k r i s a n d r o

I have been hit by the flu bug since last Thursday and I am on the way to recovery except the need to blow out the phlegm through my nose every now and then. With the rise of H1N1 cases in Singapore, there was a slight worry from KuKuNehNeh (KKNN) and myself thinking that we may have fallen prey to the epidemic considering that KKNN had the flu before me and she was at Butter Factory a week shy of the supposed outbreak.

I did feel lousy but my temperature was at a measly 35.9 – 36.1°C throughout the period and that was pretty reassuring even though I did read that a large number of H1N1 patients didn’t experience fever.

KuKuNehNeh and I stayed apart for 2 days since the onset of my flu but she longed to see me and missed me to no end (Hey it’s my blog, I say what I want to say. :p) and so I decided to travel to Ang Mo Kio to let her have a dose of her bf.

With flu, a slight cough and a running nose that is out of my control, the best thing I can think of to be socially responsible is to purchase face masks and wear one for the 1 hr trip down from Jurong West.

Boy! Was it an interesting experience.

Besides the obvious lack of comfort of wearing a 3-ply mask in the disgusting, sweltering heat of Singapore, I had to sniff constantly to prevent drowning myself in my own mucus in the covered mask considering it makes no sense for me to remove the mask and blow my nose in the train cabin right?

The social aspect of wearing a mask was astounding. Despite the fact that most Singaporeans are aware of the H1N1 and it’s spread, not one human being I see on the street is wearing a mask except me. It might be just my mind but I swear people give me 2nd looks upon realizing that I am wearing a mask. I get the feeling that they are probably deducing that I am a carrier or I am extremely afraid of catching the virus.

Upon entering the train at the busy Jurong East MRT platform, I was lucky enough to get a seat and guess what? NOBODY sat to the adjacent seats on my left and right. Do bear in mind that the rest of the seats in my cabin were soon filled up and as far as I can see, so were the seats in the other two cabins adjacent to mine. There are people standing all around as the train moved from station to station and still nobody took the empty seats beside me!

I was practically smirking at situation, half amused at the elbow space I got and half amused at the reactions of the passengers around me. It was only until 4 stations later that a brave (or oblivious) man came in and sat beside me.

Very scary meh?

First of all, no worries that I will spoil anything about the movie in this post because I hate movie reviews that give away too much about the plot and make me feel like printing the blog post down and marching down to the blogger and shoving the paper down his/her throat.

I got to thank my iPhone and my data plan on instances like this when I was travelling underground in the MRT and received the invitation from Alvin of Omy.sg, telling me that United International Pictures (UIP) are giving away 10 pairs of tickets to the SG Blog Awards finalists watch the VIP Gala Premiere of Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen.

KuKuNehNeh (KKNN) was extremely excited when I got news that I was one of the lucky 10 bloggers who got the tickets as she was a big fan of the first installment of the movie even though she can hardly tell an Autobot from a Decepticon much less recognizing who Optimus Prime was when a group of mascots appeared at the Cathay were the premiere was held.

A retro and movie version of Optimus Prime were there amongst the insanely popular Bumble Bee and one Decepticon in the form of Starscream or Megatron. I couldn’t really tell as it looked as though they carefully crafted all the nice Autobot costumes and didn’t know what to do with the remaining material and thus decided to put them together and paint it all grey to make it look like one of the bad guys. I don’t have a picture of that poor dude in that Starscream/Megatron costume but trust me, it was baaaaaad.

KKNN was even more excited after spotting quite a few bloggers from the SG Blog Awards and especially at the local celebrities and came in dribs and drabs like Elvin Ng from Mediacorp.

The picture above summarizes very well what happened: Me before spotting Elvin Ng, KKNN after seeing Elvin, Me after seeing KKNN see Elvin.

So I mopped the remains of the starstruck KKNN from the floor and went up to the cinema theatre where she hoped for Elvin to sit in our theatre while I hoped for Megan Fox to do the same.

The movie was AWESOME! There were more robots and favorities from the original cartoon, longer and cooler fight sequences and the animation was top notch. It was a little draggy in parts because of the over dramatization of certain scences which sometimes involves Megan Fox running in slow motion in a top that left little to the imagination but that didn’t stop us from enjoying the movie thoroughly. I am definitely going to watch it a 2nd time just to check out all the action again.

I do realize that even if I say the movie sucked, people are still going to watch Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen just because of the love for action, the Transformers & Megan Fox.

Thanks to Omy.sg and UIP for the tickets and all the sponsors for the goodie bag!

Yep, it’s official! I am shortlisted in Omy’s Singapore Blog Awards 2009 in the Best Laugh-Out-Loud Blog category. I am feeling weird to be shortlisted this year knowing that I failed to be shortlisted last year even though last year was probably my most “LOL” year and I did win Ping.sg’s Most Entertaining Blog and Blog of The Year awards. I have been quite serious this year with all the marathon training posts but maybe the judges felt that running a marathon is the most hilarious thing they have ever heard and I am more deserving this year.

So if you do support me in my quest to win Omy’s Singapore Blog Awards 2009, do head down to the voting page and cast a vote for me. Voters stand a chance to win a Creative Vado (5 to be won. Worth S169) or a 250GB Portable External Hard Disk (5 to be won).

You have to register for an Omy.sg account to vote and it’s free to sign up for one over here.

Head down to Omy here and do the following:

Click on the category ‘Best Laugh-Out-Blog’ and click on the word ‘Vote’ on the top of my avatar.

Log in with your Omy credentials.

Use your own L33T intelligence to navigate after that because I forgot my own Omy credentials to login and I cannot screenshot the rest of the process nor vote for myself. WAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA!

I cannot find the voting information as of yet but I think Voters are allowed to cast a vote once a day for each category. So do vote as often as you can!

And in the event that you do not wish to vote for me, do vote for other peeps in my category except for this particular contestant. Anybody should win except him. I do not need to say much. A picture of this particular nominee will do…

Yup. The words and actions on the picture below the said individual says it all.

Voting ends on 31st July 2009, 2359H.

I had a great week of marathon training last week, hitting 30.13km of total mileage and meeting all my training goals except for a very disappointing Tempo run yesterday. I could blame it on the weather, the lack of breakfast, or the absence of babes on the jogging track that day but it’s probably all due to my bad planning and unrealistic pace for the run.

Setbacks like that are very good for my analysis and besides, the rest for the 26km ran that week was better than what I have expected.

It’s now week 7 of my marathon training with 25 weeks remaining to the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009 and although my margins for improvement are starting to get smaller, it is still quite apparent that I am getting faster and longer. Faster in terms of pace and longer in terms of distance of course. You peeps don’t get dirty now.

Besides the improvement of my resting heart rate from 66bpm (beats per minute) to the current 60bpm, I can see from the logs of my Long runs that even though my pace and distance has increased, the effort perceived by my heart rate has actually lessened!

It’s quite exciting and interesting to see my body improving and adapting to my exercise regime and that makes me look forward to the next run as I can predict and plan my pace much more easily than just running by pure feel and intuition. So I highly suggest that everyone who is training to collect as much statistics as you can about your runs. At the very least, invest in a watch that has a lap function. And I believe the same applies to training for any sport as well with reference to collection of statistics.

Grab your shoes and a watch and head out to run peeps! Feel alive!