Okay, well, metal bow was just about as difficult as I thought it'd be.

Metal riser already weighs substantially more than a wooden riser; then add to that the two side stabilisers, which probably weigh about only 100 grams together, but when you extend your arm, holding 100 grams at the end of it makes it weigh slightly more than it should.

And then add the centre stabiliser which is the one which extends all the way out in front of the bow. AND which has weights on the end. Which weigh about another 100 grams alone, maybe? And when you consider that this stabiliser extends even further, that 100 grams on the end of the stabiliser weigh about three times more than they should.

Tiring, man...

And the problem that I previously had when I upgraded from a 25-pound wooden bow to a 28-pound one is back again; namely, I couldn't turn in my elbow and my form is all shot to hell. Well, maybe that's exaggerating; not ALL. My T-draw is still um.. half-intact, I think. Haha.

Also played around with Zhan Tao's bow for a bit; he's changed his bow. It's still a 34-pounder, but with a black Hoyt riser (I *think* it's a Gold-Medallist riser??) with Stinger carbon limbs.

Carbon limbs are um... well, simply put, VERY good stuff and hence, very expensive. The thing with carbon limbs that all our seniors have been telling us is that it makes your draw smoother and doesn't require as much strength; hence, 34-poundage carbon limbs, when drawn, feel more like 32-pounds. The same amount of power with less effort, in other words. You could say that carbon limbs are just more "flexible" than wooden ones.

When I was shooting with Zhan Tao's bow today, man, I could feel the difference immediately; Khim Nyang was right: "Once you shoot with carbon limbs, everything else will feel like shit." :D

So, all that aside, currently, my metal bow has a grey-black Samick metal riser, Samick Progress-1 limbs and is a 30-pound bow. Upgrade of two pounds. Heh... I was lazy, and didn't want to upgrade to things like 34 pounds; didn't want to take too long to retrain my form, since indoor competition is in June, and the rest of March and a good part of April are probably going to be spent mugging more than training.

All this is just making me appreciate my old wooden bow a little more; looks like good ol' Bloodsucker's going to be on hiatus till next year's junior comm steps in.

And on a side note, apparently Ivy Singh-Lim, President of the Singapore Netball Association, will be stepping down soon. Quite sad; I always did love how outspoken she was, and all her amusingly-worded insults. :D Enjoyed myself thoroughly that one time when she was on Channel NewsAsia's Primetime Morning and she was arguing with this other guy from the Singapore Sports Council over the subject of women in sports or something of the like. I've forgotten exactly what the subject was, but she was just giving him a hard time, man. I think the two newscasters were pretty amused themselves. :D

But, yeah, she has made a lot of headway for netball in Singapore; I wonder if anyone will ever do the same for archery. Coz currently, the President of the Archery Association of Singapore is this old guy (all right, maybe not old; middle-aged?) whom I don't have a terribly flattering opinion of.

But you didn't hear me say anything about that. ;)

Happy Good Friday; although that doesn't really sound right. Who says "Happy Good Friday", anyway? On hindsight, Good Friday isn't supposed to be "happy", is it? And on further hindsight, what on earth does Saint Patrick's Day celebrate?

Babbling again. Never mind me.

Went off down to Orchard with my family after church this morning; Mum wanted to go shopping for clothes at OG coz they're having 20% discounts in certain departments, and um, I was slightly fascinated by some of the things in the lingerie department. Especially the T-shirt Bra; it looks very... I have no idea how to describe it, but it looks very.. stretchy! And synthetic. Suede-like! Yeah, I think that's how I might describe it; it looks like it'd feel like suede.

It looks like it'd feel like those rubber puzzle mats that they have in playschools, the kind that have letters or things in the middle of them that you can push out and then put back in; y'know what I'm talking about?

Maybe I should stop talking about lingerie. :P

Ended up buying quite a lot of new clothes from Specialist's Shopping Centre later; well, "a lot" by my standards, anyway. :P I think my mum felt generous today.

I now have two sleeveless strappy tops, which I happen to like quite a lot, but unfortunately, my shoulders look very broad in them. The result of my archery training, no doubt... -_-

Oh well. Still looks all right, though. Aside from the tanlines of my shirt sleeves, which look quite hideous if I wear a sleeveless top, I've realised.

Oh, and I forgot to blog yesterday.. Yesterday, while Ivan and I were walking back from the canteen after buying lunch, nearing the end of AS1 Walkway, I noticed a guy who seemed to be trying to open the two high windows up on the wall; the ones that look like they haven't been washed in the last ten years.

But then he moved away and a little sparrow just fell off the ledge of those windows. Poor thing... By then, Ivan and I had stopped to look, out of curiosity; the guy tried to pick it up, but it fluttered away and made a beeline straight for me, haha...

I saw it coming towards me and thought that it'd pass behind me, so I turned to watch it go, but it never appeared on my other side, so it made sense that.. it was clinging to the back of my shirt.

Aww... I couldn't see it, but the very idea of it is just too cute for words. ^_^

The other guy spent about a minute trying to dislodge its little claws (talons??) from my shirt, and I wanted to touch it, but he took it back with him to the bench where he was manning one of the booths with his friends, so I didn't get the chance to. So sad. Oh well.

Today feels like a Sunday, man... Will have to wake up at 7 am tomorrow coz I'm going for training... and I'll be upgrading to a metal bow! YAY!!! :D :D :D

I love the smell of freshly-washed bedsheets... :D *bounce*

Was at home the whole day today, doing reading for my symbolic-interactionist perspective thing for my soci of deviance project and typing up my part, and from time to time, went downstairs to check on washing and hang out clothes.

I love washing day. Haha. "Washing day" is really just every Sunday in my household. Coz on Sundays, there's almost always at least one person home the whole day, so more washing gets dried, since we can leave it out in the sun. On weekdays, the clothes are usually hung up and dried indoors, since no one'll be home to take it in if it rains.

Washed three loads of clothes today! Whee!

And it was so nice while I was taking in the bedsheets; surrounded by the smell of lovely, dry, warm, crisp, clean bedsheets!! *bounce bounce bounce* :D :D

And I had my lovely IVP jacket washed, along with all my sisters' jackets and the sleeping bag that my sister'd used for her camp; my jacket smells lovely too. Haha. :D

One day, I want to completely cover the floor of an empty room with about half a metre of freshly-washed bedsheets and tumble around in them. So fun!!! :D

Got back my E Lang mid-term yesterday; did quite all right, though I think I still have a bone to pick with the issue of the "small hippo" not being "small". -_-

See, thing is, in the last section of the paper, there were these questions about what particular sentences entailed. There was one that ran like this: "Raphael is a small hippo. This entails:"

And one of the following five options was "Raphael is small."

And that turned out to be wrong coz "small" is a value judgment, and so "small" by a hippo's standards isn't really "small" in every context. (-_-)||

But further down, there's another question which runs as such: "(Name which I can't remember) gave his mother a beautiful gift. This entails:"

One of the following options was "The gift was beautiful."

And this was correct! And now, if I'm not wrong, isn't "beautiful" a value judgement as well??

Heck. Whatever. Got 30/40 for it, anyway, so I guess that's all right...

But anyway. Collected my Philo essay and first Anthropology reaction paper today; got a B+ for Philo and a B for Anthropology, which apparently could've been an A if only I'd read the instructions carefully and noticed that I needed to come up with three questions at the end of the paper. Darn. Oh well.

Things are going well, it seems... Maybe I've finally got used to Uni life after one semester.

Maybe it's just that being in love really does wonderful things. :)

Or maybe it's just my inner brilliance finally shining through. Heehee... :D

Busy busy busy busy weekend. And today's competition was a very wasted one. But more on that later.

Yesterday was Open House and the day before competition; so I was at the SRC at about 9 am, helping to set up the field, moving target boards and frames and various other things. Running around with hazard tape proved to be just about as fun as I thought that it would be. :D

Archery is a dangerous sport, after all, so you see, we had to cordon off the field. You know all those lamp posts around the field? Yeah, the hazard tape went all around those lamp posts, and then up the staircase to the bus stop just next to the field, and then down again. I only did about half of that perimeter with Cheow Hui; Shiling and Huiting did the other half, going up to the bus stop, but it was fun, nevertheless. :D

I told Ivan on Friday night that "Running Around With Hazard Tape" sounds like a good name for a book. Or maybe even a good title for a story. I still intend to use it sometime. If I can come up with a story that might fit the title, that is. :)

So, from about 9 am to 12.45 pm, I was helping to move target boards and frames, playing with hazard tape and such. By the time I had to leave to get changed and report to the Dean's Office for the faculty tour thing, we'd done up the hazard tape, set up the command post, marked out the field perimeter and 70m lanes, set up ten target boards, and were in the midst of marking out the 50m lanes.

So I left for faculty tour; not surprisingly, many of the people giving the faculty tours are Arts Club affiliates. :P We had to meet at LT 9 to wait for all the NS guys who were coming for the Open House, and they were showing a video in LT 9. You know, one of those videos which schools show to sell themselves, their curricula and environment and blah, blah, blah. Saw quite a few people whom we recognised in the video; Joey, Steven, Ridtz, among others. All Arts Club people, of course. :P

And then, the biggest surprise of all: after a shot of the canteen, suddenly, there's a shot of ME, sitting at a table with Tim and (year 2) Clement and another person, laughing at something.

I did a double-take when I saw that, man.

Couldn't whoever was shooting have picked a BETTER person to shoot?!? I mean, weren't there more pretty girls or more um.. I don't know, "fitting situations" for him/her to film? Argh.. my face shall be showed to thousands of potential undergraduates, possibly even after I graduate! ARGH!! How embarrassing! The HORROR! The absolute invasion of my delicate privacy!!

I'll shut up now. You're probably not interested in my distress. -_-

If I'm lucky, maybe for the brief 2seconds that my face is shown, it will not imprint itself at all on the viewers' minds, and I shall remain perfectly happy in my completely unknown state. In all probability, that will happen, seeing as there is nothing quite outstanding about me, after all! Hooray for plainness and monotony and ordinariness. Is that even a word?

Never mind.

Vice-Dean Pauline Straughan came in to give them a short talk, and set the theme for the day: NTU and SMU bashing.

She said things like how NUS was ranked 18th best university in the world (although I can't say that many of the students here believe it) and how our Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences was ranked 10th best in the world, whereas "where is NTU??" and "where is this thing called SMU? It's nowhere to be found!" And also, that we were ranked "way above universities like Cornell, etc." Ivan immediately turned to me and laughingly told me about Henry's indignance at that. Henry is in Cornell, you see. :D

Anyway, paired off with Ivan to give tours to a group of the NS men (and later, a group of regular folk just wanting to get a better view of the faculty); one of the guys in our group was quite vocal and happy to chat with us, while most of the rest just tagged along and didn't ask many questions.

So there we were, leading them around, expounding on the confusion which finding your way around the Arts Faculty can be (let alone the whole of NUS), introducing the various departments and talking about majors, selling NUS Arts to them; for Ivan, that also meant introducing the, in his words, "view" around Arts. -_-

This.. "view" simply refers to the female population of the Faculty.

Yes, Arts is the faculty which has the largest proportion of girls in the whole of NUS, so Ivan felt that this might be a selling point with these guys who're fresh out of NS, and who've been deprived of the everyday sight of the female half of our species for about two years.

Riiight. If you say so, dear. -_-

One thing which I found particularly entertaining was telling them about how confusing it could be, finding your way around.

One of the first things that I realised in my first semester was that the more confusing thing when you're trying to get around, is not knowing where the respective buildings are and such; there're signs for that. What's more confusing is that you have to figure where on earth one building ends and where another begins.

See, in NUS, Arts has seven blocks, named AS1 to AS7. The thing is, all these blocks are arranged in something like a circular pattern, and are all joined to each other, to facilitate more convenient movement, I suppose. But this also makes it difficult to tell where one building ends and where another begins. Furthermore, NUS is built into the side of a hill (Kent Ridge, specifically), and what makes it more confusing is that the third floor of one block may not be on the same level as the third floor of every other block.

Allow me to illustrate.

When you take the lift up from the first floor of the Old Admin Block, turn to your right and turn immediately right again and walk past the SELF centre, you'll come to this sort of junction where continuing straight onward will lead you to AS6, but turning right once more will mean that you're in AS1. And note that while you're on the same floor, at that level, you'll be on the 4th floor of the Old Admin Block, but simultaneously, on the 2nd floor of AS6 and the 3rd floor of AS1. :D

Confusing, isn't it. *Grins*

Here's an even better example: when you walk up the short flight of stairs from the third floor of AS3 to AS1, you'll find that you've climbed from the third floor of AS3 up to the first floor of AS1; and if you stop at the top of those steps and look to your left, at the end of that corridor is a sign on the far wall saying: "AS2, 5th Storey".

I'm sure that you can tell by now that all this just amuses me to no end. :D :D :D

Well, moving on now...

After faculty tour, took a short nap before heading down to SRC to do my sighting for tomorrow's competition. And the most unexpected thing happened.

I got a score of 313 on the 122 cm target!

I'd been trying for the last couple of weeks to beat my personal best of 298, but always fell short, landing somewhere at 294 or so, and now, after I haven't been training for a week, I manage to break the 300 points barrier??

The best things happen to me at the strangest and sometimes most opportune of times. I'm not sure if I should be happy or sad about that. :P

So I took it to be a good omen, and felt pretty good about today, but while the first four ends of today looked just as good, things went wrong in the most Murphy's Law-esque way.

Equipment malfunction. The elastic loop of my finger tab broke, so it was no longer tight anymore, and each time I released the string, the finger tab would slide forward, so my release was affected, and consequently, the flight and path of my arrow.

I tried using Chwan Sang's finger tab, but I just wasn't used to it, and so that was really the beginning of the end for me. Oh woe is me... especially after 300+ was such a real possibility then too. Sob.

On the bright side, we finally got our IVP jackets today!! Haha.. and now they come with caps too; dark blue caps with the Team NUS logo across the front. I was joking that perhaps they came up with caps as well to make up for the hideous design of this year's IVP jacket.

Well, all right, it's not downright abominable; I exaggerate. It's just that the previous year's design was much better. This year's jacket has bright orange sleeves and has much less aesthetic appeal as compared to last year's, which was mostly dark blue.

Oh well. It's still an IVP jacket, anyway. :D

I loved Rachel's concert!!! :D :D :D

7 songs; thought the first two were all right, James Barnes "Romanza" was well... something you'd expect of James Barnes, really. But the the third piece was really nice. "Children of Sanchez" was very heavy on the drums, but really enjoyable. Apparently it was from a film of the same name. Interesting; shall have to go look that up and find out what that was about...

But after that, the remaining four songs were DEFINITELY good. :D

"Phantom of the Opera"; I played that with CJC Alumni Band late last year for our combined concert with the main band, and while the NUSWS were playing it, I could still remember all the 3rd clarinet parts and fingering!! Hahaha...

Sadly though, Pam can play the flute solo in "Phantom" a lot better than the NUSWS player who was playing it.

Oh, but they didn't do what we did; during the pause before the title song comes on, what we did (or rather, what our conductor did) was that he completely stopped the music, had the lights switched off, and had Stephanie scream from back stage. :D

And man, her scream was good. :D

Then the lights came back on and we came in with the first chord of the "Phantom of the Opera"; as in, that song for which the musical is famous.

After that, "First Suite in E-Flat" by Gustav Holst; we tried playing that once, while I was still in CJ, but we never performed it. And I heard that at CJ's concert last week, they played that.

Then there was "Mononoke Hime", which is without a doubt, lovely, and finally, "Armenian Dances Part 1", which CJ Band played for the SYF before my year's SYF! :D

Was a lot of fun; firstly, mainly because of the excellent repertoire, and secondly because I was sitting in between Ivan and William, and could tell them a lot of stuff about band, haha.

Like how during "Phantom", I could point out the English Horn to Ivan (I only realised later that Mezraq was playing it O_O) and during the intermission, William asked me what was the difference between the alto, tenor and baritone saxphones. Really, it's just the length of the air column. Oh, and Ivan finally got the chance to see an E-flat clarinet! It was used in "First Suite", but you couldn't really hear it. Just as well, in my opinion. Yes, I'm still of the opinion that E-flats are horribly screechy. :P

Got very high after the concert, which Ivan and William will probably attest to, since I was laughing and giggling and hopping and skipping all the way back while we were walking back to Arts from UCC. :P

But it wasn't my fault, really! The repertoire was just too good not to love! And even Ivan's sis (another clarinetist) agreed that the repertoire was damn good, so see, I'm not the only one. :D

Well, Carnival's finally over, and Kenny's sales over the three days did pretty well, haha. Let's just put it this way; he managed to cover the three days' rent for the booth within the first day, and *still* earn a lot more. :D

Also managed to spread quite a lot of publicity about the online book store and stuff; things are looking up! :)

If you're wondering what I'm talking about, it's Kenny's online bookstore, which can be found at BooksActually.Com, but the site won't be up for a few weeks or so, so you could check back next month, I think. :) Me will be putting a permanent link up in the links section of the sidebar on the right. :)

Saw Xiaxue yesterday, and good grief, she had a horrific amount of makeup on. O_O

And yes, I see Ivan was right when he referred to her as a "mini blogging celebrity". Even in her two-and-half-inch-high heels, she was still shorter than me. Ivan says that she's even shorter than Denise. (-_-)||

And in other news, Soci of Deviance project deadline has been extended to the 21st! A week!! Yay!! *Does a happy little jig* :D

Means only two deadlines next week, and at least I'll be able to portion the work out a lot easier. Oh, and I'm going for Jie's concert tomorrow... :D

BOOKS!!! YAY!!!

Haha... Today was the first day of Arts Carnival, and Kenny was there selling books, with Rachel, William, Sida, Ivan and me as free labour, haha. Well, maybe not really free labour, coz in return for the help, Kenny keeps telling all of us at irregular intervals that if we "see any book that (we) like, just take hor."

So when I first stopped by the booth this morning with Ivan after our 8 am lectures, I took his last copy of Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere", which I'd previously seen while helping him to sort the books alphabetically. Apparently, he'd given the other copy to Rachel. :D

I think the only thing which comes close to the feeling of having a LOT of books must be selling them. And that's only because the money makes it appealing. :P Otherwise, there's no way I'd sell them. And then again, I wouldn't sell anything that I really loved. :P

Ivan says that Xiaxue is coming tomorrow; some "mini blogging celebrity", in his words. Frankly, I don't really find her blog that much of a great read; I much prefer blogs like mr brown's, if only I actually read them. Haha. But I've seen them before, a few times when Ivan showed me stuff that mr brown blogged about; his writing/blogging style appeals to me much more.

And E Lang mid-term wasn't so bad! :D

I mean, I think we were supposed to study morphemes and syntax and semantics, but the test was more on morphemes than anything else, and the only two PS trees which I had to draw were really simple ones. Although I did get stuck on that question for about a minute. :P

Oh, but you know what really scared me when I walked into the LT? People who had stacks of notes about two or three times as thick as mine. Well, okay, that's not a lot since my stack of lecture notes and tutorial handouts is barely half an inch high, but still. Slightly freaky.

Oh, but I had Dr Madalena's textbook with me. *Grins smugly* Madalena's textbook makes things so much easier; that big fat textbook that Sunita Abraham had us buy has too much unnecessary stuff in it; Ivan agrees with me.

Am so gonna resell that fat textbook next sem. In which case, I hope Sunita Abraham still lectures EL1101E next sem. But then again, in that case, I pity the new batch of EL1101E students next sem. (But that's not really my business, so who cares. *Evil grin*)

But Ivan said that the later parts of the book are applicable for his level 2000 and 3000 E Lang modules, so if I do all right for the intro mod and end up going ahead with my plan to do a minor in English Studies, then I guess... I might keep the book around for use in my later, higher level E Lang modules. *shrugs* We'll see.

All right, yes, I've been lazy and haven't posted for um.. *squints at calendar* more than a week. Oh well.

I might decide to catch up with all the back lot or I might not, and just bring it up in more recent posts. I just happen to be rather... bored at the moment after (trying) to study E Lang for the whole day, so here I am, blogging to relieve stress.

Gerri seriously dislikes it when she has too much to do in too little time:

Gerri's list of deadlines/awful dates:

1. 7th March
English Language mid-term
*entertains the silly notion of getting Ivan to do the mid-term for her, since he was an E Lang major-- and abandons it within a second because of its innate stupidity* :P

2. 12th March
NUS Open House-- I'm giving Faculty Tours for about three hours, and the rest of the day, I'll be helping the Archery Sub-Club set up the field for our the NUS Open which we're hosting the next day.

3. 13th March
Archery-- NUS Open
MUST TRAIN HARDER!!! MUST WIN SOMETHING!!!

4. 14th March
Sociology of Deviance group project is DUE!

5. 17th March
Anthropology-- 2nd Reaction Paper due.
Must watch the film and do readings.

6. 18th March
Essay critique for SSA2208 due...

7. 19th March
SSA2208 field trip in the day, and then I'll be playing at my alumni band's concert in the evening.

Sob. Feel like slaughtering myself on the spot just looking at all the stuff which I have to do!!

Does anyone ever notice how they'll promise themselves that they won't slack in the next semester and they'll work really hard and they won't leave everything till the last minute, and EVERY semester, you end up slacking ANYWAY?

Yeah.

Sucks, it does.

I need to do filing too. Crap. I think I'll fit in the reading for my Reaction Paper somewhere next week, so that I can get that out of the way. And it looks like I'll be reading my History notes to sleep for a while.

Argh.... stupid slacker.. ngh.

*drums fingers on keyboard in a bid to control automatic response to slap herself*

Yeah, I can't slap myself anymore. Because Ivan says that he feels "very heart-pain" whenever I engage in my semi-compulsive minor self-abuse.

I do that sometimes, when there're very few people around, and when I start panicking because of stress or a lot of stuff to do or something; I'll start rambling and panicking and then I'll just slap myself or something to make myself just shut up and be quiet and think for a while.

Obviously, more often than not, I end up immediately regretting the hitting the second after I do it, but it does work. It's bad self-adjustment, I know. But it works.

This, coupled with the fact that I am very accident-prone, makes Ivan constantly say that I need to be "locked up in a padded room and kept under 24-hour surveillance and heavily sedated".

-_-...

What kind of life would that be, dear?!

Listening to my techno playlist at the moment; haven't played that in almost a month, I think. FNP Remix of "Poison" just ended (I didn't even realise that it was playing..?!) and "Rave Heaven's" starting.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to my E Lang now, so to leave you all on a brighter note, come for my concert, okie? :)

19th March, at Singapore Polytechnic; tickets are $5. Or so my conductor tells me. So I shall trust him on that. Because I don't know any better, really. All right, I'm off.