Dear Dreams – Page 65

My Elder Brother’s Chalet

It was one of the chalets that I slept early. My brothers and my elder brother’s girlfriend were the only four persons inside the double storey chalet. My younger brother went up to sleep first and followed by the couple. I stayed at the ground floor to surf net using my younger brother’s laptop, network powered by the iPhone. It was still noisy after 1am and there was a sudden birthday song. I dozed off after 2am.

In the morning, the four of us went to the shopping mall to shop for some food at the NTUC. Then, we went to the food court for brunch. My younger brother and I took a set meal of eggs, bread and tea, and we also bought a plate of carrot cake to share.

Since we were entitled four tickets to the Escape Theme Park and I made my virgin trip there. We tried both the Go Kart courses before going into the haunted house. We decided to go back later in the day for other games.

My younger brother and I dipped into the pool under the hot sun. The stamp for re-entering the Escape Theme Park was washed off by the water soon. Even though we tried to stay under the small shaded area, I felt the pain of sunburnt by the end of the day.

My mum arrived with my elder brother’s friends, with the fried mee hoon and curry. In the evening, my younger brother asked my mum and I out to the seaside for a walk and I regretted not bringing the camera along. We went back in around half an hour’s time and camped at storey two, where my younger brother and I had a game of Command and Conquer again.

The guests were impressed with the frame made by my brother to place the cupcakes. The cupcakes were quite disappointing in terms of the size, the holder and taste.

Since I did not know most of the guests, it was quite boring until I started playing with a baby together with my mum and younger brother.

Second Singapore Flyer Experience

On Friday, I woke up early in the morning again. I had only three hours of sleep as my old habit returned to haunt the night, refusing to let me go to bed before it was satisfied with the amount of work I could do.

It was not a good start of the day to face a colleague who seemed to have suffered from PMS. I was taking over Weiming’s class, which I was not familiar with as compared to all the other seven classes. On the bus towards Singapore Flyer, the fun was too short for celebration.

I was very used to seeing ugly students among the angels but the shame of Singapore joining in my group worsened my foul mood. Having twenty-five people squeezing inside a capsule was pathetic. The half an hour stay in the air was the longest thirty minutes I had ever spent.

My lunch was at Popeye at the cost of thirty-five bucks. I joined Joy’s girls at the Esplanade later for a walk. My mind was in a dilemma since I wanted to join the KO students at Marina Barrage and yet, I wanted to reach home by 3pm as to go to the chalet with my brothers. It was not long before the fatigue ruled my head and wiped out my brain. My eyes were closing and my skull was unbalanced. Nevertheless, I had some moments of relaxing periods.

I reached home just in time when my brothers were going off. Since I had not packed my stuffs and that my brain was losing to the gravitational effect, I decided to join them at night even though I could have gotten a free ride by my elder brother’s friend.

I concussed on the mattress and woke up in the evening. After dragging for a long time, I finally started leaving my house in my backpack. My younger brother picked me up near Pasir Ris MRT in the double bicycle but he got the shock of his life when we started moving off. It was difficult to balance. I took the front seat when I went East Coast Park with Wanling long ago and I supposed it was easier to team up with a non-cyclist. Alas, we got used to it and got back to the chalet.

My cross cable was put in good use when we started LAN gaming, joining my younger brother and my laptop together. However, I was very disappointed that there was no wireless internet connection within Costa Sands Resort and thus I could not do my work. My younger brother could plug in his iPhone to access the internet but mine did not work.

One of My Worst Volleyball Days

I started off my Thursday morning with the usual work’s arrow but I managed to shield myself with the lesson at Bukit Batok. There was, however, an issue with my battle against time since I could not do anything else while replying all the SMSes. I could have set off earlier so as to reduce the suffering on my feet.

The morning was a torment at times though some of the students were quite cute. It was draining but I managed to endure the entire session with Magdalene.

We went for lunch at the “duck place” at Clementi and were lucky to bang into Zaki, Eunice and Joy. I enjoyed their company a lot. I had a plate of chicken rice.

The afternoon saw the stirring of my brain juice, racking my brain so hard to think of some of the points for Afni to take note upon her return during my reservist weeks to handle the workshop. My heart was unease since I had been doing almost all the jobs for my partners for the entire week and there were certainly things that were too frequent to let them take note of.

I spent the rest of the time to settle the PowerPoint slides for Alvin before doing my personal things. I grabbed two sandwiches and a “mai gai”, together with a cup of tea from the canteen auntie, keeping my stomach filled before the volleyball game in the evening. In fact, I was trying to keep myself awake by eating.

I managed to debug a serious issue in the quit smoking website, followed by some smaller errors that I had made. Before I went down for volleyball, I remembered I had not filled up my timesheet and that began some minutes of tough work for my hand.

I went down for volleyball at around 7.30pm. Mr Peh was warming-up alone and I was quite shocked over the timeliness of the rest. When uncle Jiaming arrived, I started setting up the equipments with him. Someone else took care the net and poles.

The game started all good for me. I scored points in both spiking and servicing the ball. However, situations started changing as I did not get any single chance to spike. The worst problem was to play on the same side with arrogant person who was not fit to play the game in term of attitude. A lousy player who tried to push blames to others, and screaming at own teammates, was a shame to his years of volleyball experience. Given his height, Mingfa and I would have joined the national team. It seemed like everyone had given up trying to correct him, helpless to stop him from living in his own world of fantasy.

I was very badly affected. The sad fact of volleyball game flashed throughout the night, though not obvious to everyone. Due to height problem, having proven the worthiness was useless. The opponents were probably smiling within themselves for the loss of a threat. I went into the court for my last game unwillingly and my performance showed everything. As Jingkun was leaving, I joined him and he dropped me near Jurong East MRT station.

Appreciation Talk for the OGLs

Yesterday, Hirman gave me a call at as early as 7.30am and he was somehow lucky that the line did not cut off halfway since the Starhub reception in my room was absurd. Anyway, he wanted me to help him to do a video out of the photos taken during the camp. I had to switch on my laptop to transfer the files over to my thumbdrive and it took me longer than usual for the gigantic file size.

It was my first team-up with Eunice to conduct EIP at Bukit Batok. I had problems walking for I seemed to have strained the vein on my left ankle during the jog the night before. The pain was mild before I went to bed and thus I did not really take note of it. Walking down the stairs was the killer.

The class was noisier than the previous day’s class and hence it took me more strength to speak and more effort to control. Eunice was sick but still tried to help out as much as possible. The kids were cute as well. I had a great lunch with Eunice somewhere near the bus-stop before going back to our campus.

My shirt was wet under the hot sun and the thought of Hirman’s video, which was needed by 4pm heated my body up more. I quickly went to get some photos from Ateh and proceeded to Lab 1 to focus on the job. The transferring of the photos from the two thumbdrives and two video cameras caused latency in the processor.

I was not confident of producing the video for I could never settle for a low quality job, which I was forced to do given such a short notice and I really hated to disgrace myself. I could have done more to enhance the video. Selecting the photos, as well as to tally them with the song robbed my time. I was so tired that I even dozed off for a minute or so.

Just before I could finish it, the lousy laptop died on me. It was supposed to be a fast system but somehow, I could feel that the manufacturing error had been eating up the resources. I was extremely annoyed by the continuous auto increasing of the volume, especially when Jonathan and his students came in to share the lab and I could not reduce the volume and had to do with muting. I could have simply stayed inside the office with all disturbances inclusive of the air-con servicing.

I stared widely at the lousy laptop, too lost for words. I was fortunate enough that most of the work was saved and thus, I needed not redo everything after the crash. Deep within me was filled with emptiness as I watched the system loading slowly and the video compilation followed suit. I delivered the product late but the actual event was delayed as well to allow sufficient time.

As the video was played, my heart raced. I could see more rooms for improvements, especially on the selection of photos. I wanted to visit each individual OGL’s facebook account to capture some of the photos taken by others, but time did not allow me to do it. Nevertheless, the laughers did cover up some of my regrets.

Hirman made a good speaker. The tiredness and hectic preparation failed to bring him down as he managed the appreciation ceremony with confident and charisma. Diana was a natural host as well and I stayed throughout the event to witness and support the sincere work of all the great people.

I regretted not recording down the speeches using my phone.

After going back to the office, Herman offered to send me to the city since he would be on his way there. I was more than happy to travel with him even though taking the train would be much faster. I got to chat with Dorothy while waiting for him.

Hirman poured out his tonnes of workload to me and I hoped by listening would reduce his stress somehow for there was nothing much I could do other than offering some tiny help. I alighted near KPO and strolled to Dhoby Ghaut MRT station.

After taking dinner, I dozed off for more than an hour.

Broke my Jogging Timing Record

EIP, my dread, finally started on Tuesday morning. Going down all the way to Bukit Batok ITE was killing half of my days that I was unable to do any other stuff. It was a test of my luck to see which secondary school students were going down in order to judge how tiring I would be by the end of each session. I was lucky that the Westwood Secondary school kids were very adorable. However, I made a great communication mistake and Zaki reached at 8am.

Zaki sent me back to campus to attend my department meeting, which started forty-five minutes earlier and the meeting was over soon upon reaching. Nevertheless, I got to enjoy the nasi lemak from my boss.

I had a payback of my lack of sleep due to gaming before I went to bed. Throughout the afternoon, I was never productive by nodding in front of my laptop. The worst thing was when I discovered that my smoking site did not work properly on my webhost even though everything was fine on both laptops I was using. It was disastrous to work with AJAX when debugging was needed.

Sometimes I did doubt my own principle. I always did my best to attend to all my friends but somehow it made me very unfocused. I had been observing friends who did not even glance at me when I stood beside them during their conversation with others, and indeed they were more successful than me.

I reached home at around 6pm. I slacked for some time and finally left my house for a jog after taking my medicine. It was another challenge to my limit for I could easily sleep like a bear at that moment. I started off weak and felt like sleeping at certain points of time. By the time I reached the big T-junction separating Marina Barrage and Marina South Pier, I was exhausted. Nevertheless, I was impressed with my final timing.

On the Tuesday evening, the place was not even half as crowded as the weekends. There were more groups of youngsters around. The usual huge green snake kite departed soon before darkness embarked. I started lying down to rest. The time tickled fast and before I could doze off, it was near 8pm. I made my way down and did some stretching longer than ever, distracted by a mini bus which I suspected was from MediaCorp.

When I started to take off, I was glad to see bus 400 stopping at the bus-stop. My second race against the bus was granted but I was not given advance start off as long as the previous time. Before I reached the T-junction, the bus had already beaten me. I did not give up and kept my pace constant at the exhausting speed. My effort had a payoff for I managed to overtake the alighted passengers inside the small tunnel as they were walking towards the MRT station. I was quite proud of myself.

I could not keep up with the pace after turning away from the entrance to MRT, but managed to push myself furthermore. In the end, I checked my timing and was very amazed with myself for I broke my own record by taking less than 19 minutes.

Table Tennis with My Favourites and Dinner with the Oldies

Early in the Monday morning, I was shot again. During lunch time, I went to the office to realise everyone was not meeting out for lunch. Sometimes I just wondered if I should just start joining others instead of having to wait and even being informed of unavailability last minute. There would not be many chances for me to dine with others, including the students. In fact, I did not mind packing the lunchbox back to the office every day.

I was quite lucky that Joy was free and thus we went to Clementi Central together. I learned more about the post office from her. Then, we crossed over the road over Clementi Town Secondary side for a quick bite.

It was quite a good afternoon for I spent quite some time near the PE room playing table tennis with my favourite class. When the ball fell into the drain, I tried to reach for it but it was too deep and my shirt got into contact with the ground. The concern of them, especially Jiali, made me feel fortunate. The last survivors were Boon Peng and Criz. I was destroyed easily in my slippery shoes.

After reaching home, I took a little bit of my mum’s bon bon cha cha before I washed myself up. I missed the bus 80 right exactly in front of me across the road and I felt stupid for checking the IRIS website. I met up with Irwin at the arcade at Vivocity. Then, Huiling joined us, followed by Tingfeng. Tingfeng suggested Dian Xiao Er but somehow we switched over to the White Dog Café, which seemed to be a better choice.

Eugene was late since he had some miscommunication with Irwin, thinking that we were meeting at Bugis instead. I had a plate of tradition fish and chips, and it came in three long pieces, given a smaller diameter, easily to be consumed than other restaurants’. The taste was good as well.

I wanted to talk to Eugene but I was not sure if the rest of them knew about his recent trouble, and thus I kept it within me. When they started talking about food and travelling, I felt like I just came back from ancient. When Irwin tried to get me involved by telling Tingfeng I wanted to get a DSLR camera, I seemed to turn into a caveman from his replies.

The problem of communication lay on me for I was not bothered to keep myself updated with news, not even my hobby – photography. I was never a food craver, neither an experienced traveller. I was too different from most people.

The manager quite scared me with her fussiness about the slightest arrangement of the tables. We stayed inside the restaurant for very long and left after 10pm.

Lunch at Orchard

On Sunday, I met up with Irwin at Paragon. We had our late long lunch at Sushi Tei before proceeding to Cineleisure for a few games of pool. We took bus 167 together and he alighted at Shenton Way.

Upon reaching home, I was hardworking and somehow, I managed to accomplish big tasks for my upcoming smoking website.

The Three Best Friends Met up after more than a Year

On Sunday morning, I went to meet Gilbert and Peh for a swim at Ang Mo Kio. We were supposed to meet at 10am but I was late for half an hour. Nevertheless, I was still earlier than Peh, who arrived in his girlfriend’s van.

We started off chatting by the corner of the pool. It was crowded like usual and we went to the middle lap and slowly, shifted towards the other end. I stopped after the first lap to adjust my swimming trunk and proceeded on a non-stop swim for the next twenty-one laps. The two of them claimed that they took only ten laps.

Swimming was never as easy in the past for I was never able to keep my mind calm, dashing towards the end of the lane every lap; by the second lap, I would have drained myself like during competition. It was ever since I went swimming with my younger brother, I managed to give up every thought of trying to impress all the other swimmers around – his non-stop swim forced me to do it. By relaxing myself, saving strength for the next stroke after each pull, I was able to sustain my strength to swim at constant speed for uncountable laps.

Perhaps, I had been acting like a bull over certain jobs and tasks since young. I pushed myself without proper planning and I did not know my limit. Regardless of my own stuffs such as web building and playing sports, or helping of others, there were always times I took actions more than I used my brain.

Nonetheless, working beyond my limit was not totally disastrous, for at least it kept me fitter than many other people, except that I was plagued with injuries.

I was lucky to have a driver around for it saved me from quite a distance of walk. Peh sent Gilbert home to get changed before the three of us went to Ang Mo Kio Hub for our lunch. We went to “My Desert House” where we filled our stomachs while taking photos.

Peh could not join us for the walk in town for he had to meet his client, which was a letdown. He reminded me of the days when I worked as a property agent, which I considered “no life”. He was much luckier as a financial advisor now for at least he had his transportation somehow.

Gilbert rushed to Takashimaya to meet his friend before we started walking around, looking at expensive leather shoes that turned me off. We proceeded to Ion soon to shop for my jeans. I got him a pant as his belated birthday present at Uniqlo. He got me a polo tee at Topman and the cost was shared between him and Peh. Eventually, I still owed Peh two birthday presents, which was so pathetic of me.

I was completely destroyed soon for the lack of sleep, water and rest. Gilbert continued his journey to Cityhall to get his stuffs before going for Chingay rehearsal while I made my way home directly from Orchard MRT. I was thinking of going to Marina Barrage for a jog but I dropped onto the mattress soon after I cleared my email.

Too Early for Farewell Dinner

On Friday morning, I was not sure what time to kick off my day since I was informed of an 8am relief duty days ago, however, the summary of the daily status did not include it. Nobody replied my email. For the benefit of doubt, I dragged my feet to work earlier than usual and it proved that my effort was worthwhile. My dear friend, Xiuzhen, went to school earlier and she killed my boredom by joining me in the class.

I took half day off in the afternoon and rested at home until the evening, leaving for the dinner with the colleagues. It was my virgin visit to 313 Somerset and I was stuck at the basement. The escalators from basement 2 to 3 were not in operation yet and I tried going down the stairs. After travelling down a flock of stairs, the light went off. I got the greatest shock of the year. The worst of all was the embarrassment that I had to conceal. Moving up the stairs slowly with the limited beams of light from the door kindly built with a small piece of glass, I was hoping nobody would be outside. Nevertheless, it was a wrong decision to proceed down, wasting my steps. I met two aunties on my way into the lift and they saved my day by exclaiming there was “Marche” restaurant and I looked at the label besides the button and realised it was on level 1.

Having dinner with the best bosses in the world was enjoyable; however, it was weird to have farewell dinner when I was not confirmed with my departure yet. The food was not to my liking although the ambience was nice. I heard jokes and stories, and I started envying everyone, for I had spent most of my time in front of the computers for more than ten years of my life. There was nothing much I could share, probably except for some sad love stories.

They wanted to go pubbing at Number 5 but it was too crowded. We proceeded to KPO where the filthy rich people went to and there was not even enough space for us to stand. Next, Jenne recommended us to Bar Stop where we shared the table together with her friends. It was a nice place and it would be my greatest fantasy to live in a place beautifully designed place in future. We were left with Weitat, Henry, Jenne, Joei and me.

We made our ways off at around midnight and I missed my last bus 167, having to walk home from Chinatown by taking bus 124.

The Essential Rights to Accomplish Task

If I was not given the full authority and support to do a task, I would not want to do it since the chance of success is much lower; and worst still, the failure could be due to some ridiculous reasons.