Archive for February, 2010
February 22 2010: Particularly Absent, But With Reason
Filed under Online with 11 Comments
I’ve been particularly absent from the online community in recent months, and have even deliberately cut back on accounts I hold online. I have deleted both my Twitter account and my Snark Forums account. LiveJournal has been downsized, Formspring has been deactivated, Google Reader has been downsized, and Facebook friends have been culled.
There are a number of reasons for this:
- I have no internet access at home. I’ve obviously recently moved out of home and considering that I’m rarely at home as I’m either at work or out and about, I don’t see the point of paying $100AUD a month for a USB wireless modem for my laptop, as it wouldn’t be worthwhile to get a landline.
- I need to limit my internet usage at work. I am currently snowed under at work with a million tasks and responsibilities to prioritise. This situation isn’t going to change for the next six months. Having superfluous social networking accounts is only a distraction above and beyond what’s reasonable. Checking personal email throughout the day is reasonable. Spending half the day on Twitter and a forum isn’t.
- My mobile phone bill was going through the roof. It became a habit for me to catch up on people’s Tweets and forum updates on my phone when I was commuting to and from work. That’s two hours worth of mobile browsing each day – my bank account can’t keep up with the charges I sustained. The less accounts I have, the less I browse, the less my bill.
- I have other time-consuming offline commitments. Long story short, I am likely to be purchasing a property in the next couple of months. As such my weekends are taken up with inspecting properties for sale, and my weekdays are taken up with talking finances over the phone.
I am of course, still contactable via email, but because of demands on my time, replies may be late coming. I may in time sign up again for social networking sites, but it’s not something I can envision for the next six months. I am still keeping up with blog entries (however little I comment) and will continue to blog, however sporadically. I just need to learn to prioritise my commitments (e.g. concentrate on work) and to cut down on unnecessary expenditure (e.g. outrageous mobile browsing bills) in order to achieve my goals.
February 13 2010: Happy Chinese New Year!
Filed under Asian-ness & Family & Relationships/Men with 11 Comments
Happy Chinese New Year to anyone for whom it actually means something!
I managed to inadvertently aggravate my parents by forgetting that it was Chinese New Year’s Eve tonight – it’s more important to our family than the actual day itself. Having lived away from home for the past few months though, I forgot entirely about the New Year, and arranged early on to meet a friend from Sydney for dinner tonight as she’s only down for a few days. Bad move on my part. At least I’m back in the family home in the afternoon, to at least do my part in the worshipping of our family ancestors – the burning of paper money, etc. I try my best to do what’s expected of a good Chinese daughter.
And – tomorrow’s not only the start of the Year of the Tiger, but also Valentine’s Day! I haven’t planned or organised much as I was quite extravagant in planning an elaborate birthday for Dylan last week, so I’ve just done something quite small (which I can’t write about here yet, because apparently he’s starting to read this blog again).
I have told him though, that however commercial or cheesy he might find the holiday, I fully expect him to make an effort tomorrow. We might be used to just chilling at home with a few DVDs, but tomorrow needs to be something more. It needn’t be as cheesy as roses and chocolate – I just need him to show that he understands that while the holiday might not mean anything to him, it means something to me, so he should just suck it up and treat me like a princess. So there. =P
February 10 2010: Extravagant Wedding Expenses
Filed under Style with 18 Comments
A local radio station here are holding a wedding dress party, to give women a chance to wear their wedding dress more than once. Fantastic idea when you think about it – why have a dress you can only wear once? Each day, they have different ways of giving listeners a chance to win tickets to the party – whether it be getting people to call in if they have the most expensive wedding dress, the strangest themed wedding, etc.
A woman called into the show yesterday, telling of her $25,000AUD wedding dress which was made in Italy. That is just obscene! $25,000AUD could be a third of a deposit on a house! It could buy a new car with change left over! There’s extravagant, then there’s pointless expenditure – $25,000AUD for a dress to be worn once? Ridiculous. I wouldn’t even spend $25,000AUD on a whole wedding.
Personally, I already have a plan for my own wedding dress. Because the style I want is so specific, there’s no way I can buy off a rack – the dress will have to be custom-made. So the idea is to:
- Purchase luxury bridal silk and lace fabrics at Clegs, which is a luxury fabric store in Melbourne.
- Take base pattern ($30AUD for a strapless dress pattern from Spotlight) to Shanghai when I’m on a family visit home
- Get a local Chinese made-to-measure dressmaker to create my dream dress for a fraction of the price
So, rather than forking out $8,000AUD-$10,000AUD for a dressmaker to make a dress for me here in Australia, I’d fork out about $700AUD for materials purchased in Australia, and a dressmaker in China to create a dress perfectly fitted to my body, with an extra $2,000AUD in a holiday back home to see family before I get married (as they’re unlikely to be able to come to the wedding). That’s less than a quarter of the price of getting a custom-made dress in Australia, and less than a tenth of the cost of this woman’s $25,000AUD dress!