From A Computer Not Mine
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 are away studying and haven't returned for summer break yet, so I'm occupying one of the spare rooms. I usually eat two meals a day: breakfast/lunch and dinner: the slash is there because I generally eat either breakfast (a light meal) or lunch (a heavier meal), almost never both, which is understandable given the times of waking.
My day is thereafter usually spent online, periodically clicking on the Hunter's Horn on MouseHunt (I reached the maximum level in Restaurant City some time ago and have therefore gotten bored of it and its bandwidth-sucking abilities), mostly reading webcomics and TVTropes and occasionally blogs--Crazy Scary's blog is remarkably often updated these days. Quite likely he is also feeling the effects of this large block of free time.
My hosts are somewhat healthy-living, and usually return to the house around 5 or 6, upon which they often (about four days a week at least, at last count) immediately change clothes and head right back out to a little beach club where the wife plays tennis, the husband walks sedately on a treadmill, and I roam the beach for about an hour or so. The beach is a lovely one, not too terribly polluted, lots of life, and extending quite a distance every way. Leftwards are the small shelled creatures--miniature whelks and hermit crabs and regular small crabs, the balls the crabs produce while making holes dotting the surface of the beach in pretty patterns, partly due to the patterns made by people walking over those balls and flattening them. This goes on until one reaches a small jutting bunch of rocks, which one could conceivably go around and continue on if the rocks didn't keep jutting out into relatively deep water. Rightwards, the sand is washboard-like and very hard, which hurts my heels but then dulls into a sort of blur thumping pain that is barely noticeable after awhile due to the comparative great pleasure I take from walking in water. When the tide is out, this section of the beach gains about 30 to 40 meters more in the direction of the sea, and one can walk out onto large patches of seaweed and watch beached starfish frantically scrabble their way back to water or, failing that, burying themselves and leaving behind little five-pointed indentations in the sand. This section of the beach has fewer crabs, but they are larger and crabbier--upon seeing your shadow, they dance and raise their claws up and then proceed to run in a random direction, forcing you to not move for fear of accidentally stepping on them as they run under the shadow of your foot. More often than not they run into an incoming wave, then stop and bury themselves so quickly you start to think all crabs receive formal training in ninjutsu--or that ninjas have performed extensive study into the hiding methods of crabs. Further on, there are jellyfish--small blobby things with stubby tentacles that drift apparently completely at random, and are immensely adorable; however they drift in seaweed territory, and it leads to some moments when something soft brushes up against the back of your calf and you're not quite sure whether it is jellyfish or seaweed. At the very end of the right side of the beach there is a hotel, where you can occasionally see barbecuers (almost always foreign). Walking to the end of either side, from the club, takes about half an hour; thus a round-trip usually lasts an hour, if you don't occasionally stop to watch the aquatic life or look at the scenery (for the sunsets are quite beautiful things).
That's only the average day, though.
I am not the only one in the church here who is back on summer vacation; there are two others, a brother and a sister, who were from here but have gone to Canada to pursue studies and have returned from there, and last week five of the sister's seniors, who have graduated, came over as part of their graduation trip--it seems to be a world-wide phenomenon, this graduation trip thing. At any rate they came over, and that kicked off a few days of entertainment--semi-solitude is all nice and well, but after awhile one begins to crave physical contact with other humans of roughly one's own age group.
We went to an island (that was the first day I met them), which was nice. Man U Can Island's rather too popular with the tourists, unfortunately, and the beach isn't sandy--it's composed, apparently, mostly of bits of broken coral and shell which makes it extremely painful to walk on for long periods especially if you don't like squinting at the ground. However, there were little omnivorous fishes that we found when we started eating in the water; we were, at the time, eating buns and fruit and chicken, and fed them buns first; they liked it. So a bit of fruit went in, and that was received even more enthusiastically, upon which a bone with some meat was offered them and they immediately went all Vashta Nerada on it--the bone was picked clean before it hit the seabed. And that was just the little fishes barely the length of one finger joint--they were gossipy, it seems, because they soon attracted larger fishes (around forearm-length) that would see a bone and nibble on the fingers holding it. We also went banana-boating that day. Banana-boating involves the boaters (at least three, at most five) sitting on a speedboat and taken a safe distance away from shallow water (in our case we went practically out of sight of land). At that spot, the driver unties some ropes, dropping a large inflated thing made of three balloon-cylinders made of hard plastic into the water--a cross-section of it would probably look like an upside-down Mickey Mouse silhouette. On the topmost cylinder is where the boaters sit, and it has little handgrips; the feet are supposed to go on the two smaller ones. The entire thing is connected to the speedboat by a long length of rope, and once all the boaters are on, the speedboat takes off and the driver attempts to drop the boaters into the water by making the boaters overbalance--either through sharp turns, or go-stop methods, or whatever else their creativity comes up with. Each set of boaters is allowed two falls, and then the ride is over. After that we snorkelled in a No Snorkelling zone (we later found out that this was because of the tides, which turned the No Snorkelling zone into a No Exit zone), got reprimanded for it but got a lot of lovely views of fishes (much more colourful than the Eat Everything Fishes!) and photos out of it; and after that one of the Canadian graduates found a sea cucumber and much fun was had--my personal favourite is when I managed to poke it enough times to get it to spew water halfway across a table's width. We then played cards (apparently my eyes are so narrow that my winks go unnoticed), ate, and went away. I'm still waiting for those photos to turn up on Facebook.
A few days later we went whitewater rafting, though the Wikipedia article says we actually only went roughwater rafting, the term whitewater being only applicable to rivers of difficulty level 3 and above; we went on one of difficulty level 1 and 2 (there were two sections of river but I'm not sure if it was respectively or not). It was entirely fun, mostly because getting river-water in your mouth doesn't taste as bad as getting seawater in the mouth; also, rivers are great fun to swim in as long as you don't stand and get your foot stuck (not that that occurred). The company even supplied a couple guides with waterproof videocameras and shot DVDs that they later sold to the rafters, and (naturally!) we bought one copy amongst the eight of us and I think I'll be getting my duplicated copy tomorrow if the company wasn't tech-savvy enough to use copy protection.
I've been going out for dinners and suppers with the Pig, so it's not like I just sit around the house all day typing extra-long blog posts; however he's maintaining his habit of randomly falling sick which makes these rather erratic. My laptop persists in its troubles, and has refused utterly to even load ever since a few days ago when I and the Pig attempted to open it up and cure it; the surgery perhaps was far too invasive (the Pig insists that it's all due to me touching the heat sink and processor), and now I fear the laptop will need professional care or replacement. I'm hoping for professional repair to be effective, because replacement will be very expensive and besides I forgot to back up all the data I have on it and would hate to lose it. And then if the laptop's restored to functionality I shall start on that external hard drive!
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 are away studying and haven't returned for summer break yet, so I'm occupying one of the spare rooms. I usually eat two meals a day: breakfast/lunch and dinner: the slash is there because I generally eat either breakfast (a light meal) or lunch (a heavier meal), almost never both, which is understandable given the times of waking.
My day is thereafter usually spent online, periodically clicking on the Hunter's Horn on MouseHunt (I reached the maximum level in Restaurant City some time ago and have therefore gotten bored of it and its bandwidth-sucking abilities), mostly reading webcomics and TVTropes and occasionally blogs--Crazy Scary's blog is remarkably often updated these days. Quite likely he is also feeling the effects of this large block of free time.
My hosts are somewhat healthy-living, and usually return to the house around 5 or 6, upon which they often (about four days a week at least, at last count) immediately change clothes and head right back out to a little beach club where the wife plays tennis, the husband walks sedately on a treadmill, and I roam the beach for about an hour or so. The beach is a lovely one, not too terribly polluted, lots of life, and extending quite a distance every way. Leftwards are the small shelled creatures--miniature whelks and hermit crabs and regular small crabs, the balls the crabs produce while making holes dotting the surface of the beach in pretty patterns, partly due to the patterns made by people walking over those balls and flattening them. This goes on until one reaches a small jutting bunch of rocks, which one could conceivably go around and continue on if the rocks didn't keep jutting out into relatively deep water. Rightwards, the sand is washboard-like and very hard, which hurts my heels but then dulls into a sort of blur thumping pain that is barely noticeable after awhile due to the comparative great pleasure I take from walking in water. When the tide is out, this section of the beach gains about 30 to 40 meters more in the direction of the sea, and one can walk out onto large patches of seaweed and watch beached starfish frantically scrabble their way back to water or, failing that, burying themselves and leaving behind little five-pointed indentations in the sand. This section of the beach has fewer crabs, but they are larger and crabbier--upon seeing your shadow, they dance and raise their claws up and then proceed to run in a random direction, forcing you to not move for fear of accidentally stepping on them as they run under the shadow of your foot. More often than not they run into an incoming wave, then stop and bury themselves so quickly you start to think all crabs receive formal training in ninjutsu--or that ninjas have performed extensive study into the hiding methods of crabs. Further on, there are jellyfish--small blobby things with stubby tentacles that drift apparently completely at random, and are immensely adorable; however they drift in seaweed territory, and it leads to some moments when something soft brushes up against the back of your calf and you're not quite sure whether it is jellyfish or seaweed. At the very end of the right side of the beach there is a hotel, where you can occasionally see barbecuers (almost always foreign). Walking to the end of either side, from the club, takes about half an hour; thus a round-trip usually lasts an hour, if you don't occasionally stop to watch the aquatic life or look at the scenery (for the sunsets are quite beautiful things).
That's only the average day, though.
I am not the only one in the church here who is back on summer vacation; there are two others, a brother and a sister, who were from here but have gone to Canada to pursue studies and have returned from there, and last week five of the sister's seniors, who have graduated, came over as part of their graduation trip--it seems to be a world-wide phenomenon, this graduation trip thing. At any rate they came over, and that kicked off a few days of entertainment--semi-solitude is all nice and well, but after awhile one begins to crave physical contact with other humans of roughly one's own age group.
We went to an island (that was the first day I met them), which was nice. Man U Can Island's rather too popular with the tourists, unfortunately, and the beach isn't sandy--it's composed, apparently, mostly of bits of broken coral and shell which makes it extremely painful to walk on for long periods especially if you don't like squinting at the ground. However, there were little omnivorous fishes that we found when we started eating in the water; we were, at the time, eating buns and fruit and chicken, and fed them buns first; they liked it. So a bit of fruit went in, and that was received even more enthusiastically, upon which a bone with some meat was offered them and they immediately went all Vashta Nerada on it--the bone was picked clean before it hit the seabed. And that was just the little fishes barely the length of one finger joint--they were gossipy, it seems, because they soon attracted larger fishes (around forearm-length) that would see a bone and nibble on the fingers holding it. We also went banana-boating that day. Banana-boating involves the boaters (at least three, at most five) sitting on a speedboat and taken a safe distance away from shallow water (in our case we went practically out of sight of land). At that spot, the driver unties some ropes, dropping a large inflated thing made of three balloon-cylinders made of hard plastic into the water--a cross-section of it would probably look like an upside-down Mickey Mouse silhouette. On the topmost cylinder is where the boaters sit, and it has little handgrips; the feet are supposed to go on the two smaller ones. The entire thing is connected to the speedboat by a long length of rope, and once all the boaters are on, the speedboat takes off and the driver attempts to drop the boaters into the water by making the boaters overbalance--either through sharp turns, or go-stop methods, or whatever else their creativity comes up with. Each set of boaters is allowed two falls, and then the ride is over. After that we snorkelled in a No Snorkelling zone (we later found out that this was because of the tides, which turned the No Snorkelling zone into a No Exit zone), got reprimanded for it but got a lot of lovely views of fishes (much more colourful than the Eat Everything Fishes!) and photos out of it; and after that one of the Canadian graduates found a sea cucumber and much fun was had--my personal favourite is when I managed to poke it enough times to get it to spew water halfway across a table's width. We then played cards (apparently my eyes are so narrow that my winks go unnoticed), ate, and went away. I'm still waiting for those photos to turn up on Facebook.
A few days later we went whitewater rafting, though the Wikipedia article says we actually only went roughwater rafting, the term whitewater being only applicable to rivers of difficulty level 3 and above; we went on one of difficulty level 1 and 2 (there were two sections of river but I'm not sure if it was respectively or not). It was entirely fun, mostly because getting river-water in your mouth doesn't taste as bad as getting seawater in the mouth; also, rivers are great fun to swim in as long as you don't stand and get your foot stuck (not that that occurred). The company even supplied a couple guides with waterproof videocameras and shot DVDs that they later sold to the rafters, and (naturally!) we bought one copy amongst the eight of us and I think I'll be getting my duplicated copy tomorrow if the company wasn't tech-savvy enough to use copy protection.
I've been going out for dinners and suppers with the Pig, so it's not like I just sit around the house all day typing extra-long blog posts; however he's maintaining his habit of randomly falling sick which makes these rather erratic. My laptop persists in its troubles, and has refused utterly to even load ever since a few days ago when I and the Pig attempted to open it up and cure it; the surgery perhaps was far too invasive (the Pig insists that it's all due to me touching the heat sink and processor), and now I fear the laptop will need professional care or replacement. I'm hoping for professional repair to be effective, because replacement will be very expensive and besides I forgot to back up all the data I have on it and would hate to lose it. And then if the laptop's restored to functionality I shall start on that external hard drive!
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