Waitressing...

I just got a call from the Chinese Restaurant Rick and I go to for lunch once a week... hahaha.. it's only a part time waitressing job that pays peanuts but for some reason, I'm so happy about it!!! haha... I'm not going to belong in the unemployed group for much longer! Yeah Yeah!!! haha... You should hear me giggling... heheh yes..me giggle!!!

All the stories about being a Tai Tai... sigh! not for me, cos Rick is a poor kangeroo(hehe! I know I know...I'm not funny! I'll leave all that to Peng and Audrey.)and I feel bad about using his savings even if he insists it's our savings. Bless him!... anyways, I should know cos I've been a woman of leisure for 6 months at a stretch in the past 2+ years since I met Rick. And this time, it's been a year since I've worked! But that's cos I was here for 6 months. Then when I went home, it was preparation for the wedding, then I had to keep myself free for the visa thing till now... Gosh! I didn't realise it's been a year. I didn't feel it at home much although I had no internet cos of the kids. They, especially Nana, kept me sane. Without them around me, it's too quiet and I just don't know what to do with myself. Not to mention the fact that I had to use Rick's savings cos we blew so much on the wedding and the visa trips and the recession that hit the world hard. It's ok when he buys me presents but to actually use his money feels a bit weird to me... but I'm sure you know what I'm talking about...

Back to waitressing... heheh for some reason, I have always had this thing about being a waitress... and knowing my mood swings and fiery temper, hmm.. it's going to be hard swallowing my anger... hehe... but at least, I'll be doing something I've dreamt of doing.. not that it's my dream or ambition to be a waitress... hehe can you imagine writing an essay that goes like this? ... 'When I grow up, I want to be a waitress...' nah... nothing like that... I just feel that sometimes, it's a good to take a break from stressful teaching... hehe...

sigh! Truth is... ... ...nobody wants me here!!! I like to whine about it... I mean I'm hot commodity( in more ways than 1..hehe) at home... but here... it's like I've been degraded to being a second class immigrant! sigh.. My pride hurts!

Anyways, the boss of the restuarant actually wants me to start this sat but the girls(Rick's girls) will be here tomorrow and I don't think Rick will be very amused if I stayed behind... We're going to do the touristy thing. Sarah, Rick's daughter no.1, has never been to UK. So Jasmine, daughter no.2 and their mom, bought Sarah a ticket to visit Rick and they are arriving at dawn tomorrow morning. I'm goign to feel a teeny weeny bit leftout when they do the father-daughters things and I'm wondering which bit of Rick I get to hold if Daughter No.1 gets the right and Daughter No.2 gets the left?.. hehehe ... I hold his... hmmm... hehe

Nah... Me and the girls get along fine. I'll share! Besides, Rick has to go for a meeting in Copenhagen the last 2 days they are here. They will have to say goodbye at the airport if Rick's flight gets in on time or they'll miss each other... sigh! And this is the only time Sarah can get away. I feel so bad for them...but that's ok...he'll see them in Oct.

But.. this is supposed to be a happy blog about me!!! hehe... Rick claims I have Attention Deficit Disorder ADD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ADHD cos I keep getting distracted after 2 seconds... haha but i'm sure I don't.. I'm just BORED!

Memories...

It's 1.40am now and here I am blogging... sigh... try as I may, I couldn't sleep and didn't want to wake Rick so I came out here to blog about my thoughts... about what's keeping me up...

It's been a year and a month plus since my gramdma's passing away. For some reason tonight, as soon as I put my book away, turned the lights out and closed my eyes, I thought of my grandmother... of her funeral, her last few weeks in the hospital, a few months back before that and then further back... ... ... and soon... ... ... the tears came.

I guess I still miss her. And either the last weeks of her life has been more traumatic for me or her presence in my life was such a fixture that it really didn't cross my mind that she would leave so quick and I still don't know how to deal with the hole... I don't know. I still can't think or talk about it for very long before I start tearing up again.

Not that I was a very good granddaughter when she was alive cos I didn't visit her on a regular basis... nor did I go visit her when her condition turned worse. I was afraid. I didn't want to remember her being frail... sigh...

There are lots more I want to say and record down here... ... ... but I can't. I don't have the words to, nor do I have the courage. Maybe one day I will... when it hurts less... ... ...

Tired eyes...

I have spent the afternoon changing my blog. I found a website that tells you how to change the layout of your blog without deleting your widgets so I spent the past 2 hours after lunch trying it out. Anyone who has changed the template of their blogs will tell you what a pain it is when you get sick of you present template and want to change it. Changing the template(in most cases) means you lose whatever widgets you have on your present blog. It is a pain redoing and retyping all the urls of your friends and the cute things you had. I did that once and I wasn't in a rush to do all that again.

So this time, I cheated. hehe. This website tells you how to do it... easy-peasy but the blog links have to redone for some reason and my recent comments aren't recent! It doesn't refresh itself when I reload the page. I wonder why... and I didn't stop at that. sigh! I was trying to smart and wanted to change some things on the new template. Spent so much time on it, got teased by Rick, tweaked things here and there... ... ... aannnnndddddd then I found out I can't change anything on the template because a lot of elements on the template are jpg files so I can't change anything!!!! Sigh... Also, I had been fiddling with the html thing to get my blog the way I want it, meaning changing some of the content and changing the position of some of the widgets...

God! My eyes are tired! Rick teased me about how I liked giving him crap about how boring programming is and there I was...doing it since we came back from lunch... I didn't know how to tell him, it's bacause I 'tak nak kalah' to the silly html thing... sigh ... I'm wondering if I should add a chatbox too... would anyone leave me a message???

Real Twilight...

Rick and I have taken to going for drives during dusk cos the evenings are so nice when it's not raining. Guess what I saw on one of our drives... hehe ... Carlisle Street... hehe for you Twilight fans out there, I wonder if you are as amused as I am... Carlisle is afterall born in England...hehe ... I thought I saw wrong. but last week, we drove down the same route near Pangbourne I think... I saw the street sign again. I wanted to take a pic for the heck of it but I always see that only at the last minute... hehe ... a bit creepy? hehe ... I thought I saw wrong cos I've been reading Twilight again.. Nope, saw right. Carlisle Street. I wonder if there's an Esme, Emmett, Rosalie, Edward, Japser and Alice street somewhere...

I also want...

hehehe.. Audrey put up pics of us on her blog..and I also want!!! hehe.. so here's my pic of us... It's so nice having friends from home visiting... I miss everyone at home so much!!! It's not like I'm not enjoying myself here when I'm well,..hehehe..but it somehow feels really different when a friend form home visits... I enjoyed it very much when Audrey was here... hehe .. she didn't menton this on her blog but the moment she got here and I went and got her from the train station... on the way back, she dragged us into a survey for eye movements while watching advertisements.... hehe we were paid £5 each for looking at a few advertisements on the computer screen. Her ticket to Reading cleaned out her purse...hehe... I didn't know it was that expensive! Hmmm.. I'm thinking they should have more of this lah.. then maybe I can make some money since nobody wants to hire me...Then we had fun catching up on the gossips at home and our other friends... hehe.. if you want to know who we gossipped about, ask her! cos I'm not telling. then we called Peng at one point and it was fun when the 3 of us caught up on the phone. Too bad we didn't managed to call the others... I actually felt a bit homesick and alone when she went home...sigh... I am happy but i do want to go home...

House of Flying daggers

Nothing interesting happens to me nowadays which in a way I'm glad because things have a way of happening to me... bad things normally..so i'm glad for my dry run at the moment...

Anyways, here's something I found very amusing... I finally watched House of Flying Daggers! In UK! haha... I missed it when it showed at the cinemas at home. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw that it was on sky... hehe I was a bit excited while I waited for it to start. I'm so glad Rick doesn't mind watching the shows I want to watch. The best part was it was in Mandarin!!! Unlike in most of the other chinese shows they do show on Sky in UK, they dubbed the movies, so it sounds really stupid!! For some reason, these english people like to use stupid high pitch ah beng voices! Imagine Jet Li with a whiny high pitch voice??? Yuck!!!




Speaking of Jet Li, last week, it was Romeo Must Die I think. I wonder what's on next week... oh, it's Good As It Gets next week... yeah!!!

And below is the peom sang in the movie. It's written during the Han Dynasty by Li Yannian. It's beautiful!

北方有佳人，绝世而独立。
一顾倾人城，再顾倾人国。
宁不知倾城与倾国。
佳人难再得。
A rare beauty in the north, she's the finest lady on earth.
A glance from her, the whole city falls; a second glance leaves the whole nation in ruins.
There exists no city or nation, that has been more cherished
Than a beauty like this.

New design

hmmm... not sure about this design!!! sigh! It's so hard to do your own nails!!!!

As You Like It

It was one of the most enjoyable time I've ever had watching a play especially one at the Globe. Audrey, Rick and I went to watch As You Like It at the Globe on Friday. Although we stood in the Yard for 3 hrs in the drizzle, it was well worth it. I was reading through the reviews this play got, I'm surprised there was a so-so review about this play cos as far as I am concerned, this is FABULOUS!!!!

After a 3-course dinner at the Swan, we went down to watch the play.

We stood at the Yard right in front of the stage so we could see everything! Being so close to the stage, it was so easy to feel involved in the play! My fav was Tim Mcmullen who played melancholic Jaques(he looked like the man who played Severus Snape in Harry Potter to me!) and the more outstanding couple to me was Celia and Oliver instead of the main characters, Orlando and Rosalind. Celia and Orlando were a bit more 'real' in their acting to me. And Peter Gale, who played Amiens, sings like an angel!

Wrestling match among the audience stabding at the Yard, love poems written on papers raining down on the audience, the fantastic modern wedding dance scene at the end of the play...sigh!!!

what more can I say??? It was unbelieveably unforgettably the most fun time at a play for me! Can't wait to go and watch Romeo and Juliet next!

House Hunting

Hubby and I are sort of househunting...not to buy(I wish! sigh!) but to rent cos our landlord for reasons unknown have not been paying his loan so the flat we are staying at now will be repossessed and we might be kicked out or the rent might increase...we don't know yet cos the bloody bank hasn't got back to us!

anyways, so we thought we might as well go look at houses under HardCastles.

First, it was in a village called South Cerney. On the way in, you have to go pass a water park and 2 or 3 boating places! Was worried about being surrounded by water! beautiful small village, 3 mins to drive from end to end...sigh...but gorgeous buildings...all yellow stonewalls, this is the pub where we met Penny who showed us the houses. all the houses looked 'old' like that. This village started in AD999! However, the place we looked at was rather run down.

Then we went to Cirencester(siren-cess-ter)...it took me a while to get the name right... LOvely lovely town with yellow stone walls...lots and lots of shops in the town! but no train station....here, we looked at a small and very cute stone cottage in the middle of town, very small tucked in between buildings but it was too dark in the house. And the outside was very unkempt. It looked nowhere near like the picture.

Then it was round the corner to this place. modern, well kept, parking space, quiet and in town... but the house number...it's No.4... I'm chinese! I don want to live in No.4 ...hehe
Next, our favourite for the day! 2 houses on a farm. baa baa black sheep down just outside the garden wall, rolling hills, small backyard, the right one had a fantastic new kitchen, the left one had a big garden...so difficult to choose! but we liked the place. and it's was only 5 mins to town thru a backroad...
Decisions, decisions, decisions!!! hehe... going to look at more properties online and see what else there is... so much fun!

Romantic evening out...

It was a lovely evening last night and we were both bored. Hubby couldn't find anything to watch on the telly and I didn't want to read in bed so I suggested a night drive. It was ten to ten but it was still light. So hubby drove us out us out of town into the country. It was soooo romantic. Imagine sitting beside your hubby in the car and driving...dark blue sky at the back of us and reddish blue sky in front of us in the horizon...ROMANTIC! until it got to the part where we had to drive through forests on both sides, it got spooky and there was nothing to see but tall trees in the dark. ..Then it was 20 mins of looking at tall hedges on both sides of the road in the country. Hehehe...I still had a feeling we were lost cos he drove past the sign back to Reading but according to hubby's incredible sense of direction and 20 mins later, we saw another sign to Reading... so we drove through Pangbourne and Goring. Must make a date with hubby to go to Basildon Park or Beale Park...hope he feels less worried about my asthma now...

Been making hubby take pics with me...hehe...you can probably tell how bored I am by now...


Love hubby in this shirt! taken at our favourite chinese restaurant for lunch..

Attack of the bugs

A very weird thing happened at dawn today. you know the state of mind you are in when you are half awake and half asleep? This morning, I was over at hubby's side of the bed and I was trying to get pictures in my head. I'm assuming it's all in a dream but my body was responding... anyways, it was difficult to get many pictures(like a tv aerial thing) so i thought maybe it's cos we think at different levels so I couldn't get many pictures at his side. I turned over(both physically and in my dream) and tried to get pictures on my side of the bed...also to test out my theory of different levels of brain thinking...I could a bit more pictures this time but it was shortlived... I couldn't get many pictures after a while...and I could literally feel my brain trying to work out the reason for it when suddenly my eyes popped open. It was still dark. The moment my eyes opened, I started coughing. After a while, I sat up cos I didn't want to wake hubby. When I sat up, I stopped coughing really quickly. It was like deja vu...when I realised why that was, I nearly panicked. This is not happening again I thought...Sigh.. somehow the change in weather has made me sick and by being sick with a cold, it is beginning to affect my asthma...oh god!!! please just let it be a phase and nothing more!!!!!

Life...

The recent passing away of my old coursemate has brought back some old memories of the passing of my other friends years ago. Some of you would have read her blog by now...about how brave she was and what she went through...That got me thinking about 2 other friends of mine.

One was back in secondary school. He was diagnosed with leukemia. He was only 16. I visited him once in the hospital but he was having chemo in his room. He smiled and waved though. That's the last I saw of him cos he never came back to school and I went to college after that.

The other was a friend of William's and mine. He was 28 maybe back then. He had a brain tumour. A few days before he died, we saw him in the hospital and he couldn't speak by then. The moment he saw William, he said(wrote on a white board) that he was going to die.

I'm not even going to talk about my grandmother's passing away. I still can't.

I don have any near-death experience except for the time I was slowly suffocating to death but I didn't know it at the time. I only realised how close it was after I got well again. Even thinking about it now, It's scary!

How does one feel when one knows one is going to die? scared? frustrated? cheated? bitter? Gosh! I feel so morbid! Sigh! I shudder to think of how many deaths of loved ones a person has to endure in one lifetime.... ... ...

Dreaded Cricket Season

I was informed this morning(a very nice gesture) by hubby that the cricket season has officially started today...sigh...and the Tour de France or something is going to start soon so I'm going to be ignored and bored soon... it's nice of him to give me advance notice! hehe... so i'm starting my crochet and knitting projects again...hehe..my crochet heart...instructions by Bella Dia - Sweet Heart Crochet Pattern. I used some leftover yarn and made this. I love it...