seems like having cycling chums at your own wedding dinner, could be one of the most hazardous things that could happen to anyone.

especially when you have people like gab, foeszz, siok heng, johnson, nik & pling, zaskarboy and family and myself all at one table. we were easily the most "happening" table, as well as the loudest table. but hey, we enjoyed that! met liew, ruzhyo and fran over there, as well as chan. so many cycling kakis present - you know what mischief we could be up to, don't you? heh heh...

this must have been easily the sickest wedding dinner i've ever been to, laughing so much that my jaws still hurt from aching soreness... laughing!

can't say this was the most filling dinner i've attended, but the class of the place was good! very succinctly and aromatic dishes, individually served instead of one big lot brought to the table right from the beginning. i'm not left hungry, but at an optimal "just nicely full" level. this was a very joyous occasion that i'm glad i was present at.

i went back to pei chun last night for the midautumn fest celebrations - met up with melissa as well as my former form teacher for primary 5 and 6 mr chan, as well as madam yap. people whom you haven't seen for eons, once you see them it's really easy to know how they've changed.


for a first, i got to meet josiah and the mom...


and he's pretty cute too!


and mr chan with mdm yap

surprisingly, mdm yap did say that i looked somewhat familiar, though honestly i can't recall if she taught me before. maybe during primary 3 or 4? maybe 5?

of course by now the old school building i grew up in has been in disuse for the last few years, nostalgia just kicks right back in each time i recall of it. 15 years ago. you know sometimes when people have a viewpoint old places shouldn't be torn down? that's the sentiment, i guess.

things took a change for the better today. i apologized - eileen was right, this line of work makes one a lot humbler. i'm glad i've learnt the lesson.

today was huijun's birthday. and i called up the whole lot of pei chun folks regarding the mooncake fest event back at the school tomorrow night...

today's episode, uh, i mean, email, is brought to you courtesy of yeo's grass jelly drink.

yours sincerely was walking along the street outside peace centre after getting the abovementioned drink from cold storage, when i spotted a girl looking at me. I MEAN, A GIRL GAZING AT ME! Oh yeah baby! wait a minute! She's GAZING at me!

*THE WORLD FREEZES FOR ONE SECOND*

AUDREY!!!!

uh, ok, that's so much for drama, eh? now 6d only has 17 more people *cough cough* more to locate, before we're all fully done.

the surprise is that, she said she was talking about my sudden re-emergence from mount wudang with yuting yesterday, and the next day (today), she gets to see me in person!

is this serendipity? speaking of which, yeah, i liked that movie. kate beckinsale... oops, got carried away. HAHA!

interestingly in this new line of work i just started in, that things that i once thought wouldn't affect singapore can be reconsidered in a bigger way. case in point - the thai coup and the ouster of thaksin.

i used to think, well, it wasn't too unusual for military-led coup over there - until now because clients could jeopardize their lives because of pre-booked flights by into thailand.

which was kind of interesting, because there was a friend who was asking me about travel insurance. a fellow colleague shared a story with me where some singaporeans were in need to be repatriated back to singapore after their tour bus went off the road and went off something like a ravine (but apparently not that deep, since they survived). the insured with my company's travel insurance scheme were flown back apparently in a singapore airlines flight partially converted to a medical setup and reached home within a week - while a very cheaply priced local insurer's clients were flown back via something like a cargo plane... after they were stuck in china for two weeks.

if strictly comparing on prices, there is no comparison - it's better to go with aunt lucy's insurance company. but for the peace of mind, think deeper.

must thank felix for the laksa lunch when it was cold, hungry and really needed.

must thank david_ng for the dinner too.

just received an email from derrick, all the way in the states. too bad his coco ain't around anymore. i remember the days when i used to go to his place in pri 6 and sec 1 days, playing on the sega and super famicom. that was one and a half decades ago...

i finally visited handbag's moriah bp church this morning. though it was a less packed than other services i've gone for anywhere else before, the atmosphere of it felt good.

heehee, i'm so bad, i lifted this from merciless's blog...

after a short prayer session on tuesday morning after the healthshield gold prestige seminar, i felt SO MUCH BETTER!

each time now when i pick up the phone, i feel an extra oomph of energy from somewhere, but i don't know where... and honestly, there's nothing about being declined on the phone!

then that night after i got home at about 1130pm, i just started to clean up my room... one sudden lot of energy came in to let me make a noticeable difference in my sty, uh, i meant, room... and i packed it up from 1230am till 6+am!

thank you God!

how much do you love chilli? i know one thing for sure - i used to really abhor it. hate it. despise it. was thinking that people used it to "drown" out the real taste of food using it. i used to think that way... until i discovered that thing called pizza. see to what extent i would get my chilli...



it's nothing much, just one kilogram of it... as for how i'm storing the remainder, i'm keeping it inside my dry cabinet with my important documents...

i've been having a straight flush this week. incredible!

monday - rest day. the only flush i had was probably in the toilet.

tuesday - 3 appointments in one day. woot!

wednesday - ippt silver. woohoo!

thursday - managed to get over 10 of my primary 6 classmates over the phone.

friday - one more appointment at night.

bonus for tonight - the bike thief who pilfered the giant mcm team at the subaru action asia challenge has been caught! woohoo!

miracles of miracles, i passed my ippt yesterday! certainly the results weren't astounding, here they are:

standing broad jump: 221cm (phew, first station to clear!)
pullup: 9 (i was going to create a human blood fountain from my temples then)
shuttle run: 10.4s (ok, i'm slowtwitch)
sit-up:37 (was reaally dying on this one)
2.4k run: 9:25 (fizzled out on the 2nd and 3rd loops out of 3 loops in all)

the only "abnormalities" were the 2.4k with 5 points, and standing broad jump with 3. got 4 for the rest. phew!

went over to handbag's place to fix up his odd shifting front drivetrain, and popped by the fong seng area just before that - and the nasi goreng from the cheese prata shop was laced with a lot of hot hot hot pepper! woot!

what did we do for the action asia challenge? well, the things we did include abseiling, kayaking, trail running, offroad biking, road biking, ocean "swimming", bridge jumping, traversing, ziplining.

after i did the bridge jump at esplanade bridge, i thought i'd kissed my pro m frames goodbye. i slotted it into my helmet's vents, and put a hand to it to cover it from impact (similar to dive entry) and just went down. SPLASH! i felt my helmet to check for the oakleys. nothing? oh man! my oakleys - entirely gone despite my shielding it with my right hand? incredible! i thought i scored an incredible booboo with what seemed like a small impact water landing. how wrong i was!

i looked around me in the water, and spotted my nosepiece from the oakleys floating. i thought my entire unit was with it... but that was it! only the nosepiece, nothing else to be seen! the rest of it probably sank to the murky depths of the waters.

i looked around me in desperation. i didn't like the idea of spending another 200+ dollars to buy another one of it - no-one would too! then... something caught my eye. i recognized the shapes of the earpieces on my oakleys. i swam towards it... and voila! my oakleys were floating! thanks to the slash kit that i bought eons ago, it was actually positively buoyant, and i can't tell in words how relieved i was at that moment to find everything intact!

rode back with a new friend, gin, who's teaching music and math in a particular school - she was lost for directions back riding home after the event. i just took a slow spin to bring her over to lavender street, then split up since i'd use upper serangoon road to get back home while she used balestier to get home.

when i got home a half-drunk person who appeared sober (???) talked to me at the coffeeshop this afternoon. but he shared two truisms with me.

one, if you want to do something - do it all-out - and nothing less than all-out.

two - always make your own decisions - not based upon what others say.

yes, i know i should sleep now.

tomorrow's game plan:

0730hr - set off for canoepolo shooting at the evans road pool, first match.
1300hr - buy one more locking carabiner for the race.
1400hr - meeting chuan hwee for the action asia challenge gear check.
1800hr - vs130 fundraiser dinner.

just secured a mini-compass to my thomson stem. just in case directional navigation is needed right away. added another 3 inch strip of reflective sticker on each side of my seattube. definitely easy to notice in the darkness for the race. charging up 4 sets of aa batteries - one each for the three cateye lights, and one more for my uk40 mini divetorch.


a small compass on-the-go

packlist:
six packs of powergel, two sticks of powerbar.
zipties.
2 carabiners (1 more tomorrow, abovementioned)
3 slings
1 figure-of-8
one petzl basic harness


really ugly reflective stickers - for a purpose

what things can give a photographer a heart attack?

waking up in bed, only to realize the event's over.

now, that's a frigging nightmare.