MY FIRST 花胡!!! I went to wiki it and it's also called a 八仙过海 and is very rare!!! Wiki has a very detailed write up about the conditions to fulfill a win!

Must be the birthday luck haha :)

So I drew 5 flowers right at the beginning and then shortly after the game started I drew the 6th:

 

Note that I am #3 so technically I only have 一台 here

Then my 3 Flower came!

 

AMAZINGLY,  I AM JUST ONE SHORT OF A COMPLETE FLOWER SET!

Since all of us have never met with this situation before, after a few frantic phone calls to the Mahjong guru, it was established that I will win no matter what! Eh heh heh heh heh *cackles*

It can go 2 ways:

(i) I draw the 8th flower and I win, everybody pays me $6.40 each (considered a 满台自摸)

(ii) Someone else draws the 8th flower and I still win, the unfortunate person will have to "包" and cough up $19.20

With many more tiles to go, it was pretty nerve wrecking to see who would draw the 8th flower first haha. I even drew my winning tile twice but I discarded it just to gamble for a chance that that 8th flower will appear before the last 7.5 stacks.

Persistence pays off! (Haha life lessons from mahjong.) It finally appeared! 왔어 왔어!

 

HUAT AH!

 

Paul and the offending 8th flower haha *pats*

Did I also mention that this was the very last round, i.e. 北风北? Haha. One of the more exciting mahjong moments indeed! Good game everyone! :D

We're already approaching mid-May. Gosh. It's like April flew by and 1/3 of the year flew by. I'm still at my boring old job even after going for a few interviews. Meanwhile it seems like a lot of things has happened but yet nothing much has happened.

My computer CRASHED on Sunday! Super sian. I tried to reboot it the whole day but failed. Now I'm faced with the prospect of possibly losing all my data. :( SIGH! I never learn my lesson. Which is to always backup my data! RAWRRR!!! My office computer is slow and laggy and now my home computer is dead to the world. Well done.

I was playing mahjong on Saturday and I was waiting to game with this SUPERB COMBI that is probably worth a gazillion points. Imagine: Pong pong hu + half colour - and my half colour is made up of 白板, 红中, 东风 and another wind tile. BUT I DIDN'T WIN coz I was waiting for my winning tile of 红中 OR 东风 and before it came, someone else won. -________-" BAH!!!! If not that would have won me $30++!

Also I'm going to Shanghai and Beijing in June! It was a very last-minute, impromptu decision. Initially I had no travel plans at all for this year, but because colleague's going for an event for work and also because SIA had a promotion, we decided to go and booked our tickets within 1 weekend. I'm really looking forward to it :) in spite of a possible brewing conflict between my 2 travelling partners. Shanghai Expo! Great Wall of China! Forbidden Palace! We only have 3 days in Beijing and I think we really don't have enough time to visit all the places that we want to go! Really wasted la. Could have taken one more day of leave and then extended our holiday by another 3 days.

The past few weeks also have been pretty much a whirlwind of stuff and I have been kept pretty occupied with this thing called Life. I don't even have time to check on my Kpop news nowadays! :( 10 May also marked a pretty important day for me as I made an important (and impulsive) decision. At first I was confused. Then I stopped being confused. I straightened out my thinking. But then I threw caution to the wind. I got sick of being rational and logical. Heck it, I thought. -___- I know. I don't know if I even made the right decision? Was it stupid? Foolish? Blindly optimistic? But I've decided to plunge straight in and even if I escape bloody and hurt, I would just treat it as a milestone in my life and a valuable and precious learning experience. 我要学会有勇气去尝试和体验.

Meanwhile... I'm keeping my fingers crossed for my internal job applications. :x Wish me luck.

I finally finished watching 学警狙撃 at 5am this morning. This has got to be the most exciting HK drama I've ever watched! Full of twists and turns and the baddies aren't written as the typical one-dimensional evil character either. Bravo to the scriptwriter!

I've read 6 copies of 8 Days in a span of 4 days! I shall aim to reach Issue 1000 (that's the Dec 13 issue) by the end of my break. 9 more copies to go omg.

On 初二 I went to my grandmother's house to 拜年 (the same grandmother who comes to our house every Saturday and throws tantrums like a kid, refuses to bathe, and keeps asking when she is going home etc etc). Seems like her dementia is getting worse, because she can't even recognize her own house! When night falls she will demand to go home - even when she is already at home. She will get very angry when everyone just patronizes her. So in order to appease her, my uncle bundled her up into the car, drove from the multi-storey carpark down to the void deck of her house. She will willingly believe that that is her house when she returns to an empty house instead of one that is teeming with people. Aiyoh.

On 初三 my relatives came over and I lost at very badly at mahjong.. haha. My auntie waived off my "school fees" in the end. They are used to playing with bigger stakes so $0.20/$0.40 is too difficult for them to count. HAHA! 赚到! But I still lost $2 at blackjack.

Half of my break is gone, hopefully the other half will crawl along slowly... KTV with colleagues later!!!

I had an eventful date with 萬子 last night/this morning.

We did not plan to meet initially. Alas, fate intervened, and like the proverbial bad boy, I was too easily seduced by the allures of 萬子. 正如纪存希而言: "第一次是偶然, 第二次是必然, 第三次是命中注定." LOL.


He charmed and misled me into thinking that I can win with 半色, 碰碰胡, but the elusive 二萬 I was waiting for never appeared...!!!!!!


He appeared again when I was "莊", this is 5 台 from the flowers alone and 4 台 from 清一色!


He continued to make random appearances for the rest of the night...


But failing to come through when I needed him the most!!!
To be fair to 萬子, he did provide me with fleeting moments of happiness when I won big. LOL.
Our rendezvous lasted till early morning, and like a hard-hearted lover, he left...

悄悄的我走了，正如我悄悄的来
我挥一挥衣袖，不带走一片云彩

Next time I'm gonna play with bamboos and marbles and have a fling with 小筒 and 小索! HAHAHAHA!

Besides keeping dementia at bay (and tai-tais occupied), we found out that mahjong can also impart us valuable life lessons!

This is what we gleaned from a session of late-night mahjong.

Life lesson #1: Change is the only constant.

Life lesson #2: Always be flexible and adapt to the situation.

Life lesson #3: Being patient will pay off... eventually.

Life lesson #4: Always be optimistic.

Life lesson #5: Be persistent enough. (I know this kind of contradicts #2 but oh well.)

Now during interviews, you can tell your prospective bosses what you do for leisure... and how these important life skills that you learned will help you in your job (and life in general)! HAHAHA. :D

Didn't strike the 10 million leh :(
Never mind, next year!

Pulled an all-nighter playing mahjong and Wii and as Gillian so rightly put it, recovery rate definitely takes longer nowadays! But we finally managed to finish one entire set in our short-lived mahjong history. Yay? :)

I managed to play some mahjong today! :)

Big win of the day was when I drew the last card of 2 桐 and gamed! Very climatic! Apparently if you win with the last card, you get one more 台. So with that and my pong pong hu (2 doubles) and 2 other somethings (I think it was a flower or animal), I won the maximum of 5 doubles!

Woohoo overall I made a profit (in fake chips). Our chips are worth $2,000 and $10,000, don't play play! Haha!!!

And I am gradually learning the art of parking! I am still quite a bad driver haha but getting there lah huh. :D

I am loving this whole week coz there's no work!!! :D

Big win of the day!

Opened tiles and got 4 animals! Woot! 5 doubles plus zi mo, that's $6.40! (excluding the "gang") Still lost money in the end but it's ok - we're playing with fake money haha.