Win-Lose Condition

I woke at 10.30am today, 2.5 hours later than usual--and in fact I only woke at 10.30am because I have an alarm setting on my phone for when the 8am alarm goes off and I want to sleep in a bit more. Left to my own devices (no pun intended) I would probably have woken up a long time after lunchtime; not that I'm particularly hungry at the moment, I did plenty of eating yesterday and the fullness has got carried forward.

I think it's the sleep debt forcibly paying itself off, though; I haven't been sleeping very early for the past few days, mostly because I and a friend have gotten hooked on playing board games and we've been spending a fair bit on new ones. Well, we've only bought two, so far, but they're pretty addictive games--the first one was Shadow Hunters, which I played twice or thrice a long time ago at the Settlers' Cafe and liked, and the second was Munchkin Quest, which we've been playing over and over because the rulebook is just that difficult to comprehend initially. They're both fun games, though. And of course the staples like Bang! and Citadel and Monopoly Deal and Saboteur are all over the place. At any rate having these games around, plus both he and I being quite blase about schoolwork--we usually get the work done in the daytime and use the night for playing about--means that he keeps on calling me up to go play a game.

I don't think I've slept any earlier than 2am since Sunday night (that was the night we obtained Munchkin Quest).

We also made takoyaki the night before last; it was surprisingly fun, and again demonstrated to me a certain... short-sightedness, perhaps. We've been planning to do some cooking, since we usually make at least one meal together every semester (kind of as practice for when we have to start living independently and cooking becomes more a necessity than a hobby) and we haven't done any this semester. So he looked up the recipe on the Internet and off we went to buy the ingredients in the afternoon after lunch. I'll just say here that I hate shopping with a vengeance; the aisles are too narrow for two shopping carts to pass each other without scraping the shelves and possibly accidentally knocking some stuff to the ground, and that's not taking into account the people wandering up and down the aisles to look for whatever it is that they want, the people squatting on the ground trying to decide between two or three items, the baby prams left sitting in the middle of the aisle because the parents can't be bothered to push the pram as they go along... if it were up to me really I'd have taken the prams and sent them careening into the nearest wall and see what happened, but I'm not chaotic enough to do it. And then actually finding the items you want is difficult in itself--the dairy products are here and the baking products are there and the vegetables are arranged in a perfectly ridiculous fashion. Very inefficient for the customer, though I suppose the supermarket does want the customers to walk all over the place and maybe they'll do some impulse buying of all the shiny stuff they have to keep walking past. At any rate we finally found the various ingredients, after nearly two hours of slowly inching our way around people and prams and other trolleys (and what is it with old aunties? They just stand there with their trolley in the middle of the aisle and if you so much as scrape them as you try to get past you get the evil eye and the death glare! Fortunately I'm quite capable of a death glare myself.) and then we got in line to pay and then we went back to the hostel.

The cooking proper only commenced around 8pm, so I napped in between the getting-back and the cooking--we'd both only fallen asleep around 3am the night before due to a round of Munchkin Quest (each round takes about 2 hours to resolve)--and at 8pm or so we started getting the stuff ready and carrying it to the pantry. Then I found out he'd invited about five other people along and so the tiny pantry was now filled with seven people learning to cook takoyaki for the first time. As it turns out that was a good thing, because we had grossly underestimated the amount of takoyaki that can be prepared from 600g of takoyaki flour (apparently it's a special blend of something and something else that creates a particular texture): every 150g turned out to produce something like 40 to 50 takoyaki, and the packet we had was 600g. Do the math and you'll see we wound up with somewhere between 160 to 200 takoyaki (my rough calculations on the night itself put the number at slightly higher, something like 216) amongst the 7 of us. But at any rate when I saw the little crowd my first thought was oh no, we're going to have to get supper too. It was fun, though, the cooking; once you get past the mixing and the chopping of the tentacle into tiny pieces, the cooking basically consists of lightly oiling a specialised metal dish with ping-pong-ball-sized indents and then pouring the mixture in, and adding a bit of chopped octopus to it; you then let it cook 'til the outside is hardened but the inside isn't, and then you take a couple of toothpicks and turn it over. Ideally the inside gooey mixture then drips out and forms the other hemisphere and when it's fully cooked, you take it out and it should look like a little light brown ball. Of course this is to massively oversimplify, there's a lot of fiddling with the gas stove involved, but you get the idea. The turning over of the half-sphere turned out to also be surprisingly fun, and so it became the most popular part of the procedure.

I have a patch of numbness on the left side of my right middle finger, stretching from just past the base of the fingernail to just after the outermost joint; it's been there for awhile, really, ever since the incident when I cut that finger and it turned giant and green--the doctor put something on to numb it and then cut it open to extract the pus, but ever since then it's been kind of stiff and numb. I thought it'd go away, but then that finger's started itching and little bumps have started occasionally appearing near the numb patch. And of course the numb patch is growing... I don't think it's anything life-threatening, but it's certainly something to contemplate. At least if I ever need to go wolf on that finger I'll know which side to do it from. At the moment it's not itching, but for whatever reason the skin's coming off of it and the layer under the skin is toughish.

There's a meeting with the professors later to go over the rough draft of the report--which means I'll have to print out 72 pages or so of report plus appendix and then we'll be looking over the stuff and hopefully they won't decide it's been horribly written and will need to be entirely redone--not that I can't do that in a few days, but it'll be a hassle. Still, we'll see! Tomorrow ought to be the last day of labwork, since it'll just be SEMing and from then on it'll be reports and discussions and rearranging the appendices to make sense and look nice and professional.