I've shifted!

don't ask me why but i've been in a cooking mood lately :) went grocery shopping over the weekend and came back with loads of baking materials. on sunday, i made sherperd's pie (something easy to start) for the family and on monday i baked carrot cake.
so, why carrot cake? simple reason being i didn't have a cake mixer for the other cake recipes BUT i think i (or my mom hopefully!) will be investing in one soon :) anyway carrot cake attempt wasn't quite successful. as you can see from the photo, the cake wasn't as fluffy as it should be. it look a long time to cook the inside such that the top layer was burnt i had to slice it off before creaming it. but the fruit of one's own labour always tastes sweet :) now the task is to make it even sweeter haha.

CONGRATULATIONS to my favourite celebrity couple!

a pleasant surprise when i was going down the stairs two days ago - a herd of kittens (four of them!) feeding off their mother! since then, i've been keeping a lookout for my newfound squatter neighbours. in the day, the kittens are usually sleeping there by themselves (while the mother goes out to look for food i suppose?) today i found the whole family together again and i cldn't resist taking a photo!

this is probably the most tiring week of my internship so far, even though it's only been three weeks! it certainly felt longer than that! the warehouse sale earlier this week totally exhausted me but i'm glad the weekend has finally arrived again, what's more an extended one! :):)
three weeks into the internship and tiring as it is, i'm pretty much enjoying what i'm doing so far. i can forsee that the experience which i'll be gaining here is going to be so much more and different from my previous stint; goes to show the difference between working in a statutory board and a multinational company. for one, the working population in a mnc is young and vibrant, seemingly meritocracy-based, wheras a stat board has a mixed population of the young and old, segregated vertically. because of that and in part due to the nature of the organization, the mnc generally practises an open working culture wheras the other tends to be bureaucratic and conservative. this then leads me to the third difference which is the degree of autonomy in the two types of organizations. clearly, there is a higher degree of autonomy in an mnc than in a stat board. while i do understand from the company's pov that an intern's presence is temporary, thereby placing much limitation on the amount and type of work she can be given, i feel that the value the intern can contribute to the company is as much as the responsibility the company can entrust her with. that said, i gotta admit i was pretty taken aback at the free rein thrown at me during my first week of work which i gradually acquainted myself with. so far, things have been going fine - an industry i've grown to become interested in, friendly colleagues and an approachable manager who are most willing to help only if you're not afraid to ask plus an interesting job scope which i enjoy doing. i do hope things will only get even better in the next few months to come and not get complicated by the ugly side of office life we always hear people complaining about!

i'm starting my internship tomorrow, after NINE WHOLE MONTHS OF slacking, traveling and whatnot. feeling somewhat unsettled and ill-equipped to start work again but i suppose everything will soon start falling into place and i'll get the momentum soon!
expectations for the internship? WORK, BRING IT ON!

a final tribute to the place i called home a fantabulous five months away from singapore.
that's my apartment directly above the bicyles; that's my room with the blinds up.