Bit and pieces of the remaining whole of April...

Haven't been updating again this month, oh well, I guess it sorta gets to this when the time passes so fast and there's holidays and stuff and there was nothing really super exciting to rant about. In short, I bought myself the new Nintendo DSi. It was actually a trade-in of my old chipped pink Nintendo DS Lite. A pretty good deal actually, I only had to pay extra $150 more to get it and it came with a free 2GB SD Card. And of course for the moment the new gadget doesn't support the R4 Revolution, so it's back to buying games legitimately. :p

Especially love the new Photo-taking feature, you can distort faces, put new frames, draw graffitti on your photos and much more! It's much like what the neo print machines can do, except you can take as many photos as you want here and its free! :D Of course don't expect too much about the photo quality. I also like the idea of downloading games to play from the DSi store, they are not too costly at all

Then we went bowling with Daniel and Serene on Easter Sunday. CFA was given free passes to play 2 games on either of the weekends. And we opted for Sunday so that serene was off and can come with us too.

Daniel and Serene - Mr. and Miss Singapore. Heeheehee... :p

Bro, the poser during his move...

Tubby and moi...

Then just a couple of weeks ago, we also went to the Sandown Toy Collectors Fair. Boy people quere queueing up like way early in the morning lah! We were late but we cut queue seeing Stuart and his wife and kids. :p

Lining up to buy tickets and be the first to check out the goodies!

A snapshot of how one part of the interior looked like. They had stores outside too.

The boys digging for goodies and seeing what they can find for a good price. Man they have good bargaining skills!

Group shot of part of the ozformers melbourne group!

Well and the rest of the time is being busy with Tennis and going to the gym. The BRTA District comps on Saturdays have also started. Oh and we also watched Xmen Origins: Woverine. Boy is Taylor Kistch (Gambit) super hot lar! Anyway am super-duper looking forward to this weekend because we are going to watch Cirque Du Soleil - Dralion this Saturday!!! Will update with photos another time! Oh oh oh and Len and Joewiz are coming to Melbourne for a visit and we're all going to Gold Coast together! Oh man! May is such an exciting month! :D

Mooncake festival gathering, Jasper's got a facebook account and thoughts on the Mummy 3.

Darling and I took a long drive back to Gippsland two weekends ago for Mooncake / Lantern Festival or which is also known in chinese terms as "Zhong Qiu Jie". Boy I think it felt like ages since we went back and as usual I slept all the way. For some funny reason, the ride seemed pretty fast. Maybe because Jasper and I were sleeping most of the way leaving poor tubby to drive. :D It was a short but good trip and if only someone didn't want to keep rushing home for the Man Utd. match, we probably could have stayed longed. Anyway we did the usuals:

The food; nothing fancy, just nice home cook food and some char siew and siew yoke which Lex/Weichao brought from city. And Ammie made her yummuy dumplings again.

And of course after every meal at every gathering, there's the "Group Shot". Though some of them like Reshme, Yihorng, Ivy hadn't arrived yet. *ssshhhh* it was because they were only invited for the lantern walk and not dinner. :p

And here's all the preety ladies in waiting with their pretty lanterns all in a row, getting ready to go for the lantern walk in the park. Someone said it looked like a beauty pageant. ;)

Back to the days of childhood, lighting lanterns and taking a walk with them. Irritatingly the "birthday" candles went off really fast and halfway throughout, everyone had to light new candles. We used to use those thickier candles when we were small, they were actually specially made for the lanterns and they fitted in the metal holder nicely too.

And another proper group shot with everyone at Glen Donald Park (minus Ben cause he was taking the photo). Imagine the Ang Mohs walking past us and giving us the weird look. If you were looking from afar, I swear you'd think there are colourful lights floating by themselves. Because with that dim moonlight that night, the lighted lanterns were the only thing you could see. :o

And of course we had to have mooncakes since it IS mooncake festival. This was the "higher" quality mooncake, so there was only 4 for like 18 of us! So everyone got about a slice each except for the greedy me who had 2 because it was offered to me anyway mah. :P Yum

Alright and that is the end of the Mooncake extravaganza. The full album is on facebook.

Now if anyone does not know yet, Jasper has a FACEBOOK account now! Dom was the clown who decided to create one for him. I know he was pestering me for ages, but I was just too lazy. So all you Jasper fans, dog-lovers or just people who find our white furry prince cute, you can add him as a friend.

P.S: Dom and I have shared rights to the account. So if you see any long-winded intellectual stuff written, that's from him. Any short, sweet and simple things written is from me. And yeah Jasper does "reply" your messages. I showed him his facebook account that night and he gave the screen a lick... haha silly cute lovable honey buns. :)

Anyway we also went to watch the Mummy 3 - Tomb of the Dragon Emperor over the weekend. Got to say 1 and 2 were better. The 3rd one sort of had not much depth into the storyline and 3/4 s of the movie was just really good CGI. And please... the wife of Brendan Fraser was so much more hotter than this one who tried to put on a fake british accent. Also for a couple who has an 18-20 year old son, they didn't seem like they have aged much over the past 20 years. :\

I also didn't like the fact that they took part of China's history and change it. Ancient Chinese history has always been one of my favourite and highly appreciated. So yeah too much discrepancies in the story like how the Terracotta warriors came about. And how can the 2000 year old witch and her daughter speak english?! :o Even if they did speak to the angmohs in English, they would be more comfortable to speak to each other in mandarin. Thank God they didn't make the mummy speak English too, I would have fainted.

Hello and goodbye to Baxter, some work stuff and the new Batman movie.

I think it's about time I tell you about Baxter. It's was a mere few weeks before it was "hello" and "goodbye" to him. Don't worry, nothing bad has happened to him, it's just that he has gone off to another family who can love him for who he is. That was the main reason why we didn't want to tell people when we got him; cause we weren't sure if he was gonna remain ours.

Baxter's an 8 month old maltese / shih tzu. His owner listed him on trading post that she was selling him as she was going overseas. When we got to the house to see him, it didn't matter that the feeling didn't feel quite as "right" as when we picked Jasper up, but Tubbs and I were just excited that we were gonna to get a play pal for Jasper that we just decided to take him anyway. Now of course we did mention that our dogs are kept in-house and asked if he was house-trained and she said "yes", which we found to be totally otherwise in the next couple of weeks.

In the first few days, peeing and pooping everywhere was fine, we could understand; it was a new house and environment. But then when days turned into weeks and he got from bad to worse, we realised we just got ourselves a troubled mutt. He could pee and walk at the same time (totally oblivious that he's peeing), he shit at any corner/place in the house, even on our floor mats and carpets(once on our new doona and mattress!), totally refusing to do his business on the pee/poo soaked training mats. Those were the last straw, and we knew we didn't have the time to train him properly cause he was usually an outside dog and at that age, trying to re-train him to be an in-house dog was like trying to tame a bull. So he was up on trading post again and in a few days, another couple who had a maltese/shihtzu of their own adopted Baxter. And it was good cause they kept their dog outside as well. Anyway here some shots of Baxter, together with Jasper (below) as well.

We felt a little sad (especially tubbs) who is really sentimental about dogs, but it was better that Baxter had gone off to people who would love him more. This is especially true due to the fact that any other dog that comes is always compared to our smarty Jasper (which isn't fair we know), but like tubbs said, Jasper's sort of set a benchmark and we can't seem to accept any dog that falls below that benchmark. So we are always biased towards Jasper. So we have resigned to the fact that we either get Jasper a GF to mate and get his puppies or buy a puppy and train it from small. I guess adopting older dogs that are sort of used to their way of life and trying to re-train them again is not something we are actually prepared to do.

Apart from that, work is usual for me and Tubbs though he was previously stressed by the company audit last week. Then the health dept in CFA held a pilates / health check session last week. People can go for a 1-2 hour pilates class during office hours, how cool is that! I missed out on the last session cause I didn't bring my sports outfit, but I will certainly try it out the next session. I'm also going for an IT certification course (also organised by the org.) in a few weeks which includes a mini exam after that, boy it's like going back to uni again.

We also went to watch Batman - The Dark Knight in IMAX Theatre last night. It was awesome, what with the huge screen and the acting of the "truly evil" Joker played by Heath Ledger. A pity though it didn't seemed right that Katie Holmes wasn't acting as the main "girl" this time. They got someone who looked like her. I shan't spoil the story for those who haven't watch it, but don't expect too much action. It's more about the plot and menacing conversations between Batman and the Joker. Go watch it !

Melbourne Wedding Expo, Transformers Movie and Action Figures and my R4 Revolution Card for DS

Tubbs is back and I'ma soo happy and glad because not only did I miss him (twas only 2 weeks I know), but situations are much easier to handle with him around. ;) So darling and I went to the 2007 Melbourne Bride Wedding Expo last Sat. I'd say I wasn't too impressed at all since I have been to exhibitions on a larger scale. I'd thought there would be few hundred of exhibitors, but there were only about 120 of them. As you can see, you can have any type of wedding car you want (if you can afford it.) Let's just say a limousine costs around AUD$800 - $1000 per hour.

Then of course there were bridal boutiques displaying their gowns, hotels, convention centre executives trying to persuade couples to host their wedding at their venues, wedding decorations and event stands, photographt stands, souvenir stands, etc. All in all, I'd say they had exhibitors to cater for every wedding need, but just less variety of 'em thats all. There were also Fashion catwalk parades of gowns, jewellery and shoes and it was a really good experience since it's the first time we've been to a live one. Camaras weren't allowed, but I manage to get just one shot. :P

We also went to watch Transformers on Sunday with Eileen, Jason, Ammie, Dom, Alex(H), Byron, Sueli and her BF. Yeap it was a group outing alright, but lucky this time it was a unanimous vote to watch the same movie. And why? Because it's Transformers and hey! who can resist not watching it right? :P The movie plot was only alright, but I guess all we wanted to see was mostly the action and the gist of it. It was a little disappointing though that they changed the vehicles of the robots from the original cartoon. Like Bumble Bee became a Chevrolet Camaro instead of a Volks Wagon. And Optimus Prime was a different Truck altogether too.

But it was still all good. As long as it's Transformers, anything will do. We were speculating that there's gonna be a part 2. Well, guess I've been influenced too much by my brother when I was small. I used to play with all the Transformers Action Figures that he had. And I've been hooked on them ever since. Jason and I have been mad lately, and have been browsing through Transformer stuff during work time. (ssssshhhhhh...) I lurrve Bumble Bee most.

I also found out that Kmart, Target, Big W and Toy'R'Us are selling the Transformer toys. And we headed to Kmart straight after work yesterday. But I couldn't find anything I really like and thought that we should check out the other stores as well to see if they have a different variety. But nevertheless, I couldn't resist getting this small Bumble Bee first, for a cheap price of $5.99.

And also, darling bought my Nintendo DS R4 Memory card for me from Singapore! It was a better bargain there since the bundle cost SGD$75 together with the MicroSD card, but cost around AUD$90 here. So it's noo more spending money on expensive games for my DS! And even better, I can have around 18 games on my DS all at once. *Yippie* :D And darling also got me the CKIn2U perfume as a gift. Apparantly it's the newest popular hit in town. I love the smell, it smells of fruits with a zest of lemons. Go try it out! Tata for now...