i have recently noticed that

the supermarket queue i join nearly always turns out to be the slowest-moving. some item belonging to a woman a few places in front will not scan properly, or someone prefers to pay by credit card, and the card-reader get jammed and times out.

on a 2-lane road, the lane i'm on always turns out to be slower because of an obstruction, or a driver waiting to turn right at the traffic light.

after reading LMD's post on her horrendous haircut, i am craving for a haircut myself. except my hair is too short to do anything worthwhile with at the moment.

with the onset of winter, i am drinking more water to justify boiling more water in my plastic 1.8litre kettle, just so i can hug the hot kettle while i work. i know a hot water bottle will help, but it's just not the same as a huge kettle.

i like taking long walks on sunny afternoons. back in singapore, it would have to be at least past 8pm that i'd be persuaded to take a walk outside for longer than 10minutes.

there is so much steam in the bathroom after my bath that i'd choke if i took too deep a breath.

the book i intended to read during the train ride to/from the city almost never gets read.

i don't care much for what's on tv, besides CSI:NY.

my parenting instincts are not at all well developed. i avoid toddlers like the plague and i'd much rather have a puppy.

in stark constrast to the lack of parenting skills, my abilities at procrastinating have increased tremendously. the graduate research conference is 4 days away, and i'm thinking yay. i'll get started tomorrow. the studio's the worst place to be in, because everyone else is printing, pasting, typing and editing away. me? hey, i have a life, y'know.



that's dart the frog, and hedgehog contemplating some red m&ms, because S suggested they tasted better!

bits

when i'm working under stress (which has been the case for the past few months), i can consume up to 1kg of m&m's per week. the mix-pack is the best, so i have a selection of no-nuts, nuts, and biscuit. i've noticed i can only eat one m&m at a time, but can carry on for several hours. and it used to be that i fished them out of the bag, so i'd be getting a random m&m each time, but i've lately developed the habit of pouring them all out into a container so i can see what i'm picking. funny thing i've noticed is that, the browns are the first to go. i'm colour-biased when it comes to chocs, it seems. and the last ones around are a mixture of reds, oranges and yellows. the happy colours.

yesterday, the flatmate surprised me with mighty mouse, and we've been inseparable ever since. it actually has a right-click button. hmmm. how pc-synonymous. with their move to have that intel-duo core, mac seems to have been selling out steadily. but oh, how i love my mighty mouse. i even set up a pillow for might mouse next to mine last night.

the sleep of the just

after working on 4 different drafts of my review of candidature within slightly less than a fortnight, i finally cracked. (actually, i cracked after the 2nd one) maybe 2 years of churning out reviews and reports and philosophical insights just ain't what i've made it out to be. darned if i know how those academics do it. for one, consistency is not one of my strong points - i get distracted too easily. bugger.

apparently, there are, on average, 6 days in may where you actually get to see the sun down here in victoria... and the past 5 days have been lover-ly weather. so. 1 more day of sun day left. out of 10 remaining may days. i'll survive. :) and with the rays of sun filtering into the fog that made up most of my struggles analysing my area of resesarch, came the much-needed approval from the supervisor. there are 2 most depressing things in life. 1 is when you put shitloads of effort into a research document, and your supervisor asks you what the hell it was about. and the 2nd is, running out of chocolate when it is the only thing helping you churn out ideas. and i've been through both in the past fortnight. go, me!



with the past 5 days of sun, the outdoors was beckoning, and it was such a temptation to take wilmot, my laptop, out to the park to work. probably the most contagious angmoh habit i've developed so far is to sit on a grass patch, or bench, or seat outside a cafe to soak up the sun. they have this way of worshipping the sun - and no wonder too, with some of the gray rainy weeks they get. i settled for taking an hour-long walk in the afternoons when i could afford the time. fresh air does so much for the appetite! and the lungs! and the spirit! even caught myself belting out living on a prayer while driving to the city. tsk.



speaking of which, i'm wondering if anyone remembers the local girl-band a decade ago, the lizard's convention. managed to unearth their album the last time i was back home, and have since been blasting if cows grew on trees and wooden heart with much gusto from itunes. i remember a time when wooden heart reigned on the airwaves back home, and i'd made my own bootleg of it on cassette. gah! those were the days. before alanis morissette and sheryl crow and the bloody spice girls.



and those were the days, too, of sweating for crits. in the my undergrad days, the semester was defined by critique sessions, or referred to with hatred/affection as crits. informal sessions, interims, work-in-progress, and formal crits mark the passing of time for a design student. there were lots of sweating over models, materials, UHU glue, cad drawings, time spent in the workshops and the occasional scare of accidents happening with the table saw. a classmate of mine once had about 3 fingers nearly severed by said table saw. brr. not an urban legend, these accidents.

these days, the kids seem much more confident. or perhaps they're angmohs who have always been encouraged to speak up, to have an opinion, and have a much better command of language and therefore able to express themselves better. but i must say, even the asians are improving by leaps and bounds in the department of presenting their projects. while on the panel for an informal session, i was impressed by the relative ease with which they breezed through their allocated 7-minute presentations, and questions were addressed unfalteringly too. my undergrad days almost pale in comparison.

but at the end of it all, for the people of crits, girl-bands and researchers, there is the sleep of the just.

stay-at-home friday

can't remember when the last time i stayed home on a friday night. but tonight was one - it was waaaay too dreary to go out. blistering cold and blustery wind and the freezing rain were all factors contributing to the good idea that it was to stay home.

so. sitting in front of the telly with our farmer-brand peanuts in front of us and our stubbies in hand, we watched flashdance (yay! jennifer beals!) and footloose (double yay! kevin bacon!) in succession. a sure way to overdose and relive the big-hair-tight-jeans moments of my youth.

by the time i started to realise i was drooling too much over a used-to-be-cute kevin bacon, i'd also realised how "uncle" the nature of my night home had been.

and it felt gooood. :)