Hi, 2014!

I had applied for a month's no-pay leave this year, and will be working on a part-time basis when I return to school next month.

I felt that I needed a break. A break from many things: the job, the politics, the people, the being-watched, the appraisal, the watsapp chatgroup.

2013 was not a fantastic year for me.

Besides having a hard drive that died on me, which brought 2 years' worth of pictures along with it to its grave, the computer had some problems with blogspot. I could not upload pictures, and even now, it works very weirdly whenever I log into blogspot to try blogging.

Workwise, I felt very oppressed throughout the year, especially when I had a few opinionated colleagues who worked closely with me, and demanded that I did what they wanted me to do even when it was not their scope of management.

I had some bad fights with my sisters last year. Something that had not happened before in our close to 4 decades of sisterhood.

Coco was so caught up with her CCA and her new-found freedom as a teenager in a secondary school that she forgot that diligence was the key to her academic success.

Socially, I often met up with a friend who had a negative perception of the world around her. To me, her working environment is just about the best I have ever heard, but she was always complaining about how lousy the environment was, yet refusing to change to another environment after exchanging information with other friends from other workplaces. Such mindset is beyond me. If you are so awfully unhappy with your workplace, why don't you seek a greener pasture? And when she saw something, usually unpleasant, that she could comment about my kids, she would go into that too.

I decided to take a break from her too.

I am a pessimistic person enough. I indulge in complaints sometimes, but not all the time. It's fine to let out your frustration and exasperation here and there but I find it tiring to be critical about everything.

Without the negative energies around me these few days, I feel lighter. It's like having an air of oppression lifted from me. But of course, my pocket also feels lighter. I even compared prices of photo albums from Popular versus a photo-printing shop.

With more time and energy on my hand, I think about taking pictures again.