Questions, questions....

Had a 'study chat' the other day with Gorgeous Boss, Madame AAL... :) She's been trying to drill the need to attempt questions into my head. Admittedly, my skull is rather thick, but the information is slowly, but surely, sinking in…heh.

Hmm, I guess I won't know what I don't know until I've attempted to answer some questions for practice. Better to find out what I don't know, NOW…rather than find out during the exam.

D-Day is 18th April. T-18 and counting. Yikes.

Surprise!!

Wanted to do something special for hubby's hatching day this year; so I plotted and schemed to organise a surprise birthday party. It had to be a week early, since we had a wedding dinner to attend on the actual birthday- so that helped with the 'surprise' factor! It was really quite difficult to plan the party; anything out of my ordinary routine would risk hubby getting suspicious... :p So imagine my relief when he announced his plan to play futsal on the afternoon of the surprise party- that meant there would be time to get everything ready! Yeay! Alas, that was not to be. Unexpectedly, hubby had to get a lot of work done, so he had to stay at home instead. Thankfully, he was working upstairs, concentrating too hard to catch me red-handed cooking an ENORMOUS pot of bolognaise. Now that would have been hard to wriggle out of. What reasonable answer could I have possibly given?? Heh. Thanks to dear friends who were such cooperative 'partners-in-crime', we managed to smuggle heaps of food into the house and hide in strategic corners to deliver a boisterous 'SURPRISE!!!!!' as hubby made his way downstairs. And what a surprise it was- luckily the birthday boy did not tumble down the stairs! It was a great success. Hubby was genuinely surprised and touched by the friendship and love :D Had another surprise for him on the actual birthday- bought him a lovely, yummy, Chocolate Oreo cake (hubby likes chocolate) from superbaker Fatboy. The cake was a HIT- everyone loved it! Think I must have eaten at least 40% of the cake, and I'm not even a chocolate fan! :D

Thanks so much, Fatboy!

Singapore Motorshow 2006

Stumbled across some photos taken at the motorshow. Mmm... check out these nice cars :)

*Drooooool*

Nice!

Nicer!!

Very nice!!!

The BEST!!!! :D

Land Below the Wind (Part 3)

We spent the rest of our trip near the sea, at the luxurious Shangri-La Tanjung Aru in KK. On hindsight, it was really good that we took the trip in the order that we did, as the accommodation got progressively better as the days went by. The ‘motel’ would have been a lot less bearable after the Shangri-La!

One thing though, it doesn’t have much of a beach to speak of, but the pool more than makes up for that. We took strolls in the lovely gardens, sipped cocktails while watching the sunset, enjoyed a relaxing aromatherapy massage… sigh…

The small beach..

The lovely sunset...

It wasn’t the peak / school holiday season yet, so it was fairly quiet and peaceful. Nice.

We decided to venture out to see KK town; and again, we were ‘kiasu’ and decided to go out as early as we could to maximise our time seeing the sights. There was a handicraft market and another market next to it selling different kinds of ‘keropok’, but we didn’t see anything much other than that. We walked from one shopping centre to another; each time thinking the next would be better… Hmm, guess we wouldn’t call KK a shoppers’ paradise, heh. :D

After all that was done, we still had hours to kill before the seafood dinner places opened for business. We really wanted to eat some seafood while we were in town, so we decided to wait out the afternoon by getting some magazines and plonking ourselves down at Starbucks. Alas, after an hour or so of reading about Hollywood’s latest gossip (and there’s only so much one can stomach at a go), the time was only something like 2 pm! Alamak, so how to last till dinnertime?

Fortunately, hubby found a cinema (it was situated in a rather obscure part of the building- through an alley, then a carpark and then a lift up a few more levels) and we watched ‘Déjà Vu’. That saved the day!

And so, we did manage to eat our seafood- it wasn’t all that cheap (but that’s maybe because we rather foolishly allowed the restaurant free reign in selecting the crustaceans :p)! Check out the monster prawn...

Land Below the Wind (Part 2)

Here are a couple of pictures of the beautiful flora we saw in the park...

A really tiny pitcher plant....

We tried some of these berries.. :D

This is known as the naked tree! Cool huh...

Land Below the Wind (Part 1)

After considering numerous holiday destinations, we decided to go to Sabah after the wedding. Being such 'kiasu' travellers, we wanted to see both the mountains and the sea, and experience both warm and cool weather!

We flew Air Asia into the ‘makeshift’ Terminal 2 of the KK airport (it was really quite awful but since most of the building was virtually under construction- we’ll cut them some slack :p). We then made our way up to the Kinabalu National Park, which was about 2 hours drive away. One thing we noticed was that there were SO MANY Catholic churches along the day; it was unbelievable- we reckon on average that there must have been one every 5 km!

We decided to stay in Kundasang for the first night, which was about 20 minutes outside the National Park itself. Since we were so ‘kiasu’, we wanted to see Kundasang AND get a nice view of Mt Kinabalu from afar- after all, one cannot see the mountain from the foot of the mountain, right? Wrong. But shall save that story for later.

Back to Kundasang- seriously, there is NOTHING to miss. It was just sad. But on the bright side, one of the more memorable parts of the whole trip was the room TV (with only RTM 1,2 and TV3) at the so-called ‘resort’. Actually a ‘motel’ would be a more accurate word- don’t think it even qualifies as a ‘hotel’... Anyway, hubby was trying to figure out why there wasn't any sound, when he suddenly saw this message on top of the TV, scribbled with a marker:

Tunggu panas baru ada suara

(wait until it's warm for the sound to come on) :D

The next morning, we packed our bags and headed for the National Park itself, excited at the thought of staying a night there. No, we didn’t pitch a tent or anything- we had a lovely lodge all to ourselves, complete with 2 bedrooms, a living room with a fireplace (fake of course), a dining area, a kitchen and an Astro dish! :D

Anyway, after all that effort of going to Kundasang to supposedly get a good view of the mountain, check out what we saw from our front porch early next morning….

Chehhhh…. the foot of the mountain will do just fine!!

Speaking of gifts....

Take a look at the wonderful cards and gifts we received from all of you! Couldn't bring ourselves to open them; they looked too pretty! It was approaching Christmas-time too, and since we didn't have a tree... :)

Awww... isn't this cute?

In the beginning...

It's kinda old news now, but we thought we'd start from the 'beginning'- the first day of the rest of our lives together... :)

After months and months of planning, we thank God that everything went fairly smoothly. Of course, things were not PERFECT- there were minor glitches here and there, but we bet (or hope) they weren't noticeable!

The day started off beautifully; we were a bit concerned as it was the rainy season, but we woke up to a lovely crisp morning. It was a flurry of activities at both ends- everyone fighting for the bathroom to get ready, the make-up, the hair, the photographers clicking and clicking away, the arrival of the charming chee muis, the display of support by the heroic heng dais. The chee muis launched a series of creative 'trials', the heng dais gamely took them all on, without even a squeak of protest!

This might have been the easiest trial of the lot!

It was lovely to see family and friends attend the church ceremony. The sermon was humorous yet insightful, and it was very encouraging to find out later that there were hearts touched and souls enriched. The worship team was wonderful; they worked hard to learn the new Psalm 23 song we wanted to sing (parts and all); we are so very blessed to have you all as brothers and sisters in Christ!

Our sincere, heartfelt thanks to all of you who helped make the lovely day possible. To those who travelled from afar specially to share in our joy- we thank you for taking the time and effort to join us in celebration. To all who were unable to make it- we really missed your presence, and we thank you for the many kind words, best wishes and generous gifts!

God bless you all!

Here We Go!

We've finally decided to hop on the blog-wagon! :D

We're still trying to figure how this works; so please do bear with us. Ask us again how the blogging is going in 6 months' time, and hopefully we haven't fallen off the blog-wagon by then!