Little things matter - Home sweet home

To be honest, I'm not good in taking care of little details. I slowly learn, and here are some little things lessons that I think make a huge difference in making my home better =)

1. put my shoes back in the shoe racks
It's really simple, but I find it difficult at times. However, with 5 girls living in the same house, and all of us have quite a significant number of shoes, putting shoes back in the shoe racks makes a huge difference in getting tidy vs. untidy atmosphere once I step into the house

2. never ever delay picking up dry laundry
I often delay picking up dry laundry and as a result, it hinders my housemates to have an easy time hanging their laundry.

3. picking up hairs from the bathroom
My mom used to scold me A LOT because I always forget to pick up hairs from my bathroom. Eventually I feel disgusted with the amount of hair in my bathroom, so now I try to pick up hairs from the bathroom every time I finish taking showers.

4. having a house gathering
Each of us has a busy schedule. Last Sunday, we decided to revive our Disney Night, so we watched Snow White and Frozen =P It helps to create family atmosphere in our house.

Just a little bit of background about my house. One of my housemates works as a restaurant manager, so we rarely see her on weekday nights and weekends. Another housemate is studying bakery and working part-time. My own roommate is a programmer and she has Japanese lesson on Saturdays. Another housemate is my colleague and recently she has been overseas quite regularly. Me? I am a normal research assistant who always ends work on time, but I always eat out in the evenings.

So, finding common time is a challenge, and a sacrifice. Yet, I think it's worth it to have our 'family gathering' regularly =)

5. having cleaning schedule
--> self explanatory =P

=)

House vs. Home vs. Hotel

I posted this picture looong time ago. It's the mess of my room in my hostel. Oh well, life has changed. I'm working now and after I moved out from my hostel, I stayed with a roommate who was allergic to dust!!! So yeah...there's a change of lifestyle. And since last November when I moved to another new house where I am staying now, I don't think I can live in that kind of mess anymore.

My room is sometimes (?) still messy, but after 4 years staying in a hostel and 4 months staying with 2 nice housemates whom I rarely meet, but always say "Hi" and "How's your day?", I can't accept "my-room-is-like-hotel" behaviour. I'm so thankful that Priya, my current roommate, used to stay in the same hostel too, so we had the open-door-policy. Hahaha. We hang out in living room, we chit chat in living room, we open the door of our room if we're not going to sleep yet, and we just have a quick chat about the day when any of us go home. After a while, I think each of us can also sense when another party needs her private space and so we'll stop talking quickly when that kind of moment comes.

It's a home, not just a house, or worse, a hotel.

I'm still very far from being a homemaker. When I was in Indonesia, I was the type of person who just studies-goes to English course-goes this activity and that activity-full stop. I didn't iron my own cloth, I just put my uniforms in the laundry bag. The only things I washed were dishes (with complaint sometimes (?) ), socks, and... undergarment. So I do not know lots of things!! Please laugh at me because I don't know some names of vegetables (when I order food, I just point here and there) and I didn't know how to clean bathroom properly until I worked for a few hours per day in a study centre to fund myself to go for the service project in Thailand. There I learned how to clean the mirror, the toilet bowl, the sink, etc. They also taught me how to remove stain from the table cloth and how to clean the toaster.

However, I never practiced those things until I moved to Serangoon with the two housemates. Wahhh, I am literally the dirtiest and the messiest among them. One housemate is a guy, but he LOVES to mop the floor, vacuum everything, etc. My roommate is allergic to dust right? So she wiped the table and mopped the floor almost every day. Since we didn't have any schedule, so I picked the areas that I'm familiar with: bathroom!! Hahahahaha. (also tried to mop the floor once a week). And our house in Serangoon was sooo huge so that cleaning was really a good exercise. HAHAHAHA.

Anyway, I really learned a lot from my two housemates. Four months was enough to make me cry the night after my roommate left to Indonesia. The following day I moved to this current house. Different dynamic. Hahaha. 6 girls!! (So our kitchen and bathroom are filled with hairs soooo easily). Most of us go home very late and some of us do not have the habit to greet each other once we see others' coming home. It's such a simple thing, but I was quite sad the first few weeks because of this. (And sometimes I'm tempted to follow this style too! --> like now --> duh!). However, I thank God that things start to be better now :):)

Time to practice what they told us in circle: Have I put effort to make my home bright and cheerful???
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.........................

I love Steam Iron

I (finally) bought a steam iron. I can't believe that having a steam iron gave me more joy than getting a dress *oops* It's less frustrating :P

Nevertheless, after having steam iron and still got wrinkles on my shirt here and there, I came to a conclusion: I just can't iron properly >.<

So........
I watched this video on "how to iron a shirt"

I'll try the tips tomorrow. Collar-shoulder blade-sleeves-back. Set! :)

Noise level at my home

This is what I love from my home:
It's noisy!!! Hahaha. My mom will say A, then I say "Yes" or "later lah" (most common answer is the latter =P), then she will say B, then I say "Yes", and she'll continue. The same case for my grandma.

On Saturday, my brother went out with a "friend" and he came home very late!! I talked to my parents once in the afternoon, "hah...how come my brother hasn't come back, as if the friend doesn't need to have Chinese New Year reunion dinner with the family." In the evening, I repeated the same sentence then my dad said, "Da, why are you so talkative like your mom??" Ooops. Like mom like daughter?

Well, this is what I love from my home. We have dogs' noise, parents' noise, kids' noise, and so on and so forth. hahaha..

Ahh..so nice....

Vacation Diary 2 ~ Movies revenge

Fyi, I only watched six movies on the cinema this year: ATM (a Thai movie), The Avengers, Taken 2, Suddenly It's Magic (a Filipino movie with a Thai actor), Hobbit, and Life of Pi. During my vacation, I spent most of my time watching movies with my brother (or alone). Nevertheless, most of these movies were watched only from the middle to the end, or from beginning to the middle, hahaha. I finally watched The Lord of The Rings (the first and the third one, but I didn't watch the first one from the beginning). In this vacation, I watched two movies about the use of time: Click and In Time. Good reminder for the new year! :) I also watched some romantic movies; Something Borrowed, What's Your Number, and one movie, title of which I can't remember on two friends that adopted baby of their friends that passed away in an accident.

Lessons from these movies:
Hmm.. Well, Nic is correct. It's kinda tiring to watch American movies; sleep here, sleep there >.<
Nevertheless, a movie like What's Your Number in which the girl had sex with 20 guys in her life somehow still teaches us to guard our purity, to respect ourselves and respect our partner. I love Ally's speech in her younger sister's wedding: "When you are in love you can be yourself." (somewhere along that line hehehe) And the guy that at the end Ally was truly in love with was the one who respects her the most, the one who 'slows down' and respects her decision to not sleep with her!! (even this guy was someone who just slept around easily)

LOTR is beautiful!! I like what Gandalf said to Frodo, "....the important thing is what you do with the time given." (when Frodo kept regretting and wishing that the ring didn't come to him). I also adore Sam's courage and loyalty! Beautiful! My brother said I look like a fool when I watched the third LOTR. (Sorry! But my mouth opens according to the dynamics of the movie!!)

Last four days of vacation! Fully recharged! Hehehehe :D
Please pray for my family's pilgrimage tomorrow. We are going to a shrine of Our Lady at Cisantana :)

How to spend quality time with my grandma

When my maternal grandma passed away, I regret that I didn't spend enough time with her. Since then I learn to appreciate my paternal grandma more. Sometimes I tried to call her from Singapore and I tried not to go out too often when I'm at home so I can spend time at home with her.

So..here are some stuff that may be useful for you if you're thinking how to spend quality time with your grandma:
1. Cook with her!
Today I tried to fry her kerupuk. Quite fun!

2. Be 'stupid' and ask her many things
I saw her drying pork with pepper outside our house. Then I asked her, "You use pepper because Dad likes pepper?" Apparently she used pepper to get rid of the flies because flies don't like pepper! Hahaha.

3. Follow her interest and don't complain if she repeats the same story
Somehow last year my grandma started talking about her love story. Her first love, her second love, my grandpa's love to her, and so on and so forth. Perhaps because she missed my late grandma.
Today she repeated the same story, but yeah.. just listen to her. And talk to her too about your love story. It's quite fun! Hahaha.

4. Sleep with her
We sleep on the same bed. Hehehe.

5. Play traditional game with her
I did this with my late maternal grandma. We used to play congklak together

6. Learn a language from her
I learned Mandarin a bit from my maternal grandma and asked some Hakka words to my paternal grandma

7. Additional point for grandpa: ask about "history in real life"
I used to ask my late paternal grandpa about how things were like during 1960s when the Communist Party was in power.

There was one photo on facebook that was shared by my friends. It was written somewhere along this line. "You've grown up. Don't forget that your parents are growing old too." This applies to our grandparents too. So yeah... be thankful that they're still with us and pray for them if they have passed on :) ps. you can ask their souls to pray for you too!

How to spend quality time with my brother

The unique thing about Nic, Pril, Nyz, and me is all of us have a younger brother and our younger brothers are only 1 year apart from each other. Well, it's kinda tough to relate with my brother. He only whatsapp or message me when he needs something and so do I! But this vacation, I have learned some stuff that may inspire us to spend quality time with our brothers:

1. Watch movie together
Apparently my brother likes to copy files of movie from his friends. I watched "You are the apple of my eye", a Taiwanese movie, with him two days ago.

2. Watch video clips that have pretty girls in the videos *duh* (e.g., Taylor Swift, SNSD, T-ara, etc.)
I've never known that my brother likes Korean stars. One day, he said, "Excuse me, can you move somewhere? I'm going to exercise (push-ups, pull-ups, etc.). Then, he played his collection of videos and did push-ups and watched those video clips at the same time.

3. Exercise together (arggghh..)
He'll force me to do 3 sets of fifteen leg-raise >.< arrrgggh!!

4. Buy gadget together
Just walk with him to the phone store and he'll act like my dad asking the salesman on the features of each phone.

5. Ask him to accompany you learn driving
Well, this one needs patience from both sides. Thank God he didn't complain anything during the lesson. However, after the lesson he will say things like "When I learned driving, after 2 sessions I could steer properly already!" or "You know, you don't feel it when you sit at the front, but when you sit behind like me, I want to vomit because you don't drive through the humps properly" >.< Nevermind...he's quite nice to accompany me to learn driving at 7am each morning! (it's vacation and I wake up earlier than Nic!! duhhh..)

6. Ask him to drive you everywhere
I would say that he's grown up already this year because he doesn't complain too much when I ask him to drive me to meet my friend, to go to Church, to do this, to do that. Hahaha.

7. Ask his opinion about new dress
His taste is not too bad. When boyfriend is not around, a brother is a good replacement to test your personal taste of fashion.

Hope you have a good time with your brother!! :)