Saturday, December 30, 2017

To sum up 2017

It's the penultimate day of the year and a lot has happened in 2017, especially in the past two months. I'm not sure if this is a characteristic of aging, but time has been flying past really really fast lately. And every day in my last working week felt like a week in itself with insufficient time to complete what I had planned for the day.
In 2016, I wanted to achieve as many firsts as possible, but in 2017 my resolutions were less "ambitious".


  1. Pass exams - I did pass my IRM exams! Thank God!
  2. Join cell group - I tried visiting a cell group but unfortunately it just didn't work for certain reasons
  3. More firsts - more on this later
  4. Road trip - errr... if driving up to Janda Baik can be considered as a road trip, then yes!
  5. Meaningful trip - errr... not really meaningful, but I did manage to travel a little this year on my company's expenses and I finally got to see Foo Fighters live!


So the tally of hitting my resolutions is somewhat on the majority side (I think).

There has been many ups this year but also some downs towards the end of the year. I feel like I have reached my comfort zone but I know this will not last long (and so, that's why I am a little melancholic when I think of it).

So, more firsts in 2017 were (in no particular order):-


  1. Foo Fighters (of course!)
  2. Solo trip (to sit for my exams) and it wasn't too bad
  3. Met a new friend at my exams and after 6 months he still remembers to wish me Merry Christmas
  4. Passed my exams although I had lost 3 months of study time compared to the others. Praise God!
  5. Being directly a part of achieving one of our corporate KPIs (yay, we will get bonus next year!)
  6. Bought my first fitness tracker (even though I had told everyone before this that I don't need one - ok, I eat my words now! But it really has given me motivation to walk and sleep more)
  7. Bought my first car in my name (little white elephant will always be my first true car. Although I paid for her, she's not registered in my name - poor thing) and I am truly loving this new experience, no matter what others have said that it isn't quite a bang for the buck. I was so happy with my Mazda 2 that I readily promoted it to a colleague and she bought it as well! Call me shallow, but the M2 looks good, feels good and the size is just right for my handling and my needs (I don't have a tonne of babies and guests to ferry around all day, so I am perfectly fine with the lack of space in the rear seats). I actually wanted the silver M2 but it was sold out in the entire Malaysia and there was a pressing need to get the new car, so I settled for the soul red (which was my first choice when I started my car hunt 2 years back). After reading so much about the M2 and watching every possible video review and asking some friends who were Mazda owners, I decided to test drive the M2 and Honda City (as everyone said it was the best value for money). Perhaps I was biased, but the M2's steering felt very much smoother than the City, which was for me, reminiscent of my little white elephant. I knew the pros and cons of each car (and the other decent B-segment models) but for me, design and performance trumps price. Since I got my new car in July, my dog has scratched it up nicely... but I still forgave her, my love for her is stronger I guess
  8. Painted my car (touch up paint) by myself after Poppy scratched it bad (to the metal) within less than a month old
  9. Agreed to a couple of setups and still cringing at the experiences
  10. Ran a Board Meeting and Management Committee meeting solo - actually this isn't really a first if I consider my previous company, but in this current company it is a first for me and preparations for meetings here are quite intense (in the sense of knowing the content to be discussed / tabled)
  11. Danced in our staff trip river cruise (the company you are with really makes a difference)
  12. Discovered that I am related to a colleague by marriage (not my marriage, duh!)
  13. Bought myself a shiny blue HTC U11 (they call it Amazing Silver but anyone with an eye will tell you it's blue) and am waiting for the Oreo update, which doesn't seem to be coming :'( Again, I eat my words - after many years of dissing HTC for my bad experience with my HTC Sensation, I decided to get the U11 after my Google Pixel XL Very Blue purchase was rejected by the seller (I also bodoh didn't realise there's no such thing as a 128GB version for the Very Blue variant). Just to justify to myself, I decided on the U11 because (i) HTC is the contract manufacturer for the new Pixel 2 XL and the side squeeze function is also proprietary to HTC (ii) so pretty - I like shiny stuffs, even though it's a fingerprint magnet (iii) cheaper than Pixel 2 and storage is 128GB! (no more lack of space to install useless apps and take many useless photos / videos) (iv) I read that HTC has one of the closest user experience to stock Android (after my Google Nexus 5, I don't think I could go back to all the bloatware and UI ugliness (ok this is my personal preference) of non-stock Android) - admittedly, it is a bit annoying that my U11 has some duplicate apps now but I have space and it isn't eating up too much of my storage (v) it has a great camera with DxO rating on par with the Pixel, which was one of the great phone cameras of 2016 - of course Pixel 2 is way better, but no money, no dream lorr...
  14. Became part of office politics (I've seen office politics before but this is truly my first experience of actually being in the thick of it in my working life thus far) and honestly, till this day I don't know what the heck I did to invite this situation where there is some undercurrent issue going on and fake cheery 'my-teeth-all-fall-out-from-the-saccharine' pretense of a friendship. I think in 2018, I really need to review how I judge people on first impressions and not be too excited to extend my full friendship to new colleagues. Again I have let down my internal firewall to friendship in the workplace and it has hurt me (and very sadly from a 'sister' in Christ), but I have come to terms that if someone doesn't want to be my friend then it is their loss and I should move on. I've had tiffs with colleagues before (not that many, but definitely some with raised voices) and we have battled it out, settled our issues (sometimes apologising openly) and became friends thereafter, and this is what I am accustomed to. Not silently excluding themselves from our lunch clique (with all of us wondering what happened, even the guy in our group realised it) and using me (and another colleague) as scapegoats for your errors / forgetfulness. Forgive me for being such a prude, but I really feel that professionalism and ethics are very important traits to practice in the workplace and being glib will only take you so far. Evidently this has been one of the thorns in my side this year and I need to reprogramme my mind to not dwell on unpleasant circumstances in the new year.
  15. Became an ISO QMS internal auditor - who would've thought that I, who knows nuts about internal audit and never been audited, would be an auditor. This was actually a miscommunication and I ended up being enrolled into the training and audit plan.
  16. Being audited for my risk management process and reports - I learned that I need to dig deeper when compiling the report from the risk owners. For some reason I had the thinking that I had no right to probe further when the academics provided me with their updates but I now understand that as the report preparer, I need to be ready with answers when the committee asks questions
  17. Helped out in a convocation - wow, I never knew such detail goes into protocol. It's like planning the wedding march up the aisle!
  18. Getting a beads bag from one of our directors from Singapore! Such a dear lady.
  19. Painted my toilet (goal is to paint all the internal walls downstairs - still work in progress) - I can now confirm that I will never be able to moonlight as a wall painter. My shoulder muscles burning from the paint stripping and sandpapering!
  20. Got bitten by a leech after a Christmas party - my gift from nature (and jungle trekking wasn't needed for this, just walk to the grassy area behind my car can kena already!) and my gift to nature (sucking my blood for more than an hour while I drove home) - although dad did kill the bugger after he dropped off my foot. I bled continuously for more than an hour - I bled through the surgical tape, ice pack didn't slow down the flow, and if I didn't press a tissue paper to the puncture, blood oozed out like a leaky pipe (and all I felt was a slight itch). When I had to go to bed, I bandaged my foot with some tissue paper (dunno where we kept the gauze) and lots of surgical tape, with an eraser to provide pressure on the puncture (I didn't want to go out to find a rock). The funny thing was how I discovered the bite: when we reached home, mum asked me whether I had cut my foot as I was bleeding all over the kitchen floor and when I looked down I immediately thought "OMG, my period must've leaked!" but my pants were clean. And then both our eyes trained towards the kitchen cabinet skirting and there we saw a wriggly black leech, like 10x fatter than the ones I saw in FRIM 20+ years ago during a school trip! Mum was going weak in the knees and I was like half-ass screaming for dad to come kill the leech (in my mind: OMG my blood, OMG big leech, OMG big leech bit me for over an hour, OMG in my new car summore!). It was a comical incident, now that I replay it in my mind!
  21. Being prophesied upon by a feng shui sifu that from my face, he can tell that I don't need to work hard to obtain success! That was classic hard sell to the max! Joke of the year in my books! I don't think I will ever forget that experience! hahaha
  22. My Fitbit got hacked and I am a Daniel Saunders from London, UK till early January 2018 due to Fitbit's policy of only being able to change the user's name every 60 days.
This year has been eventful on the personal front as well as the professional side. I would say that some relationships have been deepened, some which I would've like to deepen have not progressed and others, unfortunately had to be managed. But it's all good and I am satisfied with where I am today and with some hope for tomorrow.

I know I have been absent from this blog for 6 months and although I had so much to write about, I kept thinking whether it was worth my time to sit down and compose a post. But a few days ago I had stumbled upon some blog posts of someone I've worked with and it was a joy to be able to read the text and actually hear it in my mind like how this person would've said it. And I was reminded that besides being therapeutic, writing allows me to express myself like how I would like to say it in person and I also actually like documenting things down, to be able to jog my memory years later of how I felt and what I learned. My writing style may not quite mirror how I speak, but I would like to think that it is the better form of my self expression. Some people have affirmed this and I do not disagree with them.

santa pooch
My e-card this Christmas 2017 - Blessed belated Christmas to everyone!

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