Moved

So as at yesterday, I have finally moved out of my old apartment at Orchard Downs. It is a mixed bag of feelings though---having lived in the same place for a year, I have developed some light attachment to its oddities and general feel. But let's face it---I was having problems with that place. I don't know the neighbours well (they are mostly families who kept to their... social group centred around ethnicities), and I was forever talking to the walls that surround me. So when John suggested that we rent a place together by taking over an apartment of his friend, I was game to do so.

The moving was tricky, but finally done. The cleaning though, was a little exhausting. Sweeping the floor of dust, then mopping it with a wet mop, cleaning up the entire kitchen (including the refrigerator), disinfecting the entire toilet---those took about 3 hours from start to finish. By the time I was done, I didn't really feel like doing anything else.

But now, I'm safely at my new place. The neighbourhood is quieter, there is air-conditioning if we need it, and there's a room mate to talk to and do crazy shit with. Oh, and the rent is lower too. I think that this is an overall plus.

Moving

This week is sort of a crapshoot. I'm busy packing the few (but scattered) items I have to move to my new place with John, my roomie. The relative distance to campus is roughly the same, with slightly worse public transport access, but the overall lower rent and the company is very much welcomed. I think that it is time that I start acknowledging that I am, in spite of all appearances, biased towards the extraverted side.

On a more awkward and personal note, I've started to replace my bikini briefs with boxer briefs. Yes, to those who don't know what kind of underwear I wear (that's like almost everyone), I used to wear bikini briefs. But now, for a change of pace, I've switched to the boxer briefs. Initial impressions on this style of underwear are quite good---they don't give you wedgies like briefs do, and unlike boxers, they don't really ride up your leg and get caught in a thousand and one different bunches that make things rather uncomfortable. One more test that I need to subject these to would be to go for Jujitsu training with an athletic cup + jock strap; we'll see if the boxer briefs provide better support for the entire protection system as compared to my bikini briefs from before. And yes, it is high time to change my entire stash of underwear---the current set has followed me for the last uhh 6 years and are quite worn. And yes again, this falls in the ``too much information'' category, but it's just that little sauciness that I think my blog is lacking, right? ;-)

[PROTOTYPE2] finally came out for the PC via Steam. From initial impressions, this feels like a much improved version of the original [PROTOTYPE]. But considering that I'm at most 20% through the game content, it remains to be seen if the game is really that good. Things that I like about this compared to the old [PROTOTYPE] is the ``controlled'' evolution mechanism, which promotes exploration but hinders grinding as a means of advancing the character's ability. In some sense, this makes the story flow a little smoother. But as noted before, it will be a while before I can come to a final conclusion of the game.

Alright, enough chatter. I need to triage my belongings for the massive move detail tomorrow. Till next time.

Home Trip: A Hasty Report

*stretches fingers*

I promised to talk about my home trip, and so here it is. Note that the text might be a bit strange in style because I started on this much earlier, and am trying to finish it up now. Anyway, here we go.

First off, the main purpose of the home trip was really to deal with the fact that I was going a little nuts from too much social isolation. Yes, that's right, too much social isolation---the loss of any semblence of a support network. It is probably one of my biggest weaknesses, possibly a karmic lesson that I will need to learn during this life time. Since this is going to be a long post, I'm going to try something a little different and make use of fourth-level header tags to create sub-sections. They are unlikely to be well formatted as compared to the rest of the text, but I suppose it is more palatable than just a great wall of text.

And so, we begin.

Massive Travels

Travelling out from the C-U area to get back to Singapore is pretty non-trivial. The closest airport is CMI (Williard Airport), but it's hard to find/coordinate connection flights from there to other international airport hubs like say ORD (Chicago O'Hare). So my trip back consisted of getting to ORD, hopping on a plane from there to HKG (Hong Kong), and then from there straight to SIN (Singapore). The hard part was figuring out how to get to ORD in the first place, since it is a good 3-hour drive up north. I couldn't really ask friends to drive me up there, mostly because it is going to be a 6-hour drive for them (3 out and 3 back), but also because that meant that I needed to coordinate the schedule of yet another person, which makes things ridiculously complicated. That left with taking the bus from the Lincoln Express (LEX).

There was some mild drama for the LEX. The original timing that I booked was cancelled for some reason, and I had to choose between an earlier time slot or a later one. Being someone who would rather be checked in early especially for an international flight, I opted for the early morning one, which was a good 2 hours earliear. As a result, I ended up camping out in the office overnight to ensure that I could get on the bus in time---it was too early that the city buses were not running yet.

The trip up to ORD was fairly uneventful, except that there were short detours here and there to pick up other passengers along the route. Check-in at the airport did not happen as early as I wanted because the counter just wasn't opened that early. That was settled soon enough and before I knew it, I was already on the plane and en route home.

I'll spare the details of the long flight and just fast forward to touching down on Sunday (SGT).

Day 0

Reaching SIN made me feel a little delirious from happiness, well that and the fact that my sleep schedule was horribly messed up at that point, having to ``steal'' sleep from waiting and being onboard the planes. It was nice to see my mum and dad at the airport to pick me up, and we wasted no time to head off to Jalan Kayu to grab some prata---one of the foods that I have been craving for quite a long while. While at Jalan Kayu, I picked up one of the newer traditional caches there and checked up on the puzzle cache that YT and I placed in Seletar. It surprised me to no end that the cache was still there, pretty much in shape and well hidden from the muggles around. That was a good sign.

When I got home, the first thing that I did was to take a shower. At that point, I had probably passed 2--3 days without actually having taken a shower. I felt yucky from the stickiness that came from the clinging prespiration from the high humidity. After the shower, I started on some machine upkeep before heading out to get some of my running gear before meeting up with RX for some sushi/sashimi at our usual sushi place in AMK Hub (Ichiban Sushi).

Day 1

I had a meeting coming up, so I spent most of the day working on my research, with a breakfast session some time in between. I had to nap here and there to cope with the drastic time zone differences. In the evening, I went back to Buona Vista CC to train with the gang on Aikido.

I realised that after training in HDR JJT for about a year, my Aikido is a little ``hard''---not as yielding/cooperative as we ought to be. I think I'm still not at the stage where I can switch between philosophies that quickly. I met up with Tommy Senpai, Sam and Ejin. It was fun to train with them, even though I was a little rusty on my techniques. Ejin looked as lovely as ever, and Sam was definitely more skilled than before after getting his Shodan.

Day 2

Nothing else other than work was done, though I caught up with Jo in the evening. We had a simple dinner and watched The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a British comedy-drama film that had a cast consisting of quite a few old-time British actors/actresses. I will not go through the plot (see the link for details), but suffice to say, it was a really enjoyable film. It is not often that I went out for films like this, but this one was nice, just like the other films. Originally I was supposed to meet up with Kishore and Becky to watch Prometheus, but Kishore couldn't make it as his cold was still in progress and the medication was making him too woozy to drive. The late night was spent on working, of course.

Day 3

I was basically running on pure caffeine on this day. I had a meeting in the morning regarding my research, and had to make my way to SMU. Thinking that it might be a good idea to take the Circle Line (it wasn't complete the time I left), I hopped onto the NEL from Hougang and got off at the interchange at Serangoon to transfer to the Circle Line. What I saw/heard scared the hell out of me.

First, it was silent at that time of the day. No one was talking---no one was making an effort to talk. One could not hear anything that sounded ``human''---no chatter, no machinery sound, nothing.

Second, while I said that there was nothing that sounded ``human'', there was this uniform and synchronised footstep sound as the huge throng of people marched from the NEL section to the Circle Line section. It was a terrifying thing to hear at that time of the day. To me, it sounded like a whole army of zombies walking through the tunnels. I was sufficiently unnerved by it that I ended up running through the tunnel just to create some dissonance and retain whatever was left of my sanity.

The meeting came and went, and I left it feeling worse than I had going in. Fear gripped me like no other, and I felt even more guilty for deciding to take the home trip. Shaking my fears aside in as much as I could, I went on for my dental appointment before heading home for a nap. In the evening, I met up with my friend Chara, and we spent an enjoyable evening chatting about what was going on with our lives and things in general. Though she and I were not super close, it was still very heart-warming to talk to a friend, something that I have been finding trouble getting over here, more so than ever.

Day 4

Thursday. Originally, I planned to go for Aikido training again to meet with Freddy Sensei, but then I realised that I had basically spent the last 24--48 hours awake, and additional physical exertion was something that I thought was not a good idea. Besides, I had a meeting on Friday morning with my advisors for research---more work needed to be done, as well as the catching up on my sleep. So the day was spent napping/recovering, while the night was spent working on more concepts for my research.

Day 5

I made my way to ADSC and had my meeting before meeting up with Victor to go geocaching in the afternoon. We decided to tackle some of the new caches in the city area like Fort Canning Hill, and as we were traipsing along the river side, I found YT trailing us, to my surprise. I knew that she was due in Singapore for some exigencies, but I didn't realise that she had chosen the earlier of the two options. The three of us, reunited after a year, went along our geocaching ways before parting at the west side of Singapore. YT and Victor had different events to attend to, and so I went home from there on my own, without having a chance to have a meal with them to chat.

Day 6

Saturday. It was a day filled with events, and for this day, I borrowed my father's car to go about my ways. I miss driving the manual transmission car, and found to my amazement that despite not driving for a year, my driving skills did not deteriorate at all. The morning was spent at a CITO event at the newly opened Bishan Park. The event was organised by onehappy and Just1Gal, with me being the instigator and swag transporter. It drew a healthy number of geocachers, most of them local, but a couple of foreign visitors also turned up for the fun. We picked up the trash, found the geocache, and had a nice chat about all things geocaching related. YT made it in the end; she had told me on Friday that her family was having something related to 端午节 in the morning and thus might have some timing collisions.

After the CITO event, I began my own solo geocaching trip for the day. The first stop was to the Sembawang Hot Spring for the only Earthcache in Singapore. I took a fellow geocacher there too (he's from Portugal), and drove there fairly safely. That geocache done, I drove all over the Punggol/Sengkang area to pick up the geocaches that were out-of-the-way before heading down to Kovan. I tried to do the multi-cache there, but it didn't turn out well and so I ended up eating a Yoshinoya (yay beef bowl!) before heading off to Teck Ghee CC for Chinese Orchestra practice.

The Chinese Orchestra group was... quite small. Only a few of the old-timers were still around, and even the children's group was not super fancy. It's quite sad actually, and made me wonder if things would be different if I were around.

I managed to meet up with Kishore finallly during the late night, where we ate Prata at Jalan Kayu. It was a good meet up, and we talked about what happened to us in between.

Day 7

Quick packing in the morning and by afternoon, I was at the airport ready to go back to C-U. I was supposed to meet Cui in the morning for breakfast, but she couldn't make it on her schedule (by some coincidence, Cui was also in town at that point).

The trip back to C-U was fairly uneventful, except for the excessive 11-hour stop over in Hong Kong International Airport. By the time I got back to my domicile, it was beyond 2000hrs.

So, what about the trip? I think it served its purpose well---I didn't feel as nuts as compared to the time period before I went home, but also I felt like I was some kind of prisoner, never really having the opportunity to relish the fact that I was home. It raised quite a few questions in my mind that I don't know how to answer even now as I am writing this.

Maybe time will tell what the implications are.

Heat Wave

It's the weekend once more, but like any self-loathingrespecting PhD student, I find myself in the office working on my little contribution to what is hopefully the body of useful knowledge for the human race. The week that was just past was rather eventful in several strange ways, partly due to the federal holiday known as Independence Day, and partly because of a rather extensive heat wave.

Parts of the US was hit by a rather unfortunate heat wave that saw the maximum temperature rising to around 37--40°C, with minimum temperatures staying mostly above the 30°C mark. If it were only the heat, I couldn't really care less, since cooling off is as easy as drinking more water and letter perspiration/peeing do their work. But the humidity was relatively high too, which meant that the perspiration just clung on to the skin like a thin sticky film, which made doing anything rather uncomfortable. I opted to work from my apartment instead of hunkering down to the office where air conditioning was available, under the belief that the 2-mile cycle out in the ridiculous heat was not worth as much as being mostly naked at home and having access to my stock of food/refreshments and shower.

Surprisingly, my skin didn't flare up as badly as one would expect. Yes, there was some mild inflammation, but it wasn't as bad as the ``heat rash'' that I sustained when I got back home. I ran two experiments: involved just cleaning up the perspiration with a soaked towel, and the other involving showering every four to five hours with soap and water. It turns out that the soap and water combination was much more useful than the cleaning with the soaked towel. For one, the soap actually did much in removing the film of perspiration, which I think is the cause of the inflammation due to the ample growth medium for the bacteria. For two, a shower is generally better at removing extraneous thermal energy from the body, if one calibrates the temperature of the water properly.

I survived well throughout the week until Thursday night, where the still air made sleep almost impossible. I woke up at 0300hrs (Friday), finding myself drenched in perspiration. I ended up having to transfer my tiny table fan into the bedroom to blow myself just to get a couple more hours of sleep.

Independence Day was just as hot and humid as any of the other days in the week. I found my will to concentrate falling under the dual influence of the heat and the general holiday spirit, and when John IM-ed me suggesting to go geocaching as a way of escaping the heat via the air-conditioning in his car, I readily agreed. We had arranged earlier to attend the fireworks display held at Parkland College (north-west of Champaign-Urbana), but we ended up extending the plan to include an afternoon of geocaching. That ended well as we drove out around 15 miles westwards and proceeded to hunt down those pesky ``park-n-grab'' caches located along the intersections of the country roads. All in all, the cache haul for the day was 27, a new record, and one that helped push my total cache find beyond 400.

The evening was spent at one of John's dancing friend's Independence Day grill event, where we hung out with different people who were there for the [free] food, before capping the day with the viewing of the fireworks display.

The one thing that I can say about the fireworks was: wow. I know, it's not doing it much justice, but you just had to be there to see what I had seen. Unlike most of the fireworks display that I had attended, for this one, I was literally ``in front of'' the launch platform, having the front seats of the show, so to speak. This meant that the grandeur of the display was just magnificent.

Anyway, I ended up camping out in the office on Saturday evening and today to avoid more of the heat and to actually get some work done through the use of the large screen that I have available in the office. Oh, that and the printer and large table where I can just place strew all my material about.

I know I owe a trip description for my home trip---patience, young grasshopper. It will come up soon.