On Fri, Andrew and I decided to go for dinner at Blue Ginger (Sporean and M'sian cuisine), run by English husband and Sporean wife team. I had carrot cake to start and Andrew had Lucky Prawns (4 pieces of ala tempura style prawns). For mains, I had Hokkien Mee (sans squid cos i don't like them) and Andrew had Nasi Goreng. We also had a small bottle of Tiger beer and bottle of J2O. Total bill was :₤30.00 (S$90). Imagine spending $90 to eat carrot cake, hokkien mee and nasi goreng! Sigh... but i must admit putting the first forkful of carrot cake (started portion, no less) in my mouth was simply HEAVENLY. I have been dreaming of having carrot cake for the longest time and last monday (it was a PH here) we drove all the way there only to find it closed and I was close to tears in the carpark. You know that feeling when you have whet your appetite for something and you can almost taste it in your mouth, only to be robbed of it? It was a fairly ex meal even by comparison here but I think we will still go back once in a while. Meanwhile I am soooooo looking forward to all the carrot cake and char kway tiao that I can eat in August! Not to forget tim sum, sushi, wanton mee, mee pok tah, laksa, beef noodles, prata.... and the list goes on.
Last month, I had to do a set-up for one of our property launches and the very day that I dress up in my suit to head to work early to meet my colleague, the trains were all cancelled. Why? Because a car had driven onto the rail tracks and one of the stations that we had to pass through to get to Birmingham. I panicked and rang my boss to say I am not able to make it on time, so she said prob best to take a cab from Stourbridge to B'ham, I had not enough money on me and the train station was in the middle of nowhere, so she said just take and company will pay. The ride took about 40 mins and the fare? ₤22 (S$66). According to some of my colleagues, it was still fairly cheap for a ride from Stourbridge to Bham town centre. It was rather embarrassing to arrive at work at 9.30am and have the boss walk out to my taxi with the money for me to pay my ride, but hey, it was not my fault.
Speaking of more money affairs, i had a pay rise last week! Yay! Still not quite my ideal pay package but I am more than satisfied with it. I am terrible at negotiation and my boss even said I was "trying it on" when I asked for higher than what they offered. What it means is I am trying my luck, what we call just hantam and see whether can get or not. What matters is I got what I asked for. So there.
Speaking of work place, for a very small office which has more temps than perm staff, it sure has a lot of politics! And it even includes temps! People here have such fiery personalities and they build their impressions of people so quickly, and small things will make very deep impressions. It seems like you need to be in the "in crowd" to be safe. I have had so many temps come and go in this office in the last 3 months, we fired one after we got fed-up of her pissing about at work esp towards the end when she was so comfortable she thot she could get away with anything, including sending emails at work, walking about either to the toilet, to make tea for the entire office, or just to stand and ... chat, all except do her job, which is to make calls to companies. Oh, she also got Facebook access banned at work, cos she was on it all the time, even during working hours. But then she was goody friends with the boss's niece, who has the loudest voice and rather bad language, but also gets away with murder. We now have a 51 yr old temp guy who's real job is a software engineer, and he is such a heavy smoker, he went for 7 cig breaks one day this week (when the bosses are away) and the niece made a very loud comment once when he stepped out (prob during his 7th break) that he had gone for & breaks that day! So the next day, I had to tell him to cut it down to 2, he told me he was a heavy smoker as tho we could not tell, he had the worse case of shakes ever! even just sat at his desk, he can't just point to something without his hands shaking. its very hard to try not to laugh. In the end, he bargained to take shorter lunch breaks and have his usual cig breaks in the day so that we will not be paying for his breaks cos he will still claim an hr lunch on his time sheet. Another one now is so chatty, she has a comment to say about everything and has a habit of joining other pple's conversations with her 2 cents worth, which is driving everyone mad. Other times, she will exclaim very loudly that the PC prog is slow or just vent rather loudly at being exasperated at the computer. Yet another one who is only 23, has the tendency to be very "teh" and shrieks in a really sharp voice when she is excited extremely chatty, which is... rather often. She also likes to play with my colleague's hair and tell me how well she has dones her job almost on a daily basis. will make empty promises to me about finishing my projects on time and how she will not go home until it is done etc, but only empty promises....Still looking to hire a full-timer for our team, but that is like the biggest gamble ever, since no one has yet to please us.
Last weekend, we took the cabinet doors off and repainted the kitchen, installed the new oven. It is now a mix of chalk stone white and sage green. I like it. New doors have gone back on and the cooker hood has been installed, next will be the big job of changing the worktop surfaces and the new cooking hob. Doing up this little house has been a never-ending job, no matter how small our rooms may be.
On May 22, we celebrated Andrew's birthday with a little BBQ in our back garden, just the 2 of us. We had cheap sausages, potato salad, some tossed salad, beef patties, chicken fillets and one pork chop for Andrew, washed down with some nice white wine lemonade and the temperature that day was the highest so far this year at 28 degrees celsius! It almost felt like being back in Spore. I also baked him a cake, a really big one, too big in fact, cos I had the stupid conversion wrong, the weighing scale had this rididulous print on it saying 5lb x 1oz, so i ladida went to measure this and that and converted and turned out it was not actually a conversion! By the time I found out, it was too late as I had already mixed a huge amount of flour and suger and so had to turning back and Andrew said just carry on and add even more eggs, i think we used about 8 eggs in the end! so there was so much mix, i had to bake 2 cakes, but they turned out tasting too much like baking soda, and so we did not really eat the cake in the end. At least I made the effort.
Alright, stay tuned, I may blog again before I head home, if not, see you in August.
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