after months of consulting the Unit's street directory for ad hoc tasks, a recent assignment convinced me that it was worthwhile investing in my very own Singapore Street Directory. how else would i be able to figure out what really exists in my town?? Despite having some trouble really familiarising myself with my assigned towns, I think i cannot complain about not having been assigned a 'familiar' town... since whatever town i'm assigned i'd probably not be too familiar with it! esp when viewing it from a "bird's-eye view"!!! sis thought it funny that i bought a street directory even though i don't drive... well.... if i familiarize myself with the streets, it would be a plus if i eventually know how to get (drive) around Singapore right? :P but you know... it's really no use sitting in the office and staring at maps if you really haven't been to the areas yourself. I should really learn how to drive soon and drive myself around to familiarize with places i ought to know well!

alas, my mum finally made the discovery minutes ago despite my relatively successful attempts to hide a huge blue-black on the knee the past few days... so i had to sit through a 5 min lecture on how i don't know how to take care of myself.. as well as a mini interrogation session on how the disfiguring evidence of my clumsiness came to be... paranoid dad has even jumped to conclusions that i might suffer from some form of osteoporosis... i knew this was coming and so have been trying to hide the blue-black by wearing pants to work these past few days... but alas two min of negligence sitting in living room in knee-length nightgown have wasted all my efforts :( aaargh.

If you're wondering what movie to catch this weekend/ next week, I highly recommend Little Miss Sunshine! It's hilarious... and very sweet at the same time... :) and i guess the familiar freeways, road signs and motels did bring back fond memories of road trips too.

Tales from Earthsea (Gedo Senki)

I want to watch this!! It's Goro Miyazaki's (Hayao Miyazaki's son) first full length animation film and it has a lovely lovely theme song... very calming... and the beautiful sketches have won me over even though i've yet to watch the film haha :) Think it's going to premiere on Nov 9 in Singapore. In the meantime, you can watch Trailer No. 1 here... or Trailer No. 2 here :P

Singapore has turned mooncake island this past week or so. i'm seeing so many mooncakes around it's starting to get a little repulsive.... goodness knows how much lianrong (and other fillings too i guess) an avg Singaporean ingests during this period... and it's amazing how with some extra packaging and creativity hotels/restaurants can turn these low cost traditional desserts into highly profitable products... alas! i too fell victim to this huge commercial ploy-- HDB staff get say 25% discount on mooncakes from major hotels/restaurants and i got myself a box of mini mooncakes with champagne truffle and ganache from Raffles Hotel... colleagues were raving about it, but when i brought it home and let my family try it... my sis just went... taste like champagne, meh? haha. i did wonder how come some colleagues and other HDB staff bought so many boxes of mooncakes of various flavors.... do they really like eating mooncakes?? how much mooncake can you eat before you get sweeted out? and can ppl usually differentiate the quality?? I'm no food connoisseur, but as long as it's not significantly inferior, i doubt i can tell the difference btwn the quality of mooncakes from various hotels/ restaurants... does a Raffles Hotel mooncake really taste way better than the 80 cents mooncake you get from a heartland bakery? i suppose it boils down to the gift-giving part of buying mooncakes... obviously where you buy your mooncake from matters... hee... and when you spend so much money on your mooncake you would want to pyscho yourself to think that this expensive mooncake tastes better.... haha... i suppose this applies for many other things too? :P

sat in a public housing seminar at HDB on Friday; some variation in work routine at last! it was interesting for me, cos i got to learn a lil more about Universal Design, which includes, but is not limited to creating barrier-free access for the disabled; rather, it strives to make facilities/designs as user-friendly as possible to a broad spectrum of users. I also realized how impt it is for planners to take such things into acct, and applaud the move :) i used to admire how disabled-friendly buses and places in the States are; am happy to see progress here in sg too! i want to refrain from making this sound like a sales speech or something, but now HDB flats will come with wider corridors; bigger switches, bigger toilets, ramps instead of steps at appropriate spots etc... it really doesn't seem like it requires too much trouble to make these provisions and it's heartening that changes are slowly being introduced :)

lastly, on a random note.... we were briefly discussing recent news events in Japanese class today... and someone raised the coup in Thailand. so apparently in Japanese, the katakana for coup is not simply coup; rather, it's based on the original French coup d'etate... i guess it makes sense, since French should be as 'foreign' as English for the Japanese... why should i assume that all Katakana words are based on English? (though most of them are..)

Animal subjects

Haven't been to the zoo in YEARS... so it was really pretty refreshing for me :) realized on Sunday that it's a totally different experience trying to take pictures of wildlife... cos... alas... they wun sit still for you...whereas kids, fidgetive and restless as they are, will still listen sometimes.. but how to convey a photo request to an animal? :P

The Singapore Zoo seems to be big on wildlife conservation, for a good cause :) You get to take pictures with one of these parrots, or bigger ones, if you pay $5 towards some wildlife conservation fund. If not, you still get to take pictures... just not with them :)

yawn... go ahead and snap all you want... but be sure to leave me to my afternoon nap after that!

Friend: So... since whites are called angmohs, is Ang Mo Kio where all the angmohs live??

i was very amused. :P

A touristy week for me :P

friend's visit gave me the chance to visit quite a handful of places I prob wouldn't have visited on my own... and discovered a few decent and not overly-touristy/artificial places to visit... Sg does have a its own share of cool places too after all... :)

Visited the National Orchird Garden in the Botanic Gardens for the first time... it's such a pretty garden... no pictures can justify the experience of walking through all those colorful elegant flowers. Very good photo op too! Didn't really get much time to take pics this time round.. but hope to return in future

hehe... where was this pic taken? (read on to find out..) sadly the CBD buildings are somewhat 'clouded out' by the haze... anyway, my FIRST time taking the cable car brought me to the tranquil summit of Mount Faber. have to admit that it was a lil scary to be 'floating' in non-airconditioned cabin way above everything else... as well as above lotsa tropical trees as we neared Mount Faber... but quite cool! :P

have yet to master the art of working both efficiently and competently... still some kinda trade off for me as i tend to spend more time to ensure that quality doesn't suffer... but sometimes realize that certain things you have to race against time... and things just can't be as good as you want them to be... which leads me to another point-- i find it rather disturbing how in an attempt to get things cleared, we sometimes have to compromise on details... one wonders what happens downstream if things aren't well thought-through enough? how do diff organizations make decisions? top management ppl can't always be right also... yet seems like subordinates usually wun question excessively. just do. how can like that. why like that. will i eventually become like that. or am i already like that...

We, flowers, welcome the IMF/World Bank delegates

finally went out with my new camera on another mini photo outing... with the knowledge that town would be more flowery than usual :P well, wasn't disappointed... but at same time rather amused how intentional everything is! even all the shops are giving delgates special discounts.. why they so special! ha.

Isn't this pretty....

So i discovered rows of sunflowers lining the pathway right outside SMU... not sure it they will be permanent. in any case, they're so pretty; made me wonder why we dun ever plant sunflowers along our roads... too high maintenance i suppose.

and so i discovered this strange phenomenon of sunflower-lined roads...

this was closer to suntec... well... it is rather obvious that they have been intentionally planted.. can still see the original bunches and wiring....

this week or two is prob as happening as Sg can get...? everything has been planned to coincide with IMF/WB meeting rather intentionally, so as to showcase the island to the supposed 16,000 or so delegates arriving... sadly i can only hear about the big names in the papers; no chance to attend any public lectures and such... of course i'm happy that there are many things i can do during the weekend, yet at the same time, feel like everything's but a show. it's cool that passers-by get to appreciate Salvador Dali's sculptures in front of Taka... but me wonders if these transplanted sculptures would soon disappear after the buzz is gone? reminds me of friend's documentary... that we dun bother to slowly cultivate and allow things to slowly take root... we only want instant gratification...?

had three 'arty' events lined up back-to-back last weekend... caught Forbidden City on Sat; watched Tony Takitani at The Picturehouse on Sunday; then attended an Asian Film Symposium screening at the Substation yesterday evening... though i was left with little time to take a good rest; they were totally necessary for balancing out the draining forces at work ha. the former two were nice (though Tony Takitani wasn't very easy to figure out i have to say) but the last one was really really cool . I got to watch a documentary titled Singapore Standard Time produced by my very dear friend! and it was extremely good. Sadly, i don't think it's going to be shown anywhere in sg anytime soon, but the producers say that it might be screened on Arts Central come Jan 07... so watch out for it! ;P if only i can produce something half as good one day! ;P hee still haven't totally tossed out my far-fetched dream of making documentaries one day... but knowing me..... hai.

i still cannot really decide whether it's good to keep feeling 'sore' over having to do things you HAVE to do but dont' like to do; or whether it's better to just accept that there will always be things you dun like to do but HAVE to and be 'resigned' to fate... hmm i guess either way you still end up having to do these things you dun like to do haha. so perhaps BEST way is to think... how can i eventually not need to do things i don't like to do?! aiyah maybe i'm just being irrational and childish and spoilt... i suppose there are always things one has to learn/do, but doesn't enjoy learning/doing... and perhaps slowly tipping the scale towards things you like to learn/do is called active management/exercising control over own life? :P

tmr morning's our dept's 'Active Day' and some of us were made to participate in team spirit- boosting games.... i signed up for something called "Wet and Wild", which involves carrying scoop of water over your head over a certain distance.... then team that gets most water in shortest time or something wins. hmmm... hope i dun really end up getting wet. but wonder how effective these will be at team-building? anyway... i suppose it's a nice break from work. though this week saw me OT-ing 2/3 times, still can't help but feel unproductive even while OT-ing since i'm still somewhat "handicapped" at work... and it's funny how after i revealed to a colleague that work hasn't really won me over at all... he replied saying something like, "who likes work??" :P i think i just need to find something that will motivate me and inspire me at work, if i ever do...

Toa Payoh HDB Hub has been more re4 nao4 than usual this past couple of days, due to open auditions of juedui superstar right in front of NTUC... or some sort of pre-audition thingy... having scores of male popstar wannabes waiting for their 'ticket' to fame isn't a regular sight during lunch breaks :P yeah, so colleagues and i made use of leftover lunchbreak time to cou4 re4 nao4... also spotted Quan Yifeng doing some kinda hosting for Channel U... sad to say, i don't think i've heard anyone real good so far... and colleague's comment that some of the participants wear until 'bu san bu si' made me rather amused ;P i suppose it's one way of drawing attention...

sometimes ppl have strange affinities for things without knowing why... i think in my case i have this strange affinity for Japanese. just like at Berkeley, taking Japanese somehow makes me happy :) and... even at Berkeley i thought the teachers were amazing to produce textbooks with such cute pictures etc.... my sensei at Ikoma has the this amazing flair for illustrating cute stick figures cum scenarios on the blackboard within minutes... and uses them effectively to enhance our understanding of the material... though teaching format etc is different, i feel like the classes are really pretty decent too. actually i think i've been placed into a class too advanced for my level... but hehe to save my money, i'm gonna stick with it... i mean at least i still get quite a fair bit of what she says :P
then today on the MRT, seconds after whipping out my copy of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which i have been reading rather sporadically during my commutes to and from work, this middle-aged guy standing behind me initiated a conversation by asking if i've watched the movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis (i didn't even know it was made into a movie)... conversation gradually veered towards career consulting... and HR.. and turns out that he knows my deputy director from the HR dept (who's kinda like scholars' boss) anyway he appeared very well-informed and experienced and has daughter who works for A-Star... haha. somewhat random but coincidental though.... anyway, dunno.. lesson of the day....ERM, read interesting books on the MRT cos you'll never know what interesting conversations they can spark? haha.

having witnessed how some of my lady colleagues couldn't help shedding (more than) a few tears for boss esp towards end of the day, i cannot help but infer that he must have been a really really good boss. and these past few days of group phototaking... farewell last week... decorating his workstation early this morning... individual phototaking... and some resigned sighs of "things will never be the same again"... i suppose all of them must have built up really good working relationships as well as friendships. i have to admit that even as a newbie, i felt a little teary for 3 seconds in the middle of his mini farewell speech. funny thing is, despite having worked in a 90% female environment for some years, i believe boss is still rather clueless as to how to deal with women when they cry... and so when one colleague was hiding in cubicle (cos crying rather badly) boss was really at a loss and stared blankly at some of us... but still attempted to go in... poke poke a little, joke a little... but eventually decided to disappear :P oh well... i'm actually not so sure i can handle ppl crying either haha.but ya, it's certainly hard when you know you're going to miss someone.

my unit LOVES taking pictures. so today was pink day... we're doing all these crazy things cos old boss is leaving tmr and they want to have some things for him to bring away.... and so boss was made to wear pink too. he grudgingly did, claiming that it was the 2nd time wearing the pink shirt since some funny choir performance when everyone had to wear pink. new boss who thought it was a joke came in normal shirt then got penalized and made to pose with huge pink cushion in picture... hmm. dunno what to think haha. but feel like it's nice that everyone's kinda one big 'family'.... tomorrow's white top and jeans day-- but supposedly hawaiian shirt day for the male bosses. hmmph. wonder how bosses will react. aiyah but last chance for them to play joke on boss already... though i don't really know boss very well, i guess i can tell that my colleagues are sad to see him go... but, since he's gonna be bonded for quite a few more years after he returns from his studies, that certainly wun be the last we'll see of him ;P

haven't had much motivation to blog recently; and am trying very hard to ensure that all my entries don't end up talking about work.... so....
anyways, this one will be vaguely related to work lah. i was just thinking how much time i'll want to devote to work eventually. right now, i still have the luxury of going home around 645pm on average, but this certainly isn't the case for bosses... and in my case (ie. ppl i'm under) deputy director of my section works late into the night everyday (i heard) and comes back on weekends too to work... while her work dedication is certainly admirable, it makes me wonder how much i'm willing to give up for work. as it is now, i dun feel like i have much time to myself after work... and this is just the beginning! oh well, perhaps it also really depends on how one manages his/her time... how efficient one is at work... how perfectionist you want to be and many many other factors. in any case, i suppose i can't be too wrong to conclude that there's really a price to pay to be at the top?