Old records

I am reminded of my later father again. My Gundam Wing comics have been sitting on top of a box since I finished reading them and I finally decided to check my plastic container box where the other Gundam Wing comics are to see if I had space. They are now well protected in the box at the expense of the DVDs of Japanese dramas and movies. Aaah.. what a trip down the memory lane as these DVDs were from more than a decade old. I bought them to kill time during the half a year break between the end of JC and the start of university.

The most surprising finding is the first M1 contract when I started my post-paid number. It was such a coincidence that the date was 02/08/08, exactly 12 years ago, although I did not blog about it on the same date. With the contract, I got a $0 Sony Ericsson K660i which I gave to my father. I remembered signing this contract at Changi Airport while waiting for my dad and sister to take the plane back home. They got worried as I was taking too long and I spent more than half an hour to choose a 'nice' number haha.. Sigh.. how sad to think that my dad who still had fighting and living spirit had passed away while myself who has been wanting to die is still forced to live. Anyway, despite the 'sentimental' value whatsoever, I still threw away the papers hahaha...

Another surprise from that box is the annual health screening slips from NUS. Haha.. So it is not my delusion that I was not as fat as now a decade ago. Lol. The journey for weight loss continues as I started to exercise again since I stopped around a month ago because of the hernia scare. Everything feels good for today. Food-wise, I just realised that Deliveroo quietly increased minimum order fee to $12. The usual Thai food that I order is just nice at $10.80 (when the previous minimum order fee was $10). While the $1.20 is small, it is not worth forcing the extra calories by ordering something extra to meet the minimum. Looks like I have to start buying from hawker center daily now hehe.. Or perhaps I can start by cutting down the Deliveroo to once a week instead of every weekend. Stupid Deliveroo because in the end I will just order less frequently from them and they will be collecting less fees.

At least now I am back to these numbers, thanks to COVID

I am still emo about my laptop and I am still waiting until the uncle comes tonight. I hope he does not come at 1am again like in April. I ran Dell diagnostics and it did not give the same error message like previously when the HDD was dead. So likely this time the Windows is the issue. Haiz.. I wonder if I should invest in a Windows installation CD or create an installation file in a thumbdrive. Previously I hate myself for never be bothered about creating system restore point. Now there are 2 (from a week ago and from two weeks ago) and yet even after successful back up in the Advanced Troubleshooting, I still cannot go back to Windows upon restarting. Same thing with the Reset this PC. Bleah... Previously during the HDD death, the reset was not successful.

Sad how my living spirit is determined by the life of my laptop. Without laptop, I simply have nothing to do so what is the point of living. Bleah.. That's why I keep saying that I am satisfied with my life already and I don't know what I still want to do anymore that I do not see any value of living with no more good things that I aspire and only bad things that happen.

Disney Enchanting Collection (Enesco): Mischievous Thief (Abu)

This Abu figurine is from Enesco's Disney Enchanting Collection. It is quite small at less than 9cm (until the top of Abu's head) or around 10.5cm (until the top of the magic lamp). The box size is 14.5cm (L) x 18.5cm (H) x 8.5cm (W) with quality as bad as Jasmine and Aladdin's figurine. Considering its size, I think this is quite expensive at USD 33.80 (SGD 48.52).

Sorry Abu but I really think your face is ugly even in the cartoon

It is a miracle that his tail arrived intact with such little contact at the attachment with the body

This figurine is quite slim with its depth

Instead of showing the details of the lamp, these pictures are highlighting more of the poor paint job

I took this photo upside down and rotated it because I was worried of breaking Abu's tail if I placed it the other way around

I usually space apart the dates of my posts since I dislike how same date posts look on the blog. Thanks to my stupid laptop, I am blogging using my work laptop and the photos are from thumbdrive so I just want to complete this as soon as possible and keep the thumbdrive. Wow... so 5 posts today and this is the last. Good night.

Disney Enchanting Collection (Enesco): A Whole New World (Jasmine and Aladdin)

This is a follow up post after 2 years. Lol. Previously my whole order went missing and I got a refund. I re-ordered in July 2018 but Jafar was not available so I only got this and Abu. Sadly this arrived broken and that was the reason why I did not bother to mention about this anymore. For that, I got a full refund or else this would cost me USD 87.69.

I know Enesco from Jim Shore collections and thus I was quite excited with this Disney Enchanting Collection. Sadly, Enesco is just a distributor or something because the quality of this Enchanting Collection is so far worse than Jim Shore collections. Right from the packaging, the box is thin and flimsy. It is plain and only has a sticker to label the content of the box. The styrofoam is so fragile and flakes off so easily that taking out and placing back inside the box is challenging. The worst is yet to come: the orientation of the figurine inside the box is not upright according to the box orientation o_0 The box has to be rotated 90 degrees (i.e. the lid is sideways) so that the figurine inside is standing up. The figurine itself is lacklustre with shoddy paint jobs and glitters which are coming off.

The design is so similar to previous figurines (such as WDCC and Disney Traditions) which is quite boring but unavoidable since A Whole New World is the only scene in which Jasmine and Aladdin (in Prince Ali outfit) are together. With the similar design, it is not a surprise that this one also shares the same fate of arriving with a broken tassel too. Not to mention the box orientation issue earlier which I am sure contributed to how the tassel ended up damaged. Haiz.. I did not write in previous post but even the WDCC has one broken tassel which I only realised many years after as the crack line is so fine.

The box measures 26.5cm (L) x 28.5cm (H) x 22.5cm (W) and the figure is 21.5cm tall.

The packaging is simply a blue box with a sticker -_-"

The broken tassel at the back :(

The sculpts for the face is pretty but Aladdin looks like having sore eyes

Jasmine is pretty

From this angle, the sore eyes look even worse

The following pictures are to show the lousy quality more obviously.

Shoddy paint job on Jasmine's pants

Shoddy paint job is so apparent on Aladdin's shoulder. Gosh someone please give him eyedrops!

They are lazy to design Carpet and just add glitters which turn out to be an epic fail because they are flaking off

The funny thing about the broken tassel is a protruding wire. Naturally I thought the wire is supposed to go in to the part where it breaks so I could avoid gluing. Strangely, there is no 'hole' for the wire to go in. I never fix this part as I have no space to display this. I think it will break again if I keep it in the box after gluing. Anyway, I think I will cut off the wire when I need to glue it since the wire is preventing complete contact of the broken surfaces.

If you notice, I never took a photo to put all 3 'A Whole New World' figurines side by side. It is not that I hate this figurine. I am simply running out of space. I do not even have a space to put all 3 together to take a photo.

Schmid Aladdin figurine

I have never heard of Schmid brand before but it seems to have a quite long history in porcelain industry. I came across of this figurine while searching for Aladdin 20th Anniversary figurine by Costa Alavezos that I missed buying and never come across since then. That was in 2013 but I only bought this Schmid figurine in 2018. Honestly, the face is ugly. The reason for finally buying this was because I bought other Aladdin porcelain figurines during my Japan trip in September 2018. Perhaps after that I sort of could tolerate ugly faces. Haha...

I think these are handpainted because the images online are not identical. I do not know when this was produced but there seems to be a never ending listing in eBay. I see some listings have more acceptable faces than mine. Lol. Anyway I bought 2 of this since the shipping fee (USD 19.08) was double of the price of the figurine itself (USD 9.50). So in total I paid USD 38.08 (SGD 53.50) for two. The box measures 13.2cm (L) x 19cm (H) x 9.3cm (W) and the figurine itself is around 18cm.

The print quality of the images and text on the box is so bad that perhaps these are not originals? I don't know..

Aladdin in one of his signature poses (the other is hands folded across the chest)

The paint job is actually pretty good. Just that for this piece, the eyeballs are too 'far' out

A random basket which is definitely to ensure that the figurine is stable

Another mark of 'uniqueness' of each figurine, the 'hole' on the foot always looks different in various photos I see on eBay.

Although I have 2, I am too lazy to take both for a side by side comparison. 

'Mysterious' Aladdin porcelain figurine

I say this is mysterious because I really cannot find any information about this figurine. I own it without its original packaging so the only information I have that this was from Tokyo Disneyland according to the marking at the base of the figurine, I am unable to find any other information or picture of this item online. To make it even more mysterious, I cannot even remember if I bought this online or I found this at Mandarake when I visited Tokyo. Without its original box, it is unlikely that I bought this online. However, if I found this in person, it is quite peculiar that I did not write anything about this earlier. With that, I cannot remember how much I bought this for and the only information I can share about this is the height of around 13 cm.

This figurine does not age well and it has a lot of yellow discolouration. That did not stop me from buying since Aladdin merchandises are rare after all. Hehe.. Picture time.

The yellowing on Genie's smoke

Yellow and white discolourations on Genie :(

The face sculpt is actually not too horrible

Aging signs are also visible on Aladdin's skin and hair

There is no mention of even the year

Again???

Just when I thought my mood is getting better and I am recovering from work stuff last week, it is my personal life that turns shitty this week. I am happy with my savings on June and I feel quite emo that I cannot replicate that for July. Things will not be better for August as there are so many things that I want to buy already.

Singapore Mint just sent a mailer this week and I will definitely get the Mickey Loves Singapore medallions. I am on the fence for the Disney Year of the Mouse 2020 coins from Niue. When I checked online, I found that New Zealand Mint is selling them cheaper because of its free international delivery fee. The 'Good Fortune' was already low stock two days ago. I wanted to check my current coin collections to decide if it is going to be worth buying since there are four. I did that yesterday and I made my mind to buy since I can earn money back but year 2020 and the Chinese New Year design with Mickey and Minnie will not happen again. This morning it already went out of stock and there is no where else I can buy it with free shipping. Bleah..

My sister sent me a random message about some Aladdin figures from Enesco. Although there is no Aladdin in the photo she sent me, I decided to have itchy finger and kaypoh online. I found there is one Aladdin figure (Group Hug) that was out last year that I was not aware of. Of course I will buy it but I am waiting for tomorrow in order to meet credit card minimum spending for August. As I was googling, another figure caught my attention. I had a feeling that I bought it before but I could not remember. Yep.. I have too many things already. So I dug my eBay history, my blog posts and my room and yes I already had it. It has been so long since I took photos and wrote about toys so I decided to do that this morning.

Here comes the bad news. My laptop was working fine so far and there was no slowness whatsoever. After transferring the photos, I saw that Avast required an update. After restarting after the update, my laptop just died. Aaaargh!!! I think the SSD died since the reset as well as restore from the Advanced Troubleshooting were successful but upon restarting, the laptop will just keep on going to Automatic Repair. This shit just happened 3 months ago. Either I got a shitty SSD or my laptop is really shit that it keeps killing HDD and SSD. This SSD is on a 1 year warranty so I am waiting for the person that I got it from to reply. Haiz.. He was last online at 730am and I am still waiting for any reply.

This really screws up my long weekend. I thought I would be having fun editing photos and writing about my toys...

Need to stop but cannot stop

One and a half month ago, I thought completing a series in 3 days would be the fastest I can do. After all, that series is about school and comedy which are the combination of themes that I like. On Saturday, I broke the record with completing another series in 2 days. I am quite surprised that I was quite hooked with the mystery and adventure theme. The dystopian setting is not unique or new but I really enjoy the plot twists and mind games that happen even until the last episode. Well this was broken on Sunday when I finished another series in 1 day. Although this series only has 8 episodes, they are an hour each which is almost the same to 12-episode series with 45 minutes per episode.

The series is not available in Youtube so I watched it at kissasian. Initially my intention of rushing was because I think I cannot access the streaming website using my work laptop. So if I had to continue it today, I would not be able to watch it during lunch time. End up I was not rushing but I was simply hooked. It feels like a dejavu because the theme is so similar to the series I completed 1.5 weeks ago. The previous one is about reincarnation and the reincarnated version of the characters are still somehow related to the families of their past selves and towards the end, they are trying to find out and find closure to what happened with their past selves. The series I just finished yesterday is about a spirit who cannot be reincarnated and can only reincarnate if he knows what caused his death. He meets a boy who can see spirit and eventually helps him to find out and find closure.

I completed the series within a day despite a 2 hour break when my friend helped me to transfer my toy box to my storage area. I was not expecting that he would be driving somewhere near my place yesterday hehe.. The box for Tsume Cancer Deathmask is too big even for the car boot. It had to be squashed a bit but I had no other choice. If I were to grab or book a taxi, perhaps the car boots also could not fit. With this, my extra storage space is officially full. Sigh.. I have to rent additional space when Tsume Aquarius and Prime 1 Ikki arrive. I hope they will be delayed because of COVID. Huhuhu... This love-hate relationship with collecting toys is always ongoing. I am excited to buy but then emo when they arrive because I am homeless and only have limited storage space. But that will not stop me from buying again and so on.

I think I have to try restarting my exercise again tomorrow to prevent the inertia and laziness from growing even bigger. I need to get my discipline back with diet too as now I am eating potato chips almost daily sigh.. With a limitation of going out once a week, I think I will not sacrifice bubble tea but I have to stop the potato chips part.

Oh ya I just went for my dental cleaning on Saturday and discovered another benefit of working from home arrangement. I have less staining because I drink more water and less tea or coffee. Hehe.. Aih.. that reminds me of the bottled milk teas that nowadays I regularly drink. I should stop these as well :(

Long winded

With the hernia thingy is temporarily out of my mind, it is time to rant about my mid year review. I am quite pissed that someone (or perhaps more than one person) says that I tend to be long winded with my writing. Aiyer... I am not that pissed with the remarks (because perhaps it may be true) but I am pissed that this kind of thing also can be brought up as a feedback.

Our writing work is essentially subjective. There is no right and there is no wrong. So just because something is not according to your liking or your style, it does not mean it is wrong. It is not as if the rest is perfect. We are all humans and we make mistakes occasionally. It is just that I choose not to highlight those few occasional mistakes during appraisal since I consider it something human. What is the point of highlighting since even after highlighting, there is no guarantee that there is no mistake all the time?

Ehem.. why do suddenly I mention 'mistakes'? It is because sometimes they make mistake, which is objective, and I have to correct it. Now then people say my correction is long winded. Hello, if you do not make mistake in the first place, then my longwindedness will not even happen. I can even counter that the problem is not with what I write but with their capability to understand and comprehend. Fuckers like this are the ones making work feels like a chore. Perhaps I am too used doing training and dealing with people with performance issues that my threshold for these types of minor errors is higher.

My point is if you are not perfect, please do not expect others to be perfect. Or at the very least, please do not judge others using your 'subjective' standards when you yourself are not perfect. Of course I could retaliate and 'defend' myself by pointing out others' mistake. But what would I get out of it? It will be seriously just out of spite or revenge since in the first place I am not really bothered or I can tolerate the different styles of others. Sadly, holding myself from retaliating only makes me emo because that means withholding my human nature to exact revenge. I have to force myself to take the highway instead of joining the rest in the gutter work politics. Anyway I am quite happy with myself that despite the anger and the open opportunity provided to strike back with any feedback, I did not mention any names and I only said in general that I hope everyone can be more mature and less emotional at work and not making a hill out of a mole for any small matter.

My self defense mechanism is to tell myself that my role is different and higher from the rest so I will not myself to be torn down by their feedback as they will not really affect my performance whatsoever. Call me proud but that is the fact haha...

Interestingly, the new drama that I started today is of the same tune of what I am experiencing. The story is about a group of students with special gifts or powers in a school. First important lesson is when you are better than others, the rest will be jealous. Of course it is natural to feel sad when people are nasty towards you out of jealousy and you do nothing wrong. But just hold your head up since it is not your fault and you are not responsible for others' jealousy.

The second lesson is more painful because every gift is also a curse for when you use your gift, you will lose or sacrifice something in return. The drama depicts it in more extreme ways such as nosebleed when making something disappear or personality split (resulting in multiple personality disorders) when copying a new skill from others. It is similar in real life. You may be gifted in speech but you can hurt others if talking without thinking or you hurt yourself when you have something to say but have to hold it back. You may be gifted with power/position/authority in exchange of you being held up to higher standards or expectations and are exposed to more public scrutiny.

So this drama is timely as it reminds me to be grateful with what I have (ultimately I still choose to have something over nothing), to be careful with how I exercise my gifts and most importantly to keep my head up and avoid being dragged to lowly gossiping.

This is by far the fastest drama that I am watching. I started the first episode during my lunch time and by now I am already at episode 7 part 2. This is not the usual comedy or light hearted school drama that I usually like so I am quite surprised that I can be hooked to something a bit heavier and more sci-fi.

Verdict is out

Yesterday I felt as if I was going to receive my sentence to undergo surgery again when I went to see doctor today. I even started praying for intercession from St Jude again this week as I think my situation is hopeless again. Doctor asked me to cough repeatedly and strongly. He also pressed where I felt the discomfort and I told him that it was not comfortable that. The good news is it is not hernia. The bad news is I do not know what is wrong. I just have to live with whatever discomfort I am feeling and hopefully it will go away. I even get a clearance for exercise without restrictions. I am not into weights but even with weights, doctor said to just do slowly and gradually if I want instead of going heavy at one go.

I am partly relieved for now because previously from the first time I started to feel something was not right until the surgery took about 6 months. I cannot help but think perhaps if the hernia is too small, it is not noticeable yet and there is nothing can be done about it. Oh well, since there is nothing can be done now, I shall try not too think too much about this. I want to start exercising again but I still have a bit of fear. Maybe I wait until Monday to resume.

The weighing machine in my room really needs replacement. It shows 59kg now but I weighed 61.65kg at the clinic. This means I was more than 70kg at one point of time because my highest weight was 68kg according to my weighing machine. Anyway below is the current state of my weighing machine.

'Fat until weighing machine broke' is not a joke anymore

With the crowd I experienced today, I think people do not give a damn about the COVID situation anymore. This is Thursday and yet train to town, Orchard and even the hospital were crowded. Junction 8 was even more crowded that Orchard. Wew.. I thought I could eat out today but even the usually not so popular restaurants were also crowded. I wonder what secret these people have that they can tahan wearing the masks. I wore for around 3 hours plus in total today and my face feels so irritated right now. I have dental appointment this Saturday so it is gonna be another few hours with mask on again.

Broken things

Haiz.. I could not sleep until close to 3 am yesterday. As much as I am able to accept what come may with my stomach, deep within me still has some worry with the pain of the surgery. I am praying for a miracle and yet I am also being realistic. With the bulge remaining, I know the problem is still there. My sleep is also affected physically because I usually sleep on my sides but now either on the left or right is uncomfortable. Plus last night I started to notice a bit of painful sensation inside which made me think perhaps there is an injury or a cut inside. Maybe the net last time is partially torn. Bleah..

I still cannot control all the passive suicidal thoughts even though I know they are wrong. My mum is not helping. I find her messages to be irritating instead of calming me. I sort of can empathise with my sisters. It is a skill to be able to say soothing words to someone worrying or suffering. I do not think it is something I am good at all so usually I will keep quiet and pray that God will grant what the person needs instead of me saying the wrong thing. My mum should learn that.

I have also been dreaming of my dad. On Sunday, it was about family dinner with the conversation topic of my sister damaging my dad's film camera or photos (the details are fuzzy now). Perhaps that comes about from me always scolding her for taking ugly photos when we travel together. Yesterday, it was about my dad screaming in pain and asking my mum for his ketorolac. They were trying to hide the fact that he was in pain from my sisters and I but we were outside the room and we could hear. Then we asked mum if she would urge him to see doctor. I don't know how ketorolac specifically came into the dream (I was not even reviewing ketorolac at work) but the rest is similar to the situation with my dad before his hospitalisation. He was in pain for so many months and yet refused to seek help until very jialat.

The most recent dream that woke me up from my evening nap was even more random. Initially I was with 2 friends and I told them I would bring them to eat koi peng. I still vividly remember the specific of me explaining I do not know what the food is called but in Teo Chew, my dad's side of the family calls it koi peng. The scene changed and when we were walking through the shop houses and there was a boy and his dad sitting on the floor while playing guitar. My shortcut to reach the koi peng place was through someone else's house which happened to be locked. I decided not to take the shortcut but the uncle sitting on the floor earlier called for the maid to open the house gate so I could pass through. Somehow this maid was an elderly lady who was close to my family. When seeing her, I cried and hugged her asking if she already heard that  my dad recently passed away. She then looked for my mum who was behind me (suddenly I was no longer with the 2 friends earlier) and she told me 'Lucky I still have my mum'. Alamak... I woke up with tears dripping. I thought the drama I finished last week is exaggerating when the main characters often have tears dripping because of their dreams. Now it happened to me. Haha... I was trying to remember who this elderly lady was before realising that she actually looked like my grandma. Aiih!! Anyway now my memory of her face in the dream is already fuzzy.

Hmm.. maybe these are signs that I will join my dad soon since I have been saying that I want to just die peacefully on the operating table. Haiz.. again and again.. I just cannot run away from such passive suicidal thoughts.

Ok let's talk about reality now. I am quite emo to realise cracks with the spectacles I am wearing while working from home. I bought it in 2014 (the bottom right in the first photo which I notice to be blur now) and only started wearing it from this February. This one has the blue light filter and I have been putting it aside is because I use the superhero goggles one, which also has blue light filter, at work. So although technically it is almost 6 years old now, it sort of broke only after few months of use :(

The location of the cracks is also quite unusual (as shown in the photos below) as this part is not normally touched or manipulated. If the cracks are not at the place backed by the screw, I think the lenses would come off. The only reason I can think of is that because the whole frame and temples are made of metal, they may be more rigid and the tension when I put on and remove the spectacles is badly distributed to these crack points. But supposedly this frame is made of titanium which is a strong spectacles material leh.. On the bright side, thanks to COVID, at least this pair gets to be worn hahaha..