The thing about living in HDB flats is that people can just come into the building, and you get different types of people knocking at your door.

In the past, whenever the doorbell rang, I would open the door (but not the metal gate) to see what the person outside wanted. Most of the time the person is trying to sell me something, and I get so sick of hearing sales pitches over and over again.

So nowadays I don’t open the door unless it’s someone I know, the postman, or the indian man that comes to collect the money for delivering the newspapers. I don’t always recognise the later 2 though, but the postman tends to shout “postman!” whenever no one opens the door after he rings the doorbell or knocks on the door. And the indian man only comes towards the end of the month at night time, and he always has this pink stack of billing receipts with him. The bad thing about me not wanting to open the door for random people is that sometimes my parents get something delivered to the house, but they forget to mention it, and I might have made them leave because no one was there to open the door. Oops.

At least I don’t have to listen to sales people or people making weird requests anymore. A few weeks ago there was someone who rang my doorbell, as well as my neighbour’s. My neighbour opened the door, and I heard the man asking to whether he could borrow their toilet. They didn’t let him in of course, and I would have done the same. I don’t see what someone would be doing there unless they were visiting someone, or selling something, and if they were visiting someone, they could surely have used their friend’s toilet. And you can just walk to the coffeeshop 2 blocks away to use the public toilets should you need one anyway.

I guess most people are paranoid about such things after hearing stories about people making similar requests, and ended up robbing the house or something similar.

My cold is gone, but now I’m left with a blocked nose, which is extremely uncomfortable. I can’t exactly test my food either, which is a really sad thing. :(

I’m trying to sit down and do some revision, but recently my attention span seems really short. I sit down and read for a while, and then I get distracted and do something else. Sigh. Organic chemistry really doesn’t interest me, and it’s so much more confusing that what I’ve learn in JC. I have no idea how I’m going to memorise all those mechanisms for the exam.

And since I haven’t mentioned about my Japanese oral exam the other day…

It actually went quite well; at least that was what my sensei (teacher) told me. Sitting in front of him and having him firing all sorts of questions was really nerve-wrecking, espcially when everything you said is recorded on tape and would be reviewed by other senseis later. Unlike some of the other senseis who were smiling at their students and telling them to relax, my sensei only had this serious expression on his face, which makes me feel even more nervous. I made a 1 or 2 mistakes while answering, but I’m not sure if he caught that, and therefore told me that I did well for it. The questions weren’t extremely difficult, but sometimes under exam conditions you feel really nervous, and you don’t answer as well as how you would normally do. Now it’s only the final paper that I have to do well in to get a reasonably good grade, and I shall seriously consider taking the next level next semester.

1 week more to go! :/

I came home in a rather good mood despite having a bloocked nose, and she just had to spoil it for me. I don’t understand why she seems to have such bad mood swings at times. When she’s in a good mood she can be really nice, but when she’s tired or in a bad mood she gets irritated over the smallest things and won’t stop nagging.

Soon after I came home she asked me to eat dinner, and while I was eating dinner she asked me to go renew my passport on my own. But it’s my exam in 2 weeks and my passport isn’t even with me; how am I supposed to renew it?! Then she said that my room was messy, and I was making a mess out of the dining table with my books as well. I admit that my room can be cleaner, but the reason why I haven’t tidied the dining table is because I’ve been sick the past 2 days, and I really didn’t feel well enough to do a lot of things. Not as though I’m never going to tidy it…

I thought she would stop there, but no… she then said that if I don’t take my clothes out to the washing machine she won’t bother about washing them. Said that I have so many clothes and I shouldn’t buy anymore unless I give away some of mine. I don’t even hae that many clothes in the first place. You’re the one with at least twice the number of clothes as I do, and the pot is calling the kettle black. And now that I don’t have uniforms, buying more clothes can be justified, and I buy like only 1 or 2 new clothes each month!

Nowadays, what goes in through one ear comes out of the other, especially when I don’t agree with some of the things being said. Especially when someone calls me lazy! You can nag and nag at me and I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear it, but call me lazy when you don’t have a very good reason to and I will get mad. It’s not as though I do nothing at all in the house you know. If I don’t have school and I’m just bumming around at home, I think that others have a very good reason to say that I’m lazy, and I will even agree with them. I still cook my own food and wash the dishes, change the bedsheets and fold the clothes sometimes, but when I only reach home at 8.30pm, have work to rush for the next day and I’m really tired as well, sometimes I really can’t do that much. Plus the exams are coming soon and I only have a week to study for 6 papers before the exams begin… it’s stressful you know. Sometimes I really wonder if people that have not been in university can understand how it feels to be so busy. It’s not as though I “study the whole day” because I like it, for one thing I don’t study 24/7, and sometimes I don’t have much of a choice because once I lag too far behind it becomes very difficult to catch up. Can you understand, or at least try to understand?!

I know that you say these things because you care, but when it’s being put across this way, it just makes me feel upset.

At this moment I just wish that we still had a maid around, not because I won’t have to do any housework otherwise, but rather so that you won’t have to do the housework and you can do whatever you want then. You can sleep early if you’re tired and no one will have to put with with the bad mood. Just having one person in such a bad mood can crush the moods of others around you you know.

かぜをひきました。
I caught a cold.

Serves me right for walking home in the rain yesterday, when I was already sneezing for most of the day. But I was just 10m away from my house when it started raining, and I was too lazy to take out my umbrella.

It least I’m feeling much better today as compared to yesterday. I woke up with my throat hurting badly, and I was sniffing away since the morning. It’s a good thing my throat doesn’t really hurt anymore.

Hopefully I’ll recover by tomorrow, because it’s a long school day, and I don’t want to go for my oral test while feeling sick.

I’m kind of pissed regarding the submission of one of our lab reports.

We were initially supposed to hand in 2 practical reports this week, one for our wet lab and another for our computer lab. Sherry and I went to the resource room after lunch today since I was going to hand in my prac, and looking at the submission box for the other practical we were supposed to hand in, we noticed that the label said “Spectroscopy”. Initially we didn’t think to much about it, and just assumed that it was referring to the practical we did 2 weeks ago, since all practicals are to be submitted 2 weeks after the lab session. It was only until we met her friend, and her friend mentioned that the label was wrong, that it struck us that the lab report due this week isn’t the one on spectroscopy.

Assuming that the office staff had written the label wrongly, her friend went to clarify things with the office staff, only to be told that it is indeed the spectroscopy practical that needs to be submited by this friday. Apparently someone had approched the office staff, saying that he didn’t want to come back to school during the study break to submit the assignment, and asked for the deadline to be brought forward.

If you don’t want to make a trip down to submit your assignment, why not ask your friend to do it for you, or just request for the submission box to be put up earlier? There’s certainly no need to request for the deadline to be pushed forward as well. And what’s more unbelievable is that the office actually acceded to such a request. Isn’t it being unfair to us? And we were not even told about this as well! If no one bothered to check the box or to clarify things, we would have happily thought that we still had more time to complete that report, or submit the wrong report into that box, since there was no submission box for the practical that was originally due this friday. It’s unfair to us, since this means that we only have 4 days to complete that report, and I’m sure most people haven’t completed theirs yet.

I’m sure that everyone reading this now will know what I’m going to do tonight. This sucks. :(