Mobile Jeans Repairman

Went for lunch at Acoy's today. Saw this jeans repair guy, he basically is an expert and mending ripped jeans, or making them longer, or shorter. You might say he's a mobile tailor, has a sewing machine mounted on his three wheeled bicycle, made another seat and a pedal just inside the white box / workstation.

Queen of the Sky: Fired

It's official, the Queen of the Sky has been fired. I saw it on NBC and Fox this morning.

Ellen Simonetti is known in the blog community as the Dysfunctional Stewardess with the self titled: Queen of the sky. Her blog has been about her travels, work and stories about the airline business. She was fired for posting several photos of herself that the company (Delta Airlines) claims to be provocative and not becoming of an Airline Stewardess.

Well yes, those pictures do make you wish you joined the Mile High Club, but its actually not that racy nor offensive. Her website is actually funny and sarcastic about the airline industry, oh well, I guess we wont be seeing much of those writings again.

Lamaran Day

Ok, I've proposed marriage to Rika like a few months ago, its time to make it official. This is the Lamaran day or engagement day. Its meet the parents in a not Ben Stiller kinda way. It is custom that when you get engaged, you let the world know, or at least your closest friends and relatives. And today was it.

With a posse of my closest friends and family, we arrived at Rika's home this morning, bearing gifts for the family. We sat around the living room and then the reception started.

I was represented by my father's brother: Pak'De Wadji, in explaining our means by coming there, and was accepted by Rika's family Qur'an teacher (an Ustad). After reaching an aggrement on the engagement, Rika stepped into the room and joined us. She never looked so beautiful.
I placed an engagement ring on her finger, and after that was a small feast in honor of our engagement. A simple procedure, but it actually made me nervous for the past 3 days. We had fun that day, and I got engaged...


wow, I'm actually engaged.

Setting Up for Toyota

I've been working on an Interactive game for Toyota since last month with the help of a few friends including Acho. We worked together with an event organizer for this project. Its a hush-hush project that involves launching Toyota's latest Kijang installment, the Innova. Right now I'm setting up the projectors and checking the software's compability with it. Cross your fingers.

Prepare for battle!!

Right then.

Despite working late last night doing the final work on the Gramedia TV commercial, I'm off to the clients.

Ready as ever, laptop on my right, documents on my left, have my tie ready, suit in hand and a camera to pose and look good on the mirror... Oh man I'm soooo tired, I'm gonna fuck this presentation up aren't I ???

Her Confirmation

After many months of wooing and liplocking, Rika finally said yes to my plan to propose to her on November this year. (You can't see me, but I'm doing the dance of Joy, Balky style)I've proposed mariage to her since last month, but it's not that simple. A proposal of marriage must be witnessed by the two families, meaning she's already accepted my proposal, but havent decided on the time to make it public. I was proposing for a September date, she wanted March next year, we settled on November. All we need to do now is introduce our parents at a dinner we plan to have on July, and hopefully by September next year I'll be sending you guys invitations. It's a bit long between November 2004 and September 2005, but I am paying for the wedding my self, so I do need time to save money. I need roughly US$20.000 for the wedding. Any donations is welcomed*. :D*please make your donations in the form of cash, cars or house. hehehe...

Match made in...

See that smile... Rika bought me a new shirt yesterday. I bought her a surprise present the other day (ok... I admit, I'm a sappy guy), basically just things she ran out of that I hear now and then. I bought her a compact, lipstick and that spray at the body shop (she was complaining that she was running out of them the last time she had to perform a dance). The thing is, when I surprised her, she surprised me back. She got me 2 shirts, one long sleeve and one short. The surprise turned to a present exchange moment, we were thinking the same thing... yeah, I love that girl.

Strike a pose!

Arief striking his patented "METAL" pose at the new office building we just moved into... actually, most of his pictures contains that hand gesture... even the pictures I took of him with Riska for his wedding invitation (yup, the most annoying photo session of my life). Dude, get a new pose.

Will you marry me?

Yeah, I actually popped the question lest night.
She said Yes immediately.

Now comes the hard part: When?

Keep on swimming

Gotta keep in shape. While the other grunts work coding the software, me and Aher took a swim at the apartment's pool. It's the benefit of having an office at an apartment complex. Aher's looking a bit confused, I think he lost his pants in the pool...


Bwahahahaha

Dude, get a phone

This is my friend Wendy, currently in charge of Musica Plus. Wendy now is also the head of IndoWerks, you know, that company that went boom and then went sour in just under a year (multimedia factory my ass). Well, now Wendy is incharge of the company, basicly he just maintain the rest of the "werks" family's sites and data farm. Anyway, nowadays his baby is Musica Plus, a place where you can download your favorite musica artist songs for your mobile ring tone...

Wendy might be in the Mobile Ringtone business, but he doesn't own a cell phone. He claims that the phone's radiation messes with his brain function... WHaaaaaaaaat? Are you like serious?

So so tired

Through the whole fiasco, I didn't go to work today. Actually I haven't slept either last night.

You see, although Riska was in the accident, Arief was the one who went to the hospital. That stubborn headed mule kept saying "NO" when I wanted to take him to the hospital, and today after I got Riska's car to the garage, he collapsed. We took him to OMC, seems his blood pressure was way below and he's got Vertigo...(soo Hitchcock). anyway, I ended up taking care of Riska's insurance claims, and driving her to pick up his things (she's still in shock from the crash). Look at the bags on my eyes... so tired. Nevertheless, I promissed that I would take over my friend's class at IKJ for a day, and I did that. After this I'm going home and taking a nap for a week.

Picture shot during Maghrib prayer at IKJ Mosque.

Car Crash... domino style

After subuh prayer and reading the Qur'an (not perfect reading, but I try), I received a phone call from Arief; Riska is in a car accident.

I put on some clean pants and shirt and rushed out to get Arief from his apartment. The guy's been feeling under the wheather lately. Once I got him into the car, we set off to pick up Riska.

It seems a taxi cab suddenly stopped causing a domino collision to 7 cars, Riska's car was the fourth on the line. Arief drove Riska home while I took Riska's car to the garage. Took pictures of the car, including Riska's grief over the car.

Poor kid, well at least she's getting her car back in a week.

She said Yes

I'm still speechless, all I know is that this is a very happy day for me. I love you all!

The perfect day...

Watched "Love Actually" with Rika at Djakarta Theater today. A really good movie, all that I could ever expect from a British style sarcasm romantic comedy. Best of all, this was a perfect movie to bring Rika to. I wish you all could see me smile... :D

The theater has a brand new look, more class and more studios. A new favorite place to see movies at? Definitely!

After movies and Dinner, I took Rika on a little detour. I had to visit my cousin Ivan at Remedika hospital. He is sick of Dengue fever after returning from an assignment in Lampung. My cousin Ivan is the closest cousin to me. A rising star at Bakrie's holding company, the day he got sick, the whole office panicked, even Mr. Bakrie himself. Get well soon bro!

Rika and I had an early dinner (just before we visited Ivan). We stopped at Al-Azhar's Agung Mosque and prayed Maghrib, 5 minutes before it was Isya. Haven't been here in a while. I used to go to school here when I was in Junior high.

..I sat on the steps of the mosque and put my shoes on. Rika sat beside me and she gave me that smile. Never in million year would I ever think of telling a girl how much I cared for her on the steps of a mosque... I did.

Progress Report

Checked on the grunts today, just to make sure they don't kill each other (hehehehe...). Seems a night's work have paid off, they completed the front-end of the software a day early. It's either the motivation of forced working in a group and locked in an apartment or maybe the thought of going out on valentine's day with their loved ones.

I don't care which ones, at least they are working ahead of schedule, so I'm givng them the night off tonight. :D

Along came the sunshine

Left the grunts and picked up Rika after work today. We had dinner at Pizza Hut. After days of overloaded work and stress, this is the highpoint of my week... It was raining outside, but it was sunshining here.... yup, definitely my highpoint this week. Tomorrow will be good day, hopefully a better day :-D

btw, to those who celebrate it, happy Valentine's day.

Driving her home

I was with the grunts today at Arief's apartment in Gading. I called Rika up and asked her if I could take her home today, and she said Yes. :)

We talked much on the way home, unfortunately it was only a 30 minutes commute. I wished it was longer. I just dropped her off, I don't know her enough to be invited for coffee or tea I guess. Well, there's always tomorrow.

Cooking for the Grunts

With a project underway, I had the company's programmers to spend a few nights together to finish the software coding. With 3 grunts (programmers) under one roof and none with any culinary knowledge, I had to suffice them with food to eat, so I cooked (note: it's cheaper than ordering out) for the grunts.

First Date?

I'm not going to sit around and think about "what could be" nor be sorry for myself. Yeah, I had that "moment" in my car during Jakarta's traffic jam yesterday. Thinking too much will kill you they said.

I grabbed my trusty (oh, so need a new phone right now) Nokia 5110 and called Rika. Yup, that girl I met last week at the movies. I charmed her into having coffee with me after work, and maybe catch a movie afterwards. She said yes (I still got it), which was enough to pace my heart like Indy 500.

After I hung up, I kinda thought to myself: "I hope this is not my sub concious looking for a rebound. Coz, I really like this girl. Well, we'll just let time see.

I picked her up at her office after 5 and took her to the Gading Mall. We had coffee at the Dome and chatted a bit. I was a bit tired after a long meeting that afternoon, so I kinda stick to the humor and asking stuff about her. Not too much hard talk stuff. We had some laughs and I do find her interesting. We didn't catch a movie that night, but I did drove her home.

All I can say is that I had a great time.

Stab to the heart...

I was visiting Riska's place to plan her wedding with Arief last night. But then we had to get some medicines for her mother, so we went to the Patra hospital nearby to get the prescriptions filled by the hospital's pharmacy. It was there that we accidently bumped to Ulya's mom and dad. We chit-chatted a bit, but just before she left, she said the words that would rip my heart apart: "Chandra, don't forget to come to Ulya's wedding this May ok."

Oh my god. All this time she was engaged and she didn't tell me...


We've been in touch with each other, for what now... this hurts, even though nothing happened I was actually falling in love with this girl. I should've asked her straight on if she had a boyfriend or not and got a clear answer, she never did answer me. I gues her mother did that for her.

Part of me wanted to tell her mom and dad about us, but that would be stupid. That would cause much pain I guess, so I just took it like a man. I just stood there while Riska tried to comfort me. She knews about me liking her, but that didn't help.

I'm going home now.

Ratna Call Home!!

Ratna trying to to call her sister at home. It seems that she left her keys at home, and since we left the theater at 23.30, she needs to wake her sister up. Kids, don't leave your keys at home.

Rika Andriyani

This is Rika, a bit photo shy. Rika is Riska's friend from her traditional dance class. The thing is, although Riska introduced me to Rika, I've actually known her when she was just still in Junior high (9th grade) at PS 216, I was the drill instructor for the district's Paskibra.

If I'm not mistaken, she used to be Daus's (an old friend) girlfriend back then. I was like in 12 grade that time. It's a small world.

Oh yeah, she grew up nice. I think she's cute.

:)

Rina's wedding

Last night I went to Rina's (a.k.a Smack Down Girl) wedding yesterday. Met a lot of friends from school, pengajian, work and Abnon. I was planning to go alone, but Maya called and asked if she could be my date to the wedding. Good thing Indra and his 5 months pregnant wife Nina came along, he even offred to drive :D, coz I was still in "not yet slept mode" this week.


The wedding party was over crowded. There were sooo many people. The buffet was full of people, and these two plates was what we could get for the four of us. Met Iyus here also, but she dissapeared somewhere in the crowd. I also met Hiras, a co worker back in Indo.com days.

At least we had lots of laughs... We need to go to a nice restaurant after this.

Rina and Robby, best wishes to you guys!

In memory of my Opa

Last night, Jasper J van der Klooster died of a heart attack. Jasper is a distant family, and I considered him to be my Opa. When I was living in Utrecht, he and his wife Nanja took me in and helped a lot during my stay. Jasper van der Klooster is the former director of MBA at Hogeschool van Utrecht and representative of KLM to Indonesia. I tried to get a visa to leave for Holland, but I fear it'll be too late to attend the funeral. Jasper's wife Nanja died 3 month before him. They will be missed.

...what a day

That has got to be the..... it wasn't excellent, but it wasn't bad. I don't know what it was? The clients had some hoos and haaas over the product. We did good, forget to change some hard coded material, but it went well. Actually me and Arief are too sleepy and tired to care. We're just happy we won the contract.

Office with a pool

We moved in to our temporary office at Arief's un-used apartment in Kelapa Gading. Our building will be ready in May this year. The best thing about this, is the pool area. Yup, we can go swimming as much as we like, its just the best way to get rid of stress. This is a good thing as the three of us are great swimmers (the other 2 grunts however can't swim, so they hate the pool).

As you can see, Aher and I are always ready in our business attire. Ready to plunge at any moment's notice. Just had to make a few phonecalls first.

Last one in the pool is a rotten egg!!

Mobile Receptionist

Since 2 days ago, I began carrying 2 cellphones. I've reached the point of my life where I need two phones. I get about more or less 10 - 30 calls a day, and people complain when they can't reach me, especially clients. Oh my god, have I become a technology drone??? Am I now a corporate machine??? Nooooo.......!!!