Yay, I did get my haircut several weeks ago, and now that my hair has grown out a bit, it does look pretty good....so now I think I finally have a regular hairstylist whom I can trust my crowning glory with, thanks to Yee Ling for recommending him to me!
Well, I haven't blogged for a while, mainly coz' I haven't had much to blog about. I'm still working at the same TM project at Accenture...still clicking buttons everyday doing testing of an application. Sometimes I actually am quite free, which is very strange considering my company's reputation for having overworked staff. Everyone says my time of busy-ness will come...but so far it hasn't...and in a way I enjoy it, but I also feel kid of blah coz' I don't feel very challenged in my work right now. Well, perhaps once this project is done and I move on somewhere else...I'll be enjoying my work a bit more.
Christmas is also coming up, which of course means that I and almost everyone else at church is BUSYYYY. I'm in choir, and I get to lead the sopranos to do their parts...which also isn't very challenging coz' we just sing the normal melody and all of them are pretty good enough already. So usually all I do is run through all the songs with them, then we get to hang out til' we have to practice together with the other groups (altos, bass and tenors). One of these Christmases I really should try to be an alto, so I get to learn whole new parts that are more challenging...but then again, I am (in a none braggy sense) one of the stronger sopranos, so I think that if I switched, the sopranos might not be loud enough... Oh well, hopefully next year there will be so many sopranos that if I switched, it wouldn't matter. Hehe!
Anyway, doing carolling has also left me target to the usual but lame jokes about my name. Examples include:
"Carol is carolling!"
"Carolling Carol!"
"If you married a guy whose surname was Ling, you'd be Carol Ling!"
I shall make sure I steer clear of any guy I meet whose surname is Ling....
I was also recently involved in my church's annual event for kids, Discovery Days, where I was in charge of the 'Fun Singing', and also helped out for games and art and craft, while also helping to take care of the kids at other times. With over 100 kids there, running around like little energizer bunnies on caffeine every chance they got, I was pretty zonked out by lunch time. Somehow or another I did manage to make it through the entire day...woo hoo! But then the next day there another day of outing with the kids. I actually didn't think I would be going coz' on that Saturday morning, I had to work at the weeeeee hours of the morning around 1.30am, coz' we had to shut down TM's system for upgrading at the hour when no one would be using it. So I had to go in to test the newly upgraded system and see if there were any issues. And I didn't think I would have the energy to go for the trip the next day, especially since after DD on Friday, when I got home and planned to sleep from 7pm to 12am before going to work, I slept until 9pm and then woke up coz' of some sms-es (which is another story in itself...). After that, I tried to go back to sleep but wasn't completely in dreamland. So I went to work that night all sick-ish and sniffly due to lack of sleep, so I thought I definitely would not be able to go for the trip next day.
When I was done testing, I got home at around 6am and jumped into bed again at 6.30am. Before sleeping though, I told God that I really wanted to go for the trip and asked Him that if He wanted me to go too, then wake me up in time for me to get to church and board a bus before they leave, and make sure I'm rested enough to last the trip. But if He thought I'd better rest, then just let me continue sleeping. So I went to sleep at 6.30am without setting my alarm.... and at 7.30am (one hour later!) I woke up on my own. And I wasn't feeling sick or sleepy, so I jumped out of bed, flew to church and got there in time to meet everyone boarding the buses. So I got to go on the outing, which was pretty fun...though one of the kids I was taking care of had a rather annoying habit of going missing. And I wasn't tired or sick the whole day! Woohoo! Goes to show that the Holy Spirit is better than any coffee...:D
All in all, DD was great...although one thing we did this year which I'd very happily not do again next year is giving out little namecards to the kids. Supposedly this is for the kids to call us in case they need some aunty, uncle, 'tai ko' or 'jie jie' to talk to, for whatever reason. But then the thing we didn't seem to foresee is that our handphone numbers might end up in the 'wrong hands'... such as the needy 18 year old brothers of the kids.
See, that Friday after Discovery Days when I was sleeping early to try and get enough rest for my graveyard shift, I got two sms-es around 9pm that woke me up. Both were from the same number which I didn't know... the first one said "Hi Carol, how are you?" No name, no introduction, nada. I was still in snoozyland when that firsts sms came, and the second sms came about 5 minutes later. "Why you never reply? Please reply?" When I woke up, read the sms-es and figured out that it was probably from a DD kid and not a murderous stalker, I replied "Sorry, what's your name?". Then the kid sms-ed back in BM, saying he was one of the Stepping Stones kids' brother (Stepping Stones is a children's home from which a bunch of Indian kids came for our DD event), and he said he wanted to be my friend, but asked why did I talk like that. Hmm? Apparently in this kid's world, it's incredibly rude to ask for his name when he doesn't introduce himself. The way this kid was going, I was starting to think that the kid probably had potential to be a murderous stalker. But considering these kids are probably orphans who were emotionally scarred since childhood or some sob story like that, I thought telling him to bugger off, as tempting as it was, probably wasn't the best response to such strange behaviour, so I continued replying to him in a civilized manner. He seemed to be very happy that I 'agreed' to be his friend. That night he sent me one sms asking me to go out because 'the moon is saying goodnight to you!'. And the next morning, I got a long sms in Tamil which ended in 'Good morning', which were the only two words I understood.
To cut a long story short, I asked him how old he was, and when he told me he was 18 years old and NOT one of the kids, I told him flat out that my number is for the kids to call me in case they need someone to talk to, not for anyone else. So I asked him not to sms me anymore...and he replied by saying something about opening his heart to me and being glad to have me as a friend. Good grief. I replied by saying that he shouldn't open his heart to a person he never even met, and that I can't be his friend coz' I don't know him at all. And I said I wouldn't reply to him anymore. And ever since then, I haven't gotten any more sms-es from crazy potential stalker kid. Whew!
Well, I dunno if what I did is considered 'cruel'...but in my experience, an 18 year old boy sms-ing a girl he's never met before usually is interested in more than just being 'friends'. And this guy was obviously incredibly desperate for some sort of affection, to declare me a great friend when all he knows about me is what his brother told him about me from DD. It's quite freaky. And apparently I wasn't the only one who got strange sms-es or calls after DD...another friend got sms-es from a 15 year old kid! Nooooo way I'm going to give away my handphone number to kids next year...ESPECIALLY if they are some orphanage kids who are more likely to have attention-craving older siblings with too much phone credit to spare.
So anyway, that's about the biggest drama I've had in my life recently. I'm also in my church's Christmas production, which is a musical directed mainly for the kids. I haven't done acting for quite a while, so I signed up for acting and hoped to get a reasonably challenging role and not just be some small koochy extra with no lines. Well, I kind of got my wish...I'm playing Harriet Redrose, an 'eccentric' old lady who apparently lives at home alone with cats! :p Well, it wasn't exactly the kind of role I envisioned for myself (perhaps hot rocker chick? Hahaha... kidding)... but after a few practices, I'm actually quite enjoying the part, since I can get away with doing an impression of Diedric the Disgruntled Elf. If you don't know who that is, listen to Hitz.fm during holiday seasons...it's a elf who decides he's sick of working for Santa during Christmas only and decides to do his 'holiday rounds' during other local festivities such as Hari Raya and Deepavali. And being eccentric is always fun...so yeah, I think I make a pretty good old lady. :P But we only have 3 more weeks left before the date of the play, and we sort of just started practices, which doesn't leave us much time left. Gotta reeeaally hope and pray that we can get everything together in the short time that we have....
Ok, that's enough blabbering for now. Time for bed!
