Panthera Sapiens Ellipsis: The Blog

My dad's birthday was yesterday. To celebrate, we got him shirts from Hong Kong, as detailed in the last post, and some cake (moist and delicious and French Cheese and decidedly unhealthy, and we bought it at a discount too!), and a Wii to distract him from the nightly Chinese classical TV adaptation; the last series ended a couple nights ago and we've apparently decided that he will not get started on another bunch of love triangles, young martial students, and wise old men who haven't had access to a good barber in the last fifteen decades. Granted, the CGI are interesting and I enjoy pointing out the tropes to my kid brother, but eventually you can only take so much of the main character becoming insanely strong (to the point where he walks past and trees crumble to dust in his wake) but still can't see through the thinnest lies the next random assassin tells him, proving that he has a pure heart of gold and is completely guileless. Or completely gullible. Oh, and he...

I got back from Hong Kong yesterday, although considering that's not quite technically correct; the correct version, I think, would be to say that I left Hong Kong the day before yesterday and arrived home yesterday: the train ride took 13 hours and doesn't count as a place in itself, unless you count "between places" as a place itself. My two kid siblings and myself were visiting an aunt and her husband, who both live there; I'm still unable to work out their citizenships short of asking them directly, and I don't want to do that. My aunt is definitely a PR of the place, or at least on a residential pass; the uncle-in-law, though, appears to be a citizen or maybe also a PR--but his mother lives in a little hut there so I suppose it's more likely that he's a citizen by birth there. Still, I have no idea. We arrived in Hong Kong one day after we left Fifth Hun: again, by train, 12 hours between places. It wasn't a particularly pleasant trip, but the...

What a lot of time has passed since the last time I typed anything here! It speaks volumes about how dreadfully I tend to neglect my own need to record things in case they disappear off into the vague recesses of my memory, and in fact I wonder whether it's at all possible for me to record everything quite as fully as it would need to be, if it is to jog my memory at all in the future--at least, whether it's possible to do so without causing this particular post to cover about half the entire page; then again, at the speed at which I read, it shouldn't be too tough to read through anyway. So, let's see. What has happened in the past 15 days that I've forgotten to record here? It's a mercy that I've got photos, though my method of separating them into various folders based on theme means that it's quite difficult to find out anything in any particular order: much like my own memory, really. I can probably list a lot of things that I know happened, but the...

Well, yes. It's been almost a week, in fact about 10 days, since I last typed in here. The explanation is simple: there is another Dell laptop, whose charger I've been using all along; but that charger was taken for the other Dell laptop when my siblings decided they needed that laptop for the end-of-semester exams that they've been having all this week. In any case I only just realised that the house has a couple of international-standard socket converters, so I'm using one of those and my own charger now. Another reason for the absence, quite simply, is that I've been fairly busy for the past bit of time and so haven't had the opportunity to do anything about it until now. Let's see, then... interesting occurences that have occurred lately and that I still remember--then again, if it was monumental I should remember it anyway, so anything I don't remember here can't be too particularly monumental. The first of these interesting experiences, then, s...

The past few days haven't been exactly the best of my life; it's taken me about three days to get over a miniature panic and depressive phase, no thanks to the University (which started it off really). It's not the nicest thing in the world to receive an email that tells you that your application to remain in the hostel has been rejected, and especially when you know you can't argue with that statement because even you can rationalise about why you should be rejected anyway... In any case, yes, it looks as if I won't be living in Fifth Hun for 60 days after all: quite a bit less really. After all, I can't waltz back into the hostel around the 2nd of August when I was supposed to hand in the keys to an empty room on the 15th July (that, according to Herr Robson, is the correct date to surrender the ownership of the room). Which now leads to me frantically Googling and asking various people if they've managed to stay in the hostel and wondering how come they m...

I'm predicting that the WordPad file I'm currently typing all these bloggings on will grow quite freakishly huge by the time August rolls around and I actually start posting all this up; by which time, of course, it'll all be sadly outdated and be of no interest whatsoever except to whatever obsessive person decides to read it. After all, even I know that reading another person's entire life musings borders on the extreme side of interest. At any rate... well, I'm now in Fifth Hun, with all my family except Gobbler and the Empress. Tomorrow is my mom's birthday and we're all going out for steak, on the condition that we dress up for the occasion. Maybe I'll make a card, except I don't have anything to make it with. More likely I'll get a tub of vanilla icecream from the store tomorrow and sprinkle Oreos and M&M's into it and make a sort-of-Flurry. I like those things. I don't know what the two youngest siblings have in mind, but it...

I had a rather disagreeable morning. First of all, my phone woke me up; although I did set its alarm clock to go off at 6.30am, I never find it pleasant to be woken up by any artificial means. It's just a pity my biological clock thinks the day begins at noon, is all. And then I shut the singing thing off and dozed off, and next thing I knew it was 7.30am and I had to wake up because I needed to get some stuff done (that stuff will be the subject of the next few paragraphs). Now this was a bad thing because I was being woken up artificially for the second time in one morning and because I had no time for a shower (which I had somehow forgotten to take last night and was planning to take in the morning). Well, so that was that for waking up. Breakfast cheered me up enough that I managed to get my passport, passport-sized photographs, and some money together and went off to A. Park--interestingly enough, there are places in Malaysia with English official names--to apply for a visa....