why wy?

Joe came (a sort of birthday surprise) and left yesterday.
He has been dubbed the fly whisperer for getting a persistent bugger out of the house.
I had a great picnic in the park (the wei of spring) and forced my friends to miss the footy grand final. It won't happen again.
We drove to a tulip festival. Joe took pictures, but think paint commerical - just pure streaks of colour.
We went to a music festival up the street. Pretty decent, free and crowded.
Johan is here as well, taking him to listen to the suns tonight.
Exams are a month away, so expect this blog to gather dust. In fact, the books are calling me right now...

and the gifts keep coming!

another cake, from monica (orange blossom and almond)
a card from my aunt - with a chinese poem that I can't read
a call from ak
fantastic pizza
discovering that the library has graphic novels

things I got for my birthday:
the helsinki jacket from joe
a breakfast hug from monica
a cake nicole made
lotsa sms from family and friends
many, many, many questions of "so how old are you?"
a neil gaiman story (sorta counts because I discovered it today) which by the way seems unpostable so here is the link http://www.neilgaiman.net/extras.php
a big hairy boyfriend from the airport tonight

Ze results of ze test are back. Am putting them up because ii) I find the whole idea slightly ridiculous, ii) I did pretty well (with a little help).

Cognitive Ability Report
Work Preference Report

The weather turned superhot today, and I got a teensy weensy bit sunburnt, from tree planting and having an outdoor lecture on the grass. The lecturers have told us not to come on Thursday, they are going on strike. Guess you won't ever see those things in NUS.

The wave pillow - hook it up to your pc and gps and it wakes you only if there's good surf.
The horse head pillow (from the godfather)
The boyfriend pillow (half torso only)
The blurb says: They've eliminated all the sounds and smells of the standard boyfriend and have even added an alarm clock which gently shakes the arm when it's time to get up.

Just spent nearly an hour filling out an IQ test... to be a checkout girl at the equivalent of NTUC/Cold storage. The word overqualified pops to mind, but thankfully I had a classmate standing behind, helping me with the maths ones.

The place I work is closing down (nothing to do with me) because they are selling off the business, and it's a real bummer because I never got to insult customers and I finally remember some prices.

Birthday greetings to: Sentil, Tracy and Daniel.

forgot to add: Is anyone interested in a quick getaway to phuket or some beach place in late november? I need nice beach + cheap thai food + snorkelling or diving. Okay, will settle for malaysian food too. Pass the word on and email if any of you are keen.

Another post from the dissection room: I didn't want to, but after much laughter over dinner last night, I decided to share. It was bound to come eventually, cutting up the genitals. Nick kinda freaked out when he chanced on my open anatomy book.
choice quote: I thought it was a cook book, until I looked closer.
And in class, most were squeamish (really because we needed to use a monster-sized bone saw for the pelvis) and this was the best quote.
If a girl can't find the clitoris what chance do guys have?

lego comic figures (with neil gaiman, alan moore and grant morrison, my absolute three fav writers)
And I've added a link to pixel girl on the side. Lovely place for wallpapers and icons, Mac and pc.

forgot to add, nick made century egg porridge. Times like this I'm glad we are living together cos boy, it did kinda smell during the cooking. So we've got pei tan for dinner, breakfast and a couple more meals I think.

In the tech section of the papers today, they featured the philippe stark mouse, and I loving caressed the life-sized picture to see how it would fit in my hand. It simultaneously dawned on me that it was an incredibly geeky thing to do, even though it was a stark. Then again, it is pretty plain for a stark (ha ha , stark, get it?) so I wouldn't buy it. And it's not cordless.

There was also (in the tech section) 1) a swiss army knife that came with a USB drive (64, 128); 2) a beautiful, sexy olympus digital camera, the mju mini. Six colours.

I was telling nick about how i was a star wars kid, when he pointed out: "So, you were a geek even then."

Am currently listening to Sheila Chandra, a womad sort of singer with a hauntingly beautiful voice. Nothing to do with geeks. Go listen on amazon if you can.

Underground cinema at its finest. These guys basically converted old caves under Paris into cinemas for their own film festival. Great read.

And batman storms buckingham palace. With Robin, who is incidentally 48. Not sure if the link will work, if not head over to the bbc news website. The same group also scaled a suspension bridge, and had spiderman on the london eye.

These quotes made me laugh:
I've got blue eyes and blond hair. Hitler had brown eyes and brown hair. If we were in school together I would be the kid beating him up for being a wog. -- One of the soundbites for the docu, John Safran versus God.

He was telling me he doesn't think he will get into heaven. I am thinking, if you're not going to heaven, then I'm screwed. -- Charlize Theron, recalling a conversation with Nelson Mandela.

Saw two great movies on the weekend: American Splendor, which is not as depressing as I thought it would be; and Lost and Delirious, a Canadian film about sapphic love in an all-girls boarding school. I hate to use the L word to describe the movie because it was more than that (yes, Nick was disappointed) and, as a coming or age movie, it is way better than Mona Lisa Smile.

We walk into dissection yesterday and just as we started removing the guts, someone said: Do you hear music?
Ya, I said, sounds like opera.
Turns out one of the tutors/assistants/anatomy people was in the next room, carefully dissecting a leg with his music way up. Definitely a silence of the lambs/csi moment there.

We also learnt more about the osteo department's el capitan, ray. He's a stout guy, tall as well but he speaks in a strangled whisper. Just like the godfather.

He was an australian aikido champ, and someone reckons he had one too many chokeholds applied. While that may be true, I'm not too sure that aikido even has competitions because it goes against the whole philosophy. Whatever the case, he was in Japan and these other akido guys were trying to push him over. The aim of the exercise is to be immovable and ray was.
So, the Japanese guys came up to him later and said: we cannot move you, we call you... the rock.

So now we have been entrusted with tradition - the story was told to us by a 5th year. They also regard him as some sort of jedi master when it comes to cranial work, which will be fun when we get to do it... in a couple of years from now.

And I locked myself out of the house yesterday, with the stove on - talk about dumb life choices. Had to call Singapore to get my housemate's number.

More pictures here. Blogger's been chewing up my posts recently, so apologies if I'm repeating myself.

emus are really big pigeons 

Songs that I have cringed at during past weddings

Celine Dion. Arrrgggh. Even typing her name burns.
The Final Countdown. Mortal Kombat theme. Phantom of the Opera. Childen (famous techno track). These kinds of songs are popular for bring out the first dish, in case you were wondering. They should make a song, Thank god the food is here and we've finished all the peanuts)
The guy who sang about Jessie and her picture postcards
Other guys who sound like the guy who sang about Jessie ( in a white bread American sort of way)
Any ballad by Boys 2 Men, nsync, backstreet boys and the like.
I think one of them even did a duet with Mariah Carey that was making the rounds, which I have successfully wiped from memory.

Other inappropriate tunes (courtesty of my ipod), but oh, it would be terribly funny
Dude looks like a lady
Easy lover
Beauty and the Beast
Lying eyes
Norwegian wood
The more you ignore me, the closer I get
You're the one for me fatty
Sit on my face
I wish I knew how it feels to be free
smack my bitch up
heaven knows I'm miserable now (Morrisey again)
stuck in a moment you can't get out off
The drugs don't work
The Ballad of Tom Jones

I wonder how many weddings I've missed since I'm here.

We just drove the distance of KL and back, to see whales.

Warrnambool is about 3 to 4 hours away, depending on how fast you drive. It's a quiet seaside/industrial town, with roundabouts instead of traffic lights. We got in 15 minutes after the last movie started (850pm, The Village), so we ended up doing a pub crawl.

First stop was the criterion hotel, pretty much a dive (aussie for dingy, rough pub). It even had a big game hunter sega shooting game. Shoot buck! And moose! Dang, you shot a cow!

Second was the warrnambool hotel, a more upmarket place that had a dingy ceiling, but on purpose. They had montain goat ale on tap, which is the best beer I have tasted. It's a boutique brew, and tastes of honey and flowers. We also met really nice people, although country accent + many beers = mumble mumble huh? I just nodded and smiled lots.

There was a distracting conversion going on, with the guy and girl next to me. The guy said all the wrong things, like this priceless one:""I know you have low self-esteem because of your looks, but you shouldn't.'' At one point, his target and I exchanged looks, and we almost burst out laughing.

We tried the criterion again, but there was cover and a noisy band playing, so we continued to the royal hotel. More drinking again (this group seemed like students) and a few who had graduated from the tim-school of dancing. At about this time, the resident singer-one-man-band did a cover of bruce hornsby's that's just the way it is, and I could have sworn he sang that's just the way it is, everyone's pissed. Maybe it's just the country accent.

Whale watching was great, we saw at least two pairs of mother and calf, and they were about 20m from the shore. Ignore the top right photo on the link, the water isn't that blue. We then drove to an extinct volcano crater which is now a national park, got up close to wild kangeroos, koalas and emus. Emus are like giant pigeons - they hung around the picnic tables waiting for scraps. One even wanted to follow us into the car.

We drove some more, stopped by the 12 apostles, dodged tourists taking photos... and ended up home 5 hours later.

best music to drive to:
soundtrack to kill bill
chemical brothers, hoops

Joe left last night, and it was a quick goodbye at the airport to avoid paying hefty parking fees. It still feels like he's gone out for the day and will be back later, not two months away. Pictures of trip to come, come back in a few days.

The new G5 imac looks more like a fancy tv than a computer. As fast as you'll ever need it to be and wireless too. The top end version is only US$1,900, which would make it quite affordable. I sometimes wonder if Apple are really the bad guys in a religious sense. Isn't coveting on Moses' top ten list?

I'm feeling up my barely 24 hours new jacket, so soft, so warm! Thanks to da man, the only, Joe, unique among the Joes. Will stop as I am blathering.