it has been a LONG time since I last updated this blog. I have gone to singapore, gone to manila, gone back to singapore and come back to melbourne. and started a new semester too. =.=

anyway i was just looking at ronald’s fiance’s wedding blog (i still can’t figure her name out, but it sounds a bit like katherine) and there was this link to wedding shoes, so i clicked on it and all these really gorgeous shoes popped up on the screen.

one thing i noticed, the wearers of these shoes had equally gorgeous feet. and then i look at my monster feet and feel pissed off.

i remember i had this conversation with lr once.. about how we couldn’t wear charles and keith shoes because our feet would just OOZE out at the sides. which is extremely true, which is also why i have a hard time finding any close-toed shoes. they’ll just give me massive bunyons. which are just disgusting. I have a feeling i’m doomed to wear open shoes for the rest of my life, unless i get shoes that are either extremely ugly but good for wide, monster-feet or custom-make my shoes, or just live with the pain.. which is just plain stupid.

i can live with long feet, at least if they’re narrow they can still fit into shoes without giving massive blisters within 5 minutes.

i wish i had narrower feet :(

It’s a bit strange knowing that the new year is here. welcome 2009. i suppose this is the time to take a look, albeit belated, at 2008. definitely a very very eventful year for me and i’m thankful that it is over. there were many things that happened, some good, some ugly; the bottom line is that this year has changed me. whether it has been in a good way or a bad one remains to be seen in 2009 and the many years to come. 

maybe it’s just me, but there must be a reason why people say you become an adult at 21. it was such a difficult year. relationships-wise, academically.. 

thank God: no more cbp. i pulled through 2nd year with a decent mark. do i know more about medicine? i would like to think that, but i find that the more i learn, the more i do not know.. or rather, the more i realise that i forget. 

excited about going into hospitals next year. :)

i’m home! :) ok i’ve been home for.. um.. almost 2 weeks. but today is a day worth remembering. daryl is teaching mum how to use skype. ben has given up. che has given up. eunice has LONG given up, and furthermore, all of us are inaccessible. so since daryl stays just down the road so he can be called up in times of crisis. HAHA. and ben is extremely happy because the black hole of electronics has miraculously released him from its grasp.. at least partially. HAHA :) i would love to see the look on his face when he sees that mum has added him to her skype contact list :D

there’s no place like home :D

hello i haven’t been back here in a while. i’m currently using eunice’s computer because she’s sick and she’s trying to call her office, where the people report to work at 12pm when it’s supposed to start at 9. so she’s sitting at home, feeling sick and feverish and they are not answering the phone. she’s actually next to me right now, bemoaning the fact that nobody is answering the phone. :)

mom makes very thin tea. it tastes like hot water with colour.

Yesterday mom and I went to town and parked outside the fairmont, the hotel previously known as the westin stamford, (kind of like _____, the artist formerly known as prince. =.=) was a blue ferrari. In all honesty, it did not look like a ferrari at all. It looked like any ordinary car. And I was telling mom that it was strange that the ferrari was blue, since they are usually red, yellow or black. mom concluded that it probably belonged to some old dude who was trying to be young but not too young, and flashy, but not too flashy. so he ended up with an old man-ish blue ferrari.

mom and i had an excellent lunch of hokkien mee and beef hor fun. :) good stuff.

i’m feeling stinky, disgusting, oily. but as a side note, prince caspian is gorgeous.

i got the email as well, but the way eunice shredded the email to bits was fantastic and i thought i’d copy and paste it here. i laughed so hard, i cried.

‘Have a history teacher explain this—– if they can.

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946. Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860. John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.

Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.
Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.
Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.
Both Presidents were shot in the head

Now it gets really weird.

Lincoln ’s secretary was named Kennedy.
Kennedy’s Secretary was named Lincoln .
 Both were assassinated by Southerners. Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson.
Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln , was born in 1808.
Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln , was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939.
Both assassins were known by their three names.
Both names are composed of fifteen letters.

Now hang on to your seat.

Lincoln was shot at the theatre named ‘Ford.’ Kennedy was shot in a car called ‘ Lincoln ‘ made by ‘Ford.’ Lincoln was shot in a theatre and his assassin ran and hid in a warehouse.
Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin ran and hid in a theatre.
Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.

And here’s the kicker…
A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe , Maryland A week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe.

Creepy huh? Send this to as many people as you can, cause: Hey, this is one history lesson most people probably will not mind reading!’

now this is obviously just coincidence or mind-blowing ignorance.

Firstly John F Kennedy was elected the 35th president of the United States in 1961 and Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th president in 1861. get the facts right.

snipers and assassins usually go for the head because that’s the fastest way to kill some one, obviously. so there’s nothing significant about them both being shot in the head. lots of people in history have been shot in the head.

Both presidents were really famous and I would think well loved to an extent that borders deification. Thus the assassins who killed them would be infamous and would be known by their full names as are many famous or infamous people. let’s have examples: franklin delano roosevelt, napoleon bonaparte, Gaius julius caesar, and many more.

as for both being succeeded by Johnsons, Johnson is the second most common last name in the United States so I don’t see what’s so special about both presidents being succeeded by people with the last name Johnson, especially since both johnsons were vice presidents.

and so what if both people were assassinated by southerners? firstly the south has so many people there’s an equal chance of an assassin coming from there as other parts of the states. in fact there is a much greater chance compared to a place like new england. furthermore, the civil rights pursued by Lincoln and Kennedy in favour of african americans in the US pissed the southerners off. They liked having their slaves, and even after slavery was abolished the local courts and systems of governance in the south were still very much prejudiced in favour of white people even when they committed crimes against black people. so it’s not surprising that the assassins were southerners in either case because they were the ones that were the most pissed off by Lincoln trying to abolish slavery or kennedy trying to improve life for black people in the US.

The probability of both presidents being killed on a Friday isn’t that large. roughly 2%. before you jump out of your seat shouting about how there must be some kind of mystery here because it sounds like a tiny probability, let’s just say that probability is not the only factor here. Friday might be a more convenient day for an assassin to go after a president if he’s more likely to make public appearances on those days. It’s the end of the working week for most people as well, which might be the reason why public appearances might be scheduled on those days.

as for the car being called ‘lincoln,’ there are so many things named after famous people like washington apples. for god’s sake, if some one was killed while eating a washington apple, it doesn’t imply they were some how freakily related to george washington in the least.

ok I’m getting tired of tackling this thing. the only creepy thing in here is the level of ignorance and the eagerness to find some thing unexplainable even though it clearly is. who ever wrote this was an idiot.

I am home! The past couple of days have been pretty crazy. On tuesday morning, I woke up at 430am so that I could catch the dandenong shuttle to the airport at 545am. Any later and I probably would have missed my flight due to morning traffic. So I took shu’s car and drove to eugene’s place and picked him up and we went back to my place and waited for the shuttle at the bus stop right outside my place.

When we got to the airport, the check in line wasn’t even open yet =.= so we were waiting in line for a while and we checked all our stuff in. This is the first time I’m coming home with such light luggage. my bag weighed less than 20kg. Last year I think I was hitting 30+kg each time I flew. I was really lucky this time around. Dad had some miles that were going to expire, so he used it to bump me up to business and so eugene and i went to the lounge to eat brekky. there wasn’t much there though and at first the lady at the counter didn’t want to let the both of us in, but she said that since there weren’t many people inside, we could go in and when it got crowded we had to leave. and we were wondering how crowded it could be at 8am. so we ate and watched the news, read the paper, fell asleep and then we went to the gate.

it was really nice cuz i could stick my feet all the way out in front of me and i still had room in front :) and the food came in courses and was pretty yummy! :) and i was exploiting the in flight entertainment. watched the other boleyn girl, 27 dresses and serendipity and an episode of how i met your mother. woohoo good stuff. :D

so here i am back home in blazing hot singapore and enjoying every minute of being back home. :D i’ve had my prata, gone for a buffet.. now there’re 10 million other places to go and eat and i have to go eat at chomp chomp with rachel and chun yi :) -grin- awesome stuff. hee hee.

The past 3 or 4 days have been pretty crazy. I have been going to the city every day just to walk around and I have seen more of the city in the past 2 days than I have in the past 1.5 years.

But before talking about the post exam stuff, i shall share how amazing 1812 overture is. i have the one by the london symphony orchestra or something and after i got the piece, i have been listening to it on my way to the library every morning. it’s 15 minutes plus long and after listening to it, i feel so motivated to study, especially at the end with the bells ringing and the cannons going off in the background. ooh damn nice. :) i felt ready to take on the world after listening to it. it’s as if i was no longer sleepy :D heeeee.

On Saturday, shu, xf, wd, joyee and i went to the crown casino for a lunch buffet at sante. it was pretty ok i guess.. ended up stuffing myself silly. Well, it wasn’t as bad as the other time when I went for hot pot with damien, paul and kw when I couldn’t even walk back to the car. Anyway after the lunch, wd, xf and joyee went to the botanic gardens. and shu and i were thinking: who goes to the botanic gardens in winter? it was cloudy outside and it was freezing, so after they left, the both of us took the opportunity to look for chai’s and xf’s birthday presents.

while we were walking around the shopping arcade of the casino, we looked across the yarra and saw the melbourne aquarium and we thought that it might be a good idea to go and check the place out. while we were walking across the bridge, we deicded that we shall not just check the place out, but actually go visit the aquarium like tourists.

We looked at all the exhibits and one of them was about creepy critters. I have no idea why there were critters in an aquarium, but they were interesting to see anyway. A lot of them looked absolutely disgusting; there were roaches and all kinds of bugs and spiders. At one exhibit, it was a tank on a stand and on the base of the tank, there were these dome-like curvatures in the glass so people could stick their head up into the dome when they crawled underneath. shu went first and started going ew ew ew ew when she was in the first dome and when i looked in, there were all these eels swimming around the dome and writhing and looking gross and i also went ew ew ew ew and at the second dome (which shu skipped) i looked up and saw all these dead fish caught in some of the rocks lining the base and it was so disgusting.

We wanted to see the funnel web spider, which we learned about in pharmaco last year because it has very toxic venom. we peered through the glass.. and peered.. and peered some more and we still couldn’t see it, upon which i asked shuyu, “is it dead?”

then we went to the underwater world-like exhibit, only without a travellator and took all kinds of really stupid photos there, like kissing the fish, looking horrified when sharks swam past.. the sting rays there were HUGE. at least 50 sambal sting rays could be cooked with one sting ray. it was gorgeous though; seeing the fish swim. i remember che saying that it was very therapeutic looking at fish swim. i think that that is why people have fish tanks as their screen savers.

last night i went to the city to have dinner with shu en, hui en, eunice and swe swe. it was so nice being together with rg/rj band people. after the salmon, shu en was saying that we should do something before starting dessert.. like putting up an impromptu musical and each of us could sing our parts. haha. 2 flautists, 1 clarinettist, 1 tubist and a percussionist.. hee hee. i enjoyed that dinner. hui en and i were wondering whether only black and white cows produced milk. i can’t remember why the topic came up, but apparently, the brown ones are more for meat and the black and white ones are more for milk.

you learn something new every day.

argh i can’t wait to go home and sleep in my bed and see the parents and the siblings and the friends :) :) :) -exciteds-

i’m all alone at home now. as in, in my house in melbourne because shuyu has left for singapore and has probably already touched down. actually i think she has touched down about 2 hours ago. lucky ducky. and xf is off at the great ocean road with wd and joyee and i’m home alone blasting fix you by coldplay, which is an awesome song. chris martin rocks.

ew i just burped and i tasted my dinner. disgusting.

i realised that my entries make me sound manic, where i keep on jumping from topic to topic and there’s no particular train of thought. pressured speech (or typing) and disjointed ideas.

ugh i’m sleepy. i think i’ll go to bed. i’ll be home soon! :D

-cackles- the exam is over! after a whole month (I think) of hard core mugging in the library followed by some more hard core mugging in the deakin study room, the day that i have been working towards is finally over and a new day has begun, retarded as it may sound,

This exam has been a huge drain on me and my diet. My face has exploded in pimples, which are disgusting, and I’ve been eating so much! :( I need to do something about my diet. According to Jasmin, pimples on the face indicate a bad diet while pimples on the forehead indicate stress. I have less pimples on my forehead than on my face, which means that my lousy diet is in a more dire state than my stress levels.

As for the exam, I got owned by the microbiology and diagnosis questions. But enough about that. It’s over and tomorrow DFO awaits.

Last night while I was talking to mom, we had an interesting conversation regarding workload in year 2.

Me: Mom, this semester has been so stressful. I mean. It’s only half a year’s worth of stuff and I’m already going crazy.
Mom: Iris. You know what you have to do.

And at this point in the conversation, I thought that she was going to tell me something along the lines of Iris, when you come back you should take a good break before you start next semester. Then at least you’l be fresh! Right?

WRONG.

Mom: Iris. You know what you have to do. You have no more time. You should start studying again as soon as possible and get a good head start. Then you won’t be so stressed out.

I was thinking, “WHAT?!AAwwwwwwwwwww… :(“

Ah well. tomorrow i’ll be going for breakfast in the city and then shopping! i have carbohydrate loaded for marathon shopping tomorrow. hee hee hee. -rubs hands-

oh yes and a bunch of us went for moomba water festival with really nice fireworks. here’s a picture.l