREAAANS!!), followed by the customary wine and desserts on the roof once the rain stopped.

This was my atas contribution for the night ...


... Rose flavoured jelly!
Impulsive experiment gone right (:
Pretty and yummy!


Bernz frenziedly doing his thang


Daddy to the rescue with the electric fan.
(Just a few seconds, and the flames erupted!)


The jellies, when inverted, look like a host of obscene objects


After which, perhaps slightly tipsy, Elisa, Bern, Kenneth, and I decided to play Sardines, the funnier version of Hide & Seek:
- 1 hider
- Everyone else is a seeker
- If you find the hider, you have to hide with him (hence Sardines)
- Last one out loses!

If you haven't played Sardines before, you should, because it's most ridiculous squeezing with a bunch of people in the dark in tiny crevices, trying to suppress your giggles, waiting for more and more people to squeeze in (usually sweatily) with you. And also the sinking feeling you get when you're frantically bursting into rooms and looking behind curtains and THEN the scampering stops and there is suddenly absolute silence, and ... you know you're the loser.

Four fully grown & oversized kids, ages ranging from 20 to 27, sprinting and screaming up and down the 4 levels. Very hilarious, and also a very good aerobic workout.

Funniest incident:
We couldn't find Bernz for the longest time and were just about to conclude that he cheated and hid in Joel's locked room. Then I found him sitting uncomfortably in my little closet, feet upon my underwear and face in my dresses, sweating rivers into my clothes. Whereupon he embarrassedly struggled out because he realised that noone could squash inside the closet with him without extreme awkwardness and death from insufficient oxygen.

-

When you leave, you come back to realise that your family's always your family, and your family always loves you, and your family always has time for you. Friends can be transient, but not family (: There's never a lonely moment when I'm back home because home is full of love, and I've only just learnt to appreciate that over the past year.

Home is where the best food is, where mummy looks after you if you feel sick, where you don't have to do laundry or groceries or vacuuming, where you don't ever have to put up any pretences, where you can walk around the entire day dressed in rags, with unconcealed zits and knotty hair, sit most vulgarly with your leg up at the table, and noone really gives a damn.

Home is where you find troo bloo love!

And this is family:

It used to be just 3 kids, the parents, and the granny.
We've grown (: Big family now!


Loopy kids, adults unaware.


The Ancient Family Photo, part 2.


The Ancient Family Photo, part 1.
Taken last year, hilariously at the same restaurant before I left.


-

I miss you and I wish I could call to chat about anything and everything inconsequential, like how google's logo is currently a rhythmic gymnast pig and how I've run out of books to read and how I'm excited about going to NYC to dance and how Toby isn't helicopter-eared anymore, but it's past 2 am and you need to wake up early for work and besides, it's bad manners to wake people up at night.

So maybe I'll just go to sleep instead.

Can't wait for tomorrow, because every day is a happi day!

*595 - Bliips

A little belated: my darling Bliips from last semester. ARCH 459 final project :)



The Bliips are a curious species that feed on music and live in little glass boxes.
If you open each box, you will find that each cluster sings a different song.

The Bliips dance to their own music.
They pulse according to the beat and sway with the melody.
Their colors and radiance change to reflect the mood of the music.
When the music stops, they fade and wilt.

I still can't believe that I made this! The product of days of panic, tears, hanging laptop, and all-nighters in the Rand computer lab - designing the bliips, choreographing the bliip dance, going blind with measuring out milliseconds and coordinating with the pulsing / swaying / glow / colour of the bliips, tweaking the damn camera which refused to follow its path, and finally helplessly watching my images render at the speed of a sleepy sloth when there were only a few hours to daylight and the project was due the next afternoon and knowing that the rendering takes, what, 5 painful hours.

And running back shivering to catch a few winks before groggily & headache-ily trudging off for my Food Science final paper, and running back to make the final tweaks before presenting in class and secretly burning the final CD for submission during everyone else's presentations.

All the time, with Nuf watching on and beaming at the Bliips when they were being cute and quietly helping me whenever I was about to shrivel up and die :) Thank you Nuf ...


Watch them Bliips dance, yo:

*594 - zzz

Snore snore. Sleep talking again: "..the dreams have a lot of ways.." Maybe there are deep hidden truths in your jumbled words. You're sleeping the wrong way on my bed and I can't bear to wake you up.