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Old Friends
10 August 2007It amazes me how friends who have not met for up to 5 years can get together and sit down to a good long chat. I am blessed… because I have a group of friends like that. There is no doubt that we have drifted apart over the years, but I truly appreciate the fact that we can still chat like the old days.
We come from different schools, different backgrounds, and are working/studying in different fields. To an outsider, we must be the oddest looking group. :) Most of us have known each other since Sec 2 (14 yrs old) or have heard of one another, and a good way to illustrate how much we’ve changed (physically) is to get us talking about drills.
And someone would definitely say… “In Sec 2, Jianfu stood on my left during memaras*, now he’d be far away on the right.”
L to R: Guoxiu, Wendy, Jolene, Jiafen, Huimin, Me, YuHeng, Jianfu
I’d go into a long long story about how we bonded, but that’ll take me a very long time… in short… while our peers were walking around in their full HQ uniform, being the ones in charge AND getting double promotions (dear ol’ RC was trying to attract people to join a particular department (err.. can I call it that?)), the bunch of us were relegated to wearing white shirts, white jeans and black shoes. We ran around carrying tables and chairs, doing the dishes, wiping tables, serving meals, emptying trash, tallying attendance… name a job-you-don’t-want-to-do and we would have done it. When we finally donned our uniforms, our skirts (ok, not JF’s) were a different cut from other female instructors’ because we do more drills, our collars had 4 extra holes through which we wore our collar dots. Ahh.. those were the days.
This particular gathering actually happened on an interesting date. If this was during the time when we were active volunteers, we would not have met up, because many of us would have been busy with National Day Parade. We joined HQ in 2001 (well, for some of us, it was the very very end of 2000… SWOC camp, I think, when we first started)… today, only 2 are still active. Part of me wonder what if I’d still be active if I continued studying in Singapore and what they would mean. Hmm…
Now… here’s the planning a batch gathering 101.
1. Arrow Jianfu - Huimin’s brilliant idea… she has even mastered the art of arrowing without him even knowing until it is too late. BRAVO!!!
2. Expect people to be late - Meeting time was 12 noon, Wendy left home at 1pm. She stays an hour away.
3. People who have always been early will continue to be early - No prizes for guessing who the first fews were. LOL
4. Location - Stick to the old place.
5. Everyone’s growing old and amnesia is affecting them - I was supposed to contact YH, and er… I forgot
6. Anything wrong, bully/blame Jianfu - So I forgot to get YH, but I sent her a msg on Monday night asking if she was going… to which she said, “Huh? What gathering? What email?”.. and I said, “Huh? Jianfu forgot to tell you ah???” :P
Here’s Jiafen showing us what “pulling strings” literally means… and yes, the “model” is Jianfu.
7. Someone will also FFK - This time ’round, there were 2 FFK-ers even.
8. Try last minute notices, they might just work - Jianfu didn’t have Jolene’s contact… so couldn’t get hold of her. But someone in the group did… and we called her just after 12, and she came!!! YAY FOR JO!!!
Heehee, it’s been what… 5 years? (in her timeline, it’s merely 2 mths ;))
*grin*
I nearly forgot…
THANK YOU FOR ORGANISING IT, JIANFU!!! Or er… MR XIAO!!! :D
*Sizing up, consist of a group of commands to rearrange a squad according to height. Here, I’m referring to the first command where the squad forms a single line with the tallest on the right, shortest on the left.
on August 10th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
hopefully sunday’s attendance would be better! we still have so much more to catch up. if not for work we might have stayed there at tcc all day! hahh
on August 10th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Haha.. wanna go create an attendance list, fall everyone in and mark attendance not? Heehee… ROTFLOL… those were the days…