cranky old b*tch

it's already almost 10 saturday morning, and i'm getting desperate to find sth ermm.. productive to do today.

it looks like a lovely weather outside... which is not a suprise. being a total weather bitch as it is, of course the weather's good when we don't plan anything. we actually planned to visit this shoshone falls, 3 hrs drive away today but found out it'll be thunderstorm shower at that place.

the ironic thing is, the rain will stop and be all sunny and beautiful on monday.

typical.

i mean who needs the sun when you're surrounded by those lab walls in the office? it could very well be a tornado outside and i'd still be probing wafers.

ok this might not be entirely true, but hey, as if the tornadoes will actually reach this northwest land...

3 weeks and counting. life here has been pretty good except the fact that these locals here like to speak with closed mouth. seriously! they open their mouth like 50% smaller of normal ppl when they speak, you know, like those cowboys always do. you'd think they had gold in their mouth they're afraid to spill out.

it's such pain in the ear for me so i have to ask them to echo everytime they mumbled sth. they must think i'm such a short deaf asian or sth by now...

well, i'm a foreigner so what do i know? at least i speak english, unlike those ppl that sang star spangled banner in spanish that caused uproar recently in the states.

i don't know what some ppl are thinking. as mush as i despise bush, as least he speaks some sense criticising this. i mean, national anthem sung in another language? isn't that insulting? what's after this? change the flag colour to red and yellow with a bull in the middle?

but i'm not gonna fret about that as much. i have a city to explore. few days ago i purposely overshot my apartment after work, thought of trying new roads to see where they led. then suddenly this road i was on became a long stretch of one way street and i panicked.

it's hard enough to keep other cars at distance, then i have to remember my barings? i'm never good at this. so i'm thinking of giving it another try venturing today. the aim? wal-mart which is 11 miles away.

after all, what can be a better time venturing when your petrol is being paid for? i didn't even pay attention to those oil price hike or energy saving crap they kept on discussing nowadays on national tv. for me, it's like in awhole another world.

oh, the live score featuring all spanish nadal vs almagro in open seat godo tennis semifinal that i kept open on my pc has just ended. nadal won his 46th consecutive games on clay, which kinda made my day! not that i'll receive anything out of this other than, well, happiness when your favourite wins, but still.... i'm happy!

perhaps, this could be that productive thing that i wanted to do today!


...ed

an affair to remember. or not...

i'm not in a good mood.

i just called D just now and i got wrong number, even though i know it was D who answered. it was pretty obvious i don't know who was this person kidding.

that just confirmed my suspicion when my few recent attempts for communication failed. unanswered mails are still ok but when sms goes unreplied, you kinda get the hitch sth's gone wrong.

what is it with distance? the moment 2 ppl be apart, whatever that is holding between them cracks, and go into the drain. like it never happened at all. and this is not the first time. last time i got sms saying 'i'm already attached don't bother me' sms after being away for 3 months.

this just proved that certain relationships are just based on physical encounters. as simple as that. i mean, that is only the difference, right? ppl can still get emotional intercourse while being 8000 km apart.

the thing is, some ppl do manage to hide this fact brilliantly. they can be super nice and caring to you face to face, body to body, giving you false hope that everything's heaven but the fact is they have selective memory the moment they realized you won't be nearby to fulfill their certain needs.

well, not that it really matters to me. after all, this was just an affair.

an affair!

affairs are not meant to be long lasting. in fact, it's better that it's short-lived so that it won't disrupt real relationships. after all, affairs are the hottest for the first few times and get colder as time goes on. with D, it was just a hang-out, or rather hang-outs.

i'm not gonna be disappointed at all because of this. in fact, it was stupid just to let this affects my mood. i mean, is it worth it? yeah, D was there when i was alone and needed company before, and yeah D kinda changed my perception of star wars and watching it from the sofa won't be the same thing again, but those were it. full stop.

but still, having sth is always better than not having anything. this must be the lesson i got from all these years living in s'pore. greedy and never satisfied.

which is why in some way i'm grateful for this temporary work attachment in the states, where i can tune back my negative attitudes to being a better human being again. everyone knows those americans are god's greatest creation ever.

i mean, just look at their leader. he can tell there were WMDs in iraq eventhough they could not be seen by naked eyes or satellite. such a superb skill. now when he says iran is building nuclear weapons, iran is building nuclear weapons. in fact, it's a matter of time before he actually realized that ahmadinejad is actually osama with his beards shortened and trimmed.

so i'm sure there's a lot i can pick-up from this great great land. hey, i even managed to pick up driving skills here thanks to the big roads and absence of reckless drivers.

if i'm lucky, i could pick an affair or two here too. who knows???


...ed

salty lake and flaming dam

i watched charmed the other day, and there was this part when paige summoned this 'lady inspriration' to give, well... inspiration to this to-be boyfriend so that he could finish writing some letters of recommendation he was assigned to and went out for a date with her.

right now i swear my 'lady inspiration' must be sleeping from jet lag. i have lots of stuff in my head to write about but they just don't come out smoothly in words. like the words just failed me or sth.

suddenly i found the sofa is very tempting than this dining table where i had my laptop. i like to curl up with my blanket on the sofa with tv remote in my left hand and agatha christie novel on the other. i expect the moment i lay my back on it, i'll forget all the horror i faced while practising driving just now.

this colleague was kind enough to 'put his life in jeopardy' tutoring me how to drive. well, maybe not to that extreme considering i just went round and round at tha apartment car park. but alas, it takes gut with my horrible handling of the steering. it was like 10 years ago when i last driving.

i must say, driving is not really my thing. it's just human nature, we always have sth we just find it hard to get hold to.

just like some ppl are really not into skiing. you can beg them to go but for them it's just a waste of time and probably money too. but when this colleague asked if i wanted to go, i said yes right away. i love skiing.

so we went to this ski resort which is 2.5 hours away from our place in boise, idaho it's called brundage ski resort. i was actually quite suprised the ski place is still open considering now is already mid-april.

turned out not only we had enough snow for skiing, it was snowing like crazy the whole day there. one time i took the ski lift to the mountain top and didn't have the gut to ski down.

before you judge me, think about it rationally. the visibility was bad, and the slope was steep at some places. what if i fall down and knocked unconcious? i expect i'd be covered in snow in less than 10 minutes. it could be life threatening you know.

plus i haven't been able to ski properly because of the big ski board. i felt like i was the bigfoot lost in johore forest.

but on and all, i quite enjoyed the experience. this is a different kind of excitement than salt lake city and flaming gorge in utah trip we went to last weekend. that was filled with breathtaking sceneries, especially the salty lake and the red canyon, which compensated the long car ride we needed to go through to get there. it was 5 hours drive, and that, mind you, was with speeding speed. the feeling of being in a speeding car was in fact, another kind of thrill altogether.

that utah trip and the ski trip in just over a week, i am a bit impressed with myself. of course it'll be good if i progress that much at work too. i must say i am still in the learning curve in office. let's just say, the situation is a bit complicated.

well, i guess i need 'lady inspiration' more than ever in the office instead.



...ed

birthday bash and then gone

the past months has come and go like a blink of an eye. one minute you're writing, spending life leasurely in your 20s, then suddenly you found yourself in your 30s and counting wrinkles below your eyes.

not to mention that i have wrinkles under my eyes, of course. or else, biotherm anti rides peel has lots to answer.

one main evidence is the birthday bash i had last weekend. i actually planned it to be kinda house warming cum farewell bbq party on my part (as i'll be leaving for the states to work for awhile), but eventually it became wilder at the end.

wilder as in my friends tried to trick me and throw me inside the pool. furthermore, i got the birthday cake thrown at my face too. those are not the thing ppl usually do to old ppl with wrinkles, right?

exactly.

so i had a great time then. now have to compile those home videos taken on that day and turn it into a nice memory collection. it'll be a lot easier if i have a pensieve to store my thoughts and memories a la in harry potter movies but that just showed that some dreams would be too good to come true.

then i had to prepare for my trip to idaho. that means, spending some time with CY. while the most happened with DV was just phone calls. which i was glad for, as i came to my senses not to do anything stupid.

oh and also kissing my fishes good bye, for a moment. i do hope they'll still be alive and well when i return. i have 7 now, 3 lion-head oranda, 2 fantails, 1 pearl scale, and i just added a black ryukin to make it lucky-7 (one of the oranda, truffle, died within one month in the tank).

it's weird thinking that a moment ago i was busy changing aquarium water for the last time until cy come and clean it again 2 weeks later, and now i'm about 8000km away in a foreign land.

foreign beautiful land that is. i always see housing area in the states from tv, like wisteria lane in desperate housewives, where the houses have big, well-maintained lawn, no fence separating from one another, big roads etc. now i'm actually living in such neighbourhood.

of course minus those desperate ladies. it kinda like a deja-vu, seeing a place so familiar but yet never been in one before. i'm glad i could enjoy it after receiving such a shock at portland airport clearance.

get this. i'm holding a US passport, made in 2001, with only two stamps inside - 09/09/2001, and 15/09/2001. and the fact that my middle name is 'bin' doesn't help either, i might as well wearing a turban with osama bin laden signature on it.

it was scary. i was held back by the security and my things were inspected 100%. i really meant 100%. they actually emptied my wallet, checked files inside my laptop, and inspected the contents of my thumb drive. i was just supprised they didn't check what i could potentialy hide in between my butt cheeks.

that was the first time i felt like i was a criminal. all the thing i did was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. well, i guess coincidental is not really a word to explain things nowadays.

which was why while i was dragging my legs towards the next connection flight's gate, being in a total shocked state after the long interrogation, wishing i have someone to talk to, i saw this colleague in one of the restaurant's window, eating.

i mean what are the chances? like this is all fated. i mean, what's friend when they couldn't be there when u need them most. he was in transit, which i knew beforehand, but never made plan to meet up. talking to him kinda made myself relaxed again.

though i don't know how long i will have this fobia of being interrogated. like any moments fbi or cia could crashed on my door, and swat team coming down in ropes from my ceilings.

anyway, for now, i want to just worry about how the office ppl turns out tomorrow when i meet them first time. i hope they would turn up as nice ppl, letting me come back from work on time everyday. well even if that's not gonna happen, at least i can be rest assured they won't ask me questions like which street did i stay when i visited new york in 2001, which was like a gazillion years ago to me.

or plan to throw me inside the swimming pool.


...ed