I went to Marsiling around three times, mainly to help to babysit Luckie and my elder brother took good care of me. He tried to pay for my meals. My sister-in-law also helped me to buy lunch. Eventually, I felt I had not contributed much.
During the day of the bike shoot with Boon Hui, she bought me drinks from Starbucks and helped me to press some of my acupuncture points to relief some pain from my shoulder injuries. She refused to split the cab fare and then insisted in giving a treat to her friend who was loaning us his bike. After the shoot, she suggested me to take a cab home and offered to pay for me.
My mum helped me to apply medication oil every night. Even though she was clueless about pressing the acupuncture points, it more or less would have helped in making improvement.
My ball-bearings for my trolley from Ebay arrived. I brought it down to Bike Culture and my elder brother and Fattie helped me to replace the old ones.
Gilbert brought me to the Fitness First gym at 100AM. As he was a busy person, it was not easy for him to fork out time to catch up with me.
I had a photoshoot with Cheryl Chua. She took the initiative to do a video discussion with me. As the shoot was a little revealing, I was glad of the trust she had placed on me.
During the shoot with Sharon Ng, she bought some delicious bread from ToastBox for me. She was also very patient with me to try out the yoga moves.
Spread the Love – April 2017
While I was struck with extreme bad luck during the beginning of the year due to a few models who had wasted my time, Boon Hui helped me when I was in need of someone to test playing with my new white backdrop. We had a “last minute” shoot and it helped me to test the limitation of my equipment to prepare me for an important shoot with Joy.
After the shoot with Joy, she gave me a good treat. I felt guilty for I was not someone who would appreciate good food and dining at an expensive restaurant was really a waste of money.
There was a volleyball game in NUS new town. Jingjie gave me and others a lift over at Harbourfront Centre after our lunch at MacDonald’s. After that, we went to Tampines and he was the driver who also sent me home. Anyway, Jingjie was the coordinator for the game and it was very kind of him to help to arrange with us even though he was very busy with work.
My younger brother arranged for a Mother’s Day dinner. He managed to get discount through an application and we got to enjoy expensive Indonesian food at low price at the new Tanjong Pagar Centre.
I went over to Marsiling twice to help to take care of Luckie who had his third slip disc problem. During the first stay, my elder brother helped me to fix the tablet he had passed to me much earlier – the WiFi was down after doing windows update. During the second trip, he tried to fix my trolley’s wheels but realised the ball-bearings were spoiled. Then, he found out the model number so that I could get new pieces online.
Spread the Love – March 2017
I got a dinner date with Guoxin and appreciated that he was one of my old good friends who would contact me to meet up once in a while. He also showed excess concern about my progress in photography.
I forgot to book a timeslot for my haircut and my hairdresser kindly slotted me in. Although it was just for a one-day reservist that nobody would bother about my hair, I still wanted to maintain a good image.
During the one-day reservist, Terry gave me a lift from Yishun MRT to Chongpang camp and then to Punggol MRT after that. He had finally bought his car since talking about it during the first time we had reservist together
Spread the Love – February 2017
My volunteers gang had a gathering during February thanks to Huiting’s recommendation of a vegetarian restaurant at Bugis.
Mingfa invited the volleyball gang down to Huayi Secondary for volleyball but only Bernard and I were available. Bernard arranged to meet me at Jurong East MRT to go down together. After that, he accompanied me for lunch.
As my beauty dish’s honeycomb grid was a little bended, I decided to add some sponge to the bag in case I accidentally got it knocked again. My mum helped me to cut and stick some sponge together.
The girl from hell
I was busy with my life as usual but I was also curious about iLight Marina 2017 since I had visited the past two years’. As lazy as I could get, I didn’t really try asking around. Since social media would draw reactions from weird people, I couldn’t be direct about asking who wanted to go with me. So, I posted a status asking who hadn’t visited it to observe the responses. I did receive quite a number of reactions.
I could see that one of the girls was obviously interested. She was just a net friend whom I had not met before but she was quite interested in modelling. She had quite ordinary looks and was rather flat chested, but I was sure my HMUA friends could do a good makeover for her. Obviously, she wasn’t that bad since she was petite and would be easier to be captured. Looks aside, she had mentioned about doing sexy shoot and that was a bait, although she did show me a few examples and I thought she was rather immature. She also suggested to shoot in a hotel room and I thought she was rich.
I wasn’t desperate for a girlfriend and I knew she wasn’t my type simply by judging through the online interaction – it wasn’t about looks but her weird character. Anyway, I would usually try to maximise the action I do, such as going out with her. Firstly, I hated going out alone feeling like a loner and secondly, I wanted to know more about her simply for photography purpose.
Of course, I regretted my decision.
Princess-wannabe
During the discussion to visit the art festival, she had already instructed me to carry her laptop for her. She was upfront and serious about it, without showing any shyness, like as if every girl deserved the good treatment. I wasn’t very used to it since most of my female friends were independent and would not want to take advantage of their male friends. Usually, I would be the gentleman to insist to help them (regardless of their looks) carry their stuffs and they would be rejecting me genuinely.
Lack of surviving skill and not funny humour
Since it was a raining day and I remembered SIM would be cold as the lecture rooms were all air-conditioned, I showed her some concern by asking if she had brought along a jacket or cardigan. She said no and she wasn’t afraid of cold. After we met up, she did admit she was a little cold. It wasn’t her first day in school and she should have known. Besides, I didn’t find her joke/lie funny, but she thought it was. Was it fun to make me mistake that she was very strong?
Lack of update, no sense of urgency
We didn’t set a time since I didn’t know if her class would end earlier or later. However, she didn’t update me right after her class ended. Instead, she only texted me when she was at the bus-stop. A normal person would have contacted me right after she was ready and not acted as if we had already decided on the exact time and location to meet.
“Sotong”
She had stayed in Singapore for about 10 years and I was sure she could do simple research about travelling around. I gave her the easiest method to travel down from her school – direct bus – 75. I also listed out the landmarks the bus would be passing by to assure her that I knew the way. Besides, she used to stay near my place and I didn’t expect her to know nothing about the transportation. At the bus-stop, she couldn’t find the bus number. I told her it was operated by SMRT and double confirmed the other bus numbers with her to make sure she was at the correct bus-stop. It took quite some time for her to figure out I didn’t made a mistake. If you had been waiting for buses in a particular bus-stop (less than 10 bus numbers) for many months, you would probably have observed most of the numbers. It was beyond ways to describe someone like her. Of course, I wouldn’t take this flaw into consideration for friendship.
Her hunger
My plan was to hop onto the same bus she was taking even though I had other better buses (more direct) to the venue. It was about helping her since she didn’t even know where to alight even though I had told her to alight at the final stop. Anyway, she told me she was having gastric problem. After attending the school for long and knowing the routine, she should have better prepared herself! If she knew that her class would end late (in fact, 7pm seemed fine), she should have prepared some snacks. Besides, there were food stalls in SIM and she could grab a quick bite, not as if she was late since we didn’t confirm the time to meet.
Her instruction
After getting into the bus, she instructed me to get food and drinks for her even though I had told her the place was very near my house, which meant that we would be having dinner very soon after I boarded it. The bus journey to reach my place could be between 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the traffic, and it wasn’t a long time to do shopping for her. I grabbed some snacks from my house. Then she asked me for milk and she named 7-11. It was crazy to take any cold drink when someone was having gastric pain and thus I decided it was better to get packet Milo from NTUC, which was also much more economic as well. She then suggested buying hot Milo and I thought it was a bad idea for I could foresee her spilling it inside the bus. So, I walked very fast down to the NTUC but realised they hadn’t replenished their stock. I got some chocolate milk instead and ran home to pick up my bag and kept the extra packets, before running to the bus-stop.
The elixir
After having a few slips of the chocolate milk I passed to her, she claimed that she had felt very comfortable. It was simply weird to me because even medicine wouldn’t have such immediate healing effect. Nevertheless, if she thought she felt good, that was good.
Buff up
One of the few topics she ranked up was that I should have buffed myself up. I didn’t go to the gym and many girls already thought I was fit. I thought it was weird for a girl to ask a friend to buff up just because he had fetish for guys with big muscle; I wasn’t even her boyfriend. On the contrast, she was underweight and didn’t look very fit.
Language
At first, I thought she was from Malaysia and thus most of them prefered to converse in Mandarin, which I was more comfortable with. I tried to talk to her in Mandarin but she kept it in English. Then, I realised she was actually a Canadian. Even though it seemed to me that her English language wasn’t good as well, she had tried to correct me.
Self conscious
She asked me to compare her real person with her photographs. For people who had been through waves and tides, we knew it was trap. It was a difficult task for me since I hated lying but luckily, she resembled her photographs in her styling – long hair hiding much of the sides of her face. Of course, there was blurring effect by the phone app automatically or manually and thus she looked much paler with not-so-good complexion in real person. I didn’t tell her that her nose looked bigger in her photographs.
Lectured on joke
Somehow, the conversation led to the topic of joking. She was in a serious tone, telling me not to joke using physical looks. She was right to an extent but her tone was really bad like as if she was lecturing her student – not that I had offended her. I tried to reason with her that if a friend make obvious jokes, it was very okay. For instance, if a girl was very pretty and her friend (yes, FRIEND) told her she was ugly, obviously it was just a joke. Another more obvious example I gave was that if her hair was long and her friend called it short, it was obvious a joke as well. Eventually, she was insistence and didn’t buy my explanation. It wasn’t as if people would joke about their friend’s disfigured face or any physical inability. To me, all my friends trusted that I meant well to them and I needed not hang out with anyone who had any slight doubt in me. She was obviously not an easygoing girl because she set her own rules and everyone had to follow her instructions.
Extreme thick
Apart from some rough skin, it was “thick”. As we entered the shopping mall, she told me she didn’t have cash when the ATM machine was around five metres right in front of us. She didn’t bother to withdraw money. She borrowed money from me instead and the only good thing was that she didn’t demand to dine at a restaurant. She was quick enough to ask to share table with a couple in the foodcourt and then got the money from me before she left to get her own food.
Find her church friend
She regretted going to the foodcourt because she saw many of her ex churchmates who probably came over from Suntec City. she had stopped joining them and she didn’t like many of them for they didn’t like her. Then she made one abrupt and stupid demand (yes, she was really serious about it) for me to look for one of them in green bottom. I didn’t see the need to do it since she was not going over to say hi to that girl even if we could find her again. Logically, the foodcourt wasn’t small and there were some stalls blocking the tables on other sides, and that we were seated down while that lady could be seated as well. She was really weird and demanding.
More fluent in Mandarin
Her male friend passed by with a tray of food and I assumed he was from the church as well. She invited him to join us immediately. The first thing I noticed was that she was speaking to him in Mandarin and she was more fluent in it compared to English – I didn’t see why she could accommodate to him and not me, by using the language.
Embarrassment
She was complimenting her friend for he seemed to be popular in instagram for he was working with Jack Neo in designing clothes. I was totally freaked out when she asked him directly if he was earning a lot and I could sense that he wasn’t very comfortable. I knew it was tough working with “big brands” or “celebrities” because you would either earn little or nothing at all, but of course, I kept quiet. Then, she started asking him for jobs in marketing and I was a bit taken aback when he realised she was talking about part-time job instead of full-time job – I had no idea what she was up to. Then, she even sought help from him to become an actress in Jack Neo’s movies. As a third party who was listening to the conversation, I felt she was trying hard to sell herself like as if she was going to swallow him up. I actually felt embarrassed and if I had the chance, I would want to explain to this guy that I wasn’t dating her. Obviously, I was treated as invisible. He didn’t get a chance to chew on his food and after some time, he had to excuse himself for he was in a rush and it was weird that he left the table and seemed like he was looking for another empty seat – obviously, he just wanted to excuse himself from her.
Excuse me
After the dinner, I was glad I was finally able to get straight the goal of the night – see the iLight installations. We crossed over to the Esplanade’s side and had to cut through Makansutra but it was very crowded. I led the way by the side and we had to cut through a bar’s outdoor area. An ang moh waitress was probably having a bad day and used a high pitch tone at me, “Excuse me!” like as if I was trying to block her way. My heroine friend decided to play a prank by using a higher pitch tone to repeat it. The waitress was at the door when she turned back, “Like, seriously?!”. I was at a total lost because I was already exhausted (running around before catching the bus) and feeling unwell (usual indigestion), and I was just trying to get over to the river side as quickly as possible. She explained to me that she was trying to tease me by repeating after the waitress. Later, she suddenly blamed me for not reacting so that the waitress wouldn’t mistake, in a speed second, that she wasn’t trying to anger the waitress.
Needs no explanation
It was one of the unluckiest nights ever when iLight met Earth Hour and we rammed into the start of that one hour. Most of the installations on the Esplanade side was shut down, apart from the Art Zoo at the floating platform that required purchasing of tickets to go in. Even the street lamps were off and I explained to her that the street wasn’t so dark usually but she didn’t seem to buy it. I didn’t see a need to explain. Anyway, that was the start of her using her phone intensively.
Stare at her boobs
There were some stalls under the audience seats in front of the floating platform. She was excited and went in. As clumsy as she could, she dropped the sample food, blaming the food for being too soft to be secured by the toothpick. She started cleaning her footwear with a piece of tissue and I didn’t really realise she had actually made quite a big mess of herself. After getting out of the crowd, she asked me to check her out for any stain and I finally looked at her from her head to toes and realised the cake had caught her top on her boob. She sounded very frustrated and blamed me for not noticing it like as if it was polite for a guy to stare at a girl’s boobs. I would avoid staring at sensitive places even during my photoshoot with models!
Glued to phone
Although she was holding onto her phone, updating her Instagram Story and texting her friends or friend, she did entertain me by telling me about her crush. However, she repeated her stories a few times to seek assurance from me that he was interested in her. The entire conversation was almost meaningless to me for she already knew the answer long ago. It was also very nasty for her to do that to a male friend and I counted myself lucky that I wasn’t interested in her at all.
Food and queue
Even though we just had our dinner, she was eyeing for food. Given her size, I was certain that she couldn’t finish up two meals in such a short span of time. Moreover, she didn’t even have cash with her. Luckily, all the queues were long, or otherwise, I would be treated as her ATM again.
Ridiculous blaming game again
By the time we had reached the Gastrobeats compound, she was already badly glued to her phone that she had almost stopped talking to me. As she looked very engrossed, it was difficult for me to engage her. Suddenly, she lectured me for not leading the way as she claimed she would be able to follow me even though she was busy with her phone. She was actually doing something I hated most – gluing to her phone instead of talking to me – and yet she could sound so arrogant. We actually missed some of the installations, not just because they weren’t very interesting, but mainly because her mind wasn’t at the festival. I was glad when she decided to call it a day.
Finding way home
The underground pathways around the place was messy to me but I was certain they would be linked to Raffles Place MRT station. We entered one of the entrances and took the escalator down. There was a label “to shops” and she didn’t believe me that it could somehow be linked to Raffles Place MRT station. Of course, I was not 100% sure but was more than willing to take the risk. We exited and somehow made our way to the nearest Downtown Line instead.
Same old selfie
She started doing selfie inside the train, it was all the same closed-up shots with hair covering quite a lot of the face. She then asked me to try a shot using her phone and exclaimed I was holding it very near her even though her selfie was closer; besides, there was no good background.
Gentleman
Despite having all the shit throughout the night, I still tried to be nice and asked if she preferred to be alone for the rest of the journey. I knew the answer since she was still busy on her phone with her crush. So, I counted myself lucky and alighted at my station. Of course, I was the one who remembered about her laptop and returned it to her.
iLight without photography
The main reason that I didn’t even bother to take my camera out from my bag was obvious – the person didn’t deserve any professional shot from me.
Intention to return money
She did contact me to ask me for my bank account number. According to my analysis of her, she was kind of “testing market”. It was another trap for guy. If a guy were to get back the 10 bucks, he would be considered as ungentleman to some girls for not treating a “cheap” dinner. My real friends knew I was stingy to myself but I was generous to friends. However, for this girl, I was very reluctant but to tell her that I would have the 10 bucks parked at her side to accumulate interest. I was also trying to test her reaction and she didn’t insist to return. I didn’t help to continue the conversation.
Petty and cheapo
A week after the meet-up, she commented on one of my Instagram photographs and stated that I looked like Steven Lim. Since Steven Lim was a comedian who was often being related to “disgusting”, I assumed she was trying to play teasing game with me when she suddenly texted me in Whatsapp, repeating it. She hated people joking about physical looks and yet she was doing it on me. So, I played along to tease her that she was weak for her whatever hiking trip and linked it to sleeping at home. She exclaimed I was rude and proclaimed that I was not going to have my 10 bucks back. Then, she removed me from her social media. To be exact, she unfriended me in Facebook and unfollowed me in Instagram, instead of blocking me.
Spread the Love – January 2017
It was a very quiet start of the year.
I had an event shoot for sheep’s youngest child. He was one of the best clients ever.
Huiting was the heroine who organised another voluntary work. She roped me in last minute after we attended Jade’s grandparent’s wake. Jiayu dropped Yonghao, Huiting and I at Yonghao’s place before we waited for Yonghao’s dad’s lorry. Then, we met up with another three volunteers to collect second hand furniture to move to the beneficials’ houses. It was near midnight and one of the volunteers sent me home.
As usual, my youngest uncle on my dad organised the Chinese New Year gathering, spending the money, effort and time to organise everything.
Year 2016 – The Pressure
– Family
There was a dramatic change in my family as my elder brother and his wife moved to their new BTO flat at Marsiling, together with Luckie. From a badly clustered house to a house with only three people left, the sound of silence filled the atmosphere most of the time. There used to be a lot of unhappiness for everyone had very different lifestyle that we wanted to live in. The limited space had always been causing frustration and thus I could firmly testify against those rich hypocrites who were running the country akin to North Korea. I was probably too used to hearing complaint from my younger brother about how the couple forgot to switch off the toilet’s light and my mum who would bottom up every matter to grumble only in front of my younger brother and I.
With the reduction of conflicts, loneliness began taking over. I knew well even with the very limited help in finance in the past, my elder brother actually contributed in other ways. I never wanted to part with my elder brother but I knew it was inevitable. It was simply impossible for them to get a house within or near the CBD area – apart from having limited space for new flats, the price would be scary. Sooner or later, we had to move far away from the city.
I helped out a lot in packing up the remaining stuff to bring over to my brother’s new place. It took quite a number of trips to empty the room they used to stay in, even though my mum quickly turned the room almost as messy as before. It was not because she wanted to keep a memory of my elder brother by creating similar mess, but because she was simply a collector of everything. Somehow, everything could somehow turn useful one day for the poor, maybe no in near future.
Apart from the sadness from the moving out of my elder brother, Luckie’s absence in the house was a big blow to me. I was the one who used to sleep with him when he first joined my family. Since I worked from home, I was the one who had spent the most time with him. It was also because of him, I always hesitated to leave the house since he had fear in loneliness. I stopped my occasion afternoon jog to places like Marina Barrage and Henderson Waves mainly because of him.
The most dramatic thing happened soon after they moved out as Luckie got his first slip disc problem. His lower back caused his legs to become strengthless. After his operation, I went over to take care of him during weekdays since both my elder brother and sister-in-law had to work. Seeing Luckie in such sorry state hurt me a lot. Before he was fully recovered, he had a second slip disc that caused him greater pain than ever. Just as I thought Luckie would be out of my life, the couple spent another 10 grands to save him. I did my part by going over to take care of Luckie during weekdays.
– Friends
The closest friend I had was as usual, Gilbert. He helped me in everything without expecting anything in return – not that I was able to help him much in anything. Apart from him and my volleyball friends, I hardly had many chances to meet up with old friends. I also made many new friends through photography even though it was back to business that not everyone would keep in touch with me after they had gotten what they wanted.
– Relationship
In the third quarter of the year, my relationship ended. She was the most intelligent girl I had ever being with but we had very different priorities in life. She was more into the YOLO lifestyle while I was still struggling with my own life to make ends meet. There were also some differences that we had always struggled with, such as I felt obligated to stay over at my elder brother’s place to look after Luckie but she was fed up for she knew I was unable to work over there without even a proper table. I always felt bad for my mum’s attitude towards her even though she had always been showing respect and offering helps. Unfortunately, it was a bad start after all and my mum was more inflexible than me. I was glad both of us had tried very hard after all. I blamed myself for I was unable to give her a better life – not that I was able to.
– Health
Cough caught up with me for months and I knew well I did not recover because of the food I had been eating – my mum loved spicy food and she would deny cooking them. As for my injuries, my ex-girlfriend helped a lot. After her mum brought me to a Chinese doctor, my back injury improved a lot because it did not ache very regularly. Since she had learned some massages on the acupuncture points, she also improved the conditions of my other injuries, such as my right shoulder. Towards the end of the end, I suffered from a new injury on my left shoulder after carrying the bulky and heavy camera equipment for too long – the nerve was pressed too much that I felt weakness on my left arm.
– Finance
The tuition agency business dropped tremendously since both of my main coordinators were too busy with their lives. One of them had too much family issues to handle while another could buy a condominium just by giving tuition lessons instead. They were both not obligated to spend their time to help me in my business and thus I was more than happy that they still spent some time whenever possible to take up some assignments. Whereas for the rest of the coordinators, they were busy with their lives too.
For my photography services, I was still unable to make any breakthrough as there was a huge competition from photographers who undercutted the market while most enquiries were from clients with low budget. I knew the standard of my work and the market rates, and my strong principle insisted me not to lower down my value or further harm the photography market.
Websites were down
Some of my websites that are hosted in the same server as this blog were down for the past couple of days. I thought it was due to problems with either WordPress or the fact that the server was undergoing some “upgrades”.
I decided to take action just now and send a ticket to resolve the issue.
The “beautiful” reply was “An email was sent to [email] on January 22nd by our abuse team. In the message there was: “Your account [name] has been compromised and used to host infected files. For this reason we have blocked the web access to the site. Please use the FTP service to check and clean the files of your account. ” ”
I used my FTP to down all the files on the server, which took one or two hours because the server was based in Canada (if I didn’t remember wrongly) and that there were uncounted number of files for each copy of WordPress. Then, I used my antivirus to scan through the files to remove two infected files. I removed the entire folder of the WordPress copy on the server before dragging the scanned folder over. I replied the person before I rushed out. After returning home, I saw their reply that my websites were reinstated.
I actually paid an upfront cost for around ten years for this server, which was why it was considered dirt cheap. However, I didn’t expect the service to be like shit. My important sites are hosted in local Singapore server and thus I hardly ever access the server to make changes to my websites.
They could have done something to protect their server like installing antivirus software. Once they detect any infected files, they could quarantine or delete the files straightaway, and inform me of the paths of the infected files directly. It’s ridiculous for them to simply inform me that my account has been compromised and simply block it. Somehow, I didn’t even receive their email.
Funio.com, you are a very bad webhost and I wouldn’t recommend your service to others. You’re just a webhosting company that collects the full payment and treat your poor customers as dirt.
Spread the Love – December 2016
I had a photoshoot with Kelly Lim. Even though the shoot was focusing on her tattoos, she had to show quite some amount of skin. It was the trust that I appreciated most.
For my photoshoot with Prudential, Leslie Eng helped me a lot. He even gave me a lift to and fro the location.
For the photoshoot with Martina, I received help from my new assistant – Yee Wei. She was quiet but helpful.
Gilbert took a day off from work to accompany me for a shoot. Besides being an escort, he did his part as an assistant, enduring some craps together.
I met up with Zaki and he treated me to a 3D movie – Rogue One. I helped him to collect his Wifi-Baby while he was away from Singapore. I met up with him again to pass him the device when he returned. He treated me to dessert – my favourite ice jelly.
During my second meet-up with Zaki, Sirachar dropped by to have a chat with me, which was rather rare for a net friend to make the effort.
Yaozhong insisted to treat me to a super belated birthday lunch. We met up at Chinatown for Dim Sum. He also accompanied me to recce LePark for my next shoot.
Angela Ni took a day off her packed schedule to have a shoot with me. She went from the East to North of Singapore for Koreen who was kind enough to do the makeup and hairstyling for her.
For the Christmas Gathering with my voluntary work friends, Yonghao and his family kindly hosted us. Yonghao cooked specially for us. Some of them also brought food and drinks along. Nancy hosted us for the second round of gathering at her gorgeous place and her fiance gladly welcomed us although we would be disturbing him from his rest. Nancy stunned us with the impromptu supper that she was able to dig out from her kitchen. Jiayu gave me a lift home.
Sam from Manda fixed my Cononmark B4. He also shared a lot of things with me.
Gilbert picked me up for our swim to use our Active SG accounts so that the remaining free value would be brought forward to the next year. He was the driver for the evening, for our dinner and sending me home.
After attending Jake’s son’s baby shower with my mum, his mum and her ex-classmate went to Waterway Point with us and treated us to drinks at Yakun Kaya Toast.
Spread the Love – November 2016
Weitat organised two volleyball games at Yusok Ishak Secondary school and one at OCBC Arena, which was booked by Jelly. We had late supper after the first game and Weitat specially instructed Steven to give me a lift home. Steven could have taken the PIE route home, which was much faster. After the second game, we had dinner at Bukit Gombak’s coffee shop. In order not to let “blackbean” uncle and auntie treat, I ordered my food from the western food stall instead of the seafood stall. However, SCDF uncle footed the bill for our drinks. For both the last games, Bernard gave me a lift home using Jingjie’s car as Jingjie was not in Singapore.
The process of doing photoshoot with Jasmine Tan was glad not because I was shooting a cute girl but because she was one of the rare models who could turn up on time for a 7am shoot. She was very cooperative and we managed to get many good photographs.
During the one-day reservist at Yishun Safra, Teck Hui met up with me to walk over. Then, Fabian gave me and Terry a lift to the nearest MRT station.
For the photoshoot with Wanling, Gilbert was the driver to send Yuko and I over to Wanling’s house. Candy played a good host, drove me to package dinner back and sent us to the shooting location and then sent us home.
For the photoshoot with Rouying, Guoxin was my best assistant ever. He helped me to carry my equipment, buy drinks for all of us on his own initiative, shine light for my camera to focus and even paid for the cab after the shoot.
In total, Yuko took up three shoots with me and I was very glad that she could use her talent to aid me in creating the wonderful work.
Gilbert booked a staycation at The Amara Sanctuary Resort and chauffeured both Wanling and I to and from our houses. He also paid a larger portion for the hotel fee. Lunch was on Gilbert and dinner was on Wanling.