Once again, i'm running short of time before book-in. so, i'll try to write as much as i can in as little time as possible.

NDP preview on saturday was...ok. all i saw from my station at one fullerton were the big floating jellyfish and the fireworks. pretty impressive, but i didn't see anything else, so my judgement may not be the most accurate. anyway, my job there was to maintain comms (which i didn't have to do in the end), and to give out those clapper stars. it's surprising how strong the herd mentality is. as soon as people saw others with the stars, they came rushing over to get one. well, i won't complain that much since it works to our advantage. we are supposed to give out as many as possible after all.

i finally went to watch the C div bowl. and guess what? i got roped in to do some assistant coaching, and i had the chance to wear the "Coach" pass and go down to the lanes. cool experience...i never realized standing there watching people bowl could be that tiring. hopefully i can do it again next year.

this coming week has the potential to be the worst so far in my time at sungei gedong. potential signing of an extra, higher expectations, and superiors' horns growing could seriously endanger my free time and weekends. sadness. oh well. there's only 16+ months left. things will turn out ok, as long as i believe so.

-random thought of the day: I can't wait for ORD...-

I'm blogging! nothing special about that, but here's the thing - i'm blogging on monday! haven't been able to do that since, well, a really long time ago. for those who are wondering, i'm not AWOL-ing. it's the off i get back for burning the sunday before. next to ORD, the next favourite 3-letter word in the SAF is most definitely "off".

i think the extra day off came at a rather appropriate time. the past week has been quite screwed up. mostly my fault actually, but oh well. it's going to be a new book-in, and a new week, so i should try to forget all the bad memories/things that happened.

sometimes, i wish that i had pushed myself a little much more in BMT, so i could be posted to SISPEC, if not OCS. why? because the rank i get from SISPEC would put me on par with the sergeants, while the bar from OCS could be used to flatten my CSM. believe me, they need flattening sometimes. but since i wasn't posted to any of those places, all i can do is suck it up and vent on my blog. sad, isn't it?

from a young age, singaporeans are taught to strive for excellence in whatever they do. now, that's not a bad thing, but i think we overdo it sometimes. there's too much emphasis placed on leaders in the SAF. very clear lines are drawn between "commanders" and "the rest". as you can tell, i don't really approve. guess i'm still used to the civillain mindset of treating your superiors as friends. never mind. 1 year and 4+ months more of bearing with it and it's over. no worries. i can handle that.

live range this past week was quite a sucky experience. so far, every time i'm involved (i.e. shooting) in range, it has to rain. proning in a puddle is not fun, and neither are the mosquito bites that are sure to follow. as it stands now, i have about 8 bites in...sensitive areas, and much more elsewhere. rain screws up my shooting. it made my goal for marksman become a struggle to merely pass. sad but true. still, i passed, and i don't have to go for re-range, thanks to the nice people from 3 signal battalion. signallers rock (blatant self-praise)! i think i'd be happier there, though i can't be sure. generally, people are nicer to attached-in units, so maybe i haven't seen their horns grow yet.

oh. the highlight of my week - harry potter book 7. after waiting for about 2 years, and 6 hours of reading later, i finally got to find out what happened to everyone. it was a pretty conclusive ending, though i wish the final battle was a little more exciting. seems like there's room for a sequel, but the author ruled that out. i bet there'll be tons of new fanfiction. some things that were promised never made it into the book though, like which non-magical character would preform magic in later life, or revealing what dudley saw in the dementor attack. i must admit, i'm surprised that some of the pretty far-fetched predictions about some plot elements really came true, and as usual, some minor details in earlier books affected the story in a really big way. not too happy about the characters that died, but it helps provide a sense of reality to the story, and reminds readers that it's not a fairy tale where the good side wins a decisive victory with no casualties. i'll definitely be re-reading it in camp, provided i have the time, that is.

national schools' C div competition was today, and i was supposed to go and watch/support cat high. but, reading harry potter until 2+ and subsequently staying up until 3 or 4+ meant that i overslept and missed it. no prizes for guessing who feels horribly guilty now. a small measure of comfort is that they're competing next monday as well, and i can go for that.

the coming week look ok-ish, though something from last week could come back and bite me. saturday's burnt for the NDP preview, so we get the next monday off as well. yays. book-in time draws closer, so i better go get prepared.

-random thought of the day: Shopping sprees feel good.-

Time is against me this week, so i shall have to type faster than i have ever typed before.

this book-out is particularly short-lived, as the trainees are going for their live range tomorrow. yes, you read that right. live range on sunday. that means i will have to book in later tonight, after spending less than 24 hours out of camp. but well, it's not all that bad. i do get an off-in-lieu back the following week, so it balances out. still, i can't help but feel sian.

you know, since my posting to sungei gedong, i've been doing more office work than signal stuff (something like a ratio of 97% office : 3% signals). kind of odd, considering i'm a signaller by training. then again, there are so many "by left"s in the army, and this is a great example of one of them.

i guess it's time for me to get mentally prepared for a longer-than-usual week in camp. on the bright side, it's not confinement. and harry potter book 7 comes out in exactly 7 days, so that's something to look forward to.

-random thought of the day: ATP next week.-

"Respect is what you earn, not what you wear."

those are famous words spoken by my OC. i'm starting to see his point much more clearly now. there are certain people (or at least one person) whose rank i would love to tear off and burn. the most basic courtesy you can do is pronounce a person's name correctly (jokes aside), and the person i'm talking about can't even do that. the 3 stripes he wears does not elevate him THAT much above me, or the trainees for that matter. yet, he uses this really...patronizing tone to talk to us. i have this urge to do something drastic, but i don't know what yet. time for me to get creative and find something that would embarass him, but is still within SAF regulations. if any of my schoolmates in SISPEC now became like him, i would totally kill them.

went to catch Transformers today with a few friends. most definitely brightened up my week. in fact, i think i want to watch it again. as for when, i don't know. probably 2 weeks from now, if it's still showing. only little issue i had was that it didn't explore the robots' characters that deeply. and the chinese subtitles were a little screwed up (i mean, Starscream as "xing xing jiao"? oh please). i like the transforming sequences, though they could have been a little slower so that interested people (like me) could see where all the parts fit. all in all, it's been one of the more memorable movies i've watched. definitely going to get the DVD.

this is something one of my friends pointed out to me. compare Megatron:

with Lord Recluse (from CoH):

if you colour Megatron's eyes red (as they were in the movie), the two could almost pass off as lookalikes, except that Recluse is more organic-looking. and that covers my pointless fact of the day.

well, that just about wraps it up. i was intending to write a much longer rant about the person i have issues with in my camp, but i sort of lost steam halfway. the weather right now is really good for sleeping; i only hope i wake up in time for book-in tomorrow.

-random thought of the day: Sometimes, people are better off not hearing certain things.-

Thought i'd post to mark this special, once-in-a-lifetime date. heh.

-random thought of the day: This is actually a bo-liao post.-

Weekends are way too short. it's difficult to squeeze 5 days' worth of stuff into just 2 days. for instance, i've been wanting to go to the funfair near the interchange for slightly more than 3 weeks now, but i couldn't make the time. i'd love to go today, since it's their last day here, but i have to book in by 11:00, so that plan's been shot down in a blaze of glory.

another thing which i wanted to do was to catch Transformers this weekend. watching the movie is pretty significant to me, since i've always been fascinated by the thought of robots disguised as vehicles and other inconspicuous gadgets. in fact, as a kid, one of the first cartoons i watched was Transformers, and that left quite a deep impression on me. as such, i will kill anyone that spoils the movie for me.

to be honest, the reason this weekend felt shorter than usual was because of what i did on saturday. i only found out that it was cat high's homecoming day the night before. so i had to reshuffle (read: push to next week, or even later) some of my other plans in order to go down and support the school. i met quite a few old friends, teachers and juniors there. so far, nothing has come close to beating the feeling of being inside the school, walking around and saying hi to people i know. as an added bonus, every single time i go back, i'm still amazed at the number of teachers who remember me. makes a guy feel good, you know?

and after homecoming, i got dragged along to go bowling. it was one of those spontaneous decisions that only cat high guys can come up with, so it totally caught me off-guard. at this point in time, i think i should inform everyone that prior to yesterday, i hadn't bowled in close to 9 or 10 months, possibly even longer. so, calling myself "a little rusty" would be way too kind. it took about 3 games for me to regain my form and re-catch the timing. then again, i'm not 100% to blame. since i passed out of BMT, i realize that the things that used to work may not work any more due to my different body shape. so...adaptation has to come in, i guess. the good news is that my score didn't go below 100, so i'm not totally screwed yet. only problem is, as an unfortunate side-effect, i'm aching quite a bit. but it's nothing a few good stretches can't fix.

we went down to Victor's for the abovementioned bowling outing. i think it was particularly meaningful, seeing as that entire area will be cleared to make room for the IR. i'm actually pretty upset by that thought, as Victor's was considered "home ground" to us. in my time in cat high bowling, i rarely trained (or bowled) outside of Victor's. there's a certain attachment to it. so...it'll be quite hard to say goodbye to it, i think, at the end of the year. i plan to go down there a few more times before it closes...sort of to soak in the atmosphere, if you get what i mean.

this past wednesday (or was it tuesday? can't really remember), i got a shock while reading the new paper in camp. it reported that Chris Benoit, his wife and their son were found dead in their home. while the evidence does point to double murder and suicide, i really hope that they're mistaken. it seems like such an odd thing to happen. it's pretty alarming news. i'm not entirely sure about how to react to it. offering words of condolence would be awkward, seeing as the whole family's gone. at any rate, i hope the rest of his loved ones find peace soon, though i think this will be a hot debate topic for quite a while.

i really shouldn't listen to this song before book-in:

Louis Armstrong - What A Wonderful World
I see trees of green, red roses too
I see them bloom for me and you
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

I see skies of blue and clouds of white
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night
And I think to myself what a wonderful world.

The colors of the rainbow so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands saying how do you do
They're really saying I love you.

I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll never know
And I think to myself what a wonderful world
Yes I think to myself what a wonderful world.

it makes the world outside of camp so appealing, which in turn, makes me reluctant to go back. but well, we all have to do it, because we love our nation, and totally not because we're afraid of being charged as AWOL (right?). at least i'm not a trainee, so my life isn't totally screwed up, though it comes close enough sometimes. guess not everything's as smooth-sailing as i'd like to imagine. that's my weakness; i'm optimistic to a fault.

kind of a long post for a no-life army boy to make eh? better get showered up and pack my bag. being screwed for being late just isn't worth it.

...and i still wish it was december.

-random thought of the day: R.I.P. Chris Benoit.-