Tag Archives: 2016

2016 Sec 1 Week 16 Update

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GG had a very exciting, but tiring week with Friday being finally the day of her performance. They’ve been practicing very hard for this for the past 3 months and I am happy that it went off well. We went to see the Gala performance in the evening and though the Choir was tired, this being the second performance of the evening, they did a splendid job! In fact I really enjoyed the evening, with all the songs and the drama and the cast and crew really did a great job!

By the time we came home, it was 11 pm, GG had been in school since 7:30 am! She other 16 hour days in the week when they had intensive rehearsals and a dress rehearsal with her coming back home around 10 pm. This, compounded by the fact, she had to wake up at 5:30 the next day for school really took the toll on her.

The icing on the cake was the Hindi term 1 exam yesterday! When she was back home from the actual performance, she had a mini meltdown about her Hindi exams as she really didn’t have time to prepare for it. But, after the exams, she was quite chill about it as the paper was easier than she expected. BB, on the other hand realises that with every passing year, the syllabus continues to become more difficult, and he slides a bit more further down….I know that during the holidays, I need to sit with him for some intensive work and get his confidence up a bit, so that he is able to atleast pass!

Exams will start next week and they both need to up their studies this week….

 

2016 Week 15 Update

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I started the week feeling sorry for myself. My countdown is now at 3 weeks now and I just heard from Big B on Friday afternoon that he’s heard from HR that my position has been eliminated! So three weeks from now I am officially jobless. Actually now that I have the official confirmation, it’s easier to move on – till the meeting with Big B, I actually had hopes that maybe the contracts would be extended by a few more months which would buy me some time. I also need to speak to my helper about this, her contract with me ends sometime in September and so if I don’t have a full-time position in hand by then, I’ll have to let her go too.

I’ve written to the company which employs me and lets see what they get back to me with. I am probably the first of many who will be retrenched and so they’re going to be busy with finding jobs for others. I’ve thought about this and the next time round, unless the contract is of a longer duration (maybe 2 years), I will think hard about a contract position. The caveat being if the money is irresistible, which means from Day 1 I need to keep options option. Let’s see what happens.

I’ve been just going through the motions at work, with none of the enthusiasm I used to have earlier….I think this, more than anything else tells me I am better off ending this at the end of the month. Though Big B was quite apologetic about this, but like I keep telling myself – C’est la vie! I’ve started looking for jobs in earnest this week, so hopefully something will click very soon.

Something strange has happening to me for the past few weeks, strange because it’s never happened to me before. Most days when I wake up, I am slightly disoriented and need some time to actually figure out what day it is. I don’t know if this because of the stress I am under, but when I actually realised it a couple of days back, it slightly freaked me out. I’ve also started looking forward to Friday, which again has not happened to me in this company yet and so know that is my cue to get away. I was so different even a year ago when I used to be excited to come to work, but now all that is a distant dream!

One of my cousins is getting married (finally!) in July, in Canada and almost all of our cousins are going. I am so very tempted that this week I was looking at airfares. The cheapest is around SGD 1200 and at this point, I am not sure if I should splurge this much money when there’s no income coming my way. We have the India trip plus BB’s poonal at the end of the year and that will cost us a pretty penny! This is the biggest reason I can’t justify my spending! Let’s see how this works out…

I have plans for my period of unemployment, which I will post next week (I was waiting for the official confirmation to come through before I posted, didn’t want to pre-empt it)

This week will be a busy week for me as I need to do something I do every quarter and which I love doing, but it will be mixed feelings for me. I will not tell anyone I am leaving, but will not hide it also. On my last day, I plan to send out a generic email to some of the people I know, both here in Singapore and across the world and if anyone wants to stay in touch, then it would be great, otherwise I’m ok.

The other day I was texting my ex-boss, the guy who recruited me and he sounded quite sad to hear my news. In fact, he actually wrote he was embarrassed as he was the one who had brought me in. But I guess what he was embarrassed about was the fact that a year ago when I started seeing changes, I asked him if he thought I had a future here and if I should move on and he insisted he saw a bright future for me here, which was patently not the case….

Anyway, I have tons to do before I leave – need to clear my desk and most importantly my laptop. After this week is done, I won’t have much to do, so that’s my job for the last two weeks.

Hopefully your week is much better than mine! Have a great week folks!

2016 Sec 1 Week 15 Update

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We’re hurtling our way towards the end of semester exams. For secondary schools, the exams start earlier than they do for primary schools, with both exams starting sometime in the end of this month and ending around mid-May. This is also different compared to primary schools where the exams would be over in 4 days (5 if you take Higher Mother Tongue). Also when there are two exams on a particular day and you don’t have to give one, you can come late or leave earlier, unlike primary schools!

GG had a very busy week as she had concentrated practice sessions for the performance which is next week. On the first day of the long practice session, she came home only around 7:45 pm, which was almost 13 hours after she left home for school! Right from the time she has been a baby, she reacts to tiredness in the same way – she gets angry and cranky. She’s learned to manage her emotions slightly better now, but now and then, they overflow. That’s exactly what happened that day – she called me when she left school, close to 7 pm and said she’s tired and will not have dinner! I immediately knew she was getting cranky and as soon as she came home and showered, she started shouting and fighting with BB! I tried to console her and eventually fed her some food and she broke down. After a few minutes of hugging, she calmed down to eat and finish her homework before bed. The next day, she told me, she dozed off in class! I will be happy with the performance next week so that she can concentrate on her end of semester exams. Though, like I told GG, this is life – there will be several situations in life, especially when you start working and at the beginning of your career, when you may have to manage on minimum sleep and have to do it with grace and fortitude and this is just a rehearsal for those situations.

Oh, I have to mention this. Someone from BB’s school parent support group recommended this free app which is great. The app is called OurPact and it is free in the App Store. I guess it should be free for Android also. What it basically does is that it gives the parent (or adult) control over their child’s phone. We downloaded the app and sat together to decide on what I called ‘Phone Ban’ times. So once I schedule the times, their phone gets locked up. They can’t access apps except phone, text and music. So they are contactable at that point, but can’t use the phone to play games, watch videos and generally waste their time. We’ve used it for the better part of a week now and I love it. It also allows me to block access if they already have it remotely if I feel they are misusing phone usage privileges. It’s been such a relief, especially when I am at work and I know they are playing with their phones instead of doing something constructive.

Next week is their Hindi end of semester exam. GG’s performance is a day before that and she will be home only around 10:30 – 11 pm! Hopefully she doesn’t break down at the end of the day and this affects her exam performance!

2016 Week 14 Update

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A quarter of 2016 is over!! Where are the days flying and why? This has been quite a bad week for me, you’ll know why as you read on.

I never learn and repeat this mistake almost every week. I try to catch up on sleep over the weekend, especially by taking a post lunch nap. Saturdays are not so bad, but when I nap on Sunday afternoons, I sometimes have difficulties going to bed at a decent time on Sunday night. So this means Monday I am pretty beat at work. Usually Monday nights are ok and I manage to catch up. But this week, for some reason I didn’t sleep well on Monday aslo and so Tuesday I was a real zombie at work. In this sleepy state in the afternoon, I decided to go down to the cafeteria in my office to see if I could get something that would wake me up, but there was nothing and on the way back, I decided to use the toilet, and I am guessing you know what happened next! Yup, I dropped my phone inside!!! It was for just a second and the phone has a cover and dropped topdown (that is the top part only was in the water for that one second). And there started my phone problems….

Intitally everything seemed fine, but later that day, the headphone jack got locked, and since then my phone decided to just randomly show me the power off button and the home button has become hypersensitive. My phone is around 15 months old and while I can still buy a new phone, I don’t want to spend the money. I’ve been reading up and doing what my good friend Google says, so let’s see if I can push this another few months…Otherwise it’s money down the drain that I can ill-afford to spend now L

I was also very upset with BB (see my post of yesterday for more details) and have since spoken to him about this. I need to work with him on toning down his aggression. I do think he’s become more aggressive these days compared to a year or two back. I’m not sure if this part of being a teen or the result of the games he plays. I need to monitor this and do something about it. I know teens don’t like being told off, so need to do this very diplomatically. He was such a sweet, non-aggressive boy; don’t know why this is happening!

Work-wise, I’m down to 20 days today and there’s still no clarity. I did speak to the company which employs me and they haven’t heard anything from this company. Apparently something should have come over the weekend, clarity perhaps, on if contractors should be renewed and if yes, for how long. The site manager did let me know that she knows it will not be for one year, definitely less. So now I need to wait for Big B to come back to me. Otherwise I am going to ask them to look for a new position for me. Nothing much to do except one slightly big presentation for which I need some data which will only be available at least a week from now, some web presentations which will take me all of next week and then my handover report! I’ve already done more than 70% of that, so I’m going to keep that till the last week to tidy it up. I need to check with Big B who will be my replacement and then will tweak it accordingly.

Oh, my reading challenge, I almost forgot about it. I’ve been quite diligent about reading one non-fiction and non frivolous book for the past two months, need to just be slight more diligent about it. As of the 31st of March, I’ve managed to finish 74 out of my targeted 150 books which is almost 60% of the challenge! Most are the really fun books (romance and chick-lit which don’t take much time to go through, I can read a book a day for these), so I guess once I hit 100 books, I’ll have to revise my challenge numbers….

Well that was my week, let’s see what this week holds for me. Hopefully a much better week and a better month than the previous one. Have a wonderful week people!

2016 Sec 1 Week 14 Update

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Another week and another month has gone by! We’re looking at the first Semesteral or mid-year exams coming on very soon. The first exam is predictably Hindi which is two weeks from now and then towards the end of the month both GG & BB start their school exams.

GG’s week was more stressed out than BB’s. She had practice twice during school and once more on Saturday. Actually they’ve been having practice quite often on Saturdays, but because of her Hindi classes, her school is asking her to come only twice – the two Saturdays before the event. She comes home so tired when she has practice though and then getting up in the morning is a chore for her, but she has been a trooper. I also realise she’s matured faster than BB who still seems a bit silly to me, especially when I compare them (which I try not to do, but sometimes, it does pop in my mind!)
While GG did not too badly for her first series of class tests, she does need to do much better for this mid-year exam if she wants to top her class. I seriously think that topping her class and getting the school award will do wonders for her self-confidence. She suffers from a case of serious exam stress and this was the big reason she didn’t do well at the PSLE exams last year. We didn’t realise how bad this stress was until it was too late and now I need to get rid of it before she sits for her O levels. So an injection of self-confidence will help her a lot.

Her school concert is a day before the Hindi mid-year exams and so she needs to manage time to work on that too. She’ll be back home after the concert close to 11 and then the reporting time for the exam the next day is 7:30 am! The centre is a bit of a drive (approximately 30 mins) from our home, I don’t know how she is going to manage this as she is like me in the sense she needs her sleep or turns grumpy and cranky!

BB on the other hand was super cocky during his term 1 exams and this showed in his results! He actually failed in English Literature and didn’t achieve targets for any subject. In his case, though he does not study in a top school, I have noticed his peers and classmates, all get good scores. Again, if wants to win school and class awards, he really needs to buck up this term and needs to go up a full band for each subject. Hindi is of course going to be the weakest link, and I think I need to step up and especially from next month when I will be at home, which will co-incidentally be during their holidays, I plan to work out an intensive time-table for both of them.

Friday I got a very hesitant message from BB telling me he wanted to tell me something. My mom antenna went up and I immediately called home to speak to him. He told me his Form teacher wanted to speak to me. From the way he spoke, I knew something was wrong and asked him the reason. So the reason he told me was that during CCA on Wednesday, he accidently hurt his classmate with his penknife. They were using that to make balsam wood planes. So I spoke to his teacher and the story was slightly different. According to the teacher, the other boy wanted to see BB’s penknife and BB shouted ‘No’ while pulling it away from him and in the process, the sharp tip hurt the boy. It was apparently a deep cut and required stitches. I was quite upset to hear this. The teacher asked both boys to write an incident report and since their versions differed, he spoke to me. Now the impression I got was the teacher believed the other boy and the reason was he said, “The other boy is a top student and also a student councilor”. I don’t agree with this reason because I firmly believe that just because you are a top student and a school leader does not mean you don’t lie or twist the truth. I am not disbelieving the boy and know BB shoulders more of the blame, but I didn’t like the way the teacher used these words. This kind of reinforces my belief that in this society we live in, it’s just academic excellence which matters and nothing else! Which is very sad as you need all kinds of people in a society and just academic excellence is not a blueprint for a child’s success in life!

Anyway, BB has been asked to do another reflection and the teacher did say this incident will not be escalated and the other boy’s parents also are not pursuing it further, which is a huge relief!

So that was pretty much the children’s week.