I recently joined a small local business owned by my brother and his partner as the person in charge of everything that has to do with the word ‘Creative’. In another, I am the creative person. The creativologist. A designologist. Ha! And like I said in my recent post, the year of the Dragon has certainly been very kind to me. Business is moving in a good pace. Slow but steady. Well, not exactly slow.. maybe I was slow. Ha ha ha! The list of things to do on my board has never been empty and I realize that I am WAY behind on my designing work. Adui!

But busy is good, right? Kaching! Pretty soon I’ll be on my way getting the whole set of Pottery Barn’s bedroom vanity sets. *hee*

Here’s what I’ve been working on recently. Eh, actually what I just did.

A simple but cute design for an awesome lady who’s proud of Being Dusun.

What do you think? Alawa oi? ;-)

PS: Could you please, please, please visit our new Page and hit ‘Like’? Please… pretty please. If you do so, all the fairies of the good-hearted will love you! ;-D

Here’s the link >>Kastumized Page<<

So today is the starting day of Lent. Less food eating, more praying. Ngam kaitu?

Got the ash on my forehead yesterday at St. Thomas Church, Kepayan. We got there half an hour earlier and only to find that it was packed with people and there was no seat left! For the first 15 minutes we were standing, my fiance was already complaining. 20 minutes later, I complained how painful my legs are. Then we poked my sister’s back.

“What?”

“But we just arrived like 20 minutes ago?!”

…..

So we I forced myself to take the pain, took my lavender-colored hand fan out of my bag and start fanning myself. It’s burnin hot, yo! Anyway, I must say that I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the choirs of St. Thomas Church, Kepayan. They have awesome song arrangement and beautiful voices (tho there are some salah gitar code at some certain songs, but all is forgiven!) and great choice of hymns. Me loike! I think it’ll be more awesome if they can afford to get good guitars like washburn electric guitars for their team. Would be awesome to have electric guitar in a church. *wink* Oh! I also love the fact that they used a piano (using a keyboard) for most of their hymns. Sooooo nice. Thumbs up for your guys and girls at St. Thomas Church, Kepayan. :-)

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I know it’s the month of Lent and we’re supposed to humble ourselves, be kind, pray always and all that goodie stuff.. but I think it’s not so wrong to show off a bit of a design work that I did last week. I made a custom design blog!

What do you think, nice kah? I’m open to criticism (yang membina). :-P But if you think it’s nice, then, THANK YOU! *hee*

Oh! Just so you know.. we managed to go through the whole session of Ash Wednesday mass. I sang ALL of the hymns and we left the church after the mass ended.

God bless.

I can’t say this enough, but, yes, God is good!

This could be one of the hardest post I’ve ever made.

The couple of months since we moved to this city, I have to say that..life has not been so easy on us. My fiancé’s father passed away. Money was spent on the emergency flight tickets to Sarawak (which happened to fall on a public holiday and all the flight tickets were understandably expensive!), casket, burial etc. A lot of money has also been spent on the shipping of our car and our stuffs over. And there’s also the down-payment for the apartment that we were gonna rent (which is where we currently reside right now), flight tickets for two, car insurance & road tax to renew, money to buy things for the house (we literally have nothing brought over from our previous place but clothes, DVD, cute stuff that I collect etc) and none very useful for a new home. All in the same month! And the heart-breaking part was, we had to leave our cats behind because we couldn’t afford to bring them over. I did not know that it is SUPER EXPENSIVE to ‘migrate’ a cat over! My only consolation is that the cats are living a happy life in a new home right now. All my sincere thanks to the ever so helpful Mimi. Without her help, the idea of having the cats roam around the old house is terrifying enough!

So we basically had to fork out our dear life savings to get stuff filled into our new ‘home’: stuff like stove, mattress, chairs, dining table, plates, forks, spoon, yadda yadda. I am so grateful to my parents, especially my mom who has lent us a lot of her stuff from home, just so our home will feel more like a.. home. With pots and pans.

And then my laptop died. DIED. Along with all the precious files inside. If you didn’t know, my laptop is my source of income. I make money through that laptop, you know, design stuff. With the demise of that poor old laptop, I had no choice but to again, break the piggy bank.

To add salt to injury, out of the few (if not, many) job applications that I applied for, almost none of them even bother to contact me. Not for this 1 job, however, which would require me to work over 12 hours per day with a salary that could not even cover my monthly expenses and entertainment! OK, well, not exactly entertainment. Maybe my basic makeup needs. And hair color. And if you should know, financial problems could lead into depression.. and so are questions like:

“When are you getting married?”

“How long has it been between you two?”

Do you know how hurtful it is to hear some meanypants ask you the same question over and over again?

I would liken it to a root canal, except that I’ve never had a root canal done in my life.

But God is good. He has always been good to me. When life turns sour, He doesn’t give me lemonade. Instead, He always, ALWAYS managed to find a way to solve my problems.

As most of you know, I have been a freelance graphic designer since I started this blog. I’m not saying that I’m super good, but this God-given talent of mine has been feeding our mouths and assisted in making the ends meet. And buy me hair colors. This past month, I have been getting requests after another for designing work: web design, blog design, wedding card design etc. And the biggest Valentine’s gift from The Man Above would be the project we hit from one of the State Govt department. Good times!

Also, I managed to finish working on a client’s blog design today. I helped her setup her new design on her blog host since the coding looked rather scary (to a non CSS or HTML reader) and I guess she was happy with my service, she gave me a $100 tip! USD 100 for a tip!!

God is really good, eh? And so is that kind woman. She also taught me to speak Finnish. Ei se mitään. That means, no problem! :-)

The strange thing is that, I had just made a baby poster recently for a dear friend of my fiancé – for free. (He’s expecting his 1st born who could be born anytime soon so I thought a baby poster would be nice for him and his wife as it would make a nice picture in the baby room.) And now, I am getting the reward from God for being kind. He he. This is what I made for them:

I guess that when you do good to others, good will come back to you. Maybe I’ll earn enough this year to get myself a brand new curt hitch. *hee*

(THAT WAS A JOKE)

Oh! Life is getting better. My fiancé’s getting on track with his new job and his kind company is paying him real good money. And yesterday, while I was working on a design, he suddenly came up to me to kiss my forehead, telling me that he loves me. How sweet is that? We also bought a puppy and we named him Hachiko, after that famous Japanese dog. My custom-made chic, country-style sofa arrived this evening and I’m so in love with it! The apartment is starting to really look like a home now!

Well, OK. I have to stop posting. Plenty of work to be done. I am already behind schedule!

Thank you, God and all the good people in Heaven. :-)

For whatever reason, I’m beginning to pray as often as I could again. Maybe because I’m close to broke, maybe it’s just a New Year resolution thingy, or maybe… I am regaining my faith again. I wish I knew the exact reason for it.

Last night I was up late, working on some designing work that could earn me a few bucks, maybe even spare some changes to get them ralph lauren coupons for Christmas. I swear to God I heard ‘something’ at the door. Even the puppy looked puzzled and angry when it happened. I really should move to another apartment!

Currently working on this:

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My laptop is sadly demised. Maybe it was her ‘spirit’ that came to visit, since she never said her goodbye before ‘leaving’ away with my greatest possessions with her: my collection of beautiful (purchased) fonts, work portfolio, graphic elements, PS brushes etc. *sigh* This is the reason I’m broke and started to pray. My laptop died so a replacement is urgently needed for my piling graphic design works. :-( Anyway, I’m posting this blog post from my new desktop. *hee* I opted for a desktop instead of a laptop because I think it’s better for my graphic design activity. And since I just hit a new project with one of the dept (Govt Dept).. I’ll be making some extra $$$! Maybe I’ll get a brand new laptop with that $$$!!

Or save them in ASB.

Maybe get a new iPad.

Or just save them in ASB for rainy days.

Maybe get a brand new iPhone4.

or just save in ASB.

…..