The end of the two-day Singapore Polytechnic shoot.

I didn't participate coz I have mid-terms around this period; I had one on Friday (yes, *during* the mid-sem break) and I have one tomorrow.

Only four of the Standard Class guys took part-- Wai Xin, Chris, Ervin and my dear baby, Joseph. :) Personally, I think it's a good thing they took part; after the Standard Class archers were denied the chance to participate in IVP this year, I think it's a good thing that they at least get some experience and take part in a full shoot.

The Sembawang shoot wasn't really a full shoot in the sense that there was only one round of 6 ends of 6. In a proper shoot, there should be two rounds.

Anyway, I'm proud of the guys coz they brought back the Bronze team medal! They were up against some pretty fierce competition, although when they were fighting for third placing (coz they got beat by the Pasir Ris uncles *again*), from the very first end, from the way their opponents were shooting, I could tell they had a very good chance of coming away with the medal. :D

Pictures:


Just before the team event, lining up at the waiting line; Ervin, and Joseph behind him.


Ervin shooting, followed by Joseph.


This photo is their version of the "band of brothers" shot; during last year's IVP, Chwan was going around snapping pics with his camera and he took a photo of Nicholas, Weiquan and Weizheng walking back after retrieving their arrows which really looked pretty cool. For comparison, here's the original picture:





The guys-- from left, Ervin, Wai Xin and Joseph-- after their team event. This was the photo where they were supposed to look proud or arrogant or something. :P


The guys with their medals. Chris on the left there was the "reserve". :D


Another picture of the guys with our coach, Sunny Low...


And the last picture of the day, which included everyone who was there to support them-- which really was just Sylvia, Chris and me on the second day. Most of the others had come down to support them the previous day, the day of the individual ranking events. But after Sylvia sent out the message that they'd won third place, the messages came flooding in from everyone. :D

YAY!!!!!!

Dance Production is over!!

And I'm seriously not being biased, but I thought the production itself was pretty good-- the acting was all right, but I thought the dances were what really made the $18 and $25 tickets worthwhile.

Shazzy's mum even messaged her during the intermission to say "Bravo, worth paying", and all the Wardrobe girls cheered. :D

Then again, Shazzy's mum knew that she was in Wardrobe and after the seeing the beautiful dresses that we'd sewn for Sera and Claudine's dance, you'd have to say that our Wardrobers are pretty damn good. Not to mention that there's only *ELEVEN* of us sewing costumes for about SEVENTY dancers, most of whom are involved in more than one dance, so that makes it *at least* a hundred and forty costumes we had to make..?!??

Whoa. We rock. Hehe.

Here're some pictures that I took tonight:



My backstage pass. Pity we couldn't keep them.


The room allocated to Wardrobe at UCC.


Everyone at work. Thank goodness on the night itself we weren't left with too much to do. Or else we'd really be in trouble.


The um.. speaker of doom. The PA system is connected throughout the entire backstage area-- two floors worth of rooms and corridors: our floor which extends out from behind the stage, and the basement where the dancers' dressing rooms and access to the orchestra pit were. During rehearsals for the last two days, we'd constantly be hearing things like "Paging for all dancers" or "Paging for all actors; report to the stage now".

During rehearsals, the PA system also let us hear exactly what was happening on stage. And on the night itself, we heard things like: "Everyone, the doors are open and the audience is streaming in," "Actors, please be ready, we're starting in 5 minutes time," and "Dancers for the first dance, please be ready at backstage now."

You can probably see how the speaker might make us panic; we were just hoping that Wardrobe wasn't paged for to do anything drastically last-minute.

Now I'm just hoping that they'll release a DVD of the performance or something; I really wanna see it!! :D

Valentine's Day this year for me was probably not as happy as it could've been, but I'd like to think that my baby and me made the best of it. ^_^

This week is packed since my Hall's Dance Production, "A Feast of Fate", is on this Friday, and Wardrobe (which I'm involved in) is rushing to put all the finishing touches and alterations on all the costumes, and as if that isn't enough, Sets has asked for our help in making some things which they need, like the tablecloth for one of the earlier scenes, and on Tuesday night I even hemmed a length of cloth that was 14 metres long. O_O Don't ask me why. I don't even know what it's gonna be used for.

Every night this week has thus been devoted to helping out at Wardrobe, where we've been stationed in the Reading Room, which means staying as late as we can, getting as much sewing done as possible. Last night, we moved everything (costumes, both finished and unfinished; sewing machines and various other little tools like scissors, bobbins and unpickers) to UCC, and since UCC closes at 11 pm, we had to leave before then. Which means that for the first time, we could all actually leave Wardrobe before midnight! :P

When I told my dear baby that I'd have to be away at Wardrobe even on the night of Valentine's Day, the poor thing was understandably upset. Our first Valentine's together too. Sigh.

So he suggested celebrating a day early instead, and maybe have dinner somewhere else another day. Upon which I decided that I'd give him the chocolates that I'd got for him, sitting in the fridge in the Arts clubroom since I don't have a mini-fridge of my own in my hall room.

Ta-da. Truffles from Julius Truffles, a little online chocolate "store" which you can find here. :)

This was the special Valentine's Day set; from left: 3 peppermint truffles, 3 orange truffles, 3 strawberry, 3 vanilla and 3 rum. The last one you see there which doesn't look quite round is the last piece of three "Volcanos"; a concoction of chocolate, dusted with cocoa powder and with melty chocolate inside. :) There's only one left there coz my baby and I had already had one each. Lol.

Baby got me a pillowcase; it's one which I thought was really cute when we saw it, so he went back and got it for me without me knowing. ^_^ It's black with blue wording on it, which reads: "I don't like to sleep alone." Aww... Oh, and plus a sunflower yesterday, for Valentine's Day itself. :)

I actually like gerberas (or African daisies, as they're otherwise known), but sunflowers are fine; they're even *happier* flowers than gerberas are. :D

DP is tomorrow; finally it'll be over and done with and we can all do something else with our evenings after 7 pm other than sewing!! :P

Was helping out at DP wardobe last night after I got back from work at AS7.

The radio was tuned to Class 95, and the DJ was conducting what she called her very own "Valentine's Idol" contest, where people would call in to sing a bit of a song which was special to them and their significant other, in a bid to win dinner and weekend stay (I think) for Valentine's.

Usually, the DJ would answer the phone, make a bit of small talk, then slide into the topic of what the special song is and what their significant other's name is.

At some point, I just thought it'd be kind of amusing if a lady called up and wanted to sing that song to their girlfriend.

And then I thought it might be even more amusing if a man called in and wanted to sing to his boyfriend.

And then I wondered if that happened, which would be more likely to win? ;)

Been pretty busy this week so far, so haven't had the opportunity to blog about IVP till now.

It seems that my tradition of messing up during IVPs still stands. Sadly. Sigh.

In Year 1, my finger tab broke and ruined the whole competition, a real waste, especially since I was hitting scores of at least 50 per end at the time.

In Year 2, I was still getting used to the weight of my 34-pound limbs and my clicker and I got tired way too fast.

Now, in Year 3, things are kind of a waste all over again.

The day started out well; I achieved my highest score ever for 50m distance with a 122cm target--285/360 and achieved my highest scoring 50m end at the same time-- 54/60. This actually put me in a pretty good position to win the vouchers that Lim Chee Wee was offering to the winners of each category, provided that they could achieve a certain score for the 50m distance as well.

For C-Class Ladies, the requirements were that the champion for the event had to achieve a score of 285 at 50m with the 122cm target face.

So I hit the 285, but I didn't end up being first. Coz I screwed up my 30m end.

I'm one of those strange people who shoots better from 50m than 30m; although my all-time best for 30 m is higher than 50m-- 289/360-- you realise that it isn't *very* much higher. Which just really proves that Gerri needs to train more for the 30m distance.

So the girl who was placed second at the end of the 50m round (this NTU girl called Shuen Hui) caught up with my score during the 30m end and she wound up first instead. Sigh.

And due to some strange circumstances which I'm still unable to fathom, I wasn't able to shoot two arrows in the middle of the 30m round because of a lack of time. Double sigh.

So I watched my individual gold medal get away from me.

Team event was also kinda screwed up. I still don't really understand how it happened, especially since my team (sans Janice, since she was away on holiday, so she was replaced by Pecilius) had defeated the team which we were first up against for the first round of the team knockout event.

We got beat by 4 points. Damn. Sigh.

Oh well. I'm told that there's always NUS Open. Hopefully we'll all do better then.

We didn't send any of our Standard Class archers this time (although the juniors still turned up in the late morning to show support) since NTU threw a spanner into the mix by suddenly increasing the distance for a Standard Class shoot to 50m. I personally think that they just decided to make things difficult for us coz our Standard Class trashed theirs at the Sembawang shoot, but hey, that's just me. :P

The small team that we sent did pretty well, though. :)

C-Class Ladies: Kristy-- Bronze, Myself-- Silver
C-Class Ladies' Team: Kristy, Pecilius, Me-- Bronze
C-Class Men: Weiquan-- Silver
C-Class Men's Team: Special mention coz Weizheng, Nicholas and Weiquan are fourth place for a fourth time. Don't worry guys, one day you'll overcome that barrier. We have faith in you...! :)
Open Class Mixed: Zhan Tao-- Bronze (for his first competition in Open Class, I think it's pretty admirable.)

(And speaking of Kristy, I've just realised recently that Kristy writes really engaging blogposts. Go see her IVP entry here.)

So, in the end, a silver for individual (again; I'd better not be stagnating at second place this year, especially after stagnating at 4th place for the whole of the last academic year) and a bronze for team event.

And since it seems Lim Chee Wee's standards were too high and no one managed to fulfill both criteria for the vouchers, the $300 vouchers for archery equipment were instead split up among the top 3 placings for each category, so I got a $100 voucher as well.

On the bright side, the 300-point barrier is starting to look more and more breakable to me. Maybe it's my (relatively) new ACC arrows which are doing wonders for my groupings. Maybe it's all the time I've spent tuning and actually learning this time about what I'm doing, which has given me confidence. And the increasing scores are helping too.

Maybe I'll start aiming for a score of at least 290 during NUS Open.

Meanwhile, yet another thing which is making me happy is that a little corner of my table in my hall room is accumulating all this semester's trophies. :)