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