Thursday 29 October 2009

Mazda Freebie

Look what I got in the mail!!!


Free stopwatch!!

Not too shabby either!

Hahahaha.

I love free promotional stuff!!

Yes yes Mazda3 MPS, I'll buy when you finally revise the front grille.
And maybe change the interior leather.
And add the iStop fuel saving technology.

Then maybe I might just ignore the new Golf GTI.

Hehehe.

But anyways, this is such good timing, now I can time myself doing laps around the lake......

..

.
.

or how long I'll be playing Borderlands :P

Saturday 24 October 2009

The Proposal


You just know
when you know.


And I know I love her

and

I can't wait for the rest of my life with her.



***************************
OMG!!!

HOW DO I DO THIS?!!

DO YOU GUYS KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO PROPOSE THESE DAYS?!!!

Do you know how much PRESSURE there is to make it really special?!!! IT'S INSANE!?!!

Everything has to be perfect. Like perfect - perfect!!!

The ring, how its done, the scene - ALL HAS TO BE SUPER DUPER SPECIAL!

Like Big Mac 'special sauce' special?

No. More like how-you-proposed-will-be-told-to-everyone-including-your-neighbour's-great-great-great grandchildren special.

So not only must it blow the socks off of her, but it needs to impress five generations thereafter! Talk about pressure!!

It needs to be sweet, romantic, sentimental and funny (all the typically girly requirements which of course is nearly impossible to do).

It's crazy!! This world has gone nuts I tell you.

Nuts.

*************************


Three.



Four.



One.


or

Twelve?!!! WTFBBQ?!!


These are the month's salary I've been told I needed to save up for the engagement ring. I was like *choke* THAT MUCH?!!!! for an engagement ring?!!!

HOLY $&1)#!

Hahahaha

*DEEP SIGH*

It's the first real test of your love :P

But I knew I couldn't propose without a ring. This was something I needed to do.

I also knew that buying diamonds is really tricky. You can get really burnt if you didn't know what you're doing.

So I made sure I did a lot of research. I googled diamonds and learnt about the four C's. But most helpful was reading pages and pages of the Vogue forums. To catch a fish you need to think like fish!! Hehehe.

I also went on James-Bond-espionage-spy mode. I spied on her jewelery box when she wasn't looking (it wasn't hard, I've raided her underwear drawer many times). I checked the
type of rings she had and measured her ring size (her ring size = my pinky finger size! yes!)

Taking these into consideration, I felt I had enough material to go into a ring store without feeling completely lost. Power through knowledge!!

One Friday afternoon, I went to Tiffany's, Hardy Brother's and Rosendorff in the city. I think I spent a good half an hour on each store talking to staff and having a good look at what they had on display.

What made it easy was I knew exactly what I wanted, a beautiful solitary ring (to symbolise my one love.... awwwww.......)

The guy at Tiffany's was really nice. Really helpful and was really professional. I saw a ring there that I liked (I swear I heard music when I saw the ring).

Hardy Brother's were expensive. Even more than Tiffany's for a similar ring. Plus they made me join their email list which was very evil of them. Not a fan of the all-black interior look either.

The lady who helped me in Rosendorff was the best. She was very excited about my engagement and was very pleased to hear what style of ring I was pursuing. I actually liked what she suggested but when she started offering discounts for it, alarm bells started ringing. Suddenly I
wasn't very sure if I was getting a good deal or not.

But I didn't decide straight away.

I sat on a decision for two more weeks and I passed the shops a few more times.

In the end it came down to what felt right.

It was simple, it was beautiful, it was perfect.
The song by Deep Blue Something was one of the first guitar songs I learnt.


*******************
Taylor Swift's song Love Story is the inspiration for my proposal.

Its a cute love song and I really like it! Its about love, its got Romeo and Juliet (for which my girlfriend has seen the movie a gazillion times, drooling all over Leonardo).

But the song's best part is the surprise proposal in the end! The music turns slow and melancholic.... which then builds pace and then BAM!!! HE KNELT TO THE GROUND AND PULLED OUT A RING!! Great finish!

I wanted to use this to spring my surprise proposal :P

I was contemplating singing the song and popping the question in the end.

Last time I sang for her on the guitar she was in tears, either she liked it or it was really bad. But to play the guitar and sing, knowing a proposal was to happen in the end sounded risky! She'd pick it from my voice that something was up.

Plus my Taylor Swift voice is VERY unromantic.

Maybe I'd propose by YouTube? Pre-record a song then post it on YouTube? Then we watch the video and pop the question right in the end?! Awesome!!!! :P

Very nerdy though :(

But the idea of a video proposal did grow on me :)

I thought about it a lot more and after much brainstorming I decided to match the cute song with a cute cartoon clip that I'd make.

Now I've done some cartoon sketching a long long time ago, so I was really rusty with my drawings.
To make a whole video required a lot of work. The whole exercise took four nights of brainstorming, sketching and storyboard planning. And it took a full day to put it all together.

I made a total of 140 animation cells for the video

In the end I finished with a very cute proposal video clip.
I'm really quite pleased with how it turned out.

It was cute, romantic, sentimental and special.




****************************

We had breakfast at Monza that cloudy Sunday morning.

We both ordered dishes with eggs covered in Hollandaise sauce.

How come something so bad could be so good!

The big breakfast got us completely stuffed and so we went to Kings park to walk it off.

Kings park was beautiful that day.

All the flowers had bloom.


There were colours everywhere.


She was in a happy mood that morning (because I've fed her and she's had her coffee hehehe). and were sharing jokes and talking about random things.

Like what we always do.

After going down and up the Kokoda track, we found ourselves a tree to rest under.

We had a view overlooking the city.

The sun had come up and just being under the cool shade was really nice.



It was perfect.



*****************************
On the 18th of October, 2009, under the shade of a tree,
I proposed to her.

After she wiped away the tears, she said yes.






Tuesday 20 October 2009

Octooober

Before I post the BIGGEST THING EVER TO HAPPEN TO ME! I thought I'd post the little things that made my month of October. Save the best for last. :P

*****************
Our house went from having nine people running around like lunatics (everything was frantic during my brother's wedding) to just three people now.

And its really quite shocking how quiet the house has become.

I blame it my little nephews. They're so loud, always running around screaming and crying. You kinda get used to it after a while, but it goes weird when they're not there.


***************
ICE CREAM!!!

For some weirdly reason, there's been a lot of ice cream eating around my household this month.
Its like every dinner someone would should out "Ice cream?!" Not that its a bad thing, just weird because ice cream was a contraband in our house for its high sugar and fat content. Now its like ice cream day every day!

My brother introduce us to this brand of ice cream - available from Fresh Provisions.
SOOOOOOOOOO GOOOOOOODDDD!!!


Also available from Fresh Provisions is this - Hershey's Choco Syrup!!
SOOOOOOOOOO GOOOOOOOODDD!!


***************
First Aid

Anh and I did a first aid course together.

Learning what to do when people choke, how to tie up a bandage and sling, what to do in emergency - all good stuff!!

But I don't know about the take-home dummy to practice CPR though... that was a bit crappy. And the course itself was too rushed. It tried to cover a lot of theory and practical stuff in the one day. Thankfully we've both done some sort of training before so it didn't go over our head.

Now I just have to remember to order the first aid kits.

But what was really cute/cool/funny was us being in the same class together. We were like high school kids with little desks and paper and such. Then we had lunch together, we shared notes, compared test scores, then we both put each other in the recovery position.

:)

Sunday 18 October 2009

Happy Happy Joy Joy

I'm so happy today!! Lots of happy news.

BIG BIG HAPPY NEWS!! :P


Plus happy to have my room back.
Ecstatic to be re-united with my smelly bed!

Watch this space the next few days.
Looking to unload all these things off my head/phone/chest.


Monday 5 October 2009

Disconnected


Must be karma!

Following my last post about being connected online, I find myself in a completely opposite position!

First off - I lost my room to my rely who's flown from overseas to join in my brother's wedding celebration. Good for them, but bad for me!!

My auntie is not even using my computer!

24" of high definition gaming wasted!!! I can't wait to play Assassin's Creed and the new Left 4 Dead campaign!

I miss my bed :(

And on the same day I lost my room, my phone died!! So I couldn't even check the interwebz through that!!

Its such a shame because I have so much to blog about.

Now its slowly leaking out of my head.
All this creativity now just puddling near my feet.