A Quick Update

I had a fantastic time turning twenty, amidst alot of love from family and friends. :)

More on that later.

Will be leaving to Redang for a short vacation with the college bunch at midnight. I hope the bathroom is not as gross as Elle had depicted. *gulps* But I’m still looking forward to a good time with friends out in the sea and sun (with SPF protection, of course).

Alright, bed time!

 2:38 AM     Permalink     2 Comments

Valentine’s And Then Some

Jan, Me, Elle.

Before Jan left for Melbourne for her new semester in February, we girls had a dress-up (Elle’s idea!) dinner at Brasserie La Place, a French-inspired restaurant in Damansara Utama. Despite it being a Monday night, we certainly didn’t expect to be the only patrons at the restaurant. It was awkwardly quiet at first, walking into an empty restaurant which we were obviously over-dressed for. When we finally settled down at the table, service came quick and professional. Even the chef was happy to see us there because I remember being served a plate of appetiser that we didn’t order by a man with a tall chef’s hat.

Free appetisers!

Food presentation was superb but disappointingly, the food didn’t taste as good as they looked. I hate to say this but I think everyone struggled to finish their food. That, or we were too stuffed from the warm buns and starter to enjoy our main courses.

Sticking to tradition, our conversations will flow from one end of the table to the other, with each of us taking turns to spill-the-beans on a pre-decided topic or question that is aimed at exposing deep dark stories that we usually won’t reveal to just anybody. And that, is the basis of what we very affectionately term “girl talk”.

Girly group picture - Me, Jan, Elle, Sook, Sarah.

Then came the time when the focus of our conversation evolved into Valentine’s Day, which at that time, was about a week or so ago. The question was easy enough, and each of us were supposed to to divulge every nitty-gritty detail of what we did on February 14. I only needed one sentence to capture the essence of VDay this year. “He made me cry!”, I blurted out when it was my turn to share. As if on a cue, Jan, Sarah and Sook gasped and went, “Whaaat?!”. Then, right after that Elle quipped, “Wait… tears of joy right?”

I wish, but noooo, my boyfriend really did upset me on a day most girls would happily brag about. I spent the first half of VDay curled up in bed, crying nonstop over a calloused remark made by the boyfriend’s alleged insensitivity. Alleged because he claimed that I had blown the situation out of proportion and misinterpreted his statement because I’m always so negatively-clouded by emotions. Yeah, yeah…

But anyway! It’s hard to stay mad at him; especially when he climb into bed with me, mutter a few “I’m sorrys”, hold me in his arms and watch me cry. As I dab my tears with the sleeve of his T-shirt, I immediatey knew that I was over-reacting. But of course this is one of the things that a girl should never admit. Heh.

But I think I should openly admit the fact that I thought Valentine’s this year would be like no other, since I now have the perfect person to spend the day with. I anticipated flowers - red roses and nothing else, a candlelight dinner, a romantic stroll and then a night capped with a snuggle on the couch… you know all the formalities of the very much ‘commercialized’ VDay. I believe there’s only two ways to celebrate VDay: either you acknowledge it or you don’t. And if you choose to recognise it, commercially exploited or otherwise, why not go all out and make that reservation at that fancy restaurant with the overpriced Valentine’s menu for two? Get ripped off by your local florist with a bouquet of flowers while you’re at it. None of the half-baked or sour grapes approach of ” Valentine’s Day is soooo over-rated!”, so, “we’ll just have our candlelight feast at home, darling”.

Of course you don’t need a Feb 14 to prove your love and affection to your significant other but to say that you intend to celebrate Valentine’s Day already goes to show how much you have been pressured into a world of commercialism. I am quite sure that no one celebrates the day out of a requisite to uphold tradition nor as specified by a certain culture, unlike festivals like Christmas and CNY. So yes, I am still wishing upon an absolutely clichéd Valentine’s Day that I never had. Just out of curiosity, I swear.

(By now I’m sure my boyfriend is trembling at the thought of having to spend a bomb just to satiate his curious “high-maintenance” girlfriend on a “stupid day Hallmark created”. Hehe. Phrases in quote marks in the previous sentence are directly quoted from Mr. BF. But no pressure on you la, baby. Really. :P )

Oh right, back to what I did on VDay after a whole afternoon of being a crybaby. The next best thing after a botched Café Café dinner plan, I figure, was to be a rebel and do the extreme opposite. I’ve always wanted to go to Bagan Lalang to watch the sun set after hearing rave reviews about the place being a photographer’s heaven for amazing sunset shots. So instead of dressing up for a fancy dinner, we hopped into the car dressed in tee and shorts for the one-hour drive to Bagan Lalang. It was quite a letdown when we could hardly catch the setting rays of the sun as it was cloudy and hazy that day. Dinner was good though, alfresco style and candle-lit, at one of the many open-air Malay restaurants by the beach. We had rice with ikan pari, sotong tepung, and tomyam seafood but if you ask the boyfriend, he will tell you that we had risotto, baked salmon, fried calamari and seafood chowder. -_-

‘Nuff said. :)

This is how Bagan Lalang looks like.

Everybody, meet my boyfriend’s wife. Also known as the loud and jinjang (loosely translated as unrefined) car as my dad calls it. Sadly, the car is deformed at the moment after a bad crash.

That would be us!

Fresh seafood at the restaurant.

A portion of our dinner that night.

Our “candlelight” dinner was made possible by this little tealight Jwan brought from home, whose actual purpose was to repel mosquitoes.

Looking at the pictures, it’s safe to say that I have my pictures back, after getting tormented by the possibility that I’d never be able to see them again. Yaaaay! So now I have this desire to give my old photos a little bit of public exposure. Maybe the lack of was what caused them to stage a dramatic mock disappearance.

 7:57 PM     Permalink     5 Comments

Access Denied

I am in utter disbelief. And shock. And pain.

I feel like screaming ’till my lungs wear out. But am refraining myself from doing so.

I just want to drop onto the ground and cry foul.

This is beyond what I can handle.

Please, this can’t be happening.

I am so broken I could kill myself.

As usual, I was uploading all the recent pictures from my camera and do a double uploading by also saving the same set of pictures onto my portable HDD for back-up purposes. Well, not exactly back-up anymore because I delete most, if not all, of the pictures off my laptop/PC thinking that the external HDD was storage enough.

Just minutes ago when I tried clicking onto the folder where I store all my pictures in, I am greeted with this pop-up script that said:

Access is denied.

And a mouseover shows that the folder is empty.

Empty?

All the YEARS of photos, dating way back to 2003 and totaling up to thousands of ‘em… where did they all go?

The worst part? I haven’t got these pictures stored anywhere else.

I’m trembling as I type this.

I can’t even begin to articulate exactly how I feel right now, or even figure out why everything else on the hard disk is perfectly accessible but not my pictures folder.

Omgomgomgomgomg why is this even happening.

I feel so empty right now.

P/S to my beloved photos: If you’re hiding somewhere among the crevices of the circuit boards encased in the HDD, please don’t play hide-and-seek anymore and come back to me okay? I promise you anything and everything if you do.

 3:03 AM     Permalink     8 Comments