*/

Memory.. Little threads that hold life's patches of meaning together. ~ Mark Twain

Thursday, June 30, 2005

Haaaaaacccchhhhhhheeeeeeeee!

*Sniffle* Being sick ain't a fun thing to do. I've got a 'teruk' case of sinus this whole week. I don't know if this is an 'achievement' to be sick yet still able to go to work and not take a single MC since hm.. Early this year..

Health is of course definitely more important than money. I totally agree with that. When one is unwell, how can one concentrate on his/her work, therefore, how to earn money, right. It's bad enough that I've been having sinus for, gosh, almost 14 years now. Everyday without fail, I would be sniffling throughout the morning, and if I'm unlucky, I'll be sniffling all the way till bedtime. Quite annoying also lar, if you keep hearing this person sniffing every 5 seconds for the whole day. I've tried medicine prescribed by many doctors, most of them never worked.. Clarinase helps but not all the time, so is 'wallap-ing' down a pint of Haagen-Dazs' Belgian Chocolate (It was supposed to help 'freeze' the leaking nose, but what the heck, good enough an excuse to splurge on ice-cream, right. And it was oh, so yummy!). Worse still, I heard that sinus is incurable. Really ar? *Sighz*

Very 'cham' lar.. I go everywhere with droppy and watery eyes, sense of smell also 'tergendala' (I could still smell durian though *lol*). Hard to concentrate on the road and during work. Sometimes I really feel like doing surgery for the nose, don't know if it helps or not. How ah? What can I do?

Cannot 'tahan' anymore.. Off to bed now.. *Sniffle*

Friday, June 24, 2005

#taylors Bash In 1997

Wow.. Sounds like the PPS birthday bash was a whole lot of fun! Too bad, I didn't go for it. Then again, I wouldn't have known anyone there, nor anyone know who the heck am I. Hehe..

The bash reminded me of the IRC days when we had a huuuuge gathering at Sunway Pyramid back in 1997. Boy, that was, what, 8 years ago!! It was probably the one and only #taylors gathering we had, we practically swarmed the whole A&W and the area in front of it. Yeah, I was in the #taylors channel.. Did you use to chat there too? I don't know if I was a famous kaki in that channel, but I remember being one of the Ops (Okay, so mayyyyyybe I was famous back then.. *lol*). It was fun having the power to kick or ban people out (especially those awfuly annoying ones and those who loves to flood the channel!). Oh, and how could I forget, the power to mess around with the bots. Muahahaha...

Anyway, like how the PPS bash was, it was exciting to meet the people behind their nicks. "Oh.. So you're so-and-so!!" And also very interesting to see how people react. "Oh.. You look errrhm... Different.. I thought you would look _____ (fill in the blank)". It's funn how we've never met certain people before, yet we seemed so darn close-knitted in the virtual world. Like, maybe you were lepakking in a 24-hour Nasi Kandar stall, and this stranger was sitting on a table beside yours, sipping Teh O Ais Limau (I'm still pondering how Iced Lemon Tea can sound so high class, but Teh O Ais Limau doesn't, yet they're both the same!). Perfect strangers yet in the virtual world, you've probably traded your upmost secrets and all!

Ahhh.. What am I crapping about.. All in all, in events like these, you get to meet soooo many new friends. in fact, most of the people I met in college were through #taylors. I hope the same thing goes for everyone who attended the PPS bash. Was browsing through all the photos in other blogs, and well.. It's really nice to be able to place their nicks with a face. :)

Happy Birthday, PPS. A little late, but hopefully, better late than never! And also congratulations to the winners!!

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

*Knock knock* Who's This?

Ohayo! For those who wonders who the heck am I hiding behind this nick Lil' Patchee, you've come to the right link. :)

By the way, my Christian name is nowhere near Pat nor my surname anywhere near Chee. The blog is actually named after my bear, Patchee (yes, I name my bear.. I love him to bits, kay!!) Neh.. The bear in my avatar, that one lar.. From Me To You. Cute or not? I don't know if the owner is just as adorable though! *lol*

I see life is like how my bear is, formed out from patches - relationships, incidents, memories, regrets.. These life's patches are what make me who I am today. Hence, this space is for me to write about them as I walk through the journey of life. Perhaps it will also serve as a reflection of the past to look into the future. ;)

And oh, feedbacks are always welcomed!!

Hello World!

A new nickname, a new blog address, but with the same content.

I've been blogging for more than 2 years now. Since then I've moved to 3 different addresses but still under Blog*Spot (no $$ to host my own la).

My first blog was publicly known to my friends and colleagues. It was fun writing and having them read my entries. But it's not so fun if I rant about them. I didn't want things to go ugly.. Just in case!

So I moved, became anonymous and created this
. I didn't have to worry about offending anyone, at least not to people around me. Even if I did, they wouldn't know it was me, but of someone with the nick Lil' Miz Sunshine. The nick itself was also a problem. I leeched it from the character in Little Miss and Mr. Men. And it's so unoriginal to sign my comments as "sunshine".

After 6 months of contemplation, I've finally decided to get a new one and stick with this address. No more moving around. This is the final one. I'll be known as Lil' Patchee from now on. The reason for the nick will be found here. All entries prior to today were ported from the previous blog, coz who knows, one fine day, I might just delete the previous blog. To those who have followed my previous blog, I hope you'll continue to follow this one..

For now... HELLO WORLD!

Wednesday, June 15, 2005

Company Trip At Tiara Beach Resort, PD

"The Tiara Beach Resort Port Dickson, an "inland sea resort" with the environment and ambience of a natural beachfront comes with what is believed to be the biggest man-made beach in Malaysia"
-- Cuti.com.my & Malaysia Hotels.net

This was where we went to for our company trip last weekend, all 155 of us (inclusive of families, staff from Penang, JB, China and Philippines). The resort looks fairly new but slightly understaffed. Some rooms took longer time to be cleaned and there were A LOT of flies and flying ants (those brown ones with a bit of a smell) around the F&B lounge, apartment corridors and lifts, so room doors and windows have to be shut at all times.Despite that, the place wasn't too bad after all.

TB1
View from the 1st floor of the Resort Lobby building

Room
We stayed in Studio Apartments which has 2 super single beds, a corner sink area, a small bathroom and a lovely living hall. The air-conditioners were centralized but just switching on the 2 ceiling fans alone were enough to chill the whole room (Labu and I just didn't want to wake up at all!).

TB4
Studio Apartment

TB5
The living hall in the apartment

F&B
The buffets were so-so, not too bland and I kinda liked their chicken curry (this is coming from someone who doesn't take hot & spicy food!). There's a small, open-air cafe at the center of the resort. You can relax, enjoy the wind and watch people having fun in the pools. The only slack thing is that, the cafe closes quite early in the night, so the nearest place to go to is the bistro which is probably 30 steps away from the resort lobby. But it closes at about 11pm during weekdays and 1am on weekends.

TB2
Fountain in front of the Buffet Lounge area

Water Activities
Apparently the pools take up about 5 acres of space there, surrounded by white sandy beach. They're not very deep though, probably about 4 feet high. You can hop into the slides, or lepak by the "waterfall". If you're not a pool person, you can tan yourself by the beach, they've got those lazy benches here and there.

TB3
Malaysia's largest man-made beach

Other Activities
There's this open-air stage where they have Exercise activities every 8am, free gift for the first 10 people who join in. Then at 8pm, they will show movies. Last Friday night, it was "National Treasure".

The ballrooms are nice and spacious. The ballroom we took, Tiara 2, was big enough to fit in 15 tables. As for other function halls, they're all located on the 1st floor of a row of shoplots (same row as the bistro), each hall huge enough to fit in roughly 5-6 tables. That was where we had our departmental team building activities.

TB6
The pool view during daylight

TB7
The view as the sun sets

TB8
Tiara Beach at night

--------------------------------

The highlight of the trip was the Inter-Departmental Talent Nite Competition which was held on the 2nd night, at the cafe. They provided us a movable stage. Other departments presented a musical skit, sang and danced. My department did an Oscars 2005 cross dressing style. We acted out certain parts from The Ring, Titanic, The Matrix, Charlie's Angels and Shaolin Soccer. We didn't win, coz apparently the judges were too conservative about the cross dressing part. :( However, we were definitely the most entertaining one and the most cheered on, especially when the "girls" came out as Kate Winslet (for Titanic) and Charlie's Angels.. All dressed in sexy bareback tops and long, smooth hair wigs. They actually have greater bodies than us real girls!!! We were all suprised that we didn't win. Some colleagues said they surrendered to us, even our bosses Big Cat and Dexter both said that if they were the judges, we would have won hands down. No matter, win or lose, we aimed to entertain. And we know that our performance will always be talked about for years to come. *lol*

Overall, although it was only at PD, the resort wasn't too bad after all. What the most important thing was that, it was the people that made the whole trip fun and truly memorable. ;) By the end of everything, I was truly, truly exhausted. You would too, if you helped to organize the trip. Let's see...

Pre-Trip :
1) Bought hamper and prepared all the materials needed for the departmental team building
2) Helped make the wigs and costumes for the "girls" (bareback tops made out of extra cloths; huge, huge "breasts" made out of toilet roll paper and the wigs out of strands of plastic bags and garbage bin bags.. Not very easy lehh!)
3) Held skit practices, prepared the powerpoint slides and made sure all the equipment needed for the skit were available

Trip Day 1 :
1) Co-ordinated the departmental team building
2) Emceed for the company dinner

Trip Day 2 :
1) Helped co-ordinated the telematch
2) Skit

Super tiring lar.. But I like it. I like doing all the behind-the-scene stuffs, maybe that's why I've been in the organizing committee for nearly 4 years now. *Gasp* One thing's for sure, it helps me to get to know the rest of the colleagues, remember their names, and storing all their mobile numbers into mine proved to be very handy!

Back to the current moment, I'm now only catching up on the weekend news about SPG and our famous local blogger Kenny with his red boxers pose. Oh... My eyesssss... My eyessss.... *lol*

Sunday, June 05, 2005

Weekend In Penang

Just came back from Penang with Inspector not too long ago. We were really killing a few birds with one stone here - To attend Hippy Chick's wedding, hang out with Inspector's buddy - Dr. Bachelor (he's doing his housemanship there and was one of the Cleo's eligible bachelor nominees a few years back, hence the name), to get away from work stress and all (especially since it's a public holiday), and of course, to indulge ourselves with Penang food la!

It's been almost 2 years since we last went to Penang. I think Penang is getting a bit too crowded now! We stayed at Naza Hotel which is somewhere in Jalan Tanjung Tokong. The room was not too bad, toilet was a bit small though. Car park was limited. Breakfast was, oohhh... B-A-D. Even the guava juice was too watery! The last trip, we stayed at Berjaya Georgetown Hotel. Now that is a much, much better one.

Hippy Chick's wedding dinner was held in Gurney Hotel. It took us at least 25 minutes to reach there. Traffic was really teruk la.. Anyway, the dinner was alright. Hippy Chick's dad gave a speech in Hokkien and mentioned something (a colleague translated for me) about 2 people from different lives, different countries (the groom's a Singaporean) united together and become "rojak", which, to him, stands for R - respect for each other, O - taken from the word "love", J - Jesus Christ (they're both Christians), A - accomodate each other, K - kindness & forgiveness. Not bad, eh? The live band was quite bad though. They were singing slightly off key especially when they hit the high notes, and the worse part was that they sang a couple of heartbreaking songs, which goes something like, "I like you but I'm scared of you", "Goodbye but I'll always love you", "When will you ever be mine?", "what can I do to make you love me?". Hellloooooooo.... People are getting married here and you're singing this kind of songs? Yeah, they're nice to listen to, catchy tunes, but the lyrics don't suit the occasion at all!!

Oh well.. Dr. Bachelor entertained us with his experiences on delivering babies, his patients and while he was in Aceh (he was in the first team sent by Mercy Malaysia after the tsunami tragedy in December). He brought us around to makan as well. Let's see.. We had char kuay teow and durian ice kacang at some shop (which is apparently very famous for the durian ice kacang). We bought 11 boxes *lol* of Him Heang tau sar pneah from the market (the actual Him Heang shop in Burma Road was closed) to be distributed to families, colleagues and neighbours. We had cendol at a stall near the market. We had drinks at Breeze Cafe, just beside Naza Hotel, listening to the sound of waves. We had mua chee in Gurney Drive. We had char kuay teow, prawn mee and ice kacang in Swatow Lane. Too bad we had to leave early for KL (to avoid traffic jam), otherwise we would have gone to Ayer Itam for asam laksa. Nevermind.. Next trip! What other food did we miss out? Please let me know. I'll jot them down and make sure I go try them in my next trip to Penang. :)

Spent a couple of moment as we passed by Gurney Drive to reflect on the tsunami tragedy. I still couldn't believe that, no matter how high the land was from the sea, the waves were actually strong enough to rise and flood the land! I was glad to see that everything was back in operation, and I hope that the disaster will not occur again!

I'm tired now.. Have to go back to work tomorrow. Next weekend - Company's trip to Tiara Beach Resort, PD!