Christmas 2014: The One With The Old Friends

On the Saturday prior to Christmas, I had a packed day meeting with old friends. That's like 2 gatherings in a day and there was a 3rd too but I had to give the other one a miss with a way-in-advance notice.

First, was a cozy tea party at Bei's house.




We weren't kidding when we said it was a TEA party.




Tiff brought along cupcakes and a swirled rainbow cake from Dean and Deluca. We also had gourmet chocolates (not pictured here).




Bei, Tiff and I had a hard time choosing which cupcake we wanted so we played a mind game to determine who got what. Pardon the graininess of these photos taken with a Samsung front camera. I had to brighten them many folds. These photos would not have existed if we hadn't sent the photos to someone. *winks*




Btw, xtina was not able to fall in that day as she had an early delivery and was in confinement. She gave birth to a beautiful baby girl and there Baby Sam was winking and calling out to us.




Tiff got the Christmas tree.




Bei got the Santa Claus.




I got Olaf, I meant Frosty, I meant the snowman.




And that wasn't a good choice for Olaf, I meant Frosty, I meant the snowman as he was soon decapitated by me.




Gifts for us! Ooh la la... Simply love the packaging and the great products that Benefit always has to offer. And simply love cozy meet ups with gal pals when we could chat to our hearts content.




For dinner, I met up with the Bimbo and Himbo group at Paulaner Bräuhaus.




Paulaner is not only famous for their German beer...




or any sort of brew and alcohol...




but for their authentic Bavarian "food, flair and coziness".




Paulaner's crispy pork knuckle, otherwise known as knusprige schweinshaxe




Breaded veal escalopes "Vienna" style with sautéed potatoes and cranberry sauce




Pappardelle pasta with tomato sauce, fresh basil and Parmesan cheese




Paulaner Brew House special platter




There was so much meat to share that we needed some greens... okay not green here... some vegetables.

My favourite dessert was the cherry one.




We had 7 in attendance that evening. Bimbo Jo, Bimbo Gerra, Himbo Kh, Bimbo Zanne, Himbo Jimson. Looking forward to a homely get together again with you peeps like in 2013.




Gifts for my gal pals.
Simply love the colours and application of Ciate nail polish that I had to get these mini ones for my gal pals. Sephora had them in sets of 3 with one definite OFF colour in each set and since I saw people opening to mix and match, I decided I would do the same too. It wouldn't be fair to me getting all the super OFF colours right? Some sets have got 2 or 3 very ugly colours and I bet it must be because of other people's mixing and matching. I'm always happy to receive sweet feedback about the things people receive from me and boy am I glad when some gal pals actually texted back to swoon about the colours they got after opening their gifts. The strange thing is that, they chose the packages blindly but got the set they liked. That is, for those who texted. I'm not sure about those who didn't feedback.




The boys got gifts too but the gals got more. *wink*




As usual, some people thought I handmade the magnets while some could not see the personalization of their name. They probably needed far-sighted glasses like my parents and for the umpteenth time, no, not handmade. I'm only claiming intellectual rights to the graphic and digital aspects.




[All photos in this section were taken using iPhone 6 and Samsung S4.]

I will disclaim my usual disclaimer whenever I'm super tired while doing blog post:
"I'm typing this post with half my eyes closed and nodding off to sleep. Proofreading and phases of edits would come after everyone has spotted my grammatical error, spelling error and weird sentence expression."

Be warned... impending verbal diarrhoea, ranting and incoherence ahead. Possible deletion of portion.

I sometimes wonder how do so many of you keep up with having blog posts every alternate days or once every few days and still manage to reply to comments and/or visit blogs back and reply with the ever sweetest comments (which obviously show that you have read or at least gathered gist of the posts) all on top of having a full time job/studies and/or managing a job and kids or being a full time mum? I really salute all of you who could manage your time so well. Do share some tips. =)

By the time I travel home from work, have dinner, shower and be all refreshed for the night, it could be 9-10pm on a usual day. Sometimes I fall asleep at weird hours only to wake up in the middle of the night to shower. I could only edit my photos and churn out chunks of paragraphs during pockets of free time in addition to a considerable state of consciousness. Such free time and good state of consciousness would probably constitute about 3--5% of my weekday. Breaking up these pockets of free time even further, free time does not only constitute blogging or managing other social media platforms. There are still so many other things in life to do than to engage in social media stuff. For weekends, I love to spend one day at cozying up at home which also includes doing some blog work (prepping a blog post, replying to comments and visiting blogs). Sometimes, both Saturdays and Sundays would be spent outside especially when there are meet ups and celebrations all falling during the same weekend and blogwork would have to be put on hold.

Talking about social media, Instagram is another thing which I wanna briefly mention. I would perhaps need a whole blog post dedicated to Instagram. No offence to any of you blog friends who follow me coz you are definitely NOT whom I'm referring to. I love to receive comments from my real friends and blog friends. I also love to receive comments from new friends who really engage or whom I find an affinity to. But I get so sick of cursory comments and shallow people who just want to chat me up or who try so hard to keep a conversation going when I've already replied with a comment that seem to warrant no more further reply from the other party. Yes, I appreciate compliments and I do thank some of these people. Yet, there are simply too many of the same individual giving similar compliments to so many pictures or different individuals giving almost the same kind of compliments that I think maybe, just maybe, it is not impolite if I do not thank them after all. Next come the people who assume and just shoot off comments thinking they know me very well and it pisses me off. It gets worse when English isn't their first language. I often have to wonder if they are rude or just using words wrongly. Giving them the benefit of doubt, I can't answer them rudely too and boy it takes so much brain cells to reply them. Some try to reach out in their language and so I take the time to translate on Google to roughly gather what they mean and reply in their language. But hey... why am I the one doing all the work of translating when they are the one reaching out to me? With the increase in followers, I can no longer keep up with my notifications and I thought "What a fine way to not bother to reply to comments anymore!"

Since we are on the line of notification, this reminds me of all forms of notifications that people could see, eg WhatsApp online timing, last read message, activities on social media etc...  and assume "Hey you are free to be online, to have read my message, to like like like and comment on Instagram... bla bla bla" Erm... let's just say that online timing or a read notification do not indicate that you have really read and digest a message. Activities on social media could be posted during commutes or breaks. Such time could only be constructive in certain ways and not in the ways which I want. One of my whatsapp group recently had a discourse on WhatsApp notifications and how misunderstandings are caused. Boy it was so insightful and how we understood one another's habits even more after that.

There you see... verbal diarrhoea. How my train of thoughts could link from carriage to carraige. I think I sound totally bitchy here but I don't care at this moment. Maybe over the next few days you might see this portion disappearing from my blog after some form of consciousness takes over Mean Bitch Jo once more. This is supposed to be a Christmas post full of love... Bah...

Edited to add (few days later):
Ok I feel better (while it lasts) after ranting and I shall just leave this portion here.