Synopsis of highlights at Rag "camp" (",)

Day One:

At the Beginning...

Okay, so apparently Titus is the only house that is staying together (to build a part of e structure, that is. One of the towers, to be specific) for Rag; all the other houses have their OGs spread around in different areas of building and stuff.

No Dolus people at camp; only four of us Caedor girls (Mary, Sharon, Yingyi and me) and Alex, and two Gladius guys: Song Kwang and Alvin. And there's this guy from Opto called Jian Wu who seems to like tagging along with us and helping out, so I guess he's sorta an honorary member of the group, haha. :P

Altho Alex only came much later in the day; he was stuck at his camp for half the day waiting to collect his IC. He and Gareth both ORD-ed on the first day of Rag "camp". And when Alex came he brought us almond and cherry nougat from Marks & Spencer!! Yay.... :D :D

Went around NUS collecting materials and stuff-- wood, cardboard, waste paper and newspaper; I think we alarmed our group IC with how enthu we were. Hee. :D Not bad eh, Titus? :D

Group IC's name is Shaun; nice guy, very fatherly person, really, always being concerned with the girls and everything, haha.

Debbie dropped in later in the day! :D Us Caedor girls went out with her and Shaun for dinner; Debbie bought us grapes, then left after dinner coz she wasn't staying over, and then we went to NTUC to buy stuff for breakfast the next day. Oh, and Mary brought durians too! You know, one of those one packet for $2 kinda things outside supermarkets; we managed to pick pretty good ones too, haha. :)

Thing is, in NTUC it was slightly weird, coz Shaun's 1.83m tall and we're all just teeny little 19-year-old girls (he's 24 this year), so I made a remark that it was like he was some dad bringing his four daughters out shopping and it stuck: we called him "Daddy", "pa pa", and "A-pa" for about half the time during the camp!! :P

Y'know what's even funnier, tho? He responded when we called him that; every single time!! Haha.... ah, but he's a nice guy, so he's prob just humouring us or something, haha... :P

Strange thing is, he seems quite amused by it too. :D

Night Activities

Kicked a soccer ball around the "bridge" area near e Arts Club Rm for a while... half an hour or so; I learned that I can actually coordinate my leg and eyes! Well, somehat. :P Was really quite fun, haha.

Bathtime. Went to Eusoff Hall to bathe; Shaun took us there and waited for us. Felt so bad, but uh, he wouldn't be persuaded otherwise, so.. yeah. So nice of him. :)

Should really stop saying "nice" so often. But I have no other word to substitute it with!! Argh. Vocab, wherefore art thou bloody vocab.

I love the Hall's bathrooms, btw. They're lovely. :D Nice and big with shower cubicles that have plenty of space to hang or place your stuff.

And I thought that PGP's bathrooms were pretty good already. :P The Hall's bathrooms are about twice as big as PGP's. And they have heated water. :)

Steven and some other people went off to Clementi to watch soccer at about 3 in the morning, leaving the Arts Club Rm quite empty; speaking of Steven, he's actually really different from during Arts Camp-- turns out he's a really funny guy-- he seemed kinda uptight then! Oh, and I learned how to play mahjong! Hahaha.... :D

And apparently, I had really good luck; according to all the people that were helping me-- Alex and Song Kwang and Jian Wu. I could see that, I think, but I still didn't really understand it, haha. :P

Jasmine kept popping in at times while we were playing; she was worried about Mary and Yingyi who were sleeping outside on the benches, and she kept asking the guys to sleep outside with them to keep them company!

Thus, Jasmine earned the post of "Mummy". :P

So Sharon and I slept on the couches in the room; Jasmine came in later and took an armchair and Shaun followed after a while.

The soccer people came back at about 6 am. Apparently, after the match ended at 4 plus, they went to play soccer till 6 am. Crazy bunch. :P

Day Two:

Woke up at 9 plus, despite the fact that I slept at 4 plus. My body clock is sometimes too finely tuned for my liking. Anyway, woke at around nine and just lay there all snuggly-buggly in my sleeping bag listening to the soccer people come back and talking and whispering as they settled down to find a place to sleep. Quite fun, really. Finally decided to get my lazy arse up and start work at about 9.45.

Yingyi and Mary and the guys were all awake already; sitting around on a bench outside and talking; Song Kwang said that they all slept outside, so they were up at about 7 plus coz by then people were walking past and staring at them, haha.

So, had brekkie and everything, then started tearing up more newspaper and folding magazine pages into some spike-like thing that they want to use for scales or some other sort. Did that all the way till lunchtime.

Meanwhile, Steven entertained us with his semi-wide variety of Bible and racist jokes.

Ah, and after lunch, Gareth dropped in, and he brought those lovely mint chocs; you know, those lovely mint sweets with chocolate centres; I love those. :D And he informed us that apparently, mint lowers a guy's sperm count.

Hm. Shan't comment. :P

Steven's gay "tendencies"

Rather unnerving, really. Big macho guy like Steven talking about how he'd turn gay for only one man in the world... Well, okay, he's not really big, he's more like a little macho guy, haha. Like Wai Lun!! Hahaha!!!! Yes, anyway, he was talking about um.. Tony Leung, I think. About how even though he's 40, he still has a great smile and a lovely face and how when he goes to watch Tony Leung's movies and Tony Leung smiles on the screen he (Steven, that is) just "melts in (his) seat"... O_O

I tell you, all of us in the room were really staring at him by then. It's funny, but kinda unnerving. :P

Oh, and he sings a lot. He walks around singing a lot of chinese and cantonese songs; singing like one would in the shower. :P

The Titus House family...

Yeah, we're starting to develop into a family. Literally. Steven gave us bak kwa sometime in the morning, so we made him our "stepfather" since we already have Shaun for "pa pa"... (lame, aren't we??), and since Debbie's our self-proclaimed "house nanny" as it is, we've officially recognised her as such, haha, coz she came in the afternoon on the second day with slices of watermelon and honeydew... she's always feeding us with fruits. :)

So, at last count, we have a dad, a mum, a nanny, and a stepfather. Although having a stepfather seems wrong since we have a father. Hm. Maybe Steven should be an uncle or something.

More Stuff

Yingyi's mum came through and got her factory workmen to drive over to NUS with a lot of stuff for us; cardboard boxes and newspapers and some wood too.

Then some of the guys came back with about ten bags of aluminium cans that they'd brought back from Senoko. Christ, they stank.

And we had to wash them too. :s

I think there were about 6 guys--um.. Song Kwang, Alvin, Jian Wu, Shaun, Bobby and Haoran-- and Yingyi and I went into the gents with them and we crowded out the whole place, washing 6 bags of cans; it was like an assembly line thing: the guys washed them with soap and passed it down to Yingyi and I and we rinsed them twice with water before sorting them by colour in different bags and everything.

Jian Wu shuffled back and forth changing the water for us and getting basins; Shaun and Bobby straightened and tidied up the bags and eveything once in a while...

Actually, quite fun. :P But very dirty.

Most popular things that we find in those cans: cigarette butts, tissue paper and straws. Not very pleasant. :P

Yingyi and I took slightly longer to bathe that night... :)

Kicked the football around again; Steven and co. left to go watch football again and Shaun and Jasmine and some others went for supper; that left Song Kwang, Yingyi and me to laze around. Alex came back later, so the four of us just sat around outside the room and talked crap. :P

Bedtime: AS7. Okay, Shaun brought us there, and we were all expecting that we'd sleep around on the first floor since apparently people usually sleep there, and there's plenty of space anyway, but he brought us up to the third floor instead, just outside the Chinese Department, and there were armchairs and everything that we moved around and joined together to make makeshift beds. Plus, the aircon control panel was open, so he switched it on and we had air-conditioning the whole night! Even better than the Arts Club Room, coz all they have in there is leftover cool air after the central control turns off all the air-conditioning at about 9.

Well, I did wake up kinda semi-frozen in the morning. But that was coz I was too damn lazy to open up my sleeping bag, haha.

Day Three:

Last day... did more stuff, tearing newspapers, tearing and folding magazine pages, and now, cutting cans.

Not much different from what we've been doing the past two days.

Gareth dropped in again towards the end of the day, as the seniors were setting up the barbecue, and we were sitting around and stoning in the room; he brought his iPod again; he'd used it to "hijack" the radio the day before; so cool!! :D

So while we were all sitting around idling, he decided to tech me how to appreciate techno. Really, the stuff that he said... well, I've kinda observed that about techno, but never really thought about it and stuff. He said lots of stuff like about how techno is usually really long coz it builds up, and they layer one rhythm over another slowly, slowly, one after the another; that sorta thing.

And some kinds are actually listenable; I've heard those before. And he has a lot of songs that I like on his iPod! :D

Barbecue on the roof of Central Library at the end of the day. Quite cool, really. :D

Coz the stairs to the roof are kinda blocked by the debris from the renovation going on, plus it's on the roof; gives it a kinda unauthorised gathering kinda feel. Fun. :)

The view from the roof is also really lovely; sunset is really nice. Jasper says that the view from outside the old Arts clubroom was better; that must've been something.

They lit the area with lightsticks and tealights when it got dark; the tealights were quite nice, but most of the lightsticks that they used were green, so it looked semi-spooky too, haha.

Ah, and there was the kinda lame "initiation" ceremony. :P

See, Steven's explanation was that, at Rag, we build a float, so now, we give you a mini-float". Which was a Coke float, to be exact. So yep, each of us got a Coke float, and a tag that says "Ragger" with a white space below it; I think our names are supposed to go in that space, but I've just hung it up anyway; it looks nice, anyhow. :)

So yeah, went home after that; very fun 3 days, haha. :D