MAHOOSIVE ASOS Haul

I admit, I admit - I went a little bit overboard and crazy.

My only two excuses were I had my 12th + 13th month pay in and I had quite a few discount codes. So I purchased these 10 items on 3 different occasions. 

Chinese New Year ho seh liao, no need to worry about clothes. 

I just had my yearly employee review and it will be a great 2015. So, I just upped the amount of my monthly savings (whereby a certain set amount of money will be transferred automatically on a set date every month to a savings account) in order to curb these shopaholic sins. Hey, no shame if you spend within your means, it's all okay if you are financially able. But for me, it's time to save more (my goal this year is over S$20K in savings) for my HDB flat. Kengyang and I want to clear the payments as soon as we can. 

Ok photos for you! 

I bought one ASOS Maternity item this time. The sweater too chio already. Can keep for very long some more, next time I pregnant, I have one chio sweater in my closet liao! :D

ASOS DREAMER Plimsolls - £8.00
River Island Mix Print Shift Dress - £18.00
ASOS Longline Tee in Winter Floral Print With Sheer Hem Panel - £10.00Fallen Star Sequin Top With Embroidery - £12.00

ASOS Drop Arm Vest Top - £4.00
ASOS A-Line Skirt in Hawaiian Mirror Print  - £7.00 (OOS)
ASOS Printed Sheer Panel T-Shirt - £7.00
ASOS Playsuit With Multi Strap Detail In Geo Print - £5.00 (OOS)

ASOS Maternity Jumper With Lace Side Panels - £14.00
Minkpink Stripe Dress With Mesh Inserts - £20.00

I feel both excited and nervous whenever I write a haul post. Buyer's remorse setting in (not sure if this feeling can be classified as buyer's remorse or not since I didn't really spend damn a lot of money on a big ticket item).

Have a good week guys! Work hard for those moolahs!! 

Sleek Makeup Haul (Surprisingly cheap shipping?!)

Blush in Rose Gold
I-Divine in Garden of Eden
I-Divine in Vintage Romance

Late night itchy internet-browsing fingers always lead to surprises. I was curious how much shipping fee would be charged if I order from Sleek Makeup, so I loaded my cart with products that I would definitely purchase if the shipping fee was unexpectedly low. It was only 1.67 pound shipping to Singapore via Standard Mail? What?!

I checked out immediately.

Some more I had a 10% off coupon ("welcome10"), so the blush was 3.74 pounds and the eyeshadow palettes were 6.66 pounds each. I paid slightly over S$35 in total for these three items. WHAT?! Please ah, one eyeshadow palette from local online shops already costs more than S$20 hor.

Sometimes, anyhow curious then check things also good.

Afterglow (Keong Saik)

Eat clean lah, yoga lah, juice cleanses lah, pilates lah. It's like everyone is trying to stay as healthy as possible. But it's understandable. Once you get out of school and start working, it's really very easy to gain weight and be unfit. For me, I sit down for more than 7 hours a day and that's not recommended at all because halo that's how the tummy blubber starts to accumulate ah. 

So yes, I have also been on a health kick. I try to eat as clean as possible during the weekdays and then exercise as much as possible during the weekends. Luckily for me, I'm accustomed to eating raw vegetables since young so having salad 5 days a week is no problem at all. But I wanted something different last week, and Chay and I decided to go to Afterglow for farm-to-table, non-processed, vegan food.

To be honest, I didn't have much expectations lah. But wow, 2 out of the 3 dishes that we ordered were fantastic! It is truly a great place to dine in if you're feeling a little bit tired of the grease, salt and sugar. 

The Drag-Pom Salad was my second favourite dish of the night. Crisp mixed greens mixed with macadamia nuts, pomegranate, dragonfruit, and topped off with avocado slices. It was really sweet too - must be a good pomegranate day! 

Chay ordered the raw burger and it was alright. She was still hungry after eating this. We're not sure what root vegetable was used to mimic french fries, but we thought they were mang kwang slices. What is mang kwang in English??? Chay didn't like the mang kwang, but I love mang kwang so yay for me. Indonesians put mang kwang in their rojaks, and I love Indonesian rojak, so MANG KWANG FOR ME PLEASE. 

I ordered the Deconstructed Sushi Bowl and it was a winner! I really love this dish, and I was incredibly full after I wiped out the bowl's content. If I were to come back to Afterglow, I would definitely order this again!

Afterglow

24 Keong Saik Road 

Singapore 089131

Phone: 6224 8921

Open Mon-Sat: 12pm-11pm

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Have a great day guys! :) 

Lisa Eldridge is Queen.

Lisa Eldridge is one of my most favourite makeup artist ever. I have learnt so many tips from her and now she has a video on Korean makeup! I was so inspired, I ordered over S$100 worth of Korean cosmetic products via Qoo10. 

I want to go to S.Korea! 

Blacks, brushes and bibimbap (#GOSF)

A great weekend has ended. I spent Saturday glued to my bed and Sunday out shopping with Mr Chung. I'm actually looking forward to work! Work hard for the next weekend! 

Funny story first...

On Friday, Mr Chung and I walked all the way from Clementi MRT station to my house at Upper Bukit Timah Road. It took us around one hour and it was a great workout after a heavy dinner. Halfway through our walk, he was on the phone and I was just looking around, not caring about what was on the ground. So of course, I tripped on some raised platform. Just nice, I was holding my phone, so my first instinct was "Save the phone!!" and I did. My phone was as good as new, but I fell flat. FLAT. Like a failed superman pose on the ground. I injured my knee and palm, but that's about it. Once I got out of the shock, I kept laughing for 5 minutes straight because of how silly the situation was - I actually sacrificed myself for my newly bought phone. Humans and their gadgets. Or maybe, me and my gadgets. :P 

Anyway, here are some updates on the fashion front!

Online shopping is my favourite past-time and it's no surprise that most of my clothes were purchased online. 

Dress: Zalora
Shoes: Bought in Hong Kong
Watch: Casio

Taobao, Qoo10, Zalora, etc. I always check these sites regularly to get updated on their new stuff and sale sections. 

Inner top: Lazada
Vest: Zara
Skorts: Qoo10
Shoes: Bought in Hong Kong
Watch: Casio

Also, I visit Singsale once in a while to look through the deals and discounts. Sometimes nothing attracts me, but sometimes Singsale surprises me with amazing discounts. I bought a 24-piece brush set from Bella Brushes (based in Australia) for only S$29, and because it was Black Friday, shipping was S$1 flat every product purchased. Amazing deal right?! The brushes were amazingly soft and shed-free too. 

It's incredibly exciting what's coming up in the online shopping arena. I've been seeing the advertisements on Youtube and even at bus stops - The Great Online Shopping Festival! It's an annual event in which participating online stores offer amazing discounts! It's happening from 2-4 February 2015 and it cannot be more timely for me because it's right after my pay day, hoorah! 14 more days to GOSF! 

Ending this post with a photo of my favourite food - the delicious Bibimbap. This is one of the two reasons why I want to go to South Korea, the other reason being facial masks. 

Have a great week ahead guys. Save some money for GOSF! 

New in: Super cheap Charles & Keith shoes

I was getting quite antsy because Chinese New Year is coming and I don't know what I should wear! I figured I should start on the shoe front and so I was browsing carousell for nice wedges and I chanced upon a seller who was selling a pair of damn chio and brand new Charles & Keith wedges for S$20, so yes I chatted with her for a while. 

Then, I went to the Charles & Keith website to check out the sale section and I FOUND THE EXACT SAME PAIR GOING FOR S$12.90!! I immediately apologised to the seller, cancelled the transaction and browsed the entire sale section. WOW. It's basically like Anchorpoint Charles & Keith prices! However, the website design is quite user-unfriendly. I filtered by price but kept getting the entire list of sale shoes. 

Anyway, if you want to look at those heavily discounted shoes, just keep scrolling down lah, you will find them in the end. I looked through 1000+ listings twice! When there's a will, there's a way okay. Initially I had so many pairs opened in new tabs, but most of them had size 38 out of stock. Blessing in disguise, I guess...for my bank account. 

So yes, I bought two pairs of shoes for freaking cheap. S$12.90 for the wedges and S$16.90 for the loafers. Delivery is quite steep (S$9.90!), but aiyah both pairs totaled to less than S$30 anyway, so I just checked out. 

To be honest, I'd rather go to Anchorpoint to check out the Charles & Keith outlet, but since I'm sadly busy these days, the online store sale section will suffice!

Talking about Chinese New Year - I used to have no visiting at all, hence I didn't need to worry about my outfit since I would be a sloth at home anyway, but now, I need to visit ky's relatives and I'm going back to Indonesia too. So I will need two nice outfits. Alamak. Shoes settled and now clothes! What to wear?? At times like these ah, I wish I'm as skinny and lanky as my sister because wear anything also nice one leh.

Such first world problems haha.

Have a good day guys! :)

Just eat only

I know I said I was on a hiatus, but my fingers were itching to type something. So I'm declaring an end to this hiatus. This post is nothing but food photos, so if you're not into greasy-looking food, please feel free to check out my other more interesting posts. 

I had a rough week last week. Mentally, I was a mess. Physically, I was also a mess. I only had 3 days of work last week because the sore throat that I thought I could ignore evolved into a monster sore throat that warranted a 3-day MC from the doctor (and lots of nagging). But of course I couldn't take all 3 days of resting. Friday was the worst. I was still recovering, work was piling up and I didn't have breakfast or lunch. By the end of Friday, I was a grumpy and tired witch. 

Which was not a good state to be in because I met up with dorabanana on Friday night. I felt very bad  to her after the dinner because I was barely talking. Aiyah.... 

Anyway, we went to Fat Boys for dinner and over-ordered (as usual). The best dish that I ate was the mozzarella sticks. I didn't really like the burgers. Everything was greasy and oily, and that meant that the first few bites were heavenly, but things spiraled downwards very quickly after those first bites.  

Thanks dorabanana for putting up with my tired talks haha. Or perhaps, tired murmurs. 

My sick body obviously couldn't take the sudden influx of grease. I chiong-ed home and puked 75% of my dinner out. Extremely thankful that I didn't puke in the cab on the way home. 

So what's the best way to nourish an extremely hungry tummy the next day? 

EAT MORE GREASY STUFF!

Very smart. 

Kengyang and I had Yoogane (West Gate) and actually it was really nice. A little bit on the expensive side but it's good food lah. 

This was a very lame attempt at reviving this blog. ZZZ.

I'll do better next time!

Hiatus

Hello lovely readers, I won't be blogging for the next two-three weeks. I'll be back soon! :) 

Fourth day and I'm burning out.

We are only four days into 2015 and I already feel exhausted. It's definitely not work because lol I haven't been to work since the 30th, or maybe it is because of work - perhaps I'm craving for workload and stress.

I just spent the entire afternoon reading The Fever by Megan Abbott. I couldn't put it down because I wanted to know the ending, but if I had something else to do, I'd have stopped reading and forgot all about it. It was a thrill for sure, but the first half of the book was way too draggy.

And now, I feel empty. I just cleaned my room and everything's where they are supposed to be, and it's so much cleaner and ... but also so much emptier. Sometimes I appreciate a healthy dosage of messiness.

Maybe I can start on another book? I also have Love Letters To The Dead by Ava Dellaira and the synopsis intrigued me.

Okay, maybe the burnout started on the 1st of January, when my maternal uncle replied my new year wishes with a suggestion for me to find a church (or "home" as he calls it) in 2015 and dedicate a few hours a week embracing God. At that moment in time, I wanted to throw the phone at the wall.

I don't hate my uncle, and I certainly don't hate God.  And I'm quite sure he's asking me to do that because he knows all about the drama in my house.

But, I really hate going to churches. I used to go to a church near my house when I was in primary school, and that was the place where I faced immense prejudice and ostracism. My hair was poofy (like bush like that), I was fat and ugly, and nobody at that church made me feel good about myself. The kids who attended the same Sunday school classes with me were horrible, and the Sunday school teachers were even worse - they always asked for every kid's opinions, but they would always skip my turn. Till now, I still don't know why they did that. It got so bad (one boy said he didn't want to sit next to me because he said I was fat and my hair looked like it had lice) that I started telling lies to my mom to not attend Sunday school. Once I started secondary school, I stopped going.

Ever since then, I rarely visited churches for religious purposes.

And I know that right now, I'm a complete misfit in my family. I'm the only one who does not go to church every week and it irritates me that I have to go to church to prove that I still love God. God has been in my heart ever since I was born and that will never change. I don't announce my love for God constantly, and I don't preach how amazing and wonderful God is on a regular basis, but that does not mean that God is non-existent in my life. I still pray every night before I go to bed, thanking Him for the good things and the lessons from the bad things. It's like I'd rather have my alone time with God than sharing with a lot of people.

My sister goes to church every Saturday and her church friends have become her close friends and I'm sure they were those who influenced her to be more mature as well. Good for her and I'm happy that she found her "home".

But it's just not for me. Some people go through years to learn Bible verses and I completely salute and respect them, but for me, it's simple - I have God in my heart and in my mind, and He will always be my guidance in life.

Ah, I didn't expect this to turn out to be a naggy post about religion. But I feel a little bit better now.

I shall stop now. Don't want to go on and on and on....

Have a good week ahead! :) 

Reflections + Hello 2015!

Just a word of warning before you proceed with this post - it's going to be wordy and it's going to be long. I'm not going to be critical and check my grammar/sentence structures, so if you hate words or if you have dysgrammatophobia (yeah I just googled that), just scroll to the end of this post where you will find visual representations of how I spent the last day of 2014. 

I wanted to do the usual New Year Resolutions (NYR from here onwards), but I figured NYR posts are a little bit pretentious - well, at least for my NYR posts. After looking back at all my NYR posts (both online and offline), I realised I only wanted to momentarily make myself feel better by setting goals that seemed assuring that my life would be enriched and interesting in the coming year. And then we all know what happens to most NYR - they end up being just a post or just a list of things you want to do, but most of them will not be things that you have done. That momentary period is incredibly addictive though because you imagine a better life for yourself and hey, who doesn't want to think of a better life? Thoughts are powerful and if you think about it (hehe, sorry bad pun but yeah I had to get it out the system), our actions and behaviours are somewhat like self-fulfilling prophecies of our thoughts. For example, last year I had a NYR of completing a 21km marathon. At that moment in time, I thought of a better health regimen and completing a 21km marathon would be the perfect testimony of said better health regimen. Hence, when I wrote down this goal, I felt great. I felt like I had already conquered a 21km marathon. Did that happen? Nope. But did it feel good when I wrote down this goal? Oh yes, definitely. 

I'm going on and on about something highly insignificant because no matter how I find NYR pretentious, I know I'm still going to do it because I enjoy thinking about how my 2015 will be one that's immensely engulfed with positive life standards. 

Before I go on to my 2015 NYR, let me reflect on 2014 first. It has been a tremendously spiritual year with me finding out more about how much of a good and bad person I actually am. I'm not bullshitting right now, I actually really did have some time to reflect on my own existence and some of my realisations were not pleasant, but I'm willing to admit and acknowledge them now. 

Growing as an employee

2014 was the first full year in which I worked full time. Nothing too special here, but in just one year, I learned that being an employee was not just about doing what you're supposed to do and then getting paid for said work done. I have grown to become someone who defends my company when naysayers question us. There are a lot of people out there who don't understand how I can get paid my above average salary when my job is supposedly "easier" than theirs. They then start to question if my company is legit or not. Usually, I won't berate someone just because of their doubts. All I can say is my bosses are geniuses and they tackled an industry which lacked in terms of user-friendliness and user-specific customisations. Furthermore, I have grown to become someone who doesn't take quitting as a solution to work-related problems. It's always easy to disappear and quit, but now I understand the repercussions attached to such an irresponsible behaviour. I have done this before in the past and I'm definitely not proud of my action.  

A bad year for self-esteem

I don't have the ability to love myself and I can admit this loudly now. 2014 has been extremely trying for my self-esteem and there was a period whereby I almost fell back into depression. If you don't already know, I used to have depression and I came really close to killing myself. But it all turned out for the better, and 2013 was the year of explosively positive vibes - it was a darn good year. And then things started to take a U-turn, and I was back in the slump. Not such a deep slump, but I was in a slump. My depression mostly came from self-hate. Even when someone praised me, my brain would find a way to think of the praise negatively. For example, if someone said "oh wow, your eye makeup is so nice today!", I would think of it as "shit, is she saying I would look fucking ugly with no eye makeup on?". Yes, it's laughable if you have never experienced depression before. In 2014, I felt like I was the fattest person in the world with the worst skin condition ever. A tiny, nugatory gain of 0.5kg would freak the hell out of my brain cells and I would go into panic mode. It certainly didn't help that I have gorgeous friends (nope, not blaming any of them, I'm just saying my brain cells need to stop comparing myself to them). My brain just couldn't take all these unneeded comparisons and I remember crying myself to bed because I ate more than Kengyang and I didn't exercise that day. It's so stupid, but it happened. 

I'm desperate to belong

I have been denying this for my entire life, and finally I have come to admit that I'm desperate to have a sense of belonging. I have near-to-nothing sense of belonging family-wise, hence I always try to be in my friends' good books so that they will stay in my life. One way I do this is through giving excessive praises and through giving them gifts regularly. I have been doing this to my close friends since primary school and I guess it's what has become of me after a horrific childhood. I don't get much attention at home (some will call it abuse, but sometimes this word is used too loosely), so I try to get attention outside by making sure my close friends like me continuously and not kick me out of the group. As I grew older, this became a habit. I'm not saying that I don't mean or that I'm not sincere about what I say to my friends or what I give to my friends - I care way too much to be insincere. When I started to realise this desperation, I was alarmed and the self-hate started to come in. Why am I doing all these just to fulfill that thirst for belonging? I shower people with plaudits and I rarely get some in return, so why am I still foolish enough to do it? Why can't I just be bitter about it and just shut up? The truth is, I'm too much of a cowardice to do that. This has become a part of me and I have decided to continue doing it because I enjoy belonging to a group of friends and I enjoy giving. 

Side note to friends reading this: please don't take this the wrong way. I assure you that every positive thing that I've said to you came from my heart. Negative things.....maybe can ignore lar hor?

I learned to love a little bit more

This has got to be the most positive thing out of my 2014. Kengyang and I have been together for more than 3 years, but we still have heated arguments occasionally. Most of the time, I'm annoyed at something that he has done and I would start to fire my sarcastic words at him. Heated arguments are not pleasant. I get angry, he gets angry, and we say stupid things to each other. I will admit that when I'm angry, I will purposefully select nasty words to hurt the other party. It's a terrible, terrible habit that I'm trying to curb currently. So, whenever we get into our heated arguments, things go cray (of course not in a i-throw-flower-vase-at-you cray). The good thing about 2014 is that I learned how to take a step back and breathe before I say anything that I don't mean. And he also did the same. This way, I learned how to control my irrational anger. If I didn't have him in my life, I don't think I will ever learn to do that. People often say that you should not change yourself for another person and that he/she should accept you for what you are. But...what if I want to change myself for the better for my partner? What if I choose to change because I want to love my partner more? I'm not the perfect girlfriend and I'll never be, but I can confirm that in 2014, I learned to love Kengyang a little bit more, and I hope that every year, I will always love him a little bit more than the previous year. 

If you have made it to this part of the post - thank you very much, readers!!

Now here are my NYR for 2015:

• I want to try a juice cleanse once. I know people are saying how ridiculously expensive juice cleanses are and how they are actually bad for health, but I just want to torture myself once. 
• I want to complete a Ripped in 30 routine twice. My plan is to do each week's video for two weeks, so I should complete this routine in 8 weeks. The juice cleanse should not be carried out during this routine, because I will confirm pass out. 
• I want to care less about how many pimples I have on my face. I also want to care less about people who make comments about the pimples I have on my face. This is not easy, but I will try to care less. Key word here is less. 
• I want to save S$22,000 in 2015. 
• Travelling-wise, I'm aiming for Japan, Thailand and South Korea this year. The first two is already confirmed, but South Korea is currently still at the "say-only" period. I'm hoping my travelling does not hinder the previous NYR. 

These 5 are the only 5 specific NYR that I have. The rest are of course quite similar to all other years - lose weight lah, be more patient lah, don't get angry so much lah, ignore bad things at home lah, love my friends and boyfriend more lah, etc. Not-so-specific NYR are a bit ambiguous but they are good reminders of what I have to improve on. 

I spent the last day of 2014 with some amazing people at HillV2's Wine Connection. The meat platter as delicious, but my tuna steak was bland, tasteless and disappointing. But whatever lah - I still had an awesome time!

The tuna steak was perfectly medium rare, but there was no taste in any of the components. How can salsa be tasteless?? The squid ink fettuccine was just drenched in olive oil and nothing else. I had to sprinkle generous amounts of salt to salvage this plate of blandness. 

YAY!

New phone for the new year. Loving the space upgrade and still trying to get used to the larger screen. I had a 16gb iPhone 5 before this one and now I have a 64gb iPhone 6. The space upgrade is too awesome. I downloaded so many songs and podcasts and videos and I still have 42gb free??! All hail those gigabytes! 

Here's to a smashingly awesome 2015 to all of you and I hope the year started great for you! I have a excruciatingly painful sore throat and I spent the entire 1 January 2015 sleeping the fever and headache away. It's all better now but the throat is still not in a good condition. Well, the good thing is I'll hopefully be in tip-top condition for work next week! :D