Live A Different Life

7 days, 4 cities later, I am finally back in Napier! Graduation was great with rain, friends, family and fellow graduates :) Good old Dunedin with its super cold weather and super rainy face reminds me of the good old times being a scarfie. Go Dunedin!

Some pictures from the weekend






It was great meeting up with old friends & new friend, ie baby Alex! I felt like the graduation weekend was the busiest day(s) ever in my life. Dinner and sleepover at Jocelyn and Sharon's flat on Friday night, picked up Alex and my parents on Saturday morning, picked up regalia, makeup put on by experts, Jocelyn and Sharon, put on regalia, rush to Town Hall 10 minutes late (and apparently our names were called out *oops*), sat for 1 hour and a half for 5 seconds of fame, pictures with family, friends and lecturers, dinner @ Lone Star, reunion at Jocelyn's flat, sleep, more photos the next morning, more reunion at Jitsu, brief visit to Microbiology building and onto the bus back to Christchurch, sleep, flight to Wellington, met May for 2 hours and bus back to Napier. Whew, I felt tired even just typing all the things I have done in the past few days. I feel like I am getting older...oh no~

Happy Birthday Michelle, the coolest gamer I have ever seen and Sharon, the evil girl who made me addicted to chocolate cookies! I love cookies. I love chocolate chip cookies. I think I'm still suffering from the side effects of eating Sharon's yummy cookies last year. So last Saturday, I baked some chocolate chips cookies. Umm...or should I say I TRIED to bake some chocolate chip cookies. Feeling really excited about baking cookies, I went to The Warehouse and Pak n' Save to buy some basic bakeware and ingredients.

Real photo to come

and I met my new watch for the first time! No more finding my cellphone to check the time, no more time guessing game. Loved the new watch by my family~ Thank you!

After beauty sleep, Alex and I went out to collect my birthday gift! Driving around Auckland was not in my genes unfortunately and we ended up lost. Thanks to people who invented maps, we managed to find the place in the end. Please say hi to my NEW LAPTOP, HP dv6817TX! Loved the design, the widescreen, the webcam and microphone, the whole thing! I have already officially named it *drumroll* Alex :) In fact, I am blogging from the new laptop now. No more lagging or system crash when I'm in the middle of doing stuff.

After lunch at Nando's (highly recommended!), we came home to rest for a while before getting ready for dinner @ Hammerhead Seafood Restaurant by Mission Bay. Beautiful scenery, wonderful atmosphere and delicious food.

Thank you everyone for wishing me happy birthday. Thank you for your present, I really loved it =P Thank you for being my friend and thank you for being there for me, always!

I just realised that today is officially mantha-sam's one month birthday! To mark my blog's birthday, I decided to make it a cake.


Coincidentally (or not), one of my favourite books at the moment is Eat Cake by Jeanne Ray.


Wanted to blog about it for quite a while, but didn't have the time or opportunity to, so here goes:

Ever been so stressed that you can't seem to breathe properly? Just imagine that you are in the special place, where you can breathe freely and fully relax, be it your childhood home, the beach, your bed. For Ruth, her special place is the warm, hollowed-out centre of a Bundt cake. With her teenage daughter acting like a teenager, her husband fired, her mum moving in with the family on her plate, she seems to visit her special place quite often. To add more joy to her life, Ruth's oft-estranged father and her mother's ex-husband, with two broken wrists joined the chaotic household. It seems like cake is the only thing that can get her out of this situation, literally. Using the sheer power of her mixer, Ruth turned her imagination into reality through baking cakes and saved the day.

Really love the story, how Ruth united her family on a mission to turn the situation around through doing what she truly loves. A really simple, yet thoughtful novel. Ever feel like you are in a overwhelming situation? Stop, think about what you really like to do, think again and act on the situation. Do not let your situation define who you are.

*the teddy bear cake image was taken from http://www.maisiefantasie.co.uk

I always thought that I am cool. Not girly-cool but neutral gender-cool, Sharon-cool. My heart was shattered (jokes) when I was told "You are not cool. You are sweet." My heart was screaming "I wanna be cool, I wanna be cool. Sweet is not my thing!" Well, I guess now I can finally kiss goodbye with my illusion that I am a cool girl.

Listening to 'Beautiful in Your eyes or mine?' (Composed by *drumroll* Mrs Yeo!), I realised that at times in life, it's easy for us to say "I am too ....., I want to be ......" The comment that Jacqueline made was really true: "We will never stand before an artist and say aiyo why your art so ugly." Why should we then, do this in front of God, the mighty artist? We are beautiful in God's eyes. God created us and He obviously knew what He was doing and was good at His job.

Let this serves as an encouragement to everyone out there: God created us to be good, smart, talented, handsome, pretty, cool, sweet, awesome, able to pass exams with flying colours so do not ever believe that you are not good in any way.

Enough of the serious stuff, now on to the real topic of the day: HAPPY BIRTHDAY SHAZA!

You have really being a blessing in my life and I am glad that I had the honour of getting to know you better throughout our time together in Dunedin. Continue to be God's light, holding out the truth in the darkest place and shine like a shiner!

Considering the fact that I have spent a whole year working on the elective project, it definitely deserves a post. As part of my course at School of Pharmacy, University of Otago, I have to do a group research project with my classmates and present it to the class as part of our final year course requirement. For my group, our research topic is Solid State Stability of Drugs in Suspension - a literature review. Don't understand the topic? Worry not, for after a whole year of research, I still don't understand the topic myself.

Simplified abstract: Many drugs exist in different polymorphic forms with identical chemical structure, but different physical arrangements. Some of the polymorphic forms will be more favourable compared to others due to solubility, stability or better absorption profile etc. The main aim of our research is to investigate the stability of favoured polymorphic forms in suspension. Although it was a boring topic, it did not require much work and our supervisor was really nice as well, making the elective project really enjoyable.


As part of the elective report, some students decided to present their research in presentations and we had to listen to 18 presentations from 9am to 3.30pm. Sitting through the presentations which are very in depth and having difficulty understand the topics, I decided to focus on QuadraPop instead. 276660, my personal best! Since Alex set the record of 102810, I have never managed to come even close to that record. Finally after a year of hard work, I made it!