Gosh, where did time go? I've been such a bad blogger and blog-hopper. It can be pretty tricky to get back to the swing of things after a long break from writing in a blog. It's not that I haven't had anything to say, but I've felt less the need to share it in my blog, I guess.
Anyway, last month we had our winter break and we went to London. It was my second time going there and I was planning on meeting some friends again. While waiting for our flight to London at Helsinki airport, I had to turn off my mobile because I felt like it wasn't working properly. When I turned it back on, I had to type in the four-digit code to activate my mobile. I punched in my usual numbers, but my device said that they were the wrong ones.
Uh oh...then I realized what had happened. You see...R2 had changed my provider to a better one about two months prior to our London trip and I had forgotten to change the activation code. I hadn't memorized the new one, either (I tried punching in 0000, but it didn't work, either). The third time around my guess was wrong, so my mobile was locked and I had to enter my PUK code to activate it. Luckily R2 was there with me and since he was the one who ordered the whole thing, he had access to the PUK code. Phew!
I was panicking for a while before R2 found the PUK code, because my mobile had everything necessary for me to contact my friends easily (the ones I were planning to visit in London). Imagine if I had been alone and then my phone was locked like that. There are no more payphones in Helsinki airport these days, so I would have had to borrow someone else's mobile phone to contact R2. Geez...it reminds me how much I rely on my mobile to do so many things these days and how different it was back then when I was growing up. I remember lining up in front of public phone booths in Bali during our High Sschool trip to contact our parents and let them know that we had arrived safely. Dang, the memory makes me feel old HA HA HA HA HA HA HAHHH...
Anyway, I had the pleasure of meeting Nikki again in London. YAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY!!!! We spent half a day together and we even visited the same cafe we found two years ago. We visited the British Museum (free pass!) and we found a really strange statue that Nikki found disturbing. It was a statue of a woman who was carrying a weird-looking figure in her arms. If the figure was a baby, it would have been understandable, but the small figure in her arms looked like an old man who was pouring some water or something like that. We couldn't find any description regarding the weird-looking little old man in her arms LOL!!!
P.S. Did you notice that I was wearing the same red top, Nikki? :-D I'm glad that the blogosphere brought us together. :-D Until next time!
A friend of mine told me about her current problem in life. She met this woman at her son's school, but this woman clings to her like a magnet. She calls my friend over 15 times A DAY and sends her plenty of messages. She wants to be with my friend as much as possible, though she herself has a husband and a child. My friend becomes a bit spooked by this, so she tries to avoid her as much as she can BUT she can't help feeling that she's such a cruel person.
I told her that the woman had overstepped my friend's boundaries. I then asked if this woman's messages were important or urgent and my friend said no. I then said this, "If she's not in dire need for help and the message isn't all that important or urgent, then it's fine to ignore it or just reply later." After all, it costs money to reply to SMSes and if she sends my friend so many SMSes a day, then it's just crazy. Plus a housewife like my friend who also needs to take care of her parents' store as well as help take care of her sick father doesn't have time to answer every time that woman calls her.
In the beginning she did answer every one of her calls, though after a while she realized that it just wouldn't do, so she began to ignore her calls. It's kinda hard to make someone like this woman to understand that there are certain boundaries that she should know. Maybe she doesn't have any other friends and that's sad, but that doesn't mean she can bombard my friend like that. She even wants to spend a night at my friend's house, can you believe it? I mean, she's got her own house, her own husband, and her own child!!! And it's not as though my friend ASKED her to spend a night at her place...that woman just said to my friend that she wanted to do so!
Anyway...have you ever encountered someone like that - someone who oversteps your boundaries? What did you tell him/her then? Or did you just try to avoid that person as much as you can 'coz telling that person the truth would sound too cruel?
I remember when I first moved to Indo, I also overstepped my friends' boundaries by clinging onto them too much. At that time I didn't have friends here yet, so I bombarded my friends with emails - LONG, frequent emails and one of them had enough guts to tell me about it ('coz in a way it also made her feel guilty for not being able to reply to my many emails). It hurt me at that time, but it was the right thing to do and I TOTALLY appreciate her openness to me 'coz it made me realize I couldn't "put my eggs in one basket" so to speak. I needed to widen my sphere of friendship and blogging has helped me A LOT in that department. Without you all my blogging friends, I wouldn't have made it. So, CHEERS for you all, my beloved blogging friends! ;-D
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Crystal tagged me to do this one. THANKS, Buddy!!!
Here are 8 Things I'm grateful for:
1. Being loved. God loves me the way I am with all my brokenness. My hubby and family and closest friends love me the way I am and they always support me. And my blogging friends have also made me feel loved and supported he he he he he...
2. My family, hubby, hubby's family, closest friends, blogging friends. I'm SO rich beyond belief!!! :-D I can share many things with them and I can learn so much from them, as well.
3. Health. Self-explanatory.
4. Random acts of kindness. I've found so many different types of random acts of kindness around me that really makes me feel that this world isn't so broken after all.
5. Sense of humour. Thank GOD for sense of humour! I feel that I can stay forever young he he he he he...
6. Having the opportunity to get some income online by blogging. This is something that never crossed my mind before, so it's a wonderful surprise for me. Plus I wanna thank my fellow blogger friends who're understanding about my need to get some income online - thank you for bearing with me!!!
7. Having the chance to write my heart out to my parents and brother (and hubby, too, during our long-distance relationship) so that if I die today, I won't regret anything.
8. Being able to live my biggest dream, which is living abroad. Plus I don't have to do it alone. I'm accompanied by my sweetest, wackiest, most understanding soulmate. :-))))
I'm tagging: Juliana, Blur Ting.
