Its been months since our last post and probably the same amount of time since I've done completed my quota consistently. I've been really neglecting my HAED and hiding from Sae because I don't want to face up to the fact that I'm lagging behind so much haha.

This week however, I'm finally back to my daily quota. Just need to keep that up for the next 2 years *sigh*

Here's my progress pics which sadly won't be much different from my last I imagine:

Its been ages since our last update. But yet, still not much to update. As Sae said, I'm struggling very much with my current 4-5 pages. They are just completely yucky pages! But all is not lost, I've started a new page! Hahaha, that hole is getting deeper and deeper.

I'm definitely way behind Sae at the moment if she's already half way through. :(

But Sae has forgotten one vital thing...in a couple of weeks, I will be unemployed and have as many hours to HAED as I like. That's right, I've finally taken the plunge and resigned. At the moment, I have no plans other than to go home to Malaysia for a while.

Though I really don't intend to spend all my time HAED-ing, I have many other things to do. Of which I will be blogging about in future updates. :)

Here's my progress pic, that tiny little patch that's in the middle of nowhere up the top is my newly started page. It is the loveliest page so far. :)

I really am turning into Sae. ;) Or I'm picking up all her bad habits anyway. :p

Though, I am doing one good thing, and that is being a fundraiser for the Good Friday Appeal, which helps collect funds for Victoria's Royal Childen's Hospital. And that's one thing that's been taking up quite a fair bit of my time. Besides being a fundraiser, I'm also going to be running in the Run for the Kids event, which is the main fundraising event for the Appeal. It will be my longest distance ever at 14.6km, so I want to train lots for that so I don't end up walking the event or worse, passing out!

Please help support me in raising funds for the kids: http://www.everydayhero.com.au/eelengchang
Click on the Donate Now button and all proceeds will go straight to the Good Friday Appeal, nothing dodgy on my end is possible! :)

Back in HAED land, I've managed to keep up to 1000 stitches a week, but only because I'm skipping around 4 pages! My progress pic is so hole-y:

Eel: Wow, we've been lazy, no posts since November. Well, Happy New Year everyone! I went back to Malaysia over the Christmas/New Year break and so Sae and I got together to take photos of our pieces.

As if a 5 year cross stitch competition wasn't enough! As Sae says in her post, we're competing once again. Her post has all the details of the competition so I won't repeat it again.

Here's what my farm was like at the start of the competition:


And here it is when I took the screenshot a few days ago, I'm slightly in the lead yeay!!


If anyone else other than Sae had suggested this, I would've said Nah right away. What a waste of time! But then Sae and I always seem to compete at heaps of things. When we were in primary school, we were deadly Speed rivals (the card game, not the drug). Before HAED, we went head-to-head in a blog battle.

Luckily this competition is only short and doesn't really impact on HAED time. This week, I've managed to catch up on the 300 stitches that I didn't do in the previous week to fulfill my quota. I decided to move onto yet another new page, this time moving upwards. It's such a lovely page! HUGE clumps of the same thread. :) That's the only way I could have caught up I think.

Here's my progress pic, as you can see, its a bit all over the place:

Sheesh! Thanks to Sae, I now have to add Farmville-ing and Cafe World-ing to my list of things to do. :p The first few days was a flurry, because I didn't know my way around it so much, I was randomly planting or cooking things and then always had to check into Facebook to see if it was finished. Now I'm a bit more organised, I do my major planting at about 11am and 11pm. And then during the day, I sometimes farm at intervals of 2 or 4 hours. I'm not that into Cafe World, the food seems to spoil too easily and I really don't have that much time to sit around or log in at exactly the right time to make sure I serve my food.

During the day, I often get distracted by work or lose track of time so I stuff up my planting times sometimes. At night, its much easier, because my laptop is on a little table next to the couch, right next to where I HAED. So I just keep it open and keep an eye out for when my crops are ready for harvesting.

This week hasn't been a good week for me so far in terms of HAED. On Monday, we received our printed wedding photos that we wanted to hand out to people. So Monday night was all about sorting through photos and packaging it up to send off. And last night, I went out for Lebanese food with a couple of my high school friends. It was yummy and very 'lamby'. It seemed like all dishes had lamb in it! But it was very yummy, especially the home made baklava and halawa desserts. By the end of the night, we were really, really stuffed and we didn't manage to finish the food so looks like I'll be having more lamb for dinner. :)

Luckily I went over my quota last week so I'm not too behind! Here's my latest progress pic:

I've been sick for the past 2 weeks with tonsillitis. It really sucks! My throat hurts so bad constantly and I've had not much energy to do anything. But being stuck at home, I've managed to chip away on my HAED to keep up with my quota. If I had my full energy, I probably could have done 2 or more times my quota and not feel so tired. :p

I've finally finished my annoying page of single stitches. :D Right now, I'm tackling 3 pages all at the same time. One is a small side page to finish my second row of pages. Another is on the 3rd row and the other page is on the 4th row. I get paranoid sometimes that I get mixed up between the 2 full pages but they do look fairly different so no mistakes so far.

Here's my progress pic:

Since I set myself my 1k limit, I've actually been pretty good with it. And I've even surged ahead last week so even though its only Tuesday, I'm already almost at 500 stitches. So I'm definitely very proud of myself these last few couple of weeks since my last update.

When I went to Tokyo 2 years ago, I found the Square Enix character shop and went on a bit of spending frenzy there. When my purchases were getting added up, they told me I could have a free gift if I spent just a bit more (d'uh). So I decided why not and got 3 keychains that I had been eyeing. A Cactuar for Chen-Po, a Moogle for myself and a Chocobo for Sae. And that got me a free note pad. Not too awesome a free gift but I didn't really regret it at the time. Its one of those really thick square pads where you tear of little squares of paper as you go through them.

Well, now I'm quite pleased I got it after all, as two years later, I'm using that pad to write down my number of stitches as I stitch. And it's definitely helping me fulfill my quota and actually motivate me to do that little bit more.

I previously tried using my laptop and my iPhone to keep track of my stitches but I found that its just such a hassle. Sometimes, writing something down with a pencil and a paper is just so much easier.

At the moment, I'm trying very hard to finish a page. But not wanting to get all depressed over the single stitches, I started stitching 2 new pages as well. Here are 2 pictures showing where I'm currently working on.

As I have been slacking off very badly this year, I realised that I probably would have to push my daily quota up. So last week, I did some rough calculations of how much I'd done and the answer is....not very much at all! :'( To be more precise, I'm at about 54300 stitches. Almost 20k behind Sae!!! *Crawls into hole in despair*

Well so, doing some more maths, it looks like I will need to do a daily quota of 136 stitches. Rounding it way up, I'm going to attempt to do 1000 stitches a week. And as long as I do more than 940 stitches, I should be on track to finish by my 30th birthday (our competition finished Chinese New Year after that).

So while the maths isn't so dire just yet, just knowing how way ahead Sae is, is still so very disheartening!

Ah well, it was my own fault for being so lazy so I'll just have to suck it up and Do My Best!

Here's my pic so far, I thought I'd take a overview pic too, just like Sae's:

This week I did not quite get to my desired 1000k, I got up to 961. Which is not too bad for 4 stitching sessions if I may say so myself!

Wow, I'm super late :) and I'd probably be even later if not for Sae sitting right next to me nagging me to blog :p.

So updates! Well I just had my wedding which I'm using as my excuse for not blogging and not doing any HAED at all actually. I really did not touch it for about a full 2 weeks and I was really too busy to do any.

I'll post photos of the wedding later when I get them back. Overall, I'm really happy with how it all went. It was pretty stress-free, simple and I had heaps of fun. There was time to meet and greet everyone, eat and well just have fun through the day. It was really great having my whole family over here in Melbourne and of course it was awesome having Sae over here too. :)

Two days ago, I finally sat down and decided to do all those stupid single stitches that I had left over from, well pretty much the start of this year. So I laid out the last 4-5 pages on the floor, took some note paper and pencil and my entire collection of thread and spent about an hour or more clearing these stupid stitches. It took ages and I had an achy back by the end of it and all I achieved was maybe about 10 stitches! But at last, I can finally abandon those pages and not have to worry about them anymore.

Here's my photo of my latest update:

Thanks so much for coming over to Melb Sae!! It was really great and made our wedding so much more special and memorable. :)

Ah I've been super lazy these past few weeks. I have done a total of.....zero stitches pretty much since we went live with our new layout. On the 8th May, I went to Hong Kong for a 9 day holiday. So the days leading up to that was spent mostly working overtime and then packing. And after I got back, well I still haven't got around to doing anything. Instead I've been uploading photos, or surfing the net or well anything but stitch. There's some major changes that I'm going through right now, which I'll share more about in the next update. Well anyway, other parts of my life have been distracting me from stitching. But I should be getting back to it soon.

Well since I have no new progress pics, here's some holiday photos instead:

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

From Hong Kong

Sunset viewed from the Ngong Ping 360 cable car on Lantau Island.

From Hong Kong

Hong Kong skyline during the day. This was taken on the way up to The Peak, while on the tram.

From Hong Kong

From Family, Friends & Myself

It's hard to believe that a whole year has passed. I remember exactly one year ago, just before midnight on the 30th April, I had my cloth ready in my lap, needle was threaded and hand poised ready to strike! And at the stroke of midnight, BAM! Okay, well I'm sure it didn't quite sound like a BAM, but more like the, well, the non-noise of stitching.

Here's a slideshow of my progress pictures for the last year, for every single fortnight:

From The 5 Year Cash Race

I usually don't count how much I've done, I just normally go with approximations. But this time around, I decided I should be more systematic and count as I go. I think Sae uses an excel sheet on her laptop. I don't like having to reach from the back of my couch to my laptop on the coffee table though. I'm pretty lazy like that, sometimes I'll prepare yummy snacks and drinks for myself on the coffee table and then Chen-Po ends up eating it all up cos I'm too lazy to reach for it.

So instead I got a spreadsheet app for my iPhone so that I could just chuck my iphone on the couch with me. Its a free app called iSpreadsheet. Not the best spreadsheet app, but I'm not doing any hardcore spreadsheeting (?) anyway. Just somewhere to put in numbers, get a daily total, add it to a list of daily totals and get a final total figure.

Its been really helpful to make sure I reach my daily quota, and if not, to make sure that any excesses I've done through the week can make up for it. I'm averaging about 1k a week and I've managed to have 2 HAED-free days last week. So I'm pretty happy. I know Sae is zooming way ahead of me but I don't think I'll burn myself out with HAED just yet, we still have another 3.5 years after all.

Anyway, I started a new page, here's my progress so far:

From The 5 Year Cash Race

I finally finished my stupid annoying page! Yeay! My resolution for my next page is to keep it blocky, just do a couple of blocks til they're done, instead of moving all over the page. Hopefully I can keep to that, but its always so tempting to just leave the single stitches behind and move to a nice big clump. Well here's my progress so far: