qian (altessa), girl, 20, ntuwkwsci, bespectacled, sci-fi, bookworm, lost, resigned, running, more? aprilesque is version 7, photoshop7, original art, get your own, more? 5TORM Kathy, Dawn, Yingwan, Weiqi 05S34 class blog, Hui Fang, Jason, Poh Wei, Rachel, Wei Jie, You Jin, Yvette, Zirui friends Wen Lin, Natalie, Elyse, SozoS, Sam archives When browsing through the archives, please keep in mind that they are pieces of who I was, not who I am. People grow, people change, and I am only human. go?

As they fell, the tears caught thelight of the moon and sparkled like beautiful crystals. Then I noticed that my shadow was crying too, shedding clear, sharp shadow tears. Have you ever seen the shadows of tears, Mr Wind-up Bird? They're nothing like ordinary shadows. Nothing at all. They come here from some other distant world, especially for our hearts.

Finally finished Murakami's The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Yeah I know, I'm a slow reader. I don't have any witty insights or essay-length analysis to show to the world. I read Murakami because I enjoy his writing. That's all.

Now I'm ploughing through the huge pile of books I brought back from the UK. Took up 90% of my smaller suitcase too. Currently reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Makes me wanna read The Catcher in the Rye.

Met two cats on the way home today, while strolling in the warm night listening to Chairlift's Bruises (thanks Dawn!). I spotted a black one first, with a white bib and white socks, watching me. So I squatted down and mewed for it to come over. After playing with it for awhile, I walked on, semi-following its lead, and met another cat. This one was fatter, with brindled fur. It was sitting on the low wall surrounding a house, and I mewed it over too. xD They were housecats, had collars and tags, and were really friendly. They probably belonged to someone who lived in the area, and they seemed to know each other.

Had to leave them after awhile. It was dark, so I didn't want to stay long, not that it was dangerous or anything since I was in my estate already. But honestly, cats don't really care. They were just momentarily bearing the presence of this random human while on their nightly jaunt, so I wanted to leave them to their peace. ;)

I seem to be meeting a lot of black cats with white bibs these days. I wanted to take photos of them, but it was so dark, and I only had my phone with me.

Those two cats made my day. :) Thank you for appearing.

I'm finally home again. :)

We spent 36 hours travelling, but I'm not that tired actually. Left Hull on a 7-seater taxi at 8.45pm and reached Paragon Station about 15 minutes after that. I had two suitcases with me, one carry-on and one laptop bag. My suitcases weighed 32kg and 22kg respectively, and the total weight I was carrying on me was 13kg. The worst was dragging my humongous 32kg suitcase. It was horrible, and I'm now all ache-y because of it.

When we arrived we went to the waiting room, but we'd only had time to put down our stuff before we were told that they were closing the waiting room. -.-; So we went directly to wait at the platform for our train to come.

This little boy who looked about 10 or 11 offered to help me with my huge suitcase when we were boarding the train! I was surprised and touched at the same time.

The train to Manchester took about 2 hours, during which I forced myself not to sleep because we had a long night ahead of us and I didn't want to be wide awake for any of them.

Reached the Manchester train station and had to go to another platform to catch the train to the airport. Oh god. Dragging my two luggages was hell. It was like sprinting 400m on the track (okay I'm exaggerating). I had to stop and catch my breath every so often. Luckily we made it onto the train with plenty of time to spare.

Got off the train at the Airport and was really lucky because one of the train conductors came down to help us with our suitcases. I would have died dragging everything. Our flight out of Manchester was from Terminal 3, but out of all the terminals in Manchester airport, only one had any seating areas available, so we made our way to Terminal 1.

Found a row all to ourselves in front of the male toilets. LOL! Weird spot, I know, but it was actually pretty okay. It was really bright, didn't smell, and had a lot of human traffic going through it. Maybe a little too bright and a little too much human traffic. Not that we cared anyway. The only bad thing was a very annoying announcement that would blare suddenly through the PA system every fifteen minutes or so, reminding people not to leave their baggages unattended. I would jump whenever it came on.

I slept fitfully, but better than I expected. I woke up every hour or so to turn. It also got pretty cold in the middle of the night, which didn't help things. Slept for about 6 hours and woke up at 7am, washed up and ate a breakfast of Kristle's sandwiches which she shared with us, plus some cheddar that I had left over. We watched a few episodes of South Park on Jiahui's lappy before moving off to Terminal 3 to catch our flight. We had gotten ourselves trolleys so pushing them was so much easier. But it didn't help that Terminal 3 wasn't exactly nearby, and that the ground was uneven and sloped. D:

Met up with Angie at the airport, checked in our stuff without much incident, then boarded our small plane to London.

We had a 7 hour transit in London. We thought it was going to be pretty long and boring, but it turned out to be okay. Mostly because we spent so much of our time trying to find out where the showers were. Jiahui and I went around trying to ask airport staff, but they all had no idea. They ended up pointing us to some showers in the Departure hall, that we had to go through 2 security checks to get to. Angie ended up asking the cleaner, who pointed her to showers in our arrivals hall. =.= Ugh. Incompetence.

Had a quick dinner at Starbucks where I had a panini and hot chocolate, then sat around waiting for our gate to be announced. They took forever to announce it, and another eternity to put everyone onto the plane. We were waiting at the gate since it was confirmed, but didn't actually bother joining the queue until they were announcing "last call"s through the PA.

Spent most of my time on the plane sleeping and listening to music they had on their in-flight entertainment system. Mostly Kelly Clarkson, Snow Patrol, Take That and Starsailor. Good stuff. I love my headphones; no lousy free ones for me. No bass. I attempted to watch a couple of movies. Got about half an hour into He's Just Not That Into You actually, but for some reason they cut me off and couldn't be bothered to forward through the film again. Tried watching Valkyrie, and Good Will Hunting, but sleep overtook me. I just can't summon the patience to watch a movie on-board an airplane. I don't know why. It's too uncomfortable.

Anyway they fed us a lot. We had a snack, dinner and breakfast. AAAHHHH. Too much food. I need to start losing weight. D:

Well there's nothing much to say after that. We got off the plane, collected our baggage, went home! It's good to be back, and to order food in Chinese. LOL.

This is one of those times, when I just want time to stop and live within this moment in eternity. Not because there's anything particularly awesome or great about this moment in time, but rather because everything's just right, because the scale feels balanced. Everything is working out.

This peace won't last long. In a few days I'll be heading back home, and everything will come rushing back, like air in my face when falling down that vertical drop on Oblivion at the Alton Towers theme park today. And who knows what will happen in the future? Every tomorrow is a blank page. That scares me and thrills me in equal proportions. Maybe it's just because I'm in an optimistic mood, and that I'd like to believe this optimism will last, that this goodness will last, that everything will remain like this forever. I don't need to know the truth, I just want to continue to believe in what I know now.

/endcryptic

WTF. Why is the network scanner hogging 50% of my system resources???


I cannot set it to "low priority" because it doesn't appear in my task manager. Closing the AVG Tray icon doesn't work either. It's making my computer lag... no wonder Dragonica felt sluggish to me earlier.

I should restart my computer to fix that, but I'm in the middle of uploading something that needs 3 more hours to complete. UGH.

/endrant

Finally finished watching the first season for Code Geass! I take forever to finish watching anything because I watch so many at the same time. >.<

Anyway, I was poking around AniDB and found out that Code Geass and Planetes share the same director and music team! Epic. So I went and got myself the soundtrack. I actually only want it for the bgm that was playing in episode 25. Not sure which track it is though.

Decided to check out the other stuff Taniguchi Gorou directed as well. Dunno when I'll actually get around to watching them, but I'll definitely KIV.

I need to watch/read Planetes again!

Am doing some reading in preparation for my exam and I came across this:

In Singapore, the police unearthed a compound of illegal Indonesian workers concealed in the Singaporean jungle, living in hastily constructed shelters and in construction pipes, surviving by eating wildlife.

LOL! This passage amuses me so much. It's from a book defining "ethnicity" and this particular section talks about people who migrate to other countries to look for work.

But seriously. "Singapore" and "jungle" don't go together unless there's the word "urban" in between. xD