Helloooo!
Heh new blog specially to keep my Daddy and Mommy updated about my life in the hostel, while I'm far away from them from Mondays to Fridays. I miss home!
Yup so mostly the posts here will feature photos I take with my handphone on random occasions which I feel are worth recording.
Too bad I can't take photos while kayaking cos my phone isn't waterproof though. Speaking of kayaking.. today was a bad, bad day. I'll talk about that later.



I'm really really very proud of this cactus of mine. My mom bought this for me from Ikea a few weeks ago, and I've been taking care of it ever since. When my dad sent me back to the hostel later that day, one of its fingers actually broke. I was very very upset about it. Subsequently, while I was naming my plants, I was most hesitant to name it Mozart although it was my favourite looking cactus. This was mainly because I was high skeptical that it would grow well. Thus, I named him Haydn.
I definitely must say that it's been growing very well! Look, there are such obvious buds! I noticed them a week before, but now they're much more obvious! I wonder what happens when they grow too big for the pot..?
I would like to bring your attention to the second picture. Isn't the white glow around Haydn sooo very pretty? It's not editted, by the way! Those are its thorns. Told you it's a really nice looking cactus.



This is Mozart, one of my other two cactus which my dad specially bought for me to make up for Haydn's 'broken limb'. I guess I threw quite a tantrum about it. ): Sorry! Yup. Because Haydn's buds were realllly obvious, I noticed them earlier on. But it was only today that I took a closer look and realised that Mozart had very very obvious buds too! I really like them! I wonder why the cacti don't bud while they're at Ikea. It seems that when I bought them they were still quite plain. Hmm..

Anyway, as for my other cactus, Beethoven, it's doing really fine. It's just that I haven't noticed anything special about it since it looks mostly the same to me. It's the real typical kind of cactus you see everywhere, haha. But I still love it. It's Beethoven, after all. Oh, and there were another two potted plants my mom bought me? Hmm, the leafy one actually kind of suffered for the first week cos I didn't water it well and thus it started withering, but under my mom's magical hands, it actually revived and the purple flowers even bloomed! And for the next week that I watered it, it was looking pretty good as well but now it seems quite unhealthy. I hope the following week will be better!








hehe this was taken really long ago when I decided to stop by Kinokuniya to look at some books and ended up having tea at the Coffee Club instead. It's a pretty nice place, hurhur. The cake looks really nice, huh? It wasn't that tasty though.






This is a picture taken on my school rooftop, where the tennis courts are. I was lying down on some bench, so the pictures are taken in weird perspectives, but I find that pretty interesting. And the sky was a really nice shade of blue that day. I was practising my violin on the rooftop. Sounds really nice, huh - but actually because of the wind and the sun (sweat!!), I didn't feel very good playing. Haha. It's still better to play in classrooms! :D

Sighhhhh.
I miss my parents and my bed!
Today was a bad day for me at kayaking. I'm pretty sure I ate enough lunch (2 kit kat chunky bars, one box of ribena pastils, lots of sushi, baked potato, fish noodles, unagi rice, hiphopjelly icecream) but somehow I still felt very hungry while we were kayaking. As a result, I was pretty lightheaded. It might be because of my motion sickness too which was caused by the really bumpy bus ride to Kallang. Sigh, either that or I could've just felt that way because I ate too much and the bus ride just served to upset my stomach even more? Basically I was soooo very tired that I wasn't even doing any rowing and my poor partner Jacque had to do everything. And the worst thing is that in the end I couldn't even continue and had to stop halfway to go back to rest, so she didn't get to learn the rescue drills as well.
It's not a good thing to leave early either, though. Imagine, we were fresh out of the water, still drenched and soaked through. And I was possibly on the verge of fainting - remember, I haven't fully recovered from my last sickness yet (I ran out of medicine!!) - and soaked. But we had to walk along the freaking highway. How much sense does that make? It was so windy! And somehow we couldn't open the cupboard with our bags, so I had no towel to dry myself with. What to do?
The only way to feel warm was to run myself under the shower which thankfully had warm water. But imagine, after being under warm water and you suddenly step out into the wind again? Yeah, I almost thought icicles would start growing on my body. In the end, Jacque and I just sat down in a corner of the pretty dirty toilet and talked until we thought the others would be back. Then I helped wash the kayaks and everything else and off we went for dinner. Where I ate chicken rice! I intended to eat chicken rice, seafood mee sua and ipoh horfun. But the seafood mee sua stall was closed, so I didn't get to eat it. AND Gabriel was just being so anti "let-Jo-eat-all-she-wants". Because I have to seek permission from Jacque (she's my financial planner and money saver haha - isn't that what I'm supposed to do for myself since it's my intended careeeeer?) for whatever I want to spend on, I had to ask her if I could buy food too. As you can see, she wasn't very successful in stopping me from spending during lunch. I was given a budget of 7$ to last me throughout the entire day. But for break alone, I spent 4$ on candy and chocolate and Jacque refused to let me spend any more. Thankfully, I managed to get my junior to return me 6$ so I spent the rest of that on lunch (the noodles and rice and sushi and icecream). Haha.
Yup so I had to ask her if I could buy my food for dinner, but Gabriel just had to keep telling her "no, Jo musn't eat anymore". Bah, I'm hungry? I don't know why. I just can't seem to get full. And NONE OF THEM EAT THE CHICKEN SKIN? I don't get it. Firstly the chicken rice is so yummy. How can they not eat the skin? It's the nicest part of the chicken? I went around collecting all their chicken skin. Yay. YUMMY.
And the soup was so yummy as well! Ai Wei kept saying how much MSG there was in it but hmmm.. I don't know. It's yummy, and I drank 2 big bowls of it cos the others didn't want it. Heh.

Dinner was good, basically! And as usual, our entire gang infiltrated the last cabin of the MRT from Lavender to Clementi and very inconsiderately sat on the floor. Haha. I was really tired, and still had some minor headaches from my motion sickness (although I felt a lot better and was even hyper enough because of the good food at dinner). Yup then when we got to Clementi, Adabelle and I wanted to get the Tao Kae Noi seaweed so we went to get it at Guardian. It's pretty expensive..... Hmm. But it's really really once in a while so Jacque, please forgive me haha.

In other words I think the total expenditure for today was... More than 20$. On food alone. And half of that was spent in school alone. It's impossible man, school food is waaaaay too expensive.

BUT! I've saved almost 200$ already, according to Jacque. Although I keep withdrawing money to spend on what else but food. Yup. I'm really ill disciplined. But yup I'm hoping to save at least 500-600. My dad said he might buy me the violin from Music Essentials. The 1200$ one, which is the 2nd cheapest one there but really nice sounding. So if I can give 600$, then it wouldn't be so expensive? I mean, after all I saved up for it when I could've spent that money unwisely on... food. Which I'm sure I would, otherwise. Hehe.

Oh! I got back the results for HCL O's today. I called my mom first thing after receiving it and I'm glad she sounded quite happy - I think! I'm happy for myself, too. Although I didn't manage to score an A1, it is certainly better than the B3 I got for Chinese O's. I know that was one big screwup because I didn't even bother doin the exam properly. At least this time I was more prepared to answer the questions properly. :)

But when Eunice and I showed Laoshi our scoresheets, Laoshi took one look and saw the A2 and was like "WHAAAAAT? Which one of you scored A2??!!!" in her really really shrill voice. Sigh, I'm quite sure she was expecting us to get A1. I'm so happy Laoshi recognises that I have some talent at Chinese although I don't speak much in class unlike those geeks who simply try so hard to speak to Laoshi in their forced, unfluent mandarin. Sigh. I really miss attending Chinese lessons. I haven't written a single chinese word in... since last year, maybe? I'm glad I signed up for the Chinese to English translation module next semester! I'm quite oconfident in my translation skills at least, but what I really need is to ensure that I don't lose touch with Chinese just because I don't have formal Chinese education anymore.

Yup that's all for today. I shall go back to enjoy my seaweed and prawnrolls and yogurt and alphabet soup. Yummy supper! Just to let my parents know that I'm eating well here. :D We had fish burger for breakfast today! Yummy too! Although I'm craving for Fillet O' Fish from McDonalds now.. Maybe I can get somebody to order delivery with me in the middle of the night if I'm hungry. Heh.

(I'm not eating too much righhhht? I don't know. My appetite is getting a lot bigger these days. Bad!)