Hear me offload...

Oh god, I seriously feel I have been bitten by the Laziness Bug.

I have been so out of touch with the following recently...
- Posting new entries in my blog
- Posting new photos in my blog
- Taking part in contests (that's why I haven't won anything for ages, it's becos I'm lazy)

Even I have been feeling so very happy just with the 1 week rest from my part time studies. Trust me, the test for my 1st module made me felt like a complete moron. Imagine the test was just a sheet of A4 paper and on it were 10 sentences. We need to spot the grammer mistakes and my mind went blank. I have wasted my life for the past 30 years... The 10 sentences look all fine to me!!! Oh dear... And the presentation test where 2 other group members and I had to present our report. We really sucks! Lecturer told the class beforehand that no one is to read from notes during the presentation, and we dutifully obey. We were given a chance to draw lots and ended up being the 1st group to present. The result, 3 of us panicking and forgetting what we were supposed to say. The rest of the other groups read from their notes in front of everyone. The lecturer said they were good. I learnt my lesson, for the next 9 modules, whoever told me I should never read from notes during a presentation, is deadmeat.

Tonight's going to be the start of Module 2's lessons. It's going to be 2 tiring days a week from now on again. I got to go for lessons twice a week after work and end up home only by 11pm.

Oh right, the past weekend was good. Saturday morning was spent with Christopher at school to take part in some handicraft session. Met with "ugly" parents, even doing handicrafts for the school community, people can get all kiasu. We are told to bring a pair of scissor, UHU glue and staples. I bought 3 pairs of scissors along and one by one were borrowed away by parents who don't bother to listen to instructions (they came empty handed). I ended up having to borrow from my neighbour parent who bought 2 pairs. Parents started to fight for seats, fight for things to do, fight for recognition... Christopher and I were early, we sat down and started to learn how to do the handicraft. Later, as parents started to crowd in, the teacher told us to divide into different stations for each stage.

I asked the teacher whether Christopher could stay with me and just do the weaving process of the ribbon since our station was in charge of cutting while another station is in charge of weaving. She is fine since he's young and other kids are running around. Another mother started to talk to Christopher and said since he can do it, so can she. If the teacher scold her for not following instruction, he should get scolded too. My goodness, I can't believe that a mature mother would say something like this to a kid. So, I told her I have checked with the teacher beforehand and got permission. She is unhappy and turn away. *sigh*

Finally, we finished our station's duties of cutting. I told Christopher we should be leaving as I saw other parents are fighting for a part in the last station of putting the ribbons on. This just shows how too many cooks can spoil the broth.

Returning home, we had a rest. Hubby was actually in a good mood, he actually brought Nicholas and Bryan out to the supermarket for grocery shopping. He returned with the 2 beaming boys, they actually bought some sweets too.

Around 2pm, we decided to go fishing for crayfish again and got my mum to go along. It was raining by the time we got there but we decided that it would be fine since it's drizzling. Heavy rain came and we ran for the shelter. Finally the rain stopped, we went all out and ended up with 50 crayfish! Haha! Really broke our record, it was a good catch, just took us about 3 hours. We were walking along the edge of the water and found a "giant" one on the grass, it is the largest we have seen, at about 25cm. Too bad it's dead, we wonder how it's landed on the grass, what a pity. But my catch wasn't too bad as I got a few of 13cm and one fat one at about 17cm with fairly big claws. We decided to release all the rest of the smaller ones back into the water. End up, we only kept 8 pieces of what we caught. We throw in one big netful and some Chinese students were surprised and ask whether they could have the rest. So, we gave the rest to them. We managed to get the newbies settled well into my tank and mum's tank.

The next day, Sunday, we decided to go in the afternoon at around the same time to see whether we could find any big ones. Mum got really lucky, she caught one huge mama and she's bursting with babies. There were hundreds of them. The babies were newly hatched and most of them dropped off and were crawling around in our container. We found some were clinging on to each other and were worried they might be biting each other. I told hubby I would keep a few of the babies and put all the rest back into the water near the seaweed patch. This way, there would always be crayfish for everyone. We did not manage to find any big one that day, hubby said that we should stop for a while to let the crayfish reproduce before I wipe them all out.

Hong Kong here we come....!!!!!

Yes, dearest Sis, I read your blog frequently and I miss you very very much!!!
(I know you will be reading this too, don't wipe that smile off your face, I can see!)

Long planned and delayed trip to Hong Kong, trust me, it's really really tough to be going on holidays nowadays. Let me list you the reasons why...

1. Economy downturn nowwwwww..... in case you haven't notice
2. I have 3 kids, a house, a maid, a car and many more expenses to watch out for
3. Travelling with 3 kids isn't funny, it's like lagging along 3 huge uncontrollable bombs
4. Travelling as a big family is costly, air tickets, accommodations, tickets to attractions,
transports, food and beverages...

After much pestering and brain washing from Patrick hubby that we deserve a holiday break, bring the kids to take their first aeroplane ride, I gave in. Alright, I admit I would love to go to Hong Kong for a trip too. I can shop and bargain, I enjoy the lovely cold temperature there and everything. So, I agreed with Patrick hubby that we should just go and worry about the future later. By the way, we managed to brain washed my mum into going with us for the trip. She hasn't been to Hong Kong before and I felt strongly she would love the place.

The trip would be taking place next month in March, it's partly thanks to the great promotion deal by Singapore Airlines too. We managed to grap the 2 to go deal which means each adult costs a nett price of S$398.00 for the round trip while the kid fare is nett S$295.00. Now, we are racking our heads off over the accommodation, wondering over which hotel to book. We need a hotel that is clean, good to accommodate 3 in a room as we are going to book 2 rooms since the kids will need someone to look after.

If you are reading this and you have good recommendation or good hotel rates, please please do share with me.

We will be going for 6 days, covering the Disneyland for the kids, the ladies night market for me, and many many other places for Patrick hubby and mum. So we will be taking it at a relaxing pace since we don't really want to be dragging the kids and my mum around too hard. But Shenzhen would definitely be one place we will be going too.

More updates soon...

Back from long absence...

Arrggghhh... I'm finally back after a long absence, been occupied with my part time studies of rushing through report writing for the project with a blank mind. It's one week of rest before the next module begins.

In the meantime, my home tank is bursting with activities by the blue crayfish Patrick hubby and I have caught, not forgetting my mum. There's about 100 plus of the cuties we have caught, ranging from the baby sizes to the bigger sizes... Mum's home tank is holding about 30 of them while our home tank is holding 50. We have given a few away during our "prawning" trips, mainly to cute little kids whom haven't manage to catch any... Patrick Hubby has bought 2 reds from the shop and they are growing great with the blues.

Alright, all of a sudden, we are bitten by the prawning bugs which got us all crazy and obsessed. Sometimes we actually visualised the whiskers of the crayfish when we are sleeping!! Oh my god!

Haha, the smallest range from 3cm to the biggest at 16cm. We are feeding them lobster food pellets and bloodworms. Our tank has a block of wood and stacking rocks to let them hide in happily eventhough sometimes they fight. Now we have taken precaution to cover up the tanks with a net as the biggest one actually managed to make it's way out of the tank one night. Now, our tank is place in the living room which is quite a distance from our kids' room. The guy actually found it's way passed the kitchen, our study room and to the kids' room to pull on our maid's hair! She had a bad scare!! But it was initially when we started rearing them, now my maid's even capable to grab hold of them from the back as they wave their claws around.

There's been a few cases of molting, we actually found an empty shell one morning... what a pity we have never been able to capture the whole process. I told hubby they must be shy and only molt when the light's out at night.