It's Not Hard At All..

To love Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.

When everyday all you see are beautiful, beautiful views.










I think I overused my blue and green color quota for my eyes. That's about the only colors I see all the time in KK! But I am def not complaining! Always been quite a nature's girl!

Really enjoyed myself to the max!

The company is quite awesome, and then we all did occupy our time to the fullest! The first day was travel day, we finished work and went to catch our flight which reached KK at midnight.

The next day, we went island-hopping to Pulau Mamutik and Manukan. 3rd day went for White Water Rafting, which was quite nice, but I don't find it much challenging. I think I've experienced much more severe adrenaline rushes in Scouts. 4th day, toured around KK city before heading up to Mount KK to stay at Pine Resort.

Then, the 5th day back to Kuching :-(

Quite packed and memorable this trip I would say.

And I def get the rest I needed! Because I fell sick right after and took one more extra day's leave haha!

This is how a holiday should be. minus the falling sick part...

BRB

Trying to catch my breath after being left breathless... :-)

Hobbies?

Every time I passed by this spot, I never failed to feel some kind of warmth.

It is quite near my place, and I hoped that my camera did justice to it. Took this while I was on a moving vehicle, whipped out my camera (because I kept reminding myself I should really take pic of it one day but never happened), powered on and click.

I know. Occasionally I felt like if my camera was a human, I'd be falling heads over heels in love with it. Not that I am not doing that right now.

I should really take more pictures. When there's just so many things that are inspiring me.


I think I should take up gardening. Har har, this coming from a girl who takes 3-4 hours sleep at night and power naps in between to live her life. But I am determined.

Especially after I look at all the mismatched furnitures in my living room and grow quite annoyed at how everything doesn't seem to fit in and look homely. Not that I judged my mother's sense of style; but I don't expect much from her, coming from a home where a sofa would be considered luxurious.

I thought redecorating my home or at least small effort of trying to do should be my new-est project. And gardening is my firstest effort of trying to spruce up my house to look more homey.

Point-form

Point-form post because too many stories and too little time

1) BF nearly got into a fight yesterday while we were queuing up for the Sushi King's RM2 Bonanza thingy. The group squeezed in front of us, while at the pretense of talking to their friend. Bad news was, the group who was originally in front of us were BF's colleagues. 6 of them went in (BF's colleagues) while the other 4 who came later stayed.

So BF questioned why the cutting queue action and then, after a small exchange of words, one of them shouted back that he wasn't there to eat and walked away (with his GF), while throwing spiteful glances back at us and holding his phone like he was going to call his tai lou or something.

And then, after we got in about after an hour's wait, the same guy and his GF went in 5 minutes after us -_-'''

So much for not eating there huh? Chin malu le. I guess everybody cannot resist RM2 sushi. After all the hard work and effort of cutting queue. lol

2) I just realize I had forgotten about someone's birthday. This person had so much significance in my life and truthfully, I never thought I would forget about his birthday. All the shameless jokes and the spontainety between us; good times. Until it was marred by a single occasion.

And then we lost contact. I sometimes still think about our spontaneous emails, msgs and meet-ups. I crave for such friendships. Where I don't think you really need to validate anything, Just do it.

He was the one who made me so mad because we went to a party and the DJ asked all the couples in the house to come up for special prize. People started pushing both of us up and I was waving frantically that we were not a couple. I looked at him for help in backing me up but I found him laughing non-stop and didn't said a single thing to his friends. We ended up on the stage and I probably didn't talk to him for the next 2 months or so.

He was also the one that caused my credit limit to be busted every month because we would send one-word messages and the other has to complete the last word. Morning! Lectures. Boring. Day. It would go on all day like that and automatically the last person who didn't reply was going to pay for supper that day.

Funny too because our last one-word messages was about pink hearts, heart break and love.

3) I take too little pictures lately and it's unacceptable with my worthy investment (LX3) lying around.

4) From an interview recently, I found out that I do not have an ambition. And that isn't good.

5) The other day while being overwhelmed at work, I stopped by the guard house and waited till the rain stop before I started walking home. I didn't want to stay at the office because work practically piles up before me and not home, because then I would need to clean my room, wash my shoes, sweep the floor. I just needed a moment to breathe and so the guard house looked like a safe haven.

It was then I found out that the security guard pakcik with the garang face that I had been ignoring all this while on the way in/out of uni, actually is quite friendly and is very proud of his 2 kids. He made me feel like crying when he said he felt sad he couldn't provide much for his family, only the RM800 he got from being a guard and he hopes that his children has the chance to go to uni like I do. :-(

6) That if there's a will, there's a way

Maybe it's not meant to be..

I maybe wrong, but somehow I felt that life has never been easy for me.

I do appreciate the things around me, no matter how small and minimal they are.

Growing up, it hasn't been practically easy for me when I see people having better things and opportunities.

So,it took me quite a while to accept me for who I am. I may not live in a big house. Or may not be able to afford Prada bags the whole of my life. I may not win a beauty contest. Or boost 1000 friends in my Facebook. Or the pride of having a Dr. in front of my name.

I do not know exactly when the point of maturity came. But I realized that if I were to spend my life, whining about the things I don't have, I might lose the chance to appreciate the things I do have.

Skies are not always blue anyways.

But it has been tough lately. I barely get into restful sleep anymore. I probably spend around only 3-4 hours of sleep each day and the rest are power naps in between. Caught on in dilemmas, in people who are 'poison', in tough acts of decisions.... so much so much...

I am ashamed to admit that probably only at hours like this I am closer to God. I find it calming to read quotes from the Bible and constantly talking (in my heart/mind) to the Higher authority to at least give me strength to face whatever it is coming.


Most of the time, I do feel paralyzed. Like as if, this is too much burden for me to carry. I used as if, because it's only the state of the mind and I am just weak. Too many decisions, too many gut instincts, too many things gone wrong to ignore, too many everything, too little everything.. It's a little bit of whirlwind right now.

Everything seems so peaceful but inside, it's like a wreck of chaos, paranoia and loneliness all snowballed into one.

Do I wish to just stare out into a window of complete serenity and calmness, with the rain washing over the earth like no big matter? Like my problems are just a gust of wind?

I probably would give up everything I have right now for that peace of mind.

Just that peace of mind.

That this all didn't mattered. That the most important right now is just staring out that window, watching the rain drops.

And fell asleep into a deep peaceful sleep, knowing that someone is there, looking over me while I sleep.

How I wish.

Down appetite down!

So I was down with mild diarrhoea whole weekend.

What I was proud of myself was throughout the weekend, I did not let it slow me down one bit and as what Mr. Barrie (Johnny Depp in Finding Neverland) would have said, "Believe it and it will be real" - I really thought of it as a mild condition that I totally brushed off the need to go to the toilet every 2 hours or so as a reason to stay at home.

I had Hartz Chicken buffet on Sunday and my faculty had a belated Hari Raya open house on Monday, of which I pretty much ate to my heart's content.

When I told Tim on the MSN that I was down with diarrhoea, naturally he asked me what I had taken to fall sick. I thought he meant what I ate before, I didn't even think for a sec he meant about which food I ate that was bad that caused the diarrhoea. So I nonchalantly briefed to him my menu on Sunday and Monday, and boy was he surprised!

How could "a sick person" eat so much!?

Truthfully, as far as my memory takes me, I don't think I am those one who are plagued with decreased appetite when I fall sick. Every time a mutual friend says something about losing appetite when they are sick, I wonder how does that feels. To not feel like eating anything.

I always feel like eating something.

Maybe that explains the size I am growing in.

Despite being sick, I think I can probably find like one thing that I probably wouldn't mind taking.

Neeni, my labmate warned me though, prior to the Open House to take care of my diet since I told her I had a mild diarrhoea over the weekend, but I still went quite havoc over the buffet haha. When I told her that I didn't have any sleep over the night after because I was busy frequenting the toilet once every hour throughout the night, she said she knew all the curry, rendangs and "cold food" would do something to my tummy.

Funny because despite the lack of sleep, I still go on to work. Two of my other labmates however, stayed at home because they got the diarrhoea too haha. I am not sure whether it is linked to the food I took at the Open House because I had the symptoms since Saturday, so I thought the food just aggrievated the situation.

But nevertheless, this teaches me a lot about my body though.

Also, I might be that someone who can never lose weight when they fall sick haha. Not that I want to. Because falling sick is simply just disastrous to the new me who is starting to love life :-)

So this is how it feels like quitting your job..

I normally try to avoid writing about work in my blog, just in case anybody from the lab stumbles upon my blog and word spreads out. But I've been feeling more frustrated, annoyed, disgusted, overwhelmed, ________(insert more negative feelings here) at work lately.

It has always been quite subtle my feelings of disgruntlement. I think I am doing much more work than my peers, but I have been adjusting well to it for the past one whole year that I am managing my time better now and my experimental techniques and results improved the most among my peers, that it pretty much didn't matter to me anymore.

But for the past 2 weeks, I have been feeling very under-appreciated, taken advantage of and overwhelmed at work.

1) A new PhD student joins our lab.
Among my existing colleagues, I am the most junior to the lab. I find it exhausting and totally unfair that I am stuck with teaching the new PhD student the runarounds of the lab. If my boss has directed me that I am his new "buddy", I guess I would treat it as part of my job. But my boss didn't and so, it's not my job actually?

The problem with this is I am already stuck with one project and my own MSc, and I am handling all the paperwork of the grant supporting me. And that involves all the balancing accounts, calling up companies, handing in purchase orders etc - if you see this properly, this is actually the job of an admin assistant/accountant, not mine? I am a Research Assistant, I should be focusing on research and research only?

Why I minded about the new PhD student is I already have enough workload to burden me, and teaching someone new is very time-consuming and tiring! I had to postpone two of my experiments because I took time off to teach him and a setback in my schedule absolutely sets me off!

2) His attitude is not helping either
If this new PhD student is a bundle of joy to be with, wow maybe I can at least have a little bit of fun while postponing my work. While he's not entirely that bad a person, he is very much a nuisance! His attitude is very annoying, and he almost treats people (well, me at least) like we are supposed to be at his service all the time or something!

i) One incident was when I was in a hurry to run PCR (some kind of experiment) and was in the midst of loading my samples into the respective tubes. He called me to the corridor so I dropped my pipette and samples and followed him to the corridor. I thought he had something important to ask me, lab-wise; turns out he was asking me about the pictures on the lab notice board in the corridor! I was aghast and stomped back to my working table without answering any of his questions (he was asking me about some of the pictures), obviously irritated! I broke off from my focus and concentration to answer some stupid dull questions about the pictures!? He couldn't have asked me sometime when I am free? STUPID! Blind or what!?

ii) I was teaching him how to use this gel eletrophoresis software. Halfway through teaching him, he asked me to stop and not teach him anything further. He said he might not remember all the steps so he only want to learn until how to save the image part. What pisses me off is he said he would call me again tomorrow to ask me to teach the rest of the steps? WTF? Am I his slave or something? Did he pay for my salary? Why is my schedule should be according to what he wants to do? I am doing him a favour now by teaching him, and he is setting up his own schedule! So now I am free and I want to teach him, but NOooo, because he's not willing to learn now, he would call me again tomorrow when he's ready to learn!? What about MY own schedule?

iii) Both my colleague and me encountered this problem with him. We wanted to kill two birds with one stone, so we wanted to teach him to prepare new reagents so that he can have his own reagents and then he knows how to prepare them in the future. He has this silly attitude that he refuses to learn how to make new reagents and said he only want prepared reagents for now! Again, why should we be following his schedule and when-not he wants to learn things? Just because he's PhD and we're MSc? We're doing him a favour, he should be dropping everything to learn whatever new things we want to teach! Grrrr

3) My boss is pushing me around the clock
My working hours is 9am to 5pm but I normally worked till 6 to finish off things and allow me some time to relax as well. I've worked really hard last week to finish up things, and I also did extra things at my initiative. Two times this week (and it's only Wednesday today!), my boss has been asking me run experiments after 5pm and most experiments normally take around 2-3 hours. I've showed that I am quite pissed with this arrangement, just that I normally schedule my time appropriately so I really hate it when people pushed me past my schedule, if not for emergency. He's my boss, so that's why I've learned to just stay silent and he has the rights to asked me to do so - but otherwise, for this lousy pay and extended working hours - I just find it totally ridiculous. Yesterday, I walked home in total darkness, soaked in the rain at 7pm, and I told myself I will not allow myself to be so pitiful anymore. There are other things in life to live for, and I'd like that I have a healthy dose of hard work at the lab and my own time with family, BF or friends in a day.

4) I feel like I am baby-sitting
Twice last week now, I've aired my concerns about certain issues and to see people actually dismiss my concerns, proceed their action and got the lab equipments spoiled. Sometimes I feel like I am nagging too much - "don't do this, that; read the manual first; maybe you should google the right steps". But when bad things happened when you've already concerned about it, it's really like the tip of an iceberg.

I know I maybe complaining much, and I hope people from the lab don't read this. But carthatic? YES VERY MUCH. I needed to tell somebody! Why not my blog. Chao. Back to my overburdening lab work.