golden crow, black tie, purple dress

Back in September, I wrote and submitted a paper to nominate our recently established subsidiary company - Australian Airline Pilot Academy (AAPA) - for the Best New Business in the 2009 Golden Crow Awards presented by the Wagga Wagga Business Chamber. I was thrilled to receive notification that AAPA was one out of four finalists and a group of ten of us attended the black tie awards event with much anticipation.



I got quite stressed over what to wear in the days leading up to the event. I didn't have a single piece of formal evening gown in my entire wardrobe and was quite sure I wouldn't be able to fit into any of the cocktail dresses (considering how much weight I'd gained in the last one year) decent enough for such a formal occasion. In the end, after pulling out and trying on every single outfit I own (and surprisingly found myself fitting into most of them without difficulty), I decided on this royal purple satin dress with a pair of light gold 3-inch heels ensemble which I wore for a formal dinner at Sydney Tower last December. I was still feeling a bit jittery that I may be under-dressed for the occasion but was immensely relieved upon arrival at the venue to see that most other ladies wore short to knee length cocktail dresses too; only a few rare spottings of long gowns throughout the night. So it wasn't that formal after all hey.

Time to announce the award winners. *drum rolls*
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"The Best New Business Award goes to..."
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"The Australian Airline Pilot Academy!!!" *applause*

To be more specific, we were a joint winner with another company. No matter. We got our own trophy with the sparkly GOLDEN CROW okay! How awesome!



The best moment for me that night was not when we were announced a (joint) winner, nor was it when we received the trophy on stage, but when one of our Directors and GM made their respective short speeches back at our table; they expressly conveyed their heartfelt thanks and recognition of all the hard work I had put into not just the submission for this award but also all that I have done in the pre and post establishment of the Academy to my current efforts in expanding and progressing the company. It's a far cry now from the Mangalore days when I used to have these *gasp* bread delivery nightmares!

Finally, a group photo below with the boys in their dashing black tie outfits. As they are all quite camera shy and don't like their pics appearing in public sites, I had to mosaic their faces.



^.^V