clean linen

Yay! Julie's FINALLY 17!!! In summary, One-third had a birthday dinner at Fish&Co the Glasshouse, finishing up with a delicious cookies and cream ice-cream cake from Gelare's and doing a little walking and photo-hunting. We even got the 2-man band to sing Julie the birthday song, although it turned out a little weird-sounding because it wasn't the conventional birthday song we were expecting. I also think that if we were in our uniforms, the other people in the restaurant would have probably called our school to complain because we sure were creating a ruckus. We also were hogging the table and ate something (Recall: Gelare's ice-cream cake) NOT from Fish&Co! Gasp! ;) Let's just look at the photos... Shots we took before the food we ordered arrived... TDT! The cheerful birthday girl! Now, we fast forward to AFTER dinner, when we eat the cake! :) The cutting of cake! One-third group photo Now on to photo-hunting! After seeing this shot, Bella said she lo...

If you haven't noticed, there's a large gap of about 2 weeks of which I did not blog about. Well, that is because I was in Australia with my parents and sister from the 8-18th of December. It was most unfortunate that my brother was unable to go because of some NS stuff. Well, in this entry, I'm just going to tell you our itenerary and then in the following entries, I will just show the highlights of this trip to Australia. Firstly, just some facts. Out of the approximate 10 days spent in Australia, we spent 7 days in Tasmania and 3 days in Melbourne. It's supposed to be summer over there but in Tasmania, it was windy, rainy and cold, seemed nothing like summer. In Melbourne, we may have started to see the desert flies, a big sign of summer... however, it still was windy and rainy in Melbourne. But one very good aspect of the summer season is that the days are REALLY long. The sun only begins to set at about 7+, 8pm. One more fact, Tasmania and Melbourne are 3 hours ahe...

Here you see the amount of presents the Chua family has received during this year's Christmas. I must say though, that most of the presents you see here belong to my parents. And being displayed in the centre of the photo is our very own Christmas tree! Last year, somebody gave us a box of ornaments as a Christmas present. My sister then came up with the fabulous idea to decorate the "twigs" in our living room. Ever since we moved into this house, we've never bought a new Christmas tree because it just cannot fit into the design of my house. This year, Tina Mama helped me with the hanging of ornaments! :) I daresay that this is the most unique Christmas tree yet! ;)

Wow! I can't believe it's Christmas again! Although I must say, this year's Christmas was much more eventful for me compared to last year's Christmas. Last year, all I remember doing was watching TV by myself at night, while my siblings had their own plans and parties to attend, and my parents slept at their usual time (which is considered rather early). Then going to bed as if the next day was just ANOTHER day. This time, however, I spent Christmas eve in Church and then the 17-year-olds in my church proceeded to my house for a movie, wanting to do the countdown together. We DID watch a movie (Ocean's Eleven on Channel 5) but we didn't do the countdown because we were all busy watching Ocean's Eleven. So our countdown party wasn't REALLY a countdown party... Friday night, I had a fun time with my cell as we ate dinner at the Han's cafe (restaurant?) at the National Library, then strolled to the Esplanade for photo-taking purposes. We even caught a m...

It has been 13 weeks since my brother first entered NS . Now he's out! My dad and I left the house at about 1.45pm for Pasir Ris bus terminal. From there, we took a shuttle bus to the ferry terminal so that we could reach Pulau Tekong. Everything went quite smoothly and the parade began on the dot. 4pm sharp. After the guest-of-honour arrived, in marched the 4 companies of soldiers who were graduating from BMT today, of which Falcon, my brother's company was one of them! Spot my brother! He's right next to the flag-bearer. After the speech and review by the guest-of-honour, the 4 companies marched out. Immediately afterwards, they jogged in without their caps. Then came the meaningful part where family members were allowed onto the parade square to help the soldiers wear their caps. Here's a shot of a proud father putting on the cap of his one and only son. :) When all of us were back in our seats, all 4 companies combined. It was quite a sight. On the signal, all the s...

If you haven't watched it, you NEED to watch it. Because it's so entertaining, you'll go home at the end of it feeling so much more youthful, relaxed... entertained! This musical has a lot of local jokes that I think us Singaporeans will appreciate the most. The fairies are the most hilarious. They're all men in women's clothing so it was most interesting when they sang "We're happy and gay" in a song. They even tweaked the famous "Diamonds are forever" to say it as "Fairies are forever". The fourth, evil fairy was played by a caucasian lady. At the very end of the musical, they asked the fourth fairy why she did all the evil things she did and she said, "Because I'm always forgotten. I'm tired of being part of the OTHERS". Of which the 3 fairies replied, "But we always thought you were too busy to join us! We've never meant to exclude you. We know we must EMBRACE FOREIGN TALENT!". Ok, it's not as...

What is Kingdom Settlers? It's this year's Young People's Ministry (equivalent to Youth Ministry) camp! It was something new and VERY exciting because we had ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY campers since it was a combined camp for the Teens, Youth and Young Adult zones. Usually, we have separate camps that reach about 70 campers at most. This time around, it was a hundred MORE. I was part of the committee, planning one game slot called Time Chaser. Basically, it consisted of 4 stations each located at different parks near the church so the groups had to run from place to place because they only had 20 minutes to play and "travel". Oh by the way, the games got them dirty, they smelt ALOT like vinegar at the very end of Time Chaser. ;) I think it was well received and enjoyed very much as from the evaluation forms collected at the very end of the camp, there were many campers who circled 8-10 for Time Chaser (1 being the worst and 10 being best). Although I was completely d...