There was no typhoon, but it flooded in my apartment this morning.

 There was water EVERYWHERE. Since both the kitchen and living room were flooded, where would the water go next? Into the bedrooms of course.
This is my bathroom, located inside my bedroom. No小's shower room (located on the left hand side and not shown in the pic) wasn't flooded because it had a small step that stopped water from going on. See how much water was in the bucket? That's all water I mopped up from the bathroom floor.

 My brother and dad, sweeping water up in the living room.

 Again, brother and dad hard at work. This was 5 ish in the morning, I had not seen my brother up this early since high school, when we had to take the school bus at 6am.

 Dumping water into buckets to throw away.

 Post-flood: well, our wooden floor is pretty much effectively ruined.

 Flooded floor. Notice how the water had seeped into the joints between the wooden planks.

 Just for comparison. a pic of the floor before-flood. See how the wooden plank joints were NOT water-sodden?

Cupboard door, also effectively ruined.












Reason for this fiasco?

Ask the great folks at MAZUMA.

Just Another Day in (the now under-siege) BKK

It's Chakri Day, a public holiday today so my mom and I were planning on doing something together...

Mom: let's go to Silom, I heard the Red Shirts aren't going there after all.
Me: I just heard on the news that they arrived at Silom just now...
Mom: okay, let's go to Rama IV instead. We can go eat at that Chinese restaurant then go to Carrefour for grocery.
Me: Rama IV is one of the banned places too, meaning the Red Shirts will prolly go there too.
Mom: well then, can we go to Conrad on Wittayu Road instead. I have vouchers for afternoon tea
Me: mom... there's police all over Lumpini Park and Wittayu is waayyy too close to Suan Lum.

Me: oooh, a bomb was found in Chula earlier, luckily it didn't detonate.

Mom: oh gosh let's just stay home after all.

Mr. Francois Nars, your packaging sucks

NARS has just won the worst packaging (for makeup items) EVER in my book.

Yes, I know, some people prefer its sleek, cool, black rubber packaging, and I myself used to be one of its many supporters.

Okay, I might still love it,
if I lived in Iceland or somewhere really dry, really cold.

In Thailand's humid and extremely hot weather,
look what NARS' infamous packaging did to my hands:

The black stains are in fact, molten rubber.
Greasy, sticky. Gross.

My mom's NARS palette is covered in this gunk. Then it got onto her dressing room table, her hands, my hands (when I borrowed the palette to try to solve the gunky-hand problem), my thighs and shorts.

I had to scotch-tape the entire palette to salvage what's inside.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE NARS products. But can't they just do something about the crap packaging?

Random

Just when I thought I didn't have any readers, the non-existent entity up there proved just how naive I was by giving me all these oh-so-happy comments. Life is funny like that.

Did I offend anyone in the last post? I hope not.

Better yet, I hope I didn't offend anyone who I actually cared about.

Please, do NOT click on any of the ads in the comments. I didn't endorse them, nor do I condone them. I simply left them there because I believe in the freedom of speech :p

--------------------------------------
One of my best friends in the whole world, B, is going back to Taiwan for his military service-substitute job. B, like myself, hasn't actually lived in Taiwan since childhood, and I know that even though he loves and misses Taiwan (and the food there), he's anxious and possibly a tiny bit scared.

Here's a shout out for B:
Sis, I want me some 小吃, be good and wait for me, I shall join you there in May. In the meantime, don't screw around with J, he's still mine :p

Cheated and lied to?

I found this nice little shoe boutique in Taipei when I went home during spring break.

The shop only carried one brand, a cute-sounding (albeit cheesy) name called Sally Angel.

As I've never heard of that brand before, I asked the SA whether it's a local brand, and she proudly replied "We're a Spanish brand, everything you see here is imported."

So I thought, oh ok. But it was a bit weird since if it was indeed a Spanish brand and they were importing it directly and dedicated a whole shop in downtown Taipei to the brand, it must be a big deal for them and one would expect the manufacturers to advertise a bit more.

But either way, whatev.

There was this pair of beautiful pale lavender suede pumps with small circular and slightly larger rectangular dark-colored copper studs surrounding them. If you look closely you can see that they're slightly shimmery. And they have comfortable 5cm heels. It says "Sally Angel -- Spain, made in Macau" on the soles. The price seemed right too, at 1200nt (approx 36usd). It was love at first sight.

Just now I took them out to admire their gorgeous-ness again, and decided to Google the brand to see whether they offered any other shoes that I might like.

...And the only results that are remotely related to shoes that I found under "Sally Angel" are all in Chinese. Simplified Chinese. That could only mean one thing.

The shoes are indeed "imported" -- from China.

Niiiiice.

I mean, a nice pair of shoes is a nice pair of shoes. I would have gotten these beauties even if I knew they were from a Chinese brand beforehand, but they had to lie outright and claim that they're a SPANISH maker? Did they think no one would buy their products if they didn't invent some flashy tale about being EUROPEAN?

This is so incredibly sad. :(

I still love these shoes a whole lot, but now I'm also kind of pissed off about being lied to. If I had cared about the maker of the shoes, I would be FURIOUS now for being cheated against.

Have you ever heard about Sally Angel shoes? Are they indeed Spanish? (Highly doubt it.)

Anyhow, you know you want to see pictures of my bjootiful shoes.





<-- if you squint you can make out the "spain" written underneath Sally Angel.

Meh.

It's been a long time since I last posted.
Somehow, this always happens. I start a new blog and I post in it for months, and then one day, I just lose interest and stop.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of people following my blog closely (that's definitely an overstatement -- there doesn't seem to be anyone who reads this at all), so I think maybe it's better if I closed this, instead of leaving it to its own device like this, like a sad abandoned child.
Life's mediocre at best, and downright intolerable at its low points. But I'll live.
Hell, life's full of compromises anyway.

Fangirls scare me

I'm intimidated by the crazy, frenzied, and irrational female species dubbed "fangirls." They emit their high-pitched screams at their idols (who really could care less) and resort to completely absurd behaviors like tattooing their favorite lines or actors' names on their bods. Ten years (or even less) from now, they're going to laugh themselves silly at how ridiculous they once were.
I know I'm being terribly cynical, but, come on, what kind of a sane person would do this? -->

and all for a fictional character too.

Yes I know Edward Cullen was a hell of a hot vampire in Twilight, but still. It's not like he's even REAL.

And Robert Pattinson's cute, but not even that hot. He would probably play a good Edward, but it's funny because I thought Edward would've looked better than Rob Pattinson as I was reading the book. Oh well.

His crazily-gelled hair turns me off. I think I liked him better as Cedric Diggory.

Can't beat the system

Oh fuck.
Boxtorrents has just made my life that much more difficult :(

Even tho it was probably my fault in the first place for leeching (downloading) so much of their stuff without seeding (uploading) much... but then, isn't that what everyone does?
We wait for whatever file we wanted on a P2P network to finish downloading, and then we close off the connection before it starts to seed to others, so we don't waste our bandwidth on others?
I suppose that's all very selfish of me and I deserve for "being warned" (meaning you don't get to leech at all for one week intially, and you have to seed until your up/dl ratio improves)... But then, it all seems SO tyrannical of them. Fuckin hypocrites... It's not like the administrators of Boxtorrents provide the files themselves, it's the nice saintly users who do. And all other major P2P sites let you download all that you want...

To try to beat the system and win, I attempted to create a new account with another email address, different user name/pw and all that. For a while I thought it worked, until just now I tried to sign in under that new account and it failed, saying that account was deleted. I think I knew this was going to happen since Boxtorrents explicitly said "one account per person for lifetime" but still... *pouts*

Jack was nice enough to offer to leech for me for days until my ratio improves, but that's not the point. The point is, who the hell do those Boxtorrents ppl think they are? The admin sit on their high pedestals and dictate and say shit like "I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that our Offers section is made public for people to post useful comments. Any users posting stupid/useless comments (especially 'approve this' ) will be warned" even though it is because of its users that it is able to survive on the Net. Stupid people.

Fiiiiine, I'll just switch over to BTPlus or BTchina or one of those nicer sites then... if nothing else, I could always just revert back to Foxy and take the risk of getting bad files.

*fumes*

All that glorious time wasted in the computer lab...

Since my school campus is reeeeally boring, my friends and I spend the majority of our time on-campus sitting on our asses in the computer lab in Stats Building.
It seems like a waste of time to devote so much time to the Internet on-campus when surfing online takes up the most of my time at home, too.
This is probably because school is just... blah, and procrastination is too much fun to resist.

Shoe fetish

I'm obsessed with shoes.
It's true that I don't own a whole closetful of shoes, but that's only because I get more picky with what I buy and wear as I get older. Being the judgmental bitch that I am, I admit to judge a person based on first appearance. And out of that first impression, I look at the person's shoes before I scrutinize their other clothing/accessory choices. Price and brand don't necessarily guarantee good taste; I value good taste and a knack for knowing what goes/doesn't go with what.

Back in Seattle I had 30+ pairs at one point, and then I downsized considerably (because it was getting hard to decide on which pair to wear on a daily basis...). But that was mainly because online shopping made shopping for shoes that much easier -- and cheaper.

But somehow, now that I'm back in Thailand, I buy less and less pairs with each passing year. It's not for the lack of availability or access to shoes in here, hell there's probably way more variety of affordable goodies in Thailand than in anywhere else. But then, I went to Platinum Plaza yesterday, and all the shoes there (sandals, clogs, flats, pumps, wedge-heels, slippers) were just... blah. They were cheap alright, but they looked cheap, too. They were definitely the kind that people in the know can take one look at and say, oh you got them at mbk/platinum right? Nothing wrong with that, but being stupidly vain, I'd rather get complimented on how good my stuff looked rather than how cheap they were.

Right now I have less than 10 pairs in here, and around 5-6 pairs of shoes tucked away safely in my apartment in Taiwan.

But now these -- these are definitely the kind I'd wear even though I'd never be able to afford some of them. But hey, a girl can dream right? And ain't nothing wrong with just lookin'.

(image from Jimmy Choo)
"Simi" - Crepe de Chine pumps, Jimmy Choo. Heel height: 75 mm/3"
<-- oh gawd this is so gorgeous it kind of makes the fact that it costs £287.50 (after discount!) irrelevant... no not really, but still...

(image from Dr. Martens)
Sexy, sexy Doc Martens 1460 8 Eye Boot. Love the color, the smooth leather, and the durable sole. Functional and cute.

(image from grace gift)
Black leather booties I found from Grace Gift, an online shoe shop based in Taiwan. Heel height: 6 cm/a bit less than 2" I might get this pair when I go back to TW in December, it's only NT1480 (roughly $45), and it looks totally cute. Booties make your legs look slimmer and longer cuz they make your ankles look skinny :)

Now that I've ranted and drooled over the shoes that I want, I'm going to be helpful and point out the kind of shoes that one should not wear...

(image from nordstrom.com)

<-- from past personal horrifying experiences, one should never wear gladiator-style sandals if there are any slight imperfections to ones legs. Doesn't matter if your legs are too skinny or too muscular or lacking muscle-tone, gladiator sandals will emphasize all imperfections and make legs stubby and lumpy-looking, and that in turn, makes you frumpy. Not good if you ask me.

(image from nordstrom.com)

<-- Flats always look nice and comfy, don't they? Avoid at all cost the ultra flat flats like the pair above. Arch, toe, sole and ankle support are nonexistent, and these will probably hurt your feet more than stilettoes if you try to walk around in them. Always wear a little heel, 1-2 inches would be ideal if you have to walk around a lot in them, plus, heels will force you to arch your back straight, cuz slouching doesn't just look bad, it's bad for your posture too.

<-- I don't know if anyone's told you this before, but Crocs are just the ugliest things ever. It doesn't even matter how good they might feel on your feet, it's how they make everyone else feels about you when you're wearing them. Yup, you look totally ridiculous, that's what. Besides, you can get a really good imitation pair from Chatuchak or MBK for less than 200 baht (that's roughly $6 under the current exchange rate). Then these fur-lined Crocs come along, and they are just so much worse because they're so pointless. Aren't your toes still going to be freezing themselves off when you're treading through slush on your winter morning? Why would anyone choose to wear these is totally beyond me. (Don't come running and swinging your clubs at me, I apologize for offending anyone in advance :p)

Meh.

Talkin' to myself and feelin' old
Sometimes I'd like to quit
Nothing ever seems to fit
Hangin' around
Nothing to do but frown
Rainy Days and Mondays always get me down.
-- Rainy Days and Mondays, The Carpenters

It's a Monday and I'm cramping badly and there's this presentation I must do this afternoon... sigh. Oh well, at leat try to enjoy your Monday with a healthy dose of hot chocolate and Valium and pray that it'd be Tuesday soon. Oh wait, but I hate Tuesdays, too. Le sigh.

In the meantime, enjoy the sight of this magnificent GINORMOUS rabbit:

(I should stop overfeeding my wabbit before he becomes scarily huge.)