New blog pic

The girls were updating their blog with the latest designer templates, which made me want to change mine too. After perusing the new templates, none seemed to catch my eye. So I fiddled with some past travel photos with Photoshop, made a collage with Picasa and viola! I've got my own original blog picture!

I love how retro it looks. The photos were handpicked by none other than the traveller herself! From top left, clockwise - A quaint cafe selling (yes you got it right) sandwiches in Delphi, Greece; lovers' locks in Mala Strana, Prague; a bicycle leaning against an old shed in Yangon, Myanmar; and pretty boats afloat in Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan.

All of these trips bring back fond memories for me. Ahhhh I am feeling so sentimental but it's getting late and I need to catch my beauty sleep now. Good night! :)

The time has come

After months and months of thinking, pondering, considering, contemplating, I have done it! Yes that's right. I handed over that sacred letter this morning.

The only feeling that washed over me after the deed was done was RELIEF. It felt like a load had been lifted off my weary back and my heart no longer felt heavy. Was it the right choice? I can't even answer this question anymore - all that reasoning and "thinking through things" have blurred the lines, clouded my judgement and confounded me. At the end of the day, I was guided by my heart and not my head - it felt good so the decision must be a right one.

The whole process of handing over that letter was surreal. I could not control my thoughts, lost all sense of reasoning and everything seemed to just happen, like in a dream. Now that the events of the day have sunk in, I am feeling cheery and uncharacteristically optimistic. Life is good, afterall!

2 months - let the countdown begin!

Cross-processed

Always my favourite photo effect, they never fail to evoke feelings of nostalgia and old-world retro charm. And they're so easy to manipulate on PS! If only I'd started experimenting earlier, then I wouldn't have wasted all that money on lomo cams and applications!

Guinea pig

My attempt at airbrushing. Took quite long to learn this as there are so many different ways to airbrush, from the straightforward to the very complicated. In all of the modified photos, I used the healing brush and clone stamp to remove blemishes and moles, fade away dark eye circles and even out the skin tone.

Here's Exhibit Y before going under the photoshop knife, mole still intact.

First attempt (and also most complicated), which required me to apply surface blur, add noise, then gaussian blur. I also had to adjust the hue & saturation levels twice and do a paintjob on the mask. The effect - perfect complexion on slightly pasty-looking skin. I suspect that the colour is a bit off because most of the tutorials used ang moh models who are naturally fair.

This process was slightly simpler than the first. It involved using the dust & scratches filter, followed by Gaussian blur, add noise and adjust hue & saturation. The effect - similar to the first but less perfect skin (and perhaps more believable).

Perhaps the simplest process of all, I only had to use the surface blur and do a reverse paintjob. The effect - similar to the 2nd pic but the face colour looks more natural?

Photoshop and me

I had a sudden interest to explore my Photoshop (PS) application, which had been installed in my laptop eons ago but hardly used. I must admit that I was daunted, as the entire programme, with its many functions and tools, looked way too complicated. However, something prompted me to take up this challenge, and boy am I enjoying the learning process. Being the tech dummy that I am, my learning curve is an extremely steep one, but I'm thankful for the millions of tutorials out there which have certainly made my life easier.

These are some of my works so far.

Fiddling with the liquify function allowed me to make my face and nose sharper, remove wrinkles around the neck and erase all zit marks on my face. If you look close enough, even the mole near my right armpit is gone! I'm not terribly pleased with the results, as the changes are hardly noticeable and my face and features seem disproportionate. Instead of a round face, I now have a horse face?!

Another example of my friend K. For me, the main point is to enhance the features of a person rather than transform his/her look totally. As commenting on a friend is a sensitive issue, I'll leave you to figure out the "enhancements" made.

I gave the picture of Pik, Guak and me an overprocessed look, just like what a lomo cam would produce. I kinda like the effects! :)

More to come!

Sick as a dog

Sums up my current condition. For the past 1-2 weeks, I've been having dizzy spells in my sleeping and waking moments. I felt the whole room spinning around violently, and there were fleeting moments when I thought I was going bonkers or blind! Little bro diagnosed my condition as BPPV - Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, caused by problems in the inner ear.

Before I've even fully recovered from BPPV, I was attacked by a hacking cough that has been keeping me awake for the past 3 nights. The condition is exacerbated by a stuffy nose which now makes it impossible for me to taste my food. Not that I have much of an appetite anyway, the cough makes me feel like throwing up half the time.

After a trip to the office to clear some urgent work, I went home and crashed on my bed. Never felt so tired, awful and sickly! Dear P cooked some yummy porridge the night before - check it out.

On a sidenote, ever wondered why the expression "sick as a dog" is used? Why not sick as a rabbit or sick as a zebra? Apparently, dogs had negative connotations attached to them in the past...

There are several expressions of the form sick as a ..., that date from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sick as a dog is actually the oldest of them, recorded from 1705; it is probably no more than an attempt to give force to a strongly worded statement of physical unhappiness. It was attached to a dog, I would guess, because dogs often seem to have been linked to things considered unpleasant or undesirable; down the years they have had an incredibly bad press, linguistically speaking (think of dog tired, dog in the manger, dog’s breakfast, go to the dogs, dog Latin — big dictionaries have long entries about all the ways that dog has been used in a negative sense).

At various times cats, rats and horses have been also dragged in to the expression, though an odd thing is that horses can’t vomit; one nineteenth-century writer did suggest that this version was used “when a person is exceedingly sick without vomiting”. The strangest member of the set was used by Jonathan Swift in 1731: “Poor Miss, she’s sick as a Cushion, she wants nothing but stuffing” (stop laughing at the back).

The modern sick as a parrot recorded from the 1970s — at one time much overused by British sportsmen as the opposite of over the moon — refers to a state of deep mental depression rather than physical illness; this perhaps comes from instances of parrots contracting psittacosis and passing it to their human owners.

Source: http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-sic1.htm.

Boomerang

The girls were so sweet to celebrate my belated birthday over Sunday brunch at Boomerang, Robertson Quay. Initially, the plan was to go to Epicurious but a long queue had already formed when we got there, and truth be told, we found the chill factor missing. So we headed over to the Aussie-run Boomerang instead, which was a stark contrast to Epicurious in terms of their clientele. Over at Epicurious, we saw lots of locals but at Boomerang, the crowd was predominantly ang mohs. In Lei's words, "it didn't feel like Singapore".

I liked the ambience at Boomerang. It was stylish yet casual - great place for friends to catch up over some brunch and wine. What I didn't like, however, was the obvious superior service rendered by the predominantly Filipino waitresses to their preferred clientele, the AMs. We sat there for a good 10 minutes with no one bothering to hand us a menu. In strolls Jamie Ong (she is so gorgeous) and AM friends, and they were served iced water and given the menu pronto.

Food wise, nothing to boast about. The Wagyu burger was dry and not that tasty.

The Aussie breakfast plate (I forget its name now) was pretty good, I loved the thick beef sausage and you can never go wrong with bacon!

But the best item had to be the thick, spongy pancakes that were so so yummy!

Despite the mediocre service and average food, nothing could dampen our spirits on a cool, breezy Sunday!

xoxo

Honest juice from Cold Storage, Taka. The labels are so nice, makes me feel like trying them all!

Seriously creamy ice cream, also from Cold Storage, Taka.