REVIVED!! and now for AUGUST's sake!

Lo and behold, it has been almost ONE year since I last posted anything new here, and breaking my promises to update frequently. Well, here I am again, starting this meaningless post I guess. I had a lot of inspirations and thoughts that has caused me to 'revive' this blog once more. There are so many things going on in my head: study, classes, cleaning my room, watch movies, ideas, my family, etc. that I do not know where to start. However, I'm glad that I'm taking Creative Writing subject that has inspired me to write in a freestyle, which means, writing whatever that comes to my mind and from there I could expand more ideas from it. The lecturer for this subject really nailed it. Though there are only 7 of us, I guess it gives us the opportunities to speak and express more ideas and that the class is not too noisy or quiet.


Reminiscing the month of August..

AUGUST 2008

It's already the month of August (so fast!) and I must say that August is quite a significant month for me. It started since August 2008 on the 15th where I started my internship as a reporter in The Star northern hub. For goodness sake, it's a Friday! And usually people starts work on Monday, right? I remembered the editor at that time requested that I work on the next day as well, which is a Saturday! To her thinking, she thought that it's ridiculous to start work on Friday, take off on Saturday and Sunday and then only come back to work again on Monday. After much discussion, eventually I got my weekends off since I was just an intern.

Another significant day on that month and year is on the 30th Aug 2010 (a saturday). My boyfriend had planned on a camping trip at Pantai Kerachut with some church members and his Boys Brigade students and he invited me to come along with him. And guess what. Before I knew of his plan, I voluntarily offered myself to work on that day (in replacement for a holiday on Monday) just because it seemed to be a significant day for Malaysia, and I thought it would be celebrated in a big scale. But I was wrong. It's just Penang. Probably if I was in KL, then I would probably witness a whole lot of events. I ended up attending to some mundane dinner at a hotel in batu ferringhi accompanied by local traditional music and singing performance. What a tragic. But the good side of it is that I get to eat the hotel food for free! and the cuisine is Malay cuisine with varieties of rice, curries, and meat. Unfortunately, before I attended this event, I was unaware of it and I drove myself to the nearest hawker food centre and fed myself with some disgusting, tasteless claypot noodle that is not worth it's price at all!. When I arrived at the hotel's event, I was quite full to indulge into the hotel cooked food. :(
Disaster.
Then I was sent to check on Gurney Drive to see if there was any celebration. I arrived there and parked my car at quite a distance. Nothing interesting. Nothing newsworthy. And it's boring. The only interesting part is where some motorcycles and cars were decorated with Jalur Gemilang (Malaysian flag). That's it. Nothing more.
What's worse is that I couldn't call him because of the bad reception from Pantai Kerachut. He tried to call from the pier, but to no avail. And he was quite worried about my safety, alone in the dark.
I remembered another occasion where I had to be at a hotel to attend some event..I think it's Tanjung Bungah Hotel and it was held at the beach side with dining tables. It was quite a relaxing and a vacation kind of scene, but I was there as an intern reporter..can't really enjoy much with the thought of working motives. Sigh. Had to listen to some speech, but there's nothing newsworthy either.


The next day when he came back from Pantai Kerachut, he showed me a breathtaking picture of a sunset he witnessed from there in the evening. I regretted for having myself working on that Saturday. I could have experience camping beside a beach and watch the sunset together. He even told me that during the night, he could see thousands of stars in the sky as that area is a reserved forest and there's barely any light pollution. Dang. I missed watching all these nature stuff that a city's life couldn't offer. :(


However, before my internship started back then, I was glad to be able to explore and hike in Pantai Kerachut, Monkey Beach, and Muka Head (Lighthouse) on the first week of August 2008. If you have a facebook account, just sign in and click these links:

My first time to Kerachut
First time to Monkey Beach
To the Lighthouse! I
To the Lighthouse! II


AUGUST 2009

Last year's August was as significant to me. At the beginning of August 2009, I started my part time job at Kumon. At first, my job was just marking the student's homework, and now, I'm also teaching for English subject. For maths I'll just leave it to Iryna and the rest :p I was first trained by Karen, who was also marking for English homeworks at that time, who worked a couple of months earlier than me. I've got to know Alice who is a great boss and the other teachers like Adrian Charles, Geetha, Chris, Ashley, Amanda, Azreen, Jia Yi and Grace who had left, and now currently working are Ai Ping, Yin Tung, Hui Ming (new), Laxmi and Hui Tying.

Kumon Pictures


Exactly one year since my internship with the Star, 16th August 2009 (Sunday) is a memorable date. It's the day of my graduation day (for diploma). My parents, elder sister and bf came to celebrate it with me at Trader's Hotel. Lot's of pictures taken. I received real and fresh flowers from my parents and fake flowers (paper folded) and card from bf and his family. Click on the link to see the pictures from facebook.

Graduation 2009




AUGUST 2010

GUESS WHAT? I've been juggling my college classes and my part time job for a year now. In a way it's my one year anniversary working in Kumon. Yay. Quite sadden by the fact that Grace recently left Kumon to further her studies next month. While we were working together, she shared a lot of stories to me and keep me in company when it's boring marking those homeworks. During my two months break from college (end apr to early july), I spend most of my time with her. We shared thoughts and feelings about the kids we taught. She's my helper in handling really difficult kids that I couldn't handle. She really did a great job teaching and marking those homeworks fast speed. Even faster than me. She could speak mandarin and is able to help those mandarin speaking students to understand their english classwork. But I don't even have the mandarin vocabulary or even the right mandarin pronunciation to help these students. The best I could help is to explain those difficult words in english. On the other hand, she tries to understand the students' capabilities and behaviours to help them, and she's very observant. She always smiles, being cheerful, friendly and helpful. Quite a chatter at times. An avid gym goer and jogger. Guess I'm gonna miss her.

Another person I'm missing now is my bf. Going off for one week for company's training. Miss him lots. This is another item to start off my August month this year. He called me just now and that he's at some mall and bought me a white top! How nice.

I think this is my longest post ever in this entire blog for the past three years. I hope to write more soon, to improve my writing style and not to be bogged down thinking that nobody's reading my blog (i once thought that since nobody's reading my blog, then why blog?). But I think the fact is that people do visit my blog, but they don't leave comments, so I thought people are not interested in reading my blog.
So anyway, I think this post took me almost two hours to compose and edit. I wonder how many words I had written.
Another thing about me is that I actually enjoy reading other people's blog as they share their viewpoints in life. Maybe that explains why I didn't blog because I was too busy minding other people's business than myself.
(Sorry for all the jumbled up notes at the last paragraph. As I said, too many things in my mind that I'm pouring it out at the end.)

Till next time.