Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

I have a headache. It is not the pounding sort that makes one touch one's temples every now and then to see if the skin is tearing under all the pressure from the veins; it is merely the sort that throbs away softly, thrumming away and eroding away energy. It is late enough in the day, although it is only 8.48 to the computer's clock, that I am very nearly depleted of energy; when I have finished this post I shall call the Gobbler, then shower, then go to sleep. The Pig will feel neglected because I promised to talk to him yesterday, but was also obliged to sleep early due to this headache; but I hope he will read this and be somewhat mollified. This headache is, I think, more due to lack of sleep or rest than anything else; I cannot possibly be starving with the sheer amount of food I have been ingesting over the days since the examination. The two-hour gorging at the buffet I have mentioned. Yesterday and today have also been replete with food, if somewhat less than a buffet

The exams are ended, and with them the main occupation of my time for the last three weeks or so. It's not that I like having exams all the time, but they do at least fill up the spaces and really, it's not like I've a terribly large amount of things pressing on me to be done. My December is of course going to be busy--what's left of it, of course. There's people to meet: Gobbler, for example, before he flies off to see the parents on the 12th--I should call him sometime; a bunch of friends; there's at least two Crusade-related camps to attend, and if time permitted I would be up in Malacca attending another camp (heavens, I miss the KL church people rather), and of course I have to slot off a bit of time to go visit the grandfolks. It sounds busy, but in between all of that there's a lot of free time, and I've no idea what I'll do with it. Maybe I'll take up the novella I've always been planning but never actually done; maybe I'll make s

So, it's been a month and more since the last post; but rest assured I won't flood you with long essays about my life. That's partly because I can't for the life of me remember it myself, and partly because--well, if I don't remember the details of my own life then it can't have been terribly interesting, can it? In any case the exams have begun; in fact they began last week, and will continue for three Mondays more (I have an exam every Monday for the next two Mondays, and an exam today--which is Monday whatever the timestamp may claim). I've had two papers already, and I'm not sure what to think of them; they seemed straightforward enough but I find I skipped some rather crucial steps in the second paper (this morning) that just might cost me a grade or so. Still, I'll just blame it on the dumpy little stutterer who tried to lecture us. ...I'll see about posting more often; "an ounce apiece from the many doth outweigh a pound apiece from t

I had another one of those odd dreams yesterday. Not last night, because these days I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and then fall back to sleep before the handphone wakes me up--I still haven't put batteries in the alarm clock, and besides the handphone's alarm tone is customisable. At the moment it's a recording of me saying "Wake up. Wake up." in a slightly electronically-distorted tone, but when I figure out how to connect that phone to my computer, it will sing either "There is Life Outside Your Apartment", "I Feel Fantastic", or "The Mom Song"--you know, the one where Anita Renfroe yells "GET UP NOW GET UP NOW GET UP OUT OF BED". Admittedly those are rather loud noises, but then I needn't worry about waking the roommate anymore because he's gone away; the post-it he left behind said that one of his friends' roommate had gone away on exchange and he was going there, which means he's been wa

THE WHAT? How did it get to be September the 22nd without me noticing? How did time fly so quickly--exams begin in less than two months--egads, how time does fly! And I've so few posts up too--not that much really happens, but I have got to do this more frequently. Maybe if I left this tab permanently open, like my Facebook tabs (Home, MouseHunt, newly-added Mythmongers, and occasionally Country Story) and Twitter, you'd get a lot more updates from me here. As it is I am regrettably infrequent. My life hasn't been terribly exciting, in any case; things happen, deadlines get met, I get stressed, I sleep and eat and go about my life. This week is the first week of school where both my Monday and Tuesday nights are free, though I'm still sore from yesterday's frisbee game and the trail-walking I and some Crusaders did later in the afternoon/evening. Sore in the arms, oddly enough, which I take to mean that my lower body at least is somewhat healthy. ...I've been t

"School starts again tomorrow"--that was what, 19 days ago? I've been lax, haven't I? but I've also been busy, busy, there's so much to be done and so much more to plan for--these are times when there isn't time to do much but keep on doing, doing, doing until one falls over into bed and cannot even reminisce over the day that has just past before tiredness claims one's consciousness. Admittedly I'm exaggerating, just a little bit, but then-- This, I warn you, will be a long post. 19 days is three weeks--or very nearly so--and with the hectic nature of these past weeks, I have many, many events to record. In fact I probably have few events to record, but I'll be going into them with my customary amount of detail, which will simply fluff them up all the more. Thus--we begin with the first day of school, on which I had only two hours of classes because the labs and tutorials don't start until the second week of school, at least; this semester

School starts again tomorrow--it feels sometimes as if my whole life has been a long series of repetitions of schools restarting. This blog certainly has had a lot of schools restarting in it--considering I've been in school for quite awhile, that's understandable. And with two semesters a year, you'd think I'd get used to having school restart and end by now; but I haven't. It's still change, however expected, and will still take some readjusting to. I spent pretty much most of the weekend with family: most of Saturday and nearly all of Sunday. But I'm getting ahead of myself--there's at least 2 days undocumented between the last post and Saturday, so I shall get to them. Let me see. The last post was Wednesday, the day on which Herr Robson moved out of the hostel where he'd been squatting and into the room which he is currently renting, outside the campus; it costs him about SGD260 a month, and is a rather cramped little space--not at all to my lik

It is fourteen days since my last post, so I'll start this one off by wishing the Empress a happy 21st--I hope it turns out better for her than it did for me, and I expect it probably will too: I've already completely forgotten how my 21st birthday went. (I just spent a few minutes reading how it went. Apparently nothing at all occurred.) ...well, then, let's see. 14 days, two weeks; what's happened in that two weeks? A great deal, I must say. This post is going to be a rather long one, so I might as well type it today since the rest of this week promises to be rather less than refreshing. I returned to Spore last July the 20th, and there was a camp on July the--let me see--the--oh dear, my memory's definitely failing me these days, but I'm relatively sure it was the 22nd to the 24th of July; it was for the University's branch of Campus Crusade, since I'm one of the Bible study group leaders (it's how I tend to explain my role, since saying "SM

I returned to Spore yesterday; it was another 7-hour journey, during which I dozed fitfully and ate and drank very, very little--I try to avoid heavy eating just before and during travelling: the whole process is bad enough without the risk of travel sickness. Let us see--the last post was July the 9th--that's about two days before I left Patience for KL... well, then, let us take up the story there. What happened? Let me try to recall--ah, yes, it was Thursday. Well, little of note occurred: I got into an argument with the kid brother that resulted in us not talking to each other (in fact we still haven't talked to each other) that mostly centered around him never listening to what I say unless it increases his level of comfort, and thus landing himself in a large pile of discomfort (and I-told-you-so's) and when I refused to listen to his demands for comfort (read: my laptop), he went into a fuss and stopped talking to me entirely. Not much of a loss, admittedly; his conv

I'm quite badly tired out. I think it may be due to me not having woken naturally since the family arrived--I've been wakened every morning before ten by an overly cheerful voice, occasionally accompanied by a whap to the stomach (and, admittedly, my abdomen is sizable) or pats on the arm or back--my sleeping position is on my belly, limbs splayed out (right hand beside head, left arm around pillow, right leg curled up, left leg straight out), and apparently this is a position that greatly invites people to wake it by physical contact. While I generally hold no objections to physical contact (except from people I have some animosity towards, or am unfamiliar with, or simply don't usually touch), the circumstances make it somewhat less than appreciated. And add to that the fact that the kid brother and I have still been helping to move heavy objects around--although the weight is decreasing, the work is still tiring--and that we commonly stay up 'til 1am watching The Nan

The electricity got cut off again the night before last: the third time in a week and on the same day as the previous post, too; it was terribly annoying, especially since it was night and everything was dark as well as humid. But the afternoon was okayish, because a short time after the previous post, the family was bundled into the car and we went off mall-strolling until we found a KFC with WiFi, upon which we settled in for the next three hours, during which we caught up on as much as possible of life beyond these shores--the nature of the family's lifestyle means that a large part of all our contacts live in a different time zone or continent altogether. I watched Transformers 2 last night; it was pretty good, even if it began to start throwing out--I can't decide if those were loose threads or plot holes or sequel hooks--near the end of it, what with suddenly having teleportation and robot ghosts (plus an afterlife!) and the idea of lineages and robot families (I can'

It has been a month since I typed the above post, or very nearly so; it's not all me being my procrastinating self really since I only got my laptop back yesterday (it was with a technician for the past two weeks) and I'd not thought to do the typing during the two weeks before that. Also, the laptop was a bit busted up: some time after the previous post, I had a fit of destructive experimentation (it's what I call it when I get the idea to study something by completely taking it to pieces, though usually it's limited to rather more easily replaced things) and began unscrewing the laptop in an effort to see if its internal bits were running okay. The Pig, when told about it, decided I needed semi-professional-bordering-on-amateur help (apparently he started his university days as a computer engineering student before deciding he hated studying electronics and switched to mechanical engineering), and so I screwed everything back on and took the whole lot to his house the

My last post was May 21st, which means I have--let's see--16 days' worth of typing-up to catch you up on, plus whatever ramblings I come up with on the side. Essentially you're in, dear reader, for another wall-of-text post that might just eat up my next three hours in typing. You'll probably take about one-sixth that to finish reading it, of course. Life is still much the same, but reading the May 21st post--mostly about the RAID driver--I feel it behooves me (that's a nice word, actually, behooves is. It sounds as if I were about to turn into a cow or some sort of cattle.) to elaborate about the life I lead here in Patience, or have led for the past two weeks-odd. I commonly sleep around 12am or 1am, waking around 11am or thereabouts (today I slept at 3am and woke at 11.48am, making it my latest yet), after which I descend the stairs. I am currently living with church friends--the exact relationship is friends-of-parents and parents-of-friends, but their children

It's been awhile since my last post, hasn't it? Or has it? I'm not too terribly sure myself--at any rate it's possibly less time than I think--or possible more. It's hard to tell; I've been in Patience for a little over a week now: my flight here was on the 18th and it's now what, 8 days? 9? since then. It certainly feels like a bit more. But one's sense of time is different when there's no assignments to do, or classes to attend, or suchlike. At the moment I'm not living in my own house, though my family does possess a house here; it's reasonably well-kept because a relative goes down every week or so to hang around it for a bit, make sure all the parts still work, runs the car for a bit and tops it up as necessary. I'm just not going there yet because I hate doing laundry and cooking and especially cleaning--sure, slipping around on soap water is fun, but not the kind of thing you want to do for a whole day especially when you've go