After my last post, I (obviously) left the house. Actually I helped my sis bring her five thousand bags of food downstairs, then I ran across the overhead bridge and took the bus to HarbourFront.

I spent 1 hr 10 min on the bus (no. 10), winding round Kallang and Katong and Siglap and Bedok (Bedok especially took waaaaaaay too long) and finally stopping at Tampines Interchange, where I conveniently missed 18. I couldn't be bothered to walk in the hot sun so I waited for 18 instead of taking 38.

Reached Sam's house around 4.30 p.m. and rang the doorbell. To my surprise it was Sam's mother who opened the door. Apparently Sam was having a shower, and even more surprisingly, YQ hadn't arrived yet.

I stared out Sam's bedroom window (where you can just barely see Melville Park). Then YQ arrived. By the time Sam emerged from her shower, we were sitting on the floor and talking.

YQ and I spent a lot of time talking on the floor, because Sam kindly had to spend such a looooooooooooong time transferrings mp3s from her computer to her phone. :P After that I helped her install The Curse of Monkey Island, and then we all crowded round the screen and watched the opening credits.

Apparently everyone was so engrossed with the game that we almost forgot about dinner. I was starving as we (well, okay, Sam and I - YQ was still playing) trooped into the kitchen. YQ joined us soon after and we all watched the three pots of water beginning to boil. One pot did boil, so we put the instant noodles in.

YQ: Why is the fire so low?

Sam: Because the ring (or whatever you call it) is bigger than the others so the fire is lower.

...

*flames all go off*

*everyone stares at stove*

Jessica: What happened? Is it going to explode? ARE WE ALL GOING TO DIE?!

*runs out of the kitchen*

Anyway, turned out that the gas chose that exact moment to finish. This was quite interesting actually, because I didn't even know Sam's house uses cylinder gas.

So Sam's mother called the gas people, who said they would only arrive in half an hour. The noodles were too soft to take out by now, so we just left it in and returned to Monkey Island.

In the end we had to throw away the soggy noodles. When I say I don't really mind soggy noodles, I don't mean soggy till they're bursting out of the pot! :P

We finally managed to have our long-awaited instant noodles.

After that we lounged around until it was past 9 p.m. and we decided to leave for Tampines Central by bus.

The place was crowded but we managed to get seats inside Cartel. Finally got to order our Buy 2 Get 1 Free Spiders. Sam and I also shared a plate of wedges, whilst YQ ate a slice of chocolate cake.

There was a lot of confusion over everyone's share of the bill after that. It made my head hurt. Even though I wasn't actually the one trying to figure everything out. :P

Then we could FINALLY leave the place. Everywhere had closed for the day, so we had a nice long walk home, where I kept trying to convince Sam that there were lots of brown things and lizards waiting to spring out of the bushes we were walking past.

We got back, having decided during the walk which movie we wanted to watch.

After we had all showered, we settled down in front of the TV to watch Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. That was my third time watching it. I tell you it's still the best HP movie - and I've never liked the book. We had snacks and tried to keep awake.

When the movie ended it was like 2 a.m. (or maybe later than that), so Sam and YQ ignored me when I suggested watching another movie. :P

There was a problem with Sam's air conditioner, so two of us had to sleep in the living room, where brown things could fly in at any moment.

YQ stayed in Sam's room. Sam and I stayed up listening to music and talking about random stuff like what insects could fly in in the middle of the night. Then we finally realised that YQ had probably fallen asleep looooooooooong ago, so we had better do the same too.

For some strange reason, I was the only one who heard my rooster alarm go off only on the third time it rang. Everyone else insisted it had annoyed them from the start. :P

We OFFICIALLY got up at 1 p.m. We weren't hungry enough to have breakfast, so there was a lot of lounging around (and watching Kids Central) before we finally left for the bus stop.

Sam and I took 518 to Orchard and had student meals at McDonald's. Then we walked around and I finally went home.

My sister was already back from her birthday bash at Sentosa, the remnants of which included some big packs of chips and...

She gave me the frog. Well of course I asked for it. :P

The new week wasn't very eventful. I went to Kino on Tuesday and bought Anacaona: Golden Flower, having decided I would never be able to finish Don't Know Much About Mythology anytime soon. Finished the book in three days. Was supposed to go out on Thursday (as usual), but it was raining heavily so I took the chance to finish my book.

I woke up early on Friday and went to Orchard, where I was caught in a torrential downpour upon exiting the big Zara. As you know it is not connected to anywhere, so by the time I made it to the traffic junction, I was drenched.

Oh, and it didn't help that while I was waiting for the lights to change, this stupid taxi drove past and a big wave of water can splashing down on me.

On my way past Orchard MRT I was walking in ankle-deep water, so I was very miserable indeed. Finally sought refuge in Topshop. Visited a few other places after that (by which time the rain had finally subsided), then took the bus to Vivo, where my connecting bus happened to be right in front.

Saturday was my father's birthday, and we had dinner at the Chinese restaurant on the 60th floor of the UOB building (my sister's workplace). During dinner my father suddenly asked, "So you're starting school tomorrow?"

And my sister turned to me and exclaimed, "You're on holiday?!"

Erm. Clue No. 1: I read six books over the past two months. I never NEVER have any time to read during the semester.

Anyway, because my sis is rich beyond belief, she paid for the meal. Then she decided to dump us with her multitudes of shopping bags while she returned to work. :P

Now I'm sitting here watching my time tick away.

Have to be in school at 10 a.m. Don't ask me why 10 a.m. when my class doesn't start till noon. I may tell you why when I actually know why.

Well, final year. I like the word "final".

I think it would really suck to start Year 2 tomorrow. Then I'd have TWO loooooooooooong years ahead of me. At least in Year 1 you don't know anything so you've nothing to expect.

This year had better end as soon as possible. And not because I'm dying to turn 20 or anything.

My time is up.

Here's leaving you with my latest desktop wallpaper, done last night after updating Yahoo! Widgets to version 4:

Jessica wrote home at 12:13 am

Told you I need anger management.

And I'm not kidding. I really did break the door handle. HOWEVER I did NOT do it on purpose. Because it was just a flimsy plastic handle in the first place. :P

ANYWAY, needless to say my mother was extremely irritated with me the next morning.

So I grouched all the way to SP. It didn't help that I left the house earlier but the bus took so bloody long to arrive that I reached SP even later than on Monday (okay, maybe about 3 min later).

The day started with us doing more worksheets again. My partner and I were extremely lucky; both days we had easy worksheets. This time it was about paragraph organisation.

Then we had to get in groups and go through all the worksheets again. The other people in my group had such boring worksheets.

At breaktime I had (among other things) a packet of Lemon Barley.

After which there was a session on "Knowing Your Customer", i.e. knowing how to deal with your mentee (imo "mentee" is such a stupid-sounding term).

The session had barely ended when the lecturer announced there was a group of foreign students arriving at the classroom at anytime and we could thus put our newfound skills in action!

Great.

We each received a short essay one mentee had written the day before (with their name at the bottom) that we had to go through with them. We argued about the gender of our mentees before the whole big group of students from China came in.

Everyone had decided my mentee's name was a girl's name so it was quite surprising that it was a guy. Hahaha.

So Jessica "Great Conversationalist" Yeo spent 10-20 min going through that little essay (I don't know how long he's been learning English for but it was actually quite good) and holding a (gasp!) conversation on everything from the weather in Singapore, Singaporean accents, how hard it is to study foreign languages (actually I highly doubt I can call Chinese "foreign"...even if it does sound foreign to me...*cough*)...........and how awful the photos on our student passes are. See. It is universally accepted that those pics suck.

After the short session they all left to go don't-know-where, whilst we stayed behind for lunch. I had (among other things) another packet fo Lemon Barley.

During lunch we had to get into different groups and come up with a half-hour language activity for the mentees. After slacking about, my group finally decided on charades and some spelling game.

Lunch over, we all walked to the Main Library. I had a packet of Ice Lemon Tea as I led the way there. I don't remember it being that far and I'm damn glad my GEM classroom isn't there anymore.

At the library there was more slacking around. I even had time to find Agatha Christie's A Pocket Full of Rye and borrow it. Although honestly I have no idea how I'll ever find time to read it.

Finally the mentees arrived and they were divided into two groups to join the activities at different ends of the library.

Since there were two groups of mentors for each group of mentees, our particular corner had three activities going on. The first group's activity was "fill in the lyrics to Seasons in the Sun", then it was our turn.

Charades was quite fun although my task was to keep the score. Apparently the hardest word to guess was "dinosaur", which had been my suggestion. :P

Then it was spelling time. How it works is that everyone stands in one big circle and a word is given to the first person to spell (e.g. "house). After spelling correctly, the first person comes up with a word that begins with the last letter of "house" (e.g. "elephant") and the second person has to spell that, and so on and so forth.

We were obviously supposed to let the mentees win, so the mentors had to get kicked out early. In the very first round the person beside me (a mentee) told me to spell "run".

Jessica: Run..............R-E-N.

*Jessica bows out*

Hahahahahaha.

After a winner was finally announced, we all gathered to take photos, then the mentees left and we had to go through an extraordinarily long reflection session.

Then it was time to go home!

And sleep.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand now I had better pack and leave for Sam's house or she'll kill me if I arrive at like 8 p.m. :P

Jessica wrote home at 12:28 pm

Firstly, that "is" is a verb.

Wow.

And secondly, I learnt a new proverb.

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"

Okay I've come across it before, but definitely not in the past 11 years. So I shall call it new. It makes sense and I like it.

Today I spent 9 hours in SP eating, doing English worksheets and playing English games.

It's like the SHS English Camp, Part II.

Except I actually did like the camp, which was my second-favourite camp in secondary school (after the student council camp, which was damn fun - not to mention we got air-conditioned rooms...). Well I liked the camp other than the night, when Mr Can't-Remember-His-Name kept threatening to wake us up with a fire drill at like 3 a.m. Needless to say I didn't get much sleep.

ANYWAY. I completely digress. The worksheets would've been fun if they had only involved identifying sentences and fragments (I can identify fragments because I am always using them!). BUT I had to find the subject and the verb in each sentence to prove that it is a sentence and not a fragment.

See, the problem with learning English the "right" way is that you need to do all these tedious stuff. :P

And what if my little student asks why authors use fragments in books. (Guess what? That was just a fragment!) BLAH.

Other than that, it was still an extraordinarily long day. At 10.23 a.m. we excused ourselves from "Familiarisation with the SAC" to register for our GEMs.

I don't know how many minutes I spent just refreshing the damn page, but finally the registration opened and I tried to browse through the categories but IT WOULDN'T LOAD. So in one final desperate attempt I typed the module name and it finally loaded and the point of the story is that I got the GEM I wanted in the timeslot I wanted, Friday 1 - 3 p.m.

This will be my first (and last, obviously - no more GEMs in semester 2!) time not going for GEMs on Wednesday, but I figured my screwy Friday timetable doesn't exactly leave me with much choice. Unless I beg and beg and beg to be transferred to MIA 51 (where it seems like everyone except me is inside).

Now, if only they had posted the spec dip timeslot yesterday instead of TONIGHT, because..................what the #$%^&. It's on THURSDAY and FRIDAY this semester!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hey, I've never liked Mondays and Tuesdays but at least I get it over and done with ASAP right?

And here I was getting reconciled to the fact that at least my Thursdays and Fridays end an hour earlier than last semester.

Now they both end an hour later.

And most annoying of all, because the timeslot was only JUST posted, I registered for a GEM class that now gives me NO BREAK for 5 HOURS.

Oh, and did I mention I have MIA earlier in the day too?

Someone really hates me.

Jessica wrote home at 11:19 pm

I shall make this as quick as possible because I want to actually have breakfast later.

ANYWAY. About what I was doing at Kino last week.

I was reading Usborne puzzle adventures!!! Well actually only one, Time Train to Ancient Rome. It was actually quite lame (or else I didn't read thoroughly) because by the end of the story I still had no idea why the fake emperor and his cronies wanted to poison all the people at the banquet.

And why was I reading a kiddy book, you ask? Because after I finished my fourth book this holidays, I remembered that I had wanted to reread all my Usborne books months and months ago when it looked like I was never going to have any free time.

So I spent the whole peaceful week happily reading all the Usborne books I could find at the back of my bookshelf (i.e. non-history Usbourne books, because the former are in the front row of my reference shelf).

Which means in other words, I just read like 22 books in 4 days.

ANYWAY. It was fun reading all my favourites, like the first and second Usborne books of Solve-It-Yourself Mysteries...every page is just one giant photograph of a scene and at the end you have to (duh) solve the mystery (which I never did solve the first time I read them...and since I still remember the culprits, it did spoil some of the fun). Then there was the Usborne book of Whodunnits, which are a lot "smoother" to read than puzzle adventures because you only get asked one question at the end of the story (instead of pausing to solve something after every two pages!).

After those three books I moved on to the puzzle adventures. I remember the Ghost Puzzle Adventures used to freak me out. Hahaha. Then there were the Agent Arthur books. I like Agent Arthur!!! Don't have the last two AA books though. Blah.

Anyway, so that was a highly entertaining week, during which I had dinner with Sam on Tuesday evening at Cartel (to write YQ's card) and lunch with YQ on Friday afternoon (also at Cartel, to hand her her pressies), after which we each had a large Slurpee while we walked to City Hall. :)

And Happy Belated Birthday to YQ. Now I'm not the only one who's 19. :P

Oh yeah, and I went to Sentosa on Wednesday evening (my mother's idea) to watch the new Songs of the Sea show. (This, fyi, is only the fifth time in my life that I've been there. I don't like Sentosa and I don't care that I live so bloody near). The place was almost filled to capacity. The show didn't actually have much of a story to it. One suspects the creators were more interested in showing off all the lasers and jets of water and pyrotechnics. Not that I minded the special effects. :P We watched the 7.40 p.m. show and after that I rushed home just to catch WH online and tell him about YQ's absence.

In other news: the Topshop/Topman Spring/Summer 07 fashion show at VivoCity yesterday afternoon. It wasn't even my idea to attend. I was telling my mother about F3's emails and SMSes when she suggested I RSVP to get two places. So I did, and my sister couldn't attend (well she could; she just didn't want to wake up), which meant in the end I went to the store with my mother.

Er well if you're gonna ask why it was held in the store and not in the atrium, I suppose it was because you could go and get snacks and drinks throughout the show, plus there was a storewide 20% discount for attendees afterwards, so they could close the store doors and prevent other people from entering. Mwahahaha.

It was pretty darn crowded and since the store isn't extremely big, there weren't any seats. In fact the "runway" was just bright pink strips cordoning off a snaking line on the floor.

And then of course after that there was a great big rush to buy stuff. My mother and I both bought blouses (I finally used the card!!!) and I also finally got the green sandals I've been eyeing for so long. I figured 1) I could give it to my sister, and 2) since we wear the same size, I could always steal it, which means that 3) I won't need to pay for it (or maybe just half of it) 'cos it'll just be her birthday present from my mother!

Well, it now turns out that the front it too narrow for her, so I have to pay my mother back AND I still have to find a birthday present for her in less than one week. :P Oh well. I need a pair of sandals anyway. You never know when you might be required to wear a pair. Like for my disastrous orientation programme at Sentosa, I didn't have any sandals so I stole my sister's Nike pair...and ended up getting a deep cut from the material. I still have the stupid scar. (More "Bad Memories From Sentosa")

Finally, and most importantly, I will be busy the whole of Monday and Tuesday. 8.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in school. BLAH. Plus it clashes with my GEM registration so I have to use the suspiciously unreliable school computers. If I don't get the GEM of my choice because the internet speed is screwy................

So yeah. Won't be free till Wednesday. Sigh.

Jessica wrote home at 3:16 am