/summer. farewell

Well to be honest I was going to write another short story tonight but after reading Kim's recap of the summer I don't really feel like it anymore. I no longer feel the need to vent minor things, so I will put a metaphorical plaster over my skinned and bruised knuckle, and move on. I will not change the way I think nor will I take the immature route of receding back into an emotional mess over small things that perhaps do not go my way in my head. I will not oversensationalise my problems or exaggerate emotions that almost do not exist in an effort to make myself more interesting, not even to others, but to myself. It seems rather pointless at this point in time :) There are bigger things to concern myself with.

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Well, summer is almost over. The three months that at first seemed boundless are finally coming to an end. Boredom has been replaced by nervous anticipation for the start of uni, and expectations of USA uni offers is just about killing me but hopefully with uni full time, time will go faster.

The end of my summer is usually my least favourite time of the year. Actually when I was younger, I liked to say that my favourite season was Autumn to seem different to everyone else (who at that point liked summer the most because it meant long holidays). I convinced myself that Autumn had a beauty that other seasons didn't, but let's face it, in New Zealand Autumn is pretty shitty. It is damp and the temperature drops and the days get shorter and we lose an hour on daylight savings.

I never liked winter because the days are so short and it gets dark so early and I feel like I have achieved nothing all day, as well as the lack of sun and minor SAD. It is also the middle of the year and I get a case of "mid year crisis" where I have gone through 6 months and feel like I have achieved nothing and get stressed out due to exams and get feelings of bleakness due to the huge gap between then and the long summer holidays and all that cool stuff. So yeah, I never liked winter.

I quite like Spring now because it marks the end of winter, and I like the hope that earlier sunrises bring and the days slowly get longer and longer. It reminds me that summer is coming. However, Spring also brings with it an inordinate number of wet days and soaked chuck taylors from unexpected rainfall. It also brings with it the wardrobe problem where the 'transition period' makes it incredibly difficult for me to decide on what to wear for the day because my clothes are almost all strictly categorised into 'summer' or 'winter'. I end up wearing a lot of tights and cardigans that I often have to shed due to randomly hot weather.

So, ironically against my childish wants to 'stand out', I have decided that my favourite season is summer. I like the long days, the early sunrises and the late sunsets that make me feel like I have plenty of time to achieve what I want to. I like the sun smiling down on me every morning when I wake up and beaming its happiness down on me all through January. I like being able to sit here on my bed in a t-shirt and shorts and go to sleep with a single layer of blankets and not freeze. I like being able to throw on random combinations of shorts and tshirts every day and not worry about layering and whether or not 5+ items of clothing look good together. I like waking up at 10am and going outside and lying underneath the greenery of the tree on our deck and seeing monarchs dart around the roses, moving my toes past the barrier between the shadow of the upper-storey balcony and gentle licks of sunlit warmth. Yes, summer brings with it a blissful kind of simplicity and plenty of sun that no other season does.

But I have noticed that when I wake up these days, the sun is only just beginning to rise. I have begun to feel momentary chills in the middle of the night moving between me and my blankets, and the hyper-humidity of the last few days has been the precursor to the unpleasant kind of end-of-summer days that are trying so hard to squeeze out all the remaining warmth of the summer sun that it overexerts itself and sweats a bit too much in the process.

Yes, Autumn is coming again, and with it another cycle begins. However, this Autumn and Winter will surely be a different experience to years past. And thus, I look forward to them. I will probably never enjoy them as much as I have now conceded that I enjoy Summer, but a slyly content form of nonchalance is better than contempt, right?

Hmmm... what's your favourite season and why?

Ways in which Mousehunt has improved my life

For those of you who don't know, I have been playing the facebook game Mousehunt since July 2010. I have been mocked about this and have been asked why on earth I play it many times, as well as many people threatening to delete my account. So, I will now blog about the ways in which this game as benefited my life.

I started playing it because Jeremy and Firip kept going on about it and I saw it on Firip's laptop whenever we went to Yunbin's house for gatherings. I decided to give it a go I guess hahaha. I can't even remember who was playing at this time but a lot of them have since stopped and a lot have started. At first I was like wtf is this, it's so boring? But then the more I clicked the more I grew addicted to clicking, and then 12250 horn calls later... now we are here.

The game itself is uneventful. You are a mousehunter, and every 15 minutes you have to "sound the horn", ie. click the hunter's horn, to have a chance at encountering and catching a mouse. In addition, every hour the horn goes off on its own. Whether you will encounter a mouse depends on the cheese you have and whether you catch it depends on the base and nature of your mouse trap. There are hundreds of possible combinations of traps and as you move on the game and unlock new areas, you also unlock more and stronger mice as well as the ability to use and craft more powerful cheese, traps and bases as you gain experience points.

So, pretty straightforward right? And you're only on it really every 15 minutes, and all you do is click a button. Sooo many people are confused as to why I would play such a boring game. But you see, this is the beauty of mousehunt -- minimal energy and effort. I have an alarm plugin for it which means I am automatically reminded to sound the horn every 15 minutes. It doesn't interfere with whatever else I'm doing on the computer, and I just keep it as a single window open.

For such minimal effort, it has brought me pretty good return. The cheese and names of mice in the game is all very punny, after real life cheeses and mice. This has shockingly enough actually aided me in my life in de-ignorancing my knowledge of fancy cuisine:

1) I would have no idea what Havarti is, for instance, if not for mousehunt. At first it reminded me of Pavarti Patel from Harry Potter but now I know better :P Havarti was brought out at a dinner party with my dad's boss. I felt slightly more classy having at least heard of it before :) This also happened several times while I was in France.

2) The knowledge of what Gouda is helped me when I was watching She's the Man.

3) I now had a reason to choose between swiss, smoked and cheddar whenever I went to subway because I had a better idea of how they were in fact different and that cheese didn't all taste the same. I always choose swiss now btw, just because it's the most expensive of the three on mousehunt. That, and cheddar is too salty.

4) The knowledge of how cheese is made actually helped me in the secondary schools' chemistry quiz last year. One of the questions was a puzzle where chemicals and materials had to be joined to the product which they were used in the manufacture of. One of the materials was "whey". With my mousehunt knowledge I was able to connect it to "cheese" :) That's 1/3 of a point that helped us get third place in that competition :D

5) The pictoral representation of mozzarella which mousehunt provided helped me find it in the supermarket when my mum wanted to buy some to make pizza.

Those are just a few of the random bits of knowledge that a click every 15 minutes will grow for you without you realising :D And all knowledge turns out to be useful, even if it's about cheese haha.

However, I think most of all, the greatest lesson Mousehunt has taught me is the importance of perseverance. Having the patience to click every 15 minutes even when you're not catching the thing you want and having to start all over at the beginning of a region because you have recollect the materials for special cheese really tests that hahaha... (cough 19 misses on dragon mouse...)

But despite that, it made me realise that even if the chance of capturing something is 3%, if we try for long enough and click enough times, it will eventually happen. No matter how hard something seems to achieve, if we stick at it then numerically it's bound to happen sometime. After playing mousehunt, I perceive a 10% likelihood of something happening to be pretty good hahahaaha. Perhaps you could say that it's given me a warped perception of statistics, but I feel that it has definitely helped me be a lot more patient in other parts of my life. Not to rush, or to give up too easily. These are things that such a simple and menial game has taught me.

So, next time someone asks me why I still play mousehunt, I can just direct them to this blog. :) This has got to be the nerdiest blog I have ever written....

Layout recoding

So I spent a few moments each day in the last few days trying to add a facebook like button to my posts because some people suggested it (cos they're too lazy to comment .......... noobs), and found out it can't be done except on new layouts.

So, I upgraded to bloggers new layouts and tried to convert my old html layout to xml, except it can't be done by machine.

So instead, I took a template and recoded it to as close to my old layout as I could :) Just so you know, this present layout came from something that looks like THIS:

Yeah it took me a while. But I got there :) It was fun. Was listening to skrillex during the whole thing and felt like a badass computer hacker while changing code when actually I was just redecorating my blog ....

So I will now test the like button with this post :) Hope you all like the new layout anyways haha minor update.

A thunderstorm is coming D:

General Update

GENERAL UPDATEEE -salute- (HIMYM reference for you noobs who don't know)

So I think it's about time for an update seeing as I apparently haven't updated anything in ages which is, mind you, not an indication of how busy I've been so much as how I have been so bored and lying around at home so much that I have nothing important to note.

However, I suppose there are inevitably some things that happen with time passing, which I will now update you on:

1) Starting anew:

Well I figured what with 2012 being the year I start for uni and stuff, coupled with the fact that it's a new year (okay well it's February already but I tend to lag a bit due to procrastination), meant that I should perhaps clean my room (which is now merely only half the mess it started out as). I took all my posters off my wall except the one I can't reach and my huge ones that I have nowhere to put, and now have a huge blank space on my wall where I can play movies because I found out that we own a projector :)

Also, I finally upgraded to Windows 7 with a wiped harddrive and only the essentials, which has been mildly frustrating but generally great so far, plus I still haven't changed the background from the default windows one that comes when you install windows 7 so I look like a tech illiterate. But I feel like if I change it, it won't feel new anymore ): So I'm going to keep it like this for the time being.

I cleaned out my wardrobe (which took a full two days on its own), and from this experience I have found out that I am extremely lazy, too lazy in fact to bother with throwing out old clothing, and so to combat this I have decided that I will simply not buy any more new clothing unless I actually need it. I feel like 2011 was an extremely consumerist year for me in which I made a lot of useless purchases which I will never use again and so I will try to keep both my laziness and my wallet happier by not spending so much on materialistic goods (film tickets, by the way, are not materialistic goods. I am willing to pay ten dollars to fill my brain with intellectual ideas. Unless the film is bad, in which case I am still filling my brain with wonder concerning how amazingly horrible it was). I think going to Asia over the summer really helped with this decision as well, HK to me now feels like it is driven by consumerist culture which is something I really came to dislike about the city even though I was only actually there for 3 days.

2) Finding a job

So after looking for a job for the majority of my holidays I finally got 2 interviews and have two trial shifts tomorrow :) The first is as an English writing teacher for chinese kids at Saturday school in Newmarket. I'd be teaching to a class of Y5&Y6 and to another one of Y7&Y8. It's pretty scary LOL, I have to like plan all my classes and resources myself @_@ I'll see what it's like tomorrow... It was funny cos Kun came to me at like 11.45pm one night saying his mum was in desperate need of English teachers and that he recommended me to his mum. The next day I threw together a CV, sent it and went for my interview in the afternoon HAHAHA... Efficiency level: Asian.

The other is the hookup at Bakers Delight my thoughtful status garnered for me with the help of Jessy :) I'm just worried about the number of shifts I have to do per week once uni starts, since I don't want to have ZERO free time lollll... I'll ask tomorrow. Getting a job is such a scary process. And the job itself... hmmmm I'm looking forward to learning new things :)

3) TEAMANDREW YOUTUBE MEET WHATTTT


Everyone was trying to photobomb this photo cos Timmy did the same to everyone elses hahahahaaha.


Jumpingggg... we tried to do another one with everyone who was at the meetup but in the mess both Andrews were lost... hahahaha :D

For those who don't know, gunnarolla and songstowearpantsto were in New Zealand. Together they are known as Team Andrew because both of their names are Andrew. @Steph, songstowearpantsto is the one who did Pink Fluffy Unicorns Dancing On Rainbows :) I highly recommend you guys check out their channels, they both make music and videos and are both asian and both live in Toronto and both are called Andrew, so yeah they are pretty much the same person.

But it was a heap of fun, pretty cool to meet them, got a signed poster, preordered a Pants CD and got a free button and postcard from gunnarolla :) pretty legitttt.

Now to convince Wongfu to fly over...