Wensi.isneW

It’s a happy start to the week! Had lunch and dinner dates.. hehe.. It really is a plus point to work in the city, where it is convenient for friends to visit. Had a good chat with rz over sushi and grilled bacon.. (yes yes, I do MISS you!)

Work has been fun; everyday’s different but filled with laughter.
I find myself putting different skills to use, being tactful, encouraging, and thinking from the other side of the fence.

A little bit of design, research and planning…I particularly like designing our internal newsletter – Tinkling with the photos and captions.

Researching on must try foods, cultures and quirky stuff, and learning a little more about our island.

Woohoo, let these fun times keep coming!

The girls came over today.. an afternoon of food, more food and kiina!
Too bad kwan wasn’t able to come It is nice to have a leisurely afternoon with friends and to chit chat about about anything under the sun. I’m looking forward to the next outing at ah nei’s house!

Thanks xuehui!!! I finally got the pooh hahaha…

Had lunch with jw and zw in school and they were saying that this plush was made in china (and it really is). Haha.. back in the library, jw decided to undress pooh!!

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. I’ve put a X on those I’ve read, and the total was 28! 72 more to go…

Here’s the list:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (X)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (X)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens (X)
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (X)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (X)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (X)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (X)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (X)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (X)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson (X)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom (X)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (X)
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (X)
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

dark clouds gather! gusting winds and soon flash lightning…

The alarm went off at 5.45 this morning. Arranged to go “shao mu” at 2 places – bright hill and mandai. On the journey to grandma’s place to pick her up, the national anthem was playing from the radio.. woah.. long time since I heard it.

What took me by surprise was the amount of people at bright hill, both sides of the road were lined with parked cars and the police were already on site to direct traffic!! Row and rows of people were walking towards the temple, all carrying paper offerings. What a sight!!! The temple official opened at 7am.. but at 6.10am, it was already packed. hehe..

Went in to the columbarium to visit the ancestors. Hmm.. we had difficulty finding her some of the urns. haha.. grandma gave us the wrong row – it wasn’t B but C. The second stop at mandai columbarium was also a jammed packed event. I think I’ve not seen so many cars there before hahaa…

After which we travelled to toa payoh lor 8 for breakfast, before coming back home to nap. Nice way to spend this sunday…gotta start doing work after lunch:)

Dean Mariano invited graduating students to have lunch with him:) It was nice catching up with some friends at the event… as the last week of school approaches, I can’t feeling a little sad. But, got to keep moving forward, and throughly enjoy this final week of school!

Spotted this elmo at leisure park Couldn’t help buying! Its now on my noticeboard, along with the other small cute softies.

Kudos to Singapore Law Academy for organizing the first ever Open house at the Supreme Court!

I went to the event with Joyce and Yeen at about 2pm and we queued for about 15 minutes before getting through the security checks. The place was buzzing with excitement, and I was really looking forward to meeting a judge. We were each given a brochure for the Justice Trail – a series of 12 questions whose answer can be found on the different floors of the court.

Our first stop was to queue for the court enactments. We wanted to go for the criminal enactment as it was conducted in the court of appeal, level 9! I really wanted to see how Singapore’s highest court was like!! To our disappointment, the queue was so long that we were told that there were no more tickets. Instead, we were asked to move to the civil enactment queue. After we got the wrist bands for the civil enactments, we headed to B1 to see the exhibits and to start the Justice Trail. Lots of myths were dispelled, for instance, our courts start no by the gravel or bell but by a buzzer hehehe… our judges are referred to as ‘Your Honour’ in court and they no longer wear those white wigs for court or for ceremonies.

At 3.30pm, we headed to the level 5 courtrooms for the court enactment. Because we were among the last few to enter, we didn’t get seats! Haha. the court room was surprisingly modern! More like a meeting room than a court. The Singapore flag and crest can be seen at the front.. I think that looks quite stately. Then, the buzzer sounded and the judge came in. Everyone had to stand and bow The guy standing in the picture on the left was the plaintiff.. his acting was pretty convincing. Anyway, the judge dismissed the case as the case was not more than $250,000 in claims, and suggested that the plaintiff should go to the subordinate court instead.

After the 2 civil enactments, we decided to head upstairs. I wanted to go towards the dome – the UFO looking dish! The view was really pretty, parts of Clarke Quay and the old colonial structures can be seen with the CBD as a backdrop. On level 8, there were more exhibits to talk about the difference between a civil case and a criminal case: different burden of proofs. Went to level 9 to catch a glimpse of the Court of Appeal but there was an ongoing talk instead, so that’s the only place I didn’t managed to view.

Back on the ground floor, there was the crime scene of Humpty’s fall. Was it really the big bad wolf who pushed humpty from the second floor of the Supreme Court? I wouldn’t be able to find out since there were no more tickets for the criminal enactment…

Yeen and I completed the Justice Trail and collected the orange shoe bag. Joyce had to leave early so it was just the 2 of us, taking pictures everywhere and making sure we didn’t miss out any exhibits. Some aunties came up to us to ask for help to answer the questions so that they can get the shoe bag too .. hehehe… I think I filled out another 2-3 forms.

At 6.00pm, we were tired and ready to leave after 4 hours in court. Then, we heard an announcement saying that the criminal trial was going to be held at B2 and anyone can enter!! Haha… so 2 of us walked down and managed to get a seat right at the back of the hall.

Apparently, they shifted the criminal trial from Level 9 to B2, so that the bigger hall could take more people I’m glad I managed to see it – hehe.. the witnesses (Blind Mouse Satu, Inspector Tan, Little Red Riding Hood and surprise surprise Humpty himself!) were all good actors. Whoever thought of all the lines for the enactments must really have a good sense of humour.

We left the court feeling really satisfied… it was a good way to spend the afternoon! I said goodbye to yeen and headed to Esplanade for the opera Les Contes D’Hoffmann.. well.. that’s another story.

Signing off now….