Yarrow Yarrow Qwerty Fellow!!!11.11!1/1/11

So, it's the New Year. 2011, one year closer to 2012 and then we'll all see if the Mayans were right when they predicted general doom and catastrophe--or, at least, we think that's what they predicted--as far as I know all there is to it is that their calendar ends on our equivalent of December 2012, or something like...

At any rate exams are over. It's a little hard to believe they were only--what, two weeks ago? My final paper was the 23rd December, and it's now the 1st--a little over a week, then, about nine days. And in 9 days I've gone through so much relaxation I wouldn't mind if the next semester started the coming Monday, because I can already feel the fluff building up between the ears. But there's still 3 weeks to go, most of which I'm projecting will be spent in Singapore. I keep telling people I'm here for the FYP, but honestly there aren't any projections on that yet; I'll start work on the literature review portion of the thing on Monday, I think, and there's something I want to try out on the little metal square we've textured so far, and of course we can always email the professors to see what to do next in the absence of input from the postgrad student helpers.

So, what's gone on since the day before the final paper? ...a great deal. Obviously. The past 9 days encompassed the final paper; the post-exam celebrations, which segued into Christmas Eve celebrations; Christmas proper; Boxing Day; a few days back in So Hour; New Year's Eve, and then today--New Year's Day proper. And I shall document all of these, in as exhaustive detail as I can, simply because I can, and I don't want to forget.

The final exam began at 9am, and was probably the hardest exam to study for. Not because it was so vague and all-encompassing and so full of strange terms (really the business world is a strange and weirdly complex one), but simply because it was after everybody else's exams and the hostel had been steadily emptying out all week. The second of the two neighbours in fact left the night before, around nine or ten, to stay overnight in the airport and catch his flight (the next day at 8, I believe it was); and we chitchatted--I was bored, left the door open for fresh air, and was pacing the way I do when reading. It's a new habit, and only surfaces when I'm reading my notes. Very odd, but I suppose I have to burn the calories somehow--not that I was getting much in the way of calories, since during the exams I kept a steady diet of one meal a day on average, and not even an extra-large meal to make up the difference. At any rate I paced, eventually paced my way into the corridor, and found the neighbour periodically going in and out of the room to throw away stuff; from which I correctly surmised his imminent departure. (That and the fact that the earlier-departing neighbour had said so too.) So we made desultory small talk, over the course of which he expressed surprise at me being shirtless; I suppose being from northern climes leads to one always being clothed, while I find myself most comfortable with a nice cool breeze going on--in fact it's raining outside right now and I remain obstinately shirtless in the room, with both fans going at full speed, so yeah. We chitchatted and he left, and shortly thereafter the roommate appeared--he had his final paper at around the same time as I.

The final paper itself was more difficult than envisioned, being rather different from the style in which most of the past years' papers had been set, and was depressing; but after it I had my last helping of pork-rib noodles for the year from the aunty at the NIE canteen, and then I returned to my room. Some time after that--I think it was around 2pm or so--I was called out to begin the post-exam celebrations with a few other Crusaders; those celebrations consisted of a giant lunch at Yuki no Yaki, which essentially was a buffet, during which I learned to not overcook meat--my favourite meat was the dory, mostly because it's soft and fatty and has a nice texture to it if cooked very carefully and frequently turned over so it doesn't get overdone. And there were also sashimi and various other meats (the lamb chop I took came out pretty good too); of course I had eaten the pork-rib noodles earlier, and so was already partially full and so didn't eat quite as much as I normally might have; but I flatter myself I still outdid most of the other people at the table. On the other hand--I'm not sure, but what is it about people that makes them so bad at estimating a suitable portion size? We certainly took much more food than we could finish--well, I didn't; I took and ate and took again--but some of the other people there didn't seem to have any sort of sane estimate of their appetites. It's a mercy the restaurant didn't enforce the SGD5 per 100g wasted food rule, or we'd easily have shot into SGD50 or so penalties.

After the meat and vegetables (yes, we had vegetables too) there was an ice-cream thing that was immensely fascinating; they had little cups full of the ice-cream mix, warm liquids all; you poured those on a metal plate, and the liquids hardened. In essence it was the reverse of a hot plate; so you simply poured the mix on the plate, used a spatula to spread it around, and then scraped up the stuff to eat (plus toppings); three people went through, if I remember correctly, 13 or 14 cups of mix.

And after the entire bout of eating, we staggered out of the restaurant talking about how very very full we all were; and then somebody suggested pool and somebody else wanted to play DotA or StarCraft 2, but not everybody wanted either of those, so we settled for going shopping; it's a good thing we did, too, because I found a quite... interesting thing to buy for the Christmas Day gift exchange--so I bought it, and shortly after I also had one of my rare wins at Monopoly Deal, which was nice.

The next day was the 24th; I don't think I did anything for most of the day, but the evening was spent with the people of the House of Bread in a Christmas Eve celebration, during which we had dinner and a few rounds of Pictionary and Pictionary Telephone; one thing I very much like about the house rules is that the words are user-made instead of the standard set, which creates a great deal more flexibility--that night we had things like "liquid nitrogen", "eigenvalue", and "the understatement", which just goes to show that when you're playing Pictionary with words that come from university students and graduates, you've got to have a certain amount of background knowledge. Yesterday, for example, somebody came up with "Pyrrhic victory", of all things. Really, I ask you.

And on Christmas Day--well! Christmas Day was all fun and games from 12pm onwards, also at the House of Bread (I've been spending a great deal of time there over the past number of days, you might as well get used to hearing about it); the gift exchange was when my bought item came out and was assembled--it was an AirZooka, basically an SGD39 item that was SGD9.90 due to a sale; the thing basically consists of a plastic cone with a flexible membrane at one end, so when you pull and release, it propels a volume of air forwards at sufficient force to knock over small objects, flutter papers, give people a ringing in the ears, etc.Very worth it; I got a stack of memo pads, still unopened, out of the whole thing. Other than that there was food and drink and laughter and giggling, and I think we actually only ended it quite late--6pm? 7pm? Later? I'm relatively certain it was dark out by the time I left.

Boxing Day was Sunday, with all the things that entails: church (extra early, since I was playing that morning), the House of Bread regular meeting, and more hanging around 'til late.

The next day, the 27th, I met the Gobbler and we set out for So Hour around 2pm; we arrived at around 5pm, and that set off a series of discoveries on my part of things left behind--notably, my toothbrush and my laptop charger--which necessitated buying (toothbrush) and going without (laptop). But the time there was enjoyable: lots of good, cheap food; chats with the grandfolks--grandpa had a trip to China recently and was full of stories to tell about it--during which I also realised my command of Mandarin has massively regressed and at the moment it barely deserves to be called command, but still--and going around mussing up the cousins' hair, messing with their MMORPGing, and staring at the very fat hamsters. How the hamsters get so fat on a diet of neglect and ignorance, I will never know. We stayed there until Thursday afternoon, during which we had lots and lots of food, and even now a bunch of bananas sits on the table before me and biscuits sit on the bed beside me--all taken from So Hour because my grandfather is convinced that without such things I will starve and wither away to nothing. (It in fact seems that I have gotten thinner since the last visit--either that or some misperceptions have been going on.) Or of course perhaps he's simply being his usual generous (to me!) self; though it also seems he's gained a keen sense of his own mortality and kept on ending his speeches with "if I'm still around by then".

And then we came back on the 30th of December 2010, having left at 2pm because I had to do course registration (on the Gobbler's Mac, which I kept on having to figure out the hotkeys for--admittedly it's quite user-friendly once you figure out the shortcuts and things, but those take such a time to figure out!) and then we did our packing an dgot our food and went off; we arrived in Singapore around 6pm. I don't think I did anything productive the rest of that day, or for most of the 31st either, apart from resting and eating; and the evening-to-night of the 31st was entirely taken up in a celebration in the House of Bread where more Pictionary, more food, and a viewing of Despicable Me (we watched it without subtitles because the subtitles menu kept giving trouble) during which some people--I was looking around!--got suspiciously teary-eyed; and then singing and watching the live telecast of the fireworks at the bay.

(Ah, yes, now I remember. I spent the morning of the 31st cleaning the room--I had had sandwiches for dinner on the 30th, and managed to drop an egg-and-lettuce sandwich on the floor--they're sold for SGD1 each after 6pm at bread shops and I had bought two. At any rate the sandwich was dropped, the floor became oily, and so the next day I went and got a broom and dustpan and mop and cleaned the floor thoroughly. It turns out there was a LOT of dust and dirt and plastic wrappers, along with a behind-the-door backlog of flyers and things, which I got rid of; the mopping had to be done thrice because quite a bit of the dirt was stubborn and wouldn't be got rid of by sweeping, but the soap water did the job. So I did have some level of productivity that day!)

And then it was over, and we all departed around 1am--the trains were running late; I and a couple of friends walked back to the room from the nearest MRT station. It's a good thing the night was clear, but starless.

...this, I think, brings us to the present, and now my narrative has caught up.