i don't think i'm a very lucky guy.. perhaps i just got lucky..

during the chinese new year gathering at ST office two fridays ago, we had a competition to design some doublets for the company.. our group made a rather unique design for it, and i, being a busybody, offered to do the calligraphy for the doublets using marker pen.. i wrote them in zuan style, which is a rather old style of calligraphy and partly because of that and the unique design, we won the first prize.. and lots of people praised the nice calligraphy, but of course not many knew it was me.. they probably would find it hard for a young guy like me to be proficient in calligraphy.. haha.. i was just happy that my art was appreciated..

tonight was the chinese new year dinner at roland restaurant, which i must really admit, bad service and poor food fare.. all the veggies were located at one table, which was far from my colleagues, i asked a service crew whether they could make arrangement such that they serve the veggie food to me at my colleague's table, he simply replied "i don't know." okay, fair enough, he can't make such decision. so i asked him to whom can i direct the question, and he simply replied again, in his matter-of-state manner "i don't know." bad answer, i've decided straight away that this restaurant's service is well below average.. the food's nothing to brag about either.. mostly fried stuff, and the noodles were too salty.. alright, enough about negative parts..
i actually won the 8th prize during the lucky draw, which was really rare.. the prize was pretty cool, $80 ntuc voucher, enough to keep my office's pantry full for 8 months, on top of the $5 pantry allowance monthly from my company.. and my winning number happens to be part of my project manager's mobile number, to which she said is very lucky.. very lucky indeed..

oh well.. luck is just part and puzzle of a person's life.. it comes and goes.. nothing to open a party for, but something not to take granted of either.. be grateful when you have it, and when you don't, just take it in great strides.. life goes on..
cheers..
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entertaining weekend

had an outstanding and entertaining weekend..
saturday saw me with a couple of internationalities, a couple of chinese, a vietnamese and a french..
it was a rendez-vous that was long due and finally took place, sadly son couldn't attend..
as usual the first half an hour was used to wait for late comers, luckily i was the first to arrive there, which was quite seldom.. apart from the usual gunn, lijun and dd, there were others whom i met for the first time, and of course cyrelle from france, who is here for industrial attachment..
my chance to use french finally, which started out rather bad because it had been months since i used it.. if not for gunn who sometimes do the translation for us, we would have died trying to figure out each other..
headed for takashimaya for dinner, dd suggested fei chui restaurant but it was too full, so i bought them instead to a vegetarian restaurant, much to gunn's dismay.. but oh well, they rather enjoyed it, forcefully even.. especially cyrelle who didn't think much of the shitake mushrooms due to its dark color..
but by the end of the evening, my french was much more fluent but still in bits and pieces, but much much better.. headed to another place for some drinks and chilli crabs.. but in the end only 2 ordered them..
lessons learnt: always book a restaurant during the weekends if you don't want to end up in a vegetarian restaurant, but even so the vegetarian restaurant was almost full too; always practise your french, you will never know when you would use it..

sunday: table-tennis at richie's place..
he's got a new table-tennis table, no puns intended, and we all gathered there for a thrashing, by him of course..
never knew he played it during his primary school days, and the rest too!! damn, jonathan and ryan are so good at it that i almost felt out of place, out of league!!
jonathan played it during his primary and secondary school days, and ryan was in school team before.. me?? i only knew how to hit it.. that's all.. haha
but it was a good workout, as i slowly but surely pick up the pace again.. and the loser had to do the gardening for richie too..
he just had some water features installed in the small garden with some water plants along with some guppies.. but alas some of them died even before the end of the day.. think it was due to not getting used to the water with the plants.. so sad.. they were living so peacefully at the shop until we brought them there..
we graced the vegetarian stall of a friend of richie for dinner, he's got good culinary skills and very hardworking, but lacks the luck to be spotted for his talent.. so we decided that we would frequent and support his stall more often from now on..
oh yes, i forgot to declare the official commencement of tohyi entertainment club beginning sunday.. to more table-tennis sessions, barbeques, slacking sessions to come, cheers..

so enjoyable and tiring weekend..
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