Listen to the Rain on the Roof

Hurrah! It's the weekend!

A recap of the week's highlights, which are all about Rag since my social life is pretty much non-existent on weekdays:

I was feeling rather bitter the whole of Wednesday due to some comments, some of which were true but others, very unfair. I've ranted in an extremely long post that will never see the light of the blogosphere; it'll be kept under lock and key. Penning down my feelings made me feel the teensiest bit better but I do have one thing to say: If you haven't done it yourself, please don't judge. And that applies to you too, Dina.

Some of the bitterness carried over to Thursday but as I'm someone who doesn't bear grudges for long, it soon melted away and I began to feel happy again. Until someone repeatedly called or implied that I'm slow... There's only so much a person can take okay. I know I'm not the fastest person around. Think of some better insults, can't you? Everyone knows that I'm a big fan of teasing and everyone knows I can tolerate my fair share but seriously, it's getting old. Maybe this is how Yen feels.

Then after we ended work, JH comes noisily up the stairs and into my room to deliver a huge shock. He said that Boyan has left us. Honestly, I couldn't quite believe it. I was so so sad cos not only have we lost "a pair of very good hands", but we've also lost a friend. Out of Yee Mun, Jonathan and Boyan who are all people I didn't know before, I knew Boyan best as of that time and his loss is going to be hard on us. But I definitely understand that family comes first.

My parting words (although I know he will never read this): I hope that everything will be alright for you soon.

Edit (26/06/07, 03 25): I miss playing the clarinet. I really felt like joining alumni for the Saints Family concert on 11 August, but guess what? It's on the same day as Rag! What luck. I can't even attend the concert, much less play for it :(

I'm glad I decided to go out with the bandies today instead of sleeping at home. After working so hard for Rag, I think I deserved another much-needed break.

First I went for the alumni dinner which I thought was supposed to be a bbq, thanks to Zuan's misleading SMS :) felt a little guilty when I found out that I didn't have to pay cos I heard it's from the profits they made from Saints Hallelujah, which I wasn't a part of. Shaun entertained us with his SPI (Singapore Paranormal Investigators for the ignorant) experience, which I found rather amusing. I mean, I just found it a bit difficult to believe that little white blobs on photos can be considered 'things'.

My batchies then decided to go for a movie and I drove Shaun's new Mazda to Marina Square. The rest watched Fantastic Four while Kok, Yaofeng, Shaun and I chatted at Cafe Cartel.

After the movie we went to Minds Cafe at Boat Quay or Clarke Quay, forgot which one. Played Jenga Truth or Dare and Taboo. It was my first time there and I think it's pretty much unforgettable, considering the things that happened.

List of Hilarious Things that Happened at Minds:
1. Shaun did a semi-raspberry on Kok's stomach.
2. Deon's "Ready, have sex, go!"
3. Shaun's description of the word "highlight" was to clench his right fist repeatedly. Apparently he was describing how to highlight a driver on the road using the high beam. Like, huh?
4. Enru's forfeit to direct human traffic from the balcony of Minds.

Huishan also brought along Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans which included flavours like Vomit, Rotten Egg, Earwax, Earthworm and Dirt. The Vomit and Earwax were hands-down the worst! Earwax tasted like cod liver oil; it was damn disgusting. I wonder if someone actually tried earwax on a dare or just because they had nothing better to do and informed the company that it tasted like cod liver oil or if the company just cooked up some horrible flavour.
I spat out the Vomit and Earwax; they were simply unswallow-able.

Finally around 2 plus am I drove back home. The fact that Shaun could fall asleep while I was driving his brand new car made me feel good cos I guess he trusts me with the car enough :)

Tired, sleepy and tired

It's only my 4th day of doing what Materials Engineers are supposed to do and already I'm super duper duper freaking tired.

I measure and cut, measure and cut till I become cross-eyed. I try my darndest to place blue and brown scales accurately, only to find out that the line of scales is slowly going crooked. I'm happy and perky one moment and the next, I just don't feel like talking to anyone. I get so stressed out because I'm frustrated with my own ineptness and (lack of) speed.

This is Rag.

The only thing that keeps me going is the people. Those with passion, who work tirelessly throughout the day to achieve a common goal: to beat our neighbours with an award-winning float :) i place utmost faith in this year's team and I believe we can do it.

I didn't believe that Raggers ragged for the people and not for the hall but I do now.

I will never forget these 3 months in which I slogged day and night but as one ME said, "It's like the army. Once is enough." Or something like that anyway. I can never remember exactly what people say.

Ok enough talky talk about the trials and tribulations of Rag. As I pakat-ed with Jian Hui the other time, I must blog about Yen's incident with the topping-up machine at Somerset MRT. As always we wanted to give Yen a chance to show how fast she is in daily activities cos she complains that our comments about her slowness are unjustified. We decided to let her race against JH in the "Topping-up your EZ Link Card" challenge. First the girl takes out her Maybank card instead of her DBS card, claiming that the cards looked the same. She inserted her Maybank one not once, but twice before realising her error. Then she was always looking down at the screen when asked to key in her PIN and press Enter. Maybe she thought the screen stores PINs now :) she obviously didn't press Enter after keying in her PIN, hence the Italics. It took a total of THREE attempts before Yen managed to successfully top up her card and coupled with her characteristic Royal Tortoise-like speed, she obviously lost the challenge. The End.

L-A-Z-Y, I ain't got no alibi

First I got to explain the reason for my hiatus. My laptop crashed! That's always an acceptable excuse right? Then I was too busy with SECC to do anything but rest during my free time. Now the camp's over, my laptop is back in working order and my mind is totally refreshed from about 15 hours of sleep so I'm sort of free to blog again.

As mentioned earlier, SECC is finally over. Whoopee! I'm only happy cos it was just too tiring for me. The lack of sleep was nearly unbearable but I managed to fight through my exhaustion. I'm so proud of myself cos on the last day, I stayed awake for 22 hours straight! It's quite a personal achievement because everyone knows I need my beauty rest. The camp was a lot fun and I really love my group. At first I cringed when I was allocated to Ali Baba but in the end I couldn't have asked for more, both from the campers and the councillors. We definitely deserved the title for the Most Rah-rah Group :) and hopefully, I managed to convince some of them to come down and help the raggers during the hols.

I'm not an orientation person, as Queen Mother would say and I'm happy with that description. However, as much as I dislike over-enthusiastic campers during my own orientation camps, I sometimes wish I had the confidence and guts to be like them. Being a councillor for SECC gave me the chance to be super rah-rah without embarrassment and I'm grateful for that. Cos now I finally know that I'm better off being a worker than an orientation person.

Alrighty, I'm off to watch Heroes!