2014 Christmas Letter
23/12/14 17:33 Filed in: Christmas Letters
Now that my cousin Eugene and his family are on the plane back to Singapore, I can finally sit down and write this Christmas letter.
This is probably going to be the shortest Christmas letter from me, as the year 2014 can be summed up in two words - “family reunion”.
Firstly, on the work front, there’s nothing much to report. I continue to have a job and am thankful to have a job. I still mainly work with a colleague with whom I get along with famously but this year, as the company expands, I’ve also had to deal with idiots. It takes the gloss off the work but that’s work.
Apart from work, the year had been kind to me. Everyone in the family stayed relatively healthy while Kismet remained as cute as always.
My travels were reduced to two trips this year, with the one in June being a “dress rehearsal” of the one in October.
What the heck does that mean? Read on.
Well, firstly, I became a half-centurian this year. Like any typical guy who’s had a mid-life crisis, I went out and got a “red sports car”:
OK, Honda Civic isn’t really a sports car but I got the Sport model and it’s red.
As I don’t have a secretary, I couldn’t run away with one, so that saved some money.
As part of my birthday present, I decided that I would like to have a reunion with my cousins from my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t seen many of them in a lot of years so it was a good reason to have one, in Taiwan, for my birthday (in October).
The plan was set in motion back in January. The format of the reunion was in the form of a business conference, with attendees having to do presentations. As we are all Grandchildren of Mr S.E. Ting, we adopted an acronym for our group - the GSET group. So the politicians had their G8 summit in Brisbane, the GSET group had their conference in Taipei. Cool eh?
To make it even cooler, all attendees get a GSET show bag with GSET merchandise.
So I went to Taipei in June to meet with hotel management about what I wanted for our conference. I took the same flights as the ones we would be taking in October to make sure we got the right arrival and departure times etc. That was the dress rehearsal.
It was a great project management exercise. Failure was not an option.
October came and the attendees arrived in Taipei. Apart from some logistics problem on Day 0 (pre-conference registration day) which the organising committee quickly resolved, everything went smoothly.
We had an opening ceremony, we showed an organisation chart, we had presentations and we had a closing ceremony. We even had name tags with serial numbers. 🙂
It would have to be one of the most unusual conferences we’ve attended. For one, when did you last attended a conference where all the attendees were related? It really was a lot of fun.
It was a lot of fun catching up with the cousins, coming from Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore as well as my uncle and aunts.
It was also the first time in over 60 years that my dad’s generation (i.e. dad’s remaining siblings and siblings-in-law) all sat under one roof.
We had a good turn out - 16 people - which worked out quite well logistically for our inaugural meeting. If the group got any bigger it would have given us a headache over our meeting venue.
I have crazy cousins. Whether they are the ones I grew up with in Singapore or the ones in Hong Kong who I’m re-getting to know - we played as if we all grew up together.
My friends at the hotel and their staff were just superb. They took care of all my special requests (and I threw a couple of curved balls at them) with ease and very generous in their hospitality. To my Shang friends, my deepest gratitude, again, for making this a successful event.
Turning 50 is not a big deal - my whole high school class of 1980 turned 50 this year so I’m not the only one.
This family reunion though, is very special and is something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.
This October trip would have to be the best trip I’ve had in my entire life.
To round off the Year of the Family Reunion, cousin Eugene and his wife Yvonne brought their daughter Clara to Sydney to visit last week.
We met up each night for dinner. It was like a GSET Splinter Cell. We prepared a very traditional family dinner for them last night as their farewell dinner. The look on their faces, when they realised what dinner was going to be, was priceless.
What a way to finish off the year of the family reunion - otherwise this Christmas letter would be even shorter!
To all my friends and family, may God be with you, till we meet again (which is the music I’ve chosen this year sung by Ella Fitzgerald).
Merry Christmas.
Your friend,
Bevan
