You can get what you want

not always... but good things do happen.

last night (should be this early morning) I receive the best surprise of the year... or rather the only surprise in many years. Non of my friends have successfully given me a surprise like what M did last night. Here goes the story...

It was the usual girlie night out at our usual place for drinks and party... and C received an sms from M who is studying in Melbourne. We were pleasantly surprise to hear from her... knowing our dearest science geek, she hardly ever maintains correspondence during the semester. As the night progress, in the midst of all the drinking and merrying, M suddenly appeared and she shouted to us... I FINALLY MADE IT!!!

K, C and myself took a few seconds to react to her presence...and we screamed till our voices cracked.... we hugged and jumped for joy... we knew what she meant. It's definitely a piece of good news. When we finally calmed down... news of her presence settled into our heads... K said to M that it's 7th month now to give us such surprises in a pub.. where lightings create other visuals... erhmmm.... The crazy gal only arrived an hour ago from Melbourne and she could not wait to break the news to us. It's also undeniably the best timing too - in the presence of 3 of us - in a party ambience

At 25 she decided to go back to school and it's not even to do her masters but she is going to Medical school. After doing bachelor of science for 2.5 years on building her science foundation, she finally made it to Med school. And also one of the prestigious med school in Dublin. Now at 28, she's going to med school... and by the time she graduates she's gonna be 33. It will take her another 1-2 years before she becomes full-flege doctor...

M... I simply have to salute to you!

well... she's also another classic case of working very hard to get what you want.... and it's true that you can get what you want.

You can't always get what you want

I know my life has never been smooth and very often I fought and work very hard for the things I want. I know I can't have the best of both worlds... I just hope that at least one of them will happen way I want it.

Guess I should not have such high expectations... or at least I should be prepared for both worst scenarios...ie back up plan.

i'm still waiting for the outcome....sigh

Joshua Alexander Schmeja is born

Yeah!!!.... finally after nine months of waiting.... the little Schmeja has decided to pop out to see the world on 25 August 2005 at 3.05pm australia time. A day earlier than I expected ... cos it's his mummy's birthday tomorrow... I actually guess that mummy would want baby to have same birth date as her...well, it's close enough to celebrate both birthdays together in future... and more reasons for me to visit Melbourne in August.

our dearest Mrs Schmeja refused to tell us whether the baby was boy or girl.... and she has successfully kept mum about the sex of the baby from her family and friends for 4-5 months. Not even close buddies knew. No matter how I coaxed and cajoled... she simply refused.

in her recent photos updating us on her pregnancy, my guess (hmmm....i observed her tummy through photos) is that it's gonna be a boy... and true enough

and strangely... 2 or 3 days ago, an old friend sms me saying that she gave birth to a girl too... and her name is Isabel Desiree Sivanesan.

earlier this month, my uni hostel neighbour sms me too... anouncing her son Aden Lee's birth too.

in all coincidence, I receive all news via sms... it's amazing how short messaging over mobile phones has evolved to deliver all kinds of messages... simply fantastic technology ever invented...

STOP spam sms

I can't believe spam mails have reached sms... I actually received a strange chinese sms from a China mobile number this morning.

and it goes like this in English...

dear user,
congratulations to your mobile number! You've won the China Yuan Zhong Corp's second prize of USD190K. Please contact us at this number 008613860739652 to claim your prizes.

it sounded really nice if that's REAL.. USD190K is approximately SGD323K....hmmm what can I do with this amount?...thinking of my wish list...

I know all of you will probably say...quit dreaming, stupid!

but this spamming is so getting out of hand that it's really annoying.

can someone do anything to stop this...?

the funny moments

I know I'm sharing my sailing training in bits... but I can't help it since I also received photos of the training in bits too.

To add to my blogs... here's the first one.


Here's what we do in part B - we drink and chill onboard at the end of every day's sail.

And there were lots of massagings too...











And there were dreadful moments of long waits too... as a result of organisers' logistical screwed up.









The most recent ones that I received from my team mates are the funny ones... they were totally hilarious but I'm too embarrassed to show them all.

but here's one that my team mate caught me in action...


yes...that's me nursing a hangover in laundry shop.













dun laugh.... and thankfully they didn't put me into that large washing machine!!


















At the parties in Jersey, where we had the most drinks and fun...



first... it was the snake dance















second was the sexy dancers...















erhmmm... that's it for now!!

non-sailing moments

I was not thinking of blogging today but I was just looking at the calendar and realised that the round the worlders have left Singapore for their last training and also pre-race preparation. On 18 September in Liverpool, all the boats will be flagged off for the race. It's all happening too soon. It just daunted on me that 6 months had flown by just like this. Memories of the first press conference announcing the 21 STB sponsored crew were still fresh in my mind.

Mike's call on Friday and looking at the latest photo album shared by Shin Shin also brought back my memories of training too. He brought back latest gossips for us too. He did the 3 part trainings in 3 separate occasions unlike myself and group that I went with. We did the crazy 3-weeks back-to-back at one go. Mike was in my part B training and he was the one who brought the Singapore's Yeo's can curry and rendang for us. After one week of training, we missed our food so badly. All thanks to him that we had some local flavours to our English meals.

Where food is closest to our heart in our culture... it's tough to eat eggs, bacon, sausages, sandwiches and pasta all the time. The 'ang mos' probably thought the bunch of Singaporeans are mad when we are always talking about food. They probably didn't realise the food culture here. Well... being singapore ambassadors, our job is to promote Singapore and we started with food. In the last part of our training, we were the only boat that had the most interesting meals. In this training, all the Singaporeans and 'Uniquely Singapore' international based crew were sailing and living together for one week. We had lots of fun cooking our meals. Too many creations to remember but the best that we ever had was mediterranean rice with vege curry and naan. This was the last meal that we cooked at the end of training.

Besides the food, we've probably created a reputation of being party animals and a crazy bunch of crew. The funny things is we never really joined the rest of the other crew in pubs to drink bt we still had that reputation... What I can is that... we drank quite a lot amongst ourselves. We gossiped a lot, chatted and massaged.

In fact, we probably had lots of reputation already... one being the only Asian boat; two being small in size compared to the big ang mos; three being a team that comprised of more females than the other boats (I'm not sure of the exact ratio of genders in the other boats but it does look like Singapore have more females onboard at least for some legs)... and more reputations to be created as we sail...who knows???!!!

The hottest gossip now is that we have a couple within the team now....yes, so it's kindda become SDU too... and it's probably the first and the last... or have I spoke to soon?

cross roads

yet again... I've come to a junction of cross roads....

shall I turn right or right... go straight or stay put??

Hopefully the verdict will be out next week. It'll either have another change in my life or I'll just continue to live with what I have.

the comfort now and the fear of uncertainties of future.... whatever it is...a decision has to be made and live with that decision.