Digital Bits of Reality

Sunday, 21 July 2013

Cleaning up for Raya...

It's almost that time of the year again and extra effort has to be put into cleaning the house.

Just cleaned the fan and window grills in my room today and soon I'll have to put away my books and clear away old belongings. The amount of dust that collects in the room is horrible. Perhaps the recent haze added some additional layers of its own.

Though for the record, it isn't really my room. I just sleep there. I get a small compartment to store my clothes and a shelf for me to place my books. It isn't ideal but I guess this is the closest I got to getting my own personal space at home. :/

Today is only the beginning. Shit gets real when I get back next weekend :O

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Al-Azhar Dinner and New instructors

To celebrate the end of MOC and as well as to welcome the new instructors, we held an Iftar/dinner event at Al-Azhar.

And all was normal until Naf whipped out the hot chilli sauce Isaac brought back from Australia. Mind you, it isn't normal chilli sauce. It freaking burns ur entire mouth.

Hence, the fun started.. with epic reactions. Samuel placed some of the killer sauce in a straw from his watermelon juice before passing it to Zarny who unknowingly took a big sip.

I swear I never saw a face turn beet red so fast. It was almost as if it was about to explode at any moment.

It got so chaotic, we were reminded to keep our volume down. Well, that's what you get when a bunch of guys come down for dinner ;)

Monday, 15 July 2013

Kayaking practice again..

Fasting month has started and I'll have to modify my kayaking activities for now. Which means less expeditions :(

Though I could still tolerate short practice sessions and I'm thankful for the cloudy weather yesterday that made the 2 hour session more bearable. I was kayaking with 3 other people at sembawang water venture (located at quite an ulu place), one of them i'm meeting for the first time.

With his strong indian accent, the new guy introduced himself as Narayana (a name I keep having trouble to remember). He works as an applications architect, a term I believed is used for software programmers who usually lead a team of programmers in a project rather than directly doing the programming itself. (I.e. senior programmer)

One cool thing I found out about him was that he'd worked in Japan for 3 years, and is able to speak Japanese. He spoke in jest that he was often given higher pay as he was "tri-lingual", being able to speak English, Japanese as well as his first language which I believe should be either be Tamil, or Hindi....

The sea was pretty choppy, making kayaking in our bandits a bit tricky as the bandits would always start to spin. Other than that we had fun chatting and hopefully I'll be able to improve my skills a bit more so I can take my 3 star before the end of this year ~.~

Saturday, 13 July 2013

127 MOC POC

And so 5 weeks have finally passed..

My only regret was not being able to spend more time with these good people due to the amount of work I had to take care of especially near the end of the course.

I hoped they've made good memories together and will spend the rest of their time in NS meaningfully.

Wednesday, 19 June 2013

Haze

PSI 190 tonight. And it's been above 100 this entire day.

Singapore needs rain badly now.. Where's that tropical rainfall when u need one...

Sensitive nose + haze = sick :(

Monday, 17 June 2013

Celebrating a bro's birthday

So we gave our friend here a good revenge for all the things he did before presenting him his bd present. he'll be wearing long pants for some time ;)

Opening the present..

Sunday, 9 June 2013

Operation Peng San

Operation Peng San!

I've been crazy on kayaking for this past week. I was really excited to go for this expedition and I'm glad I had enjoyed every minute of this despite the pain and soreness I'm going to feel after today. But there were certainly some epic moments that happened during this trip.

Epic moment 1:

Zip-locks arn't water-proof

I don't own a water-resistant bag like pretty much everyone else on the trip. Instead, I relied on a cheaper alternative which was to layer pack all my things in ziplock bags to waterproof my belongings.

And the whole point for water-proofing everything? That's because everything (and I mean everything) goes into your kayak. And there'll always be water in there even with your spray skirt.

Yet despite my precautions, my ziplocks decide to burst, tear, malfunction. Everything got dip in seawater, including my clothes, toiletries, and my sleeping bag!! :( fail #1.

(luckily i decided to place my phone into a lock&lock container. It remained seawater free. a guaranteed brand indeed.)

Epic moment 2:

You're not alone

I wasn't the only one who had belongings getting a free soak in seawater. In the end, all of us just laughed it off.

Epic moment 3:

Mozzies

We slept in the outdoors. And mosquitoes came like mad. I didn't sleep well that night. And my partner decided to mysteriously disappear . I found out the next morning, he had joined the instructors and slept indoors.. while i remained outdoors as a peace offering to the mozzies.

(it didnt help knowing that there's been an increasing no. of dengue cases >_> )

Nevertheless, despite the setbacks, I enjoyed the company and silly moments we had together. Made more new friends, and there was even this girl that I got mildly interested in, haha. And I'm not just referring to looks, the fact that she's a skilled kayaker and could complete the expedition on her own (I was struggling on my second day :( ....) made her more attractive..

Hahaha, unfortunately girl company is not on my current list of priorities right now. And I guess that topic would something interesting to write down about on another post. Meanwhile, enjoy the pictures I managed to scavenge during the trip itself.