Although every day seems to sometimes drag along so slowly, time does flies and it is already 3 weeks into my 3 months of gardening leave. There is my personal urgency to want to do as many things as possible, plan events, explore opportunities and finalize on what I want to do next. But I was mainly occupied with doing a lot of exercises, morning gym sessions almost every day. But this week, 2 events made me smile.
The first happened on Monday, where a group of good friends and myself finally attended a course which we committed to sign up for last month. The course was heavily subsidized by the skillsfuture initiative and on top of the early bird 10% discount plus another 50% discount for being above 50 years of age, the eventual bill was ZERO!
This is a 8 weeks (3 hours every Monday evening) course on the Science and Business of Wine. It was interesting to see a wide range of participants (17) from all walks of life as we had a get to know you session to kick start the first lesson. Looking forward to networking with everyone else over the subsequent weeks. Besides us “ex-bankers”, there was another one. The rest were from diverse sectors like F&B, hospitality, asset management and chemical industries.
We had 4 wines to taste that evening and 3 were actually quite terrible. Maybe the instructor was trying to manage our expectations and looking to start at the bottom? Each of us was given a thick booklet as course notes to study and there would be an assessment at the end of the 8 weeks course.
Anyway, the 4 of us celebrated our first lesson completion by having a shot of Yamazaki whiskey and finger foods when it ended at 1045 pm.
The next memorable event happened on Tuesday. It was a lunch gathering that was fixed a few weeks ago. This is actually a periodic event I started a few years ago with a group of university guys from our facility (Business Administration, class of 1990). We created a Whatsapp chat group which we used to (1) wish each other happy birthdays and (2) share dirty jokes… The last lunch happened in Apr last year and I thought it was timely that we had another one.
We had a final turnout of 12 guys and everyone was busy catching up with each other, learning about the ages of our kids (the oldest was already 24) and reminiscing about the old days in uni where life was simple where we had not faced the real world yet.
Lunch was 2+ hours long and it was followed up with another coffee session with a smaller group till almost 5 pm. Amazing how time flies by and it has been 27 years since graduation. Some of us are already at the tail end of our careers and have already moved on to the next phase of our lives, into our 2nd half-times. We all agree that we have truly crossed more than the half way mark of our lives that it is ok to be addressed as “uncles” now…
My favourite picture of the week : the Putin and Trump image below. It is timely since they officially met up yesterday and the outcome is as expected. Lotsa bromance and fake news. Guess who is the puppet master and the puppet here?
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