Postcards from paradise.

My recent island trip was supposedly for work, but the bunch of uber colourful characters made burning my weekend so worth it!

Jungle dining

Breakfast for one, which I really enjoyed! :) I love my morning zen.

Sunsets

Sneak peek into a super luxe retreat

Trust me to find time to cop out for not one, but two foot massages! Right across the hotel.

Friendships forged over plenty of coma-inducing meals!

Off to the islands.

I like to think my beach girl days are over. Gone are the times when I would daydream about lying in a hammock, lulled into a catnap by the sound of waves lapping against a not so distant shore; when my idea of fun involved baking myself in the intense sunshine; and when I fervently sussed out deals for beach getaways and island retreats.

It's a little ironic then that work is, once again, taking me back to the islands. And despite the bad leg situation, I was so excited it took me awhile to get to sleep last night. I may have hung up my beach sarong indefinitely, but I guess you can never quite tame my inner island chick. :)

Finding my food voice.

Around this time last year, I started lickthyspoon. I was then an eager, eager novice, having just signed on for the job of my dreams. I was very excited, but also a little daunted, by the steep learning curve that lay before me. I was a sponge, ready to lap up anything and everything that fell on my lap, and my plate.

lickthyspoon was my way of documenting my learning journey, but I took it down a while later as a lot of what I was writing professionally seemed to overlap with my blogging, and I really wasn't keen on navigating those grey, murky areas.

A year later and my portfolio's different enough for me to draw the line between my professional and personal writing. I also like to think that writing about food outside of work constraints will help me find and develop my professional voice. This may sound queer, but never question my always irrational mind!

I know my readership has dwindled greatly ever since I shut the blog down before the passing of my brother, but to whoever's reading - click on here and let me know how you like lickthyspoon. :)

Recharge.

It's been quite a week - not a bad one, and on the contrary one that brought some pretty good news - but I've woken up each morning more exhausted than the last. Things are rolling along rather nicely at the office, but I guess I've been placing one foot in front of the other a little too quickly in my pursuit of fast-forwarding growth. Cryptic, I know, but that's the best I can do on this grapevine of a world wide web.

So what do you do when you're mentally exhausted and in dire need of new batteries? Take the day off, of course. I've postponed this my leave many times over because work kept cropping, until I realised that there'll never really be a good time to take off because someone or something will always warrant your attention. So off I went.

But while I had grand plans to spend the morning sipping coffee and kneading dough, my past week of stunted productivity had me pounding away at my laptop all morning in hopes of hitting my revised target of submitting my article at noon. I did, thank goodness, so I spent a long while watching the rain pound down, reveling in the illicit feeling of having the rest of a supposed working day to myself.

And then I took my aunt to tea at PS. Cafe at Ann Siang, where I spent another two hours revelling in the illicit feeling of having a working day off. :)