Christmas is nearly here and the year is nearly over. Which can only mean 2 things: I am going home soon and it’s time for New Year’s resolutions yet again.
I’m not sure who came up with the idea of New Year’s Resolutions, but it was a good one. I am a person who likes new beginnings, new things, anything along the lines. I’ve made many a New Year’s Resolutions, but I guess not all of them have been fulfilled. There have been insane times where I’d resolved to lose an enormous amount of weight in a year (which is ridiculous, given my love of food) to the time when I guess I resolved to try going to the gym on a regular basis (this one worked out for 6 months and went downhill after that).
Of course, with the year coming to an end and reflecting over the previous year definitely puts me in a place where I’m inspired to improve myself for the year to come. I suppose trying to better myself wouldn’t hurt, but definitely coming up with resolutions that are realistic would be the number one step. So here’s hoping for a nice new year ahead, and with hope that I manage to fulfill at least 50% of my resolutions for next year.
Kristine’s New Year’s Resolutions:
- I resolve to get a 60% average for all my units in uni next year. The higher the average, the better
- I resolve to save up to go for a holiday in Melbourne with the babes and to visit Aunty Celine and the rest of the family in Melbourne
- I resolve to lost 5 kilos next year and keep it that way for the year
- I resolve to work harder at uni and to maintain a balance in life
- I resolve to blog more and nurture my creative moments. I have to set aside time to blog and let out the emotions and not let them get in the way of life
I would think 5 resolutions for the New Year is enough. Too many might just be my undoing.
December 18th, 2006
4:10 pm
General
Will be busy between working, guest blogging at Edrei’s and playing visiting tour guide to my family who are flying in on Wednesday. Sorry, updates will be done in few numbers. Lin’s Birthday Bash post will be written and hopefully put up before Christmas!
Till then, Have a Merry Christmas everybody!
December 12th, 2006
9:30 pm
General
I finally finished all my Christmas shopping! I tell you, it didn’t help that the day was 36 degrees, but I survived somehow, albeit my dizzy spells and profuse sweating.
Managed to squeeze in Casino Royale before going shopping, saved me from bearing the brunt of the hottest part of the day. This Bond movies has got to be one of the best I’ve seen so far. The raw intensity and recklesness was just jaw dropping and amusing at the same time.
I’m not much for words right now. It’s been too tiring a day and I’ve been busting my butt working all week and I’m still counting down the days to when my family comes for Christmas 
December 11th, 2006
8:43 pm
General
Things have really been snowballing as the Christmas season builds up. On the good side, my family is coming in 9 days (Yay!), I’m going back in 19 days (double yay!) and on the bad side, I’m working most of the 9 days to Christmas.
Been having these strange spells of dizziness lately. Started on Sunday morning and it’s kinda strange. Sometimes when I stand up from bed or sit down, I feel as if the whole room is spinning and I can literally see it spinning and it makes me wanna puke my guts out. I don’t know whether to put it down to that time of the month or if my iron levels are just outta whack or if my blood pressure has gone down to insanely low levels.
Been working everyday since Friday and I’m just knackered from everything. What I don’t need is to see the room spinning everytime I try and get into bed.
Went off to Garden City aka Garbo to get some Christmas shopping done along with watching a movie. Caila and I went off to Garbo food court for lunch and we bumped into Jon there. Which was good, since he tagged along to watch The Prestige.
I admit, I was half scared of watching the movie at first cause I thought it was a horror movie and I’ve had enough of that for my lifetime.
Anyways, that was one of the best movies I’ve seen this year, besides Pirates 2. I was watching in anticipation while the storyline developed and after I watched it for the first time, I wanted to watch it again because of the twist in the story which makes sense towards the end. Definitely worth the AUD$12 I paid for to watch the movie.
Besides the movie, Christmas shopping wasn’t very productive today, only managed to get gifts for Jolene and Angeline. It’s been my 3rd Christmas shopping trip and I still have yet to buy presents for half the people on my list. And I’m going to go so broke from all of this shopping before I even head back to Malaysia.
So once again, a reminder that I return to Malaysia on the 30th of December 2006 till the 12th of February 2007. Won’t be returning to Malaysia in a long, long time after that and there are definitely some people that I’m dying to meet up with, namely some of the Malaysian bloggers whose blogs I read often and of course my friends back home. I can’t wait till that day, which is getting closer and closer, but I still don’t know what to back in my bag and I have yet to clear up the mess in my room. Tomorrow shall be the day for that
Well, it’s that time of year again. It’s 20 days to Christmas and 15 days to my family’s arrival in Perth for a holiday.
The whole Christmas spirit is too commercialized, which totally runs away from the true meaning of Christmas: the day Christ was born. I guess I do like receiving the gifts, but its all another excuse for people to spend money and buy people things that they’ll chuck away for a good portion of the year and rediscover it later on.
I know I sound like a pessimist, but well, I’m not.
I know Santa ain’t real, but who cares! I’m still writing me that Christmas list cause everybody else is doing it! 
Dear Santa,
I know I haven’t been the perfect girl this year, but I’ve tried to be good all year. I didn’t pull anybody’s hair out this year, I didn’t choke anyone and I even didn’t murder anybody. Good, right?
Well, I ask for very simple things only. If you could grant me these presents, I’ll be very good next year. I promise!
- Can I please have my family arrive safely on the 20th of December? They are very important to me
- Can you please make me thinner for next year so I can wear nice clothes without looking flabby?
- Can I please make enough money to let me buy that beautiful Guess? bag from Garbo?
Simple right, Santa?
I’m sure I can think of more, but there 3 will do for now. Will update the list later!
XOXO,
Kristine
As I was cleaning out my room today, I discovered some old year books of mine from college and from high school. I flipped thru the pages and found a piece of my writing in there from 2004. I also unearthed a poem I wrote a while ago. Back then, I had a passion for writing. A passion which I thought I’d pursue later on in life as I love writing. Although I’m not pursuing that, I am happy where I am now. I’m still doing something that I love and writing just has taken a back seat for a while.
Looking at where I am now, it has been a while since I’ve written the way I did a few years ago. Admittedly, I started blogging as a way to preserve memories and be anonymous on the world wide web. Have a tiny space in the gigantic space to call my own. To vent my feelings and to just be me.
I suppose since I go my own domain 2 weeks ago, the passion of writing has begun to return. I have ideas dancing in my head from time to time of what to write about. I know the amount of readers I have is tiny, but hey this is me. I don’t write for people, I write for me. I write to preserve my memories and the things I’ve done in life, be it good or bad.
Sometimes I write to amuse people and myself at the things we have been thru. I like that. I look forward each day to sit in front of the computer and just type without knowing what the end product might turn out to be like.
I look at the media nowadays and see how commercialized blogging has become. Open a book, you have people spouting off blogs who have made international fame because they have broken an interesting story or reviewed some good products or write just because of the money. Open the newspaper and you see it advertising blogs with posts such as, “My dog ate my homework” or “I went to the loo”.
Sometimes it pains me to see what blogging has become. It has now transformed into a fad where everybody who is somebody has a blog. I guess there really isn’t much harm in it, but I see it as attention seekers. No offence to them though.
Back to the topic of passion, I guess you could say that my spark for writing has been lit again. Since uni has let out for the summer, I’ve got more time on my hands and certainly more things to do as well. This calls for a list now.
Things to do during summer:
- Clean up my room, charity bin unneeded things or sell them on eBay
- Work during Christmas season for money and save up
- Blog and tweak blog
- Meet up with bloggers from Perth and Malaysia
- Pack things I need to move from Malaysia to Perth. Permenantly
- Buy, wrap and give Christmas presents
- Buy, write and mail Christmas cards
I’m actually looking forward to uni starting again. Although I’d probably change my mind during uni times It’s just that it feels very strange not to be studying over the summer. It’s as if something is missing in my daily routine. I can’t wait for results to come out next week, although I’m worried at the same time. But what is done, is done. No amount of worrying will do much difference and I refuse to spoil my summer worrying about something that I have no control of.
Glow bowling night on Friday was a really nice experience. Here’s the pictures that I promised
I was very amused with my socks that glowed in the dark. Even my blue top glowed in the dark!
This one would be good ol Euhin’s attempt at humour
My munky!! Whee!!
Frightening ain’t it?
After bowls
Well. It was an impromptu thing
The name really does say it all
Kim’s idea and my button pushing made this. She kept thinking the screen was a touch screen, which made things a whole heap funnier. We were trying to change Euhin’s name while he was bowling and its too funny cause he didn’t notice it till we changed it to loser..Hehe
I blame the badly cut fringe 3 weeks ago for this bad hair day.
At the bowling alley, we saw this girl who had an eating disorder, most likely anorexia but we can’t confirm. Her arms were stick skinny and it really scared us a lot. We were thinking that her arm were about to break at any moment cause she was bowling and everything.
*shudders*
Admittedly I took pictures of her cause I was just intrigued by how strong she actually was. Bowling for an hour does tire me and to imagine someone like that who can bowl without collapsing is just scary.
Went off to Utopia after that since we couldn’t decide if we wanted to, in Lin’s words, “shoot some poo” or not. That was probably her funniest phrase to date. Her face was all serious when those words came out and well, we’re not going to let her live it down now. (Hey Lin, if you’re reading this, you are welcome to make fun of me about my yoga mat incident :P)
December 4th, 2006
12:00 pm
General
Daylight savings really is a pain in the arse. I didn’t think it would take so much effort to adjust to the 1 hour difference in time. It just feel so strange for it to be bright at 8pm all of a sudden. Next month when the winter solstice occurs, its going to be worse. It’ll only get dark at 9.30pm.
So, we turned our clocks 1 hour ahead on Sunday morning. While it is now 12.55pm in Perth, it is now 11.55am in Malaysia. I definitely need to get used to this. I just woke up an hour ago cause of the crazy sleep patterns I’ve been having since we moved our clocks forwards.
This daylight savings trial will be over in March 2009, so only 3 years to try this out and see if we all like it. I suppose there are many pros and cons which have been discussed exhaustively in the media about how the politicians were doing it for their benefit and the poor farmers having to get the cows out to the fields in the hottest part of the day. Personally, at first I thought it would have been a good idea, since we were more in line with the Eastern states and not to left behind when it comes to communicating with them. Now I just want my sleep.
*yawn*
I picked this out of the STM Magazine on July 30, 2006 (Does do good to reference where you got this from :P) which in turn was taken out from the donna hay magazine which is also available online here. I’ve tried this before with varying success rate and well, I plan to cook this for our Christmas dinner this year. Since I’m feeling rather blah at the moment, I thought I ‘d get this stored in her for future references
Beef and Potato Pie
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 3 hours
Ingredients:
1 kg beef, diced
plain (all-purpose) flour for dusting
3 tablespoons vegetable oil (I use olive oil since I have no other oil)
1 brown onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
250g button mushrooms, quartered
2 bay leaves
3 tablespoons seeded mustard
3 cups beef stock
sea salt and cracked black pepper
600g desiree (waxy) potatoes, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon olive oil
Method:
- Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
- Dust beef in the flour. Heat large heavy-based saucepan over high heat. Add half the oul and cook the beef in batches for 4-5 minutes or until browned. Set aside.
- Add the remaining oil, onion and garlic to the saucepan and cook for 2-3 minutes or until onion is softened.
- Return the beef to the pan. Add the mushrooms, bay leaves, mustard, stock, salt and pepper and bring to the boil.
- Reduce the heat to low, cover with a tight-fitting lid and simmer for 30 minutes.
- Remove lid and simmer for a further 30 minutes or until beef is tender
- Place the potato slices and olive oil in a bowl and toss to coat.
- Place the beef mixture in a 4-cup capacity oven proof dish, layer with the potato and cook for 45 minutes or until the potatoes are golden. Serves 4
Usually I get the beef diced up already from the supermarket but if you want to get special cuts and do it, well thats fine as well. I’m just a lazy bum.
