by coincidence, today i read about two people’s separate projects, which both involve daily action.

first, www.readallday.org, where a woman started reading one book a day on her 46th birthday. she’s already on day 350 and has dutifully posted reviews of everything she’s read. the website’s a great reading list to go back to.

and just now, i came across http://observatory.designobserver.com/entry.html?entry=11257, where a graphic designer has picked some of the best short writings she’s done with 100 colours/100 days.

need to find a little project that’s similar. i posted the first from an NYT article on facebook, and a friend commented that she’d read a postcard every day if it was from me. it might get a little expensive, but to send a postcard every day…or at least write one and post it up. like postsecret, minus the secrets. hm…

read this article on NYT earlier: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32793225/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/, and it’s right, i don’t really remember anything from sept 12, 2001. i think i was mostly on my own, b/c my roommate had gone home, so i must’ve just holed up in the room with the tv on.

gotta stay away from youtube. but maybe read a little more of the coverage coming out of NYC at the moment…

[sept 4, after lunch]

i’ve known for awhile that i’m pretty much addicted to the internet. but i think my first couple hours in HK tell me just how…

travelling alone means ample time to think about twitter updates and FB statuses. and not being able to check email or even text for a good half day (my phone’s been wonky since before leaving SG, and by chance, the phone/internet at “home” is temporarily not working) got me feeling quite disconnected. let’s just say the feeling of relief coming up the escalator this morning at festival walk to see the pacific coffee company was quite immense.

this pacific coffee co. even has some “study carrells” in the back, with plugs ready for laptops when they run out of battery. but here i am after lunch and a walkabout (after spending the morning a couple tables away), and the wireless signal is low and patchy at the moment. too bad wirelessSG doesn’t work here…HK’s equivalent is not free. the place is quite packed too, but i think after my laptop charges to 100%, i’ll look for another seat.

for now…blogging via textedit. some thoughts that have been rattling around (that might translate to twitter updates, if i ever get a signal):

• flight uneventful. read half of time out SG, listened to travis and muse
• mom called me right when i was in the immigration line; thankfully it wasn’t my turn yet — katie e would pick me up at tsing yi station of the airport express
• dubious fashion of the night: a couple in matching sleeveless tops and striped shorts
• sadly, the krispy kreme at the airport has changed to a starbucks. with not a decent cookie in sight. fail.

today at festival walk:

• dubious fashion of the day: cream short-shorts with an equally short tulle skirt over them
• though i have a lot of HK food to eat…can’t deny the simple pleasure of a sandwich chain that has baked potato set meals. thought of alli
• shopping mission: to find the perfect laptop bag (that’s hopefully not too expensive). restrain self from buying all these cute and beautiful things
• 3:30pm: oh god, the students descend…
• 4:07pm: i really can’t stand festival walk’s UGs and LGs…why can’t they keep it simple with levels 1, 2, 3…
• retreated to page one’s cafe. a lot quieter, but wireless still not working for me. a sign that i should’ve just camped at pacific coffee co. from the beginning. :P

mom thinks it stems from not getting as much $$ from the clients he saw while he was here. all mom’s friends/acquaintances — who were briefed by mom to give a “consultation fee” of at least $30 each, b/c we paid about $40 a head when we were in the US, and come on, it just makes sense to give more than $10 if the doctor’s visiting from china etc. but, some of these ladies…just, exasperating to max. apparently he saw ten of them one afternoon, and only got $90 for his trouble. mom sensed he wasn’t too happy, so the next time she made sure to get the friend to “pay up”. so, fair enough.

but don’t take out your frustrations on us. we put you up for a week plus, pay for your meals, pay for any extra air-conditioning to make sure you’re comfortable, chauffeur you around to visit friends, pay for books and gifts…on top of letting you keep the extra money from buying your round-trip ticket *and* the $500 “consultation” fee for seeing me…and you have the bloody nerve to ask for the hotel money?? at $160/night! wtf!! mom had asked him even before he came if he was ok staying with us, and we definitely could’ve put him in a $90/night hotel, so i never imagined that mom would end up giving him an additional 1k plus (at least she “bargained down” to $150…ugh, she should have gone lower) for him *not* staying at a hotel. bloody hell.

i’ve have some time to cool off, but i’m still so pissed. any small fond feeling we’ve gained for him in the last week…completely out the window. it’s just amazing how low some people stoop.

10:02pm, edited to add: ugh he’s just called to tell my parents he’s made it back. which was the plan, but with mom telling dad “you pick it up, you pick it up”, i’m not sure mom’s told him about the $$ issue. and all i can think of is, “he can go to hell.” ok, not literally, but i could really care less if he’s made it back, and if he tries calling to “follow up” on mom’s health later…whatever dude. you know, it’s one thing to make your living or whatever; it’s another when you take my mom’s hospitality and pretty much slap us in the face for it.

have my work cut out for me. :P

edited to add: and…i’m still pretty bitter about the whole situation. a huge potential entry there…but if i ever write it, it’ll definitely be private.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – Yes
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – Yes
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – Yes
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – YES
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Yes
6. The Bible (in entirety) – No
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – Yes
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell – No*
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – Yes
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – Yes

11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – Yes
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – No
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – No
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare – No, but i read a lot for two college classes
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – No
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Yes
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk – No
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – Yes
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – Yes
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot – No

21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – No
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens – No
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – No
25. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Yes
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh – No
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – No
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – Yes
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – Yes
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – No

31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – No
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – No
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – No
34. Emma – Jane Austen – No*
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen – No*
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Yes
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – Yes
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – No
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – Yes
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – No

41. Animal Farm – George Orwell – Yes
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – Yes
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – No
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – No
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – Yes
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – No
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – Yes
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding – Yes
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan – No*

51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel – No
52. Dune – Frank Herbert – No
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons – No
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – Yes
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – No
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – No
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – No, though i may have read an abridged version when i was a kid
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – No*
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time – Mark Haddon – Yes
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No

61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – Yes
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – No
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt – No
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – Yes
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – No
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac – Yes
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – No
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – Yes
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – No
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville – Yes

71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – Yes
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker – No
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – Yes
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – No
75. Ulysses – James Joyce – No
76. The Inferno – Dante – Yes
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – No
78. Germinal – Emile Zola – No
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – No*
80. Possession – AS Byatt – Yes

81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – Yes
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – No
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker – No
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – Yes
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – No
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – No
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White – Yes
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – No
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – No

91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Yes
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – No
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – No
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams – No
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – No
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – No
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – No
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare – Yes
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – Yes
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – No

so i’m planning for what i’m calling a “vacation from unemployment”. looks like 99% it’ll be HK for two weeks, to visit audrey and hang out. i’d love to go to brisbane and visit another friend, or go to vietnam for something new, but HK is the cheapest and the easiest, and i reckon i can’t really stay two weeks (or more) anywhere else, for now. and of course, i kind of feel bad spending money and “vacationing” when i should be thinking about my future, etc etc. think that’s for an entry for tomorrow. :P

the FB stalking pertains to my cousin…i have her on facebook now (still waiting for her hubby to accept!), and am having fun looking at old wedding pictures and such. i’m realising that the english use the word “whilst” quite a lot. i don’t mind.

FB status update: Winnie Leung got home from an afternoon at sentosa and kinda feels like tagging along with her cousin to the zoo tomorrow. however, she knows she’s too lazy to get up early.

Twitter: just got back from sentosa – favourite stop of sentosa express: “future development”. underwater world: still cool. sparkly merlion: scary.

that pretty much sums it up. :P the last time i was at sentosa was to visit bethany’s family on their “staycation”, so i did see some new bits and rode the new train across to vivocity then. this time ’round i got to see *lots* of new bits. granted the only “old” place we went to was underwater world (skipped fort siloso for example), so nearly everything i saw was new.

the construction is pretty incredible. now it’s so easy to get to sentosa – cars, buses and taxis can go through, and the train from vivocity is easy and cheap (compared to the cable cars). the train goes through the future development, and it’s basically going through (and stopping momentarily at) a huge construction site. we saw the skeleton of the future rollercoaster(s), which looks like a kind of scary futuristic dragon. several new resorts/spas…i keep forgetting about one˚15 marina and sentosa cove, b/c they’re out there.

we headed to underwater world — the only familiar feeling for when we first arrived in singapore came when we walked down the entrance way to underwater world…forgot to take a picture! the only difference was a new kiosk that sold ice desserts and the random burger. i think the food court behind is “new”, too.

took a bus back and beyond where we walked from to go to the dolphin lagoon, for the pink dolphin show included in the ticket. the dolphins were lovely — these were mostly grey, with a pink underbelly, pink and grey splotchy face, and pink-tipped fins and tail. the dolphins were great, but the show itself was a bit lacklustre…i guess best for the volunteers who get to go in and touch them/swim a bit with them. the second set of volunteers got dolphin kisses. we were reminded numerous times before the show and after that it’d only take $15 to get an interaction with the dolphins. decided to skip and beelined to the bus after the show ended.

underwater world is as neat as i remember it being. got a few pretty decent shots…must come back and post pictures. and not just to this entry…