Thursday, November 19, 2009
After 24 years of having prawns appear before her on a plate with their shells magically missing, the Ojousama has finally learnt how to deshell prawns on her own.
Thanks to Kevin's instruction today, I now can remove the shells of prawns (rather clumsily) with a fork and knife. Hooray! I've added another life-skill to the list of "Things You Must Know If You Want To Do Your PhD Overseas and Come Back Again In One Piece". Now I just need to learn how to cook more than 5 dishes, how to peel off the skin of fruits with a knife, how to wash my clothes, how to iron my clothes, how to do grocery shopping, how to clean the toilet etc etc etc...
kaoru said at 7:58 AM
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Friday, November 13, 2009
Wan Ching's right: I haven't posted anything on this blog since July! O___o
This is probably Facebook's fault. Who wants to write/read long passages of prose when you can just speed through one-line updates and mindless memes? Especially if your line of work involves reading and writing long passages of prose everyday.
Anyway, just to give a short update on what has been going on in my life so far. I handed in my ISM to Dr Y yesterday afternoon and then went out to Northpoint for dinner with Wan Ching and Priscilla. Gurpreet was supposed to join us but she had a bad migraine...
It was fun to be able to meet and talk to one another after such a long absence. I hadn't spoken to Wan Ching since the semester began, and although I had met Priscilla in the Cultural Studies seminar last semester, we didn't really get a chance to talk.
Hmm, not much else to say except that I'm taking a short self-given holiday to recuperate (not that I worked extremely hard in the past few weeks, hah) before I begin work on the journal article. Welcome to my boring life.
On a completely irrelevant sidenote, I now find Swensens' ice cream too sweet for my liking and that the crowds on the South-bound train from Jurong East in the evenings are scary.
kaoru said at 9:55 PM
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Monday, July 13, 2009
The saga continues.
I told my prof about the leakage problem and guess what he replied? He told me to go to the staff pantry opposite his room and put the wet books into the REFRIGERATOR to dry them out. He wanted me to put books that have bundles of dust hanging on them and strange yellow fluids seeping out of them into a space for FOOD. That brings cross-contamination to new levels. And the staff pantry has restricted access, so I would have had to explain to the people at the General Office why I wanted to go into the pantry...
Now I can see why people often joke about how getting a Ph.D means getting "Permanent Head Damage".
In the end, my sister brought along a hairdryer to blow the books dry. One of them now looks like cabbage with pink and black splotches though.
kaoru said at 7:15 PM
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Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Yesterday my sister and I went to my prof's (who shall remain unnamed for reasons that will soon become clear) office to continue labelling the books in his library and rearranging the shelves, and we were greeted with a big surprise.
His ceiling seemed to have sprung a leak, and there were pools of water on his desk and on the floor. Later we discovered that water had soaked through some of the books we left on the floor from the previous session (oops), and the pages were all limp and the ink from his written notes had smudged all over the pages. Even the dye from the book covers was dissolving and leaving rectangular prints on the floor.
So I had to tell the General Office people about the leak and hopefully they did something about it this morning, especially since it has been raining heavily today. However, my prof can rejoice that his box of GYM SHORTS (which I thought he had brought home before he left for sabbatical, but nooo, he had simply stuffed the box into the bottom-most shelf of his bookcase when I wasn't looking!!) is safe from the rain.
kaoru said at 12:21 AM
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Friday, June 26, 2009
Updates on ISM: Dr Y agreed to supervise and he was very happy with the proposal. That means I'm a happy person too.
Updates on cleaning JWB's library: Can I be paid for this?
Updates on other thingys: I'm looking for a venue to host the Anime Club 10th anniversary alumni party in December and with my tiny budget, I had to cross out all the 3-star hotels I was considering. Does anyone have a dining hall or a condominium function room with air-conditioning and which can fit approximately 25 people? Your help is much appreciated.
Oh, I have also signed up for a deviantart account! Check it out at http://www.okaru85.deviantart.com.
However, there's only 1 picture there (=___=;) and I can't get an avatar up because no matter what I do, even the smallest image I create at the lowest resolution is still larger than the limit of 15KB. Arghhh.
kaoru said at 10:54 PM
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Sunday, June 21, 2009
Time for another update on what has been going on in my not-very-eventful life.
This past week I had a slew of outings almost entirely on consecutive days which left me feeling very tired, but more or less happy.
Last Saturday, my sister and I visited Shilei's new (?) home in Yishun together with some other members of the anime club and alumni. After dinner at Ishimura at Northpoint, we went to watch "Crackers?", a fireworks display that was the closing event of the Singapore Arts Festival. I didn't exactly feel at ease with the other members of the party (for reasons which I won't disclose here), but the performance was truly spectacular. The fireworks were dazzlingly beautiful to behold, and although there were many mock-warnings about the noise levels potentially exceeding "recommended levels", anyone who has been to a VK live before wouldn't have found the explosions particularly deafening.
On Sunday, I met up with Vanessa, Derek and Poh Lin, who had just come back from the US (and thankfully was not infected with H1N1). I hadn't seen Poh Lin since we graduated from AJ more than 5 years ago, and to tell the truth, I was actually not very keen on seeing her again, after her no-show the last time we organized a gathering for her sake (she had completely forgotten about the gathering and was watching a movie with her boyfriend while we were waiting for her at the restaurant - I had Research Workshop at 9am the following day but decided to make time for her so you can imagine how fuming mad I was).
But in the end, I was glad that I decided to overcome my misgivings, for I discovered that Poh Lin was still very much the same sweet girl I knew in JC, and that what JWB calls the "country club atmosphere" at Princeton had not corrupted her.
On Monday evening, I went out with MW, her "whatever" and Calvin for dinner and drinks. Well, Calvin only showed up at the bar 45 minutes late, so he didn't have dinner with us but I paid for one of his drinks as promised because he wanted a birthday present, and because I kind of owed him one, haha.
We went to Orgo, the new rooftop bar at the Esplanade co-owned by the apparently famous Japanese mixologist Kitazoe Tomoyuki, and the aerial view it offered of the bay was pretty fantastic. Plus it was actually cool and breezy enough to sit in the open and enjoy the night air. Orgo is supposed to be famous for its cocktails which are made with fresh fruits, so I tried a banana daiquiri. It was a bit pricey at $18, and Calvin was indignant that he was paying so much for less-than-spectacular drinks, but I thought my daiquiri was yummy enough. But the daiquiri was only the second alcoholic drink I have drunk in my life so far (and I'm not kidding), so what do I know.
Anyway, to make make his trip to Orgo more worthwhile, Calvin took home all the wet towel packets we were given, and he stuffed a coaster into my camera bag, which I only discovered when I was on the bus home... =___=;
Then on Wednesday, I met Wan Ching at Kino to buy the books we needed for our MA theses since Kino was offering a 20% discount for its members. After buying everything we needed, the two of us lugged our bags overflowing with books (manga, in my case) to the Royal Copenhagen Tea Lounge for lunch, which was actually tea because we got distracted by the pretty cakes in the display case and sacrificed nutrition for sugar and extra calories...
So after Wednesday, I was really exhausted, and I've decided to avoid going out as much as I can from now till August, because I don't want to catch anything (especially not some porcine-avian-human hybrid flu) which would disrupt my attempts to complete my Gothic paper and prepare for my ISM and conference paper within the next few weeks.
Ok, that's all for now. Tomorrow I'm going to have to draft and write my embarrassingly sketchy ISM proposal and contact my potential supervisor for a preliminary meeting on Thursday. I'll be glad to get that bloody thing out of my system and onto paper (even though it is embarrassingly sketchy) because it has been tormenting me for the past few weeks. And I think Dr Y will allow me to be sketchy at this stage, though I'm certainly not happy I'm not producing something better for him...
kaoru said at 8:36 AM
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Friday, May 29, 2009
The exam results were released this afternoon but I've only checked my results just now.
I managed to get the grade I wanted for Gothic Properties, and it's actually lower than the grade I got for Cultural Studies (which is taught, if you don't know already, by The Bishop as Pei calls him). The ways of the gods are mysterious, but I guess I can take this as a sign that I will most likely be able to write my Masters thesis on manga relatively successfully.
It feels a little strange to be receiving my results for the first time as a graduate student and a scholarship recipient. It seems like a mark of adulthood. When I was an undergrad, getting good grades meant getting rewarded with a place on the Dean's List, possibly an award, and a small present from my parents.
Now, I give my mother a monthly allowance, and I'm expected to get good grades or I'll lose my scholarship and my chances of getting another one in the future.
Growing up is a frightening business.
kaoru said at 6:39 AM
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