SINGAPORE SHORT STORIES

Chinese New Year is just over (I mean the first 15 days are over). While the red is still the hot colour this month, I am beginning to feel that another festival where red is the colour (National Day) will be here soon!

I lead a sedentary lifestyle at work. Sitting and facing the computer whole day, I have developed quite a sedentary lifestyle. Coming back home after a stressful and hectic workday day after day, I am too tired for exercises these days: I have also been kept busy by my personal committments.

Marina Bay Sands Artscience Museum opened with a fanfare yesterday and Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort was also officially opened!

Singapore Budget 2011 is tomorrow. Singapore Budget 2011 is also a day I reflect on my budget! So today, I look at my bank savings. I feel uncomfortable today looking at my bank account. I am a saver but I have to spend for the basic necessities and my bank savings now do not look impressive.

I am appalled at the sea of change sweeping the Arab countries. The regimes of Tunisia and Egypt fell within days of a sea of revolt, driven secularly, aided by the new media such as Facebook and Twitter. Years of hard regime have fuelled displeasure, discontent among the people. Years of suppression, years of oppression by the regimes have sparked the revolts by the people for the people.

My wife and I had a very steamy hot Valentine night with my wife! The moment we complete work, we headed straight home and immediately changed into our casual wear! Without any further, we headed straight to the nearest

Today is Valentine Day. If you are reading this post today, I hope you have celebrated Valentine Day well. If not, it is still okay. I find Valentine Day, like many other events, already very commercialized. Restaurants, flowers and gift shops should be the main beneficiaries of Valentine Day consumers. I was with my wife at a shop yesterday. It was a good gesture for the shop to present to us a stalk of rose after we had made our purchases. I was elated for the shop helped me to come up with a stalk of rose! At this time, you may label me stingy but it is okay. Anyway if there is no free rose, I would still buy a stalk or bouquet of roses for my lovely wife no matter how much it costs.

This year, I am giving Chingay 2011 a miss as I am very busy with my own personal stuff. If you are free later go, do go down to Chingay 2011 later on to catch one of the last highlights for Chinese New Year 2011 in Singapore before the 15th of Chinese New Year (Yuan Xiao Jie) marks the close of Chinese New Year.

If you have a number of songs on Youtube which you like, how about converting all of these songs into your mp3, mp4 or wma files so that you can listen to them wherever you are?

I have been extremely busy at work and at home for the past few weeks. When I am faced with a large workload and personal things to do, I remember Steven Covey's words: "First Things First".

I been staring at computer for hours today: at work at least 9 hrs, come back home tonight to do my stuff for another few hours and now my eyes hurt! As much as I want to blog, my eyes keep telling me to shut down this computer.. I .......want ... to blog, but.... my eyes....cannot.. ta....han....

Huffington post  , world's number 1 blog (Alexa rank is 127, Google Pagerank is 8!) has been bought over by AOL for a whopping US $315 million! Wow, I never know that a blog can be valued at such high price. But Hufffington post, being Huffington post is really an immensely successful blog. Some readers of Huffington post are up in arms for the buy over and I really hope that Huffington post can truly add value to AOL.

I have just completed reading the first book of this year. It is about how to become rich. In the book, the author advocated all of us to listen to our inner soul and do the things we love and are passionate about for a living.

I visited the library today. It is a regular habit of mine to visit the library regularly. It warms my heart to see young and old reading a wide assortment of library materials in the library, covering all topics and beefing up on their knowledge in many aspects.

With more and more barriers up on MRT platforms, I observed in quite a number of instance, our MRT trains performing "parallel parking". With the barriers, the MRT train now need to be aligned more exactly when stopping at the platform for the boarding and alighting of passengers.

Global food prices and commodities prices are on the ascent. Commodities and food prices are pushed up with the increasing global demand, especially from emerging countries. The anomaly of weather also threatens supply and further pushes prices up!

Everything seems to be returning back to normal after the recent festive buzz. I mean most of the visiting of relatives should have stopped for many Singaporeans. Many are now preparing for work and school tomorrow too.

 My wife and I visited Sentosa Flowers 2011 this afternoon. We used the new Sentosa Boardwalk from Vivocity Level 1 and enjoyed a brand new way to enter Sentosa Island! The admission fee from this walk-in is just $1, paidable by EZ link card.

It is quite hard to find a restaurant for dining on Chinese New Year days but today most of the shops resume operations. I had a meal at one of the stalls in Kopitiam. I was shocked on learning, at the point of footing my bill, that it cost an extra $0.50 today.

I woke up quite late today, but I was glad for I managed to sleep through at least 8 hours! During working days, I only managed to clock in at the very most 6 hours of sleep. I am always drained out mentally and physically at work as a result of looking at the computer screen and having to bear the many office politics and sucking up of other colleagues to the directors. There are so many office undercurrents played by those colleagues who do nothing at work except play office politics, carry the balls of directors, bad mouthing colleagues and having nothing much to do at work except to indulge in all of these office vice and playing computer.

I just returned from River Hongbao 2011. I regretted going there as there was nothing much to see this year. Standards have dropped drastically as compared to previous years. A lot of items were recycled. There was still a lot of crowd though and similarly there was a lot of China Chinese and a lot more foreign talent who made me feel like an ailen on home ground.

I thought $2 as an angbao is a dying trend. I thought $4 is the minimum. I thought the Singapore economy is doing well, or at least it is not downturn for Singapore's economy. I thought this and that but when I received a $2 Hongbao, I was SHOCKED!

Chinese New Year is a time when we meet our relatives, some of whom we have not met for years or months. As I have shared with you in yesterday post, I have not met my relatives whom I visited yesterday for a year and hence it can be quite boring because there is no real topic to discuss.

Today is the 2nd day of Chinese New Year in Singapore. It is one of the few days of the year that I can take quite a long break! With Wednesday (just 2 days ago) being half day of work for many, , many Singaporeans can enjoy a 4.5 days of break away from their work. For me, I have topped this 'deluge of holidays' by clearing some of my leaves too to augment this stretch of leave so that it can be truly rewarding!

Today, being the 1st day of Chinese New Year, I went visiting with my wife. We first paid our visit to my father's house, then to my second uncle's house and finally to my mother-in-law's house. For my father's side, it was a once in a year affair seeing all my uncles and aunties as well as their children as all of us are too busy throughout the year, hence Chinese New Year is the only time when we meet! Incredible, you may thought, but this is real. For some of my other relatives, I have not seen them for years or even in decades!

Today is eve of Chinese New Year. Again, another year flies in the flash of an eye. I have lots to say, lots to blog, about Chinese New Year and myself, but I have lots to do these days: Spring Cleaning, buying of new clothes, goodies and decorations that I have not much time to spend blogging on this blog.

It is a tired day as I carried out Spring cleaning for hours the whole of today.