Dom’s Bday Celebration (part 1)

Haha, actually the part 1 celebration (held on Friday) wasn’t exactly that elaborate for Dominic only, but it’s more like an outing [gathering] and having lots of fun [and food], but guised in the name of having an outing before his birthday as well as his exams next week.

I would suppose part 2 of the celebration is more of the nicer and sweeter one. If the wordpress timestamp works right, I should be in Dom’s house right now, having the proper birthday party. [I think the timestamp works right lah.] Yeah, the one on Sunday (aka today) is a surprise planned by none other than Dom’s gf [Huishan], with the help of [and guest appearances by?] the remaining Scheming Dudes. Lol. I may or may not have another entry on part 2. Hopefully I won’t be too lazy to write one. There will be a part 2 for this. =)

Now on to recap the events on Friday. It all began with meeting at City Hall. Thankfully all were punctual (within 5 minutes of meeting time). First stop was to Beppu Ramen [paiseh, lazy to find official site, if any], but along the way, we used the new [modified right?] city link, and we were quite “lost” by the “new” way of walking. Behaved as though we’re tourists or something =X

Anyway Beppu supposedly serves very good ramen, but the char siew ramen didn’t seem to impress me. Jon, who ordered the same dish, agreed too. In fact he probably found it below his expectations more so than mine bah. Haha. There’s also chilli rating for a selected number of dishes [namely 1/2/4/6/8 spice rating]. Don’t ask me why the rating uses such weird numbering. Among us, only Dom ordered a dish that comes with a spice rating, and he chose 1 spice rating to be on the safe side, or was it not to aggravate his cough [got relation or not ah?]. Of course, I sampled and it’s no surprise that 1 spice rating has no kick, but I’d probably not survive the 8 spice rating assuming it’s linear increasing function of spicy-ness. Heh. Maybe Waikit can go try if he ever steps into Beppu Ramen. Lolol.

Jon with 2 bowls of char siew ramen

Dom’s Teriyaki Chicken Ramen [1 chilli rating]

After filling our stomachs [at least it's no longer in danger of activating hunger rampage mode], next stop was to go to PC Show [or IT fair or whatever it's called lah. same kind of thing to me anyways.]! Anyway, stopped by Koi garden for Huishan to take some pics using her new digicam [paiseh forgot model number] and the 4SD took a group picture [hmm, maybe I should request for the pic sometime...] before completing our journey to the exhibition halls. Having not gone to any such pc show/IT fair because I know the crowd is huge, and indeed the number of people there is simply a lot. And it ain’t even the true weekend yet [though it's the school holidays...]! Didn’t stay very long at IT show though, since Huishan found she needed, and Jon collected enough pamphlets and will be going again on Saturday [which makes it ytd...] with his parents again anyway.

With that, we could move on to our next, and final location – Huishan’s house! Well, she did clean up the house a lot [the thing first Dom exclaimed was so clean!!] earlier in the day to be a better host etc. Sure worked hard to welcome us =) Anyway, mahjong was first on the list of games we played. Initially I was trying to learn some strategies from Jon, but his luck wasn’t exactly all that good yet [all with Huishan lor =P] so I couldn’t see certain tricks and strats as I had wanted to. Haha. Not long after, I was asked to take over Huishan’s place [who won quite a bit by then...] and the entire luck scene started to change. The veterans [namely zihan and jon] began to show their seniority and experience in the game [over me and Dom]. Had many fun and funny moments while playing through all the games. Had some luck [mostly not so good] and lost quite a lot [of course no real money was involved!! I don't think I'll play with real money in any foreseeable future...]

Also, while playing mahjong, there’s nice music [and even MTVs!!] [courtesy of Huishan's collection...] played using the TV [near where we placed the mahjong table...]. Shiok =D But losing quite badly after taking over Huishan’s good start isn’t exactly that good =P Oh wells, I’ve managed to win with a 清一色 for the first time in my life [not bad considering how many times I've played real mahjong nia...]. I guess that’s satisfying enough, for a newbie [occasions still count for less than 5 I believe, if you exclude Yahoo! mahjong and VWW...] End up we stopped playing [mostly because Dom only had 2 green chips left, which you could say is worth 2, out of 100 we each started with =X] and cleared up the table and tiles to eat dinner.

Dinner was quite a feast actually, with a lot of food to eat [yea, can full one...]. I found the fish dish the nicest though, followed by the chicken wings, then the soup. Hehe. There’s even choc milk mixed with Bailey [dunno spelling correct or not. should be la...] which tasted quite nice. W00t, recently drinking quite a bit of alcoholic stuff. Haha, hope I don’t turn alcoholic [don't think so right...?].

Post-dinner activities were supposed to be more tame, but the heart attack [modified??] game turned out to be rather… aggressive. Haha, good thing most of the time I’m the one who started picking the winning stone [yay, 4 other people isn't that hard to monitor... and playing 2 suits...] so I wasn’t exactly involved very much in the struggle [phew...]. Played like 7 rounds worth or something [maybe a bit more than that. shrugs, never keep count]. Then followed by 1 round of uno stacko, which I somehow survived a “draw two” at a somewhat late stage. Whee!! Not bad I suppose. Hehe. After all these, it was already like slightly past 9pm, and it was time to end this fun outing because people had various things to attend to the next day.

To end things off, even the trip home was superb! Though it’s a bit of walking to do to reach the bus stop with service 26, the bus was nice and came like within a minute. W00t! The trip to change to a connecting bus of 151 [actually I had at least 154, 966, 985 and maybe more, but was accompanying Dom since he going back hall] also came in something like within a minute after we got down from 26! W00t again! Even Dom was pleasantly surprised since he confessed that normally waiting for 151 at night is quite jialat one [dunno how true... perhaps somewhat true...]. Anyway, that means I’ve learnt a new way of travelling to another part of Singapore that’s not so inconvenient. Whee…

It was quite a long day [requires energy, at least for me], but it was fun! An outing filled with fun and goodness! Yeah as you can tell from the description [although I know my description is lousy...] that Friday’s gathering wasn’t exactly Dom-specific, but I’m having a proper one right now! I should have a part 2 for this I guess… [yes I will! when will it be out? I don't know...]

p.s. how could I forget the hamster and cat in Huishan’s house? Haha they’re cute in their own ways, but I probably wont want to keep pets ’cause I’ll probably end up being rather irresponsible in terms of taking extra good care of them [and the hassle of cleaning up here and there etc... yea i'm lazy!]. Jon had a nice time interacting with them I suppose, since he likes both cat AND hamster. Hehe.

p.p.s Happy birthday Dom! You’ll see yourself appearing in some of my entries, though it’s a mostly just a one-liner…

p.p.p.s according to WordPress’ word count functionality integrated to every post/page writing, there’re 1337 words [excluding title] for this entry! W00T!!