tsewei’s blog

Hear ye, hear ye..
It has been predicted that nothing remotely interesting will be happening the next two weeks, thus I will not be blogging much..

Because:

1. exams. Urgh. Will have to start writing 3 final papers, prepare for final song performance and 1 TV show production, producing/ directing/ soundtrack/ everything. Production’s fun, but the technicalities scares me.

2. packing. Yes it’s that time of the year again, where I get to force myself to part with my “junk” and pack my stuff to leave. Forecasted weather in the room: dust-storms, and scatterings of temper-storms as well.

For interested parties, I will be leaving the States and be back home sometime in mid-May. See you all then!

Meanwhile, it’s back to work. (and mourning for my dead flowers).

a storm is coming, I can feel it.

Ok yeah, so maybe weather.com forecasted that, but when a storm’s coming, you can always sense it.

There’s a sort of tension in the air. Maybe it’s ’cause of the overcast sky — hardly a hint of blue anywhere, but still bright enough for a hot day like this (it’s 75F / 23C today). Maybe it’s also cause of the low-hanging clouds, white, but getting greyer ever so slowly, sort of like a looming ominous presence as I walked to and fro for class. Then there’s also the wind, hurriedly sweeping across me, rushing off to give those lean trees a good shake and my room windows a good rattle.

Yup, right now, the heavy curtains in my room are doing a little dance of their own to the wind.

Damn, I was hoping the hot weather would stick around longer. With the storm and rain, it’s gonna get cold again. Won’t be surprised if temperature drops 30 F degrees. sigh.

On the other hand, I do miss storms, especially the tropical thunderstorms. There hasn’t been a single thunderstorm in the few months that I’ve been here. Silent rain just falls off the sky, unaccompanied by any visual (lighting) or audio (thunder) display. Just like that, totally unspectacular.

But tropical thunder storms are really something else. All that flashing across the sky, and lighting appearing in every imaginable pattern (a single crooked line, forks of snake’s tongue intertwined, going vertical, or horizontal). All against the angry purple-grey sky. I’ll say that’s really a lot of attitude in there.

Not forgetting the loud claps of thunder that make me clap my hands over my ears. Large raindrops would batter the hot cement floor with such force, leaving large round wet marks that would soon merge with other marks into one large wet surface, and lazily, heat rises from the floor. Leafy trees and grass bent over from the rain and wind, helpless but resisting the force at the same time.

what a show. I really miss that.
But meanwhile, I’ll just settle for its milder-mannered cousin here.

Yup, cut flowers in vase need food too. Apparently, I’m not the only one who needs to eat, huh..

In my excitement the other day, I didn’t notice that the florist had attached a little sachet of powder to my card among the flowers. Unexpectedly found it yesterday when I changed the water in the vase, and yes, it was a packet of “flower food“.

It said: “Aquaplus - Fresh Flower Nutient & Water Clarifier.”
Oh well, whatever, I’ll just throw them in the water.
It was slightly bubbly, and I guess my flowers did find it yummy and nutritious, ’cause I came back from school today to find them all blooming and looking healthy!

looking good there.. heehee..

Anyway, out of curiosity, I went and googled about flower food/flower nutrient. Hmm, notice how the word Google has now transcended beyond a proper noun to be a verb as well? ok, I’m digressing, anyway….
Apparently, because my flowers are separated from their usual source of food, this powder contains the sugars they need to help them to grow and bloom, and lower the water pH so that food & water can be transported more efficiently in their phloem & xylem system (or something).

I never knew of such thing as flower food. The florists that I bought flowers from in Malaysia never gave me or told me anything about flower food. No wonder they always die after a few days. The hot & humid tropical weather doesn’t help either. After 3 days, they always look ready to wither and drop dead.

And further research online revealed that putting an aspirin or 7-Up in the water may help a little bit, but flower food works better (’cause of the sugar & pH thingy).

There you go, interesting trivia for the day.

Now let me go see my flowers again, and sing songs to them for some spiritual food.

Yesterday was my first ever “virtual” birthday celebration. that involved a mouse-bitten cake.

Lemme explain. Since I’m halfway round the globe in the States right now, my darling au yong figured we’d do a virtual celebration instead. In other words, he buys cake, he stuffs candle on cake, he lights candle, he sings birthday song, I make my wish, he helps me blow out the candle, he *helps me* eat the cake. Immediate transmission via webcam. voila!

Sounds pretty funny actually. And because picture quality always look bad in the not-top-of-the-range-webcams that we have, the cake looked like it was mouse-bitten, like he shared it with a mouse or something. haha. Look!

haha actually it’s just hazelnut. Lots of nuts, stuck on one side of the cake. Photo was taken with his mobile phone.
No mouse was involved. But wait, there’s more.

He sent me roses!! pink ones! haha.. yeah, that was a surprise. I was already going to nap ’cause of my stupid headache when he ringed me up again, to tell me to quickly go collect the roses ’cause the delivery people couldn’t deliver to my room directly. At first we thought the delivery people were stupid enough to leave it in the postal office (which would have closed by then at 430pm), but turns out they just left it in the terrace office 2 buildings away. So yeah, I had to collect my own flowers, but it’s ok, ’cause they’re all pretty. Love the ribbon and clear vase too!

Thanks so much!! This is the best!
*muakx*

to everyone else: thanks for your wishes too.

My blog uses WordPress, and since I’m a tech idiot who also happens to be a blur cow, I have always been complaining about the uploading function for my photos.

Previously I could only upload a picture, then immediately copy the html link to my blog post. The problem is, I often forget to do this (yes, that’s real ‘cacat’/spastic). Sometimes I also forget which photos I’ve posted up and which are the ones that I have not. And WP did not have any function that allowed me to view all the stuff that I’ve uploaded and let me check through it for the html links etc.

But now my problem has been solved. Thanks to my constant ranting and my ‘cacatness’, my darling au yong has developed a WordPress plugin — the WP-Upload Manager.

Basically it helps me manage the stuff I’ve uploaded. Now I can:

• check the entire list of uploaded files
• preview the pictures, etc
• delete any picture/file that I don’t want anymore
• find out which post a specific file has been referenced to
• find out the html links for every uploaded file

And it’s really worked fine for me. Makes my life easier too (coz now I can stop going ARGH when I forget something).

If you want this for ur WP blog, head on over to auyongtc’s blog.

Since this is meant to be a user review, lemme rate this plugin..
hmmmm.. I’ll give it…
5 teh special + 1 nasi lemak!!! (only at Lotus mamak in PJ)

I’ve just become what I would call a skylight chaser. I now chase after and pursue pretty lights (and clouds) in the skies.

I was having dinner, sitting by the window at the dining hall, when my roomie and I saw the most beautiful sunset (ok, I know I say that about every sunset. But it was beautiful). I wanted a photo of it. But I didn’t have my camera with me!! Ack!

I ate the rest of my dinner and rushed back to my room, my eyes on the skylight all the time. “eeecks! s0o0o pretty! gotta get my camera!” was the only thought my brain was capable of then. Got my camera out and trudge 10 minutes out to an open area to capture a few shots.

Alas, that pretty tuff of cloud had disappeared.
Urgh.
It was blazing reddish-pink, but it’s gone now.
Ish.

But the sky was still pretty. Did what little I could with my point-n-shoot camera.
Urgh no manual options, no tripod, limited zoom.

Oh well, here they are…

target skylights hunted down? Nope.
quality pictures? Nope.
Pretty skies? Well, yeah, check!
frozen fingers? erm, check.
brrrr….

As usual, I took a look at my desktop weather indicator to see how the weather was to decide what to wear for the day before I walk off to class.

To my horror, I thought something was very wrong with it. So, I quickly opened my browser and checked weather.com.

And this is what I got!! :S

116 in Ithaca?!?!!?!? in april!!?!?!?!??

What the hell? hotter than tropical weather?!?!?!??!
But it felt normal when I opened the window and cold air rushed in!!

weather.com has gone CRAZY.. tsk tsk..

updated at 4.02pm:
yup, it must have been a bug in their system. It’s OK now. It says 52 F. Yup, that feels about right.

One of the little things about Ithaca that I like is their skies. I hate the weather, but the skies are always so lovely, especially the sunsets. If you watch it the whole day, you’ll see the different hues of blue, blending from one to another, and occationally there’s a dash of pink, orange or purple across it. Pretty!

8.20pm, and I was walking back from my shift with ICTV’s Frequency (an alternative music video show that I’m working on in college) and I saw that the sky was beautiful with the last rays of light. Good thing I had my camera with me today, but the unfortunate thing is that I had nothing to stabilize the camera against — which is a real bad thing ’cause the exposure time for my night scene option is really long — and as such the photo looked kinda crappy.

But I don’t care, I’m gonna put in here anyway, ’cause I love the colours!! (and ’cause this is my blog, I’ll have crappy pictures here if I want to.)

The sky’s colour palate…

Can’t get enough of the skies here. All the different blues! wheeee…

I ended up doing something yesterday which I have never ever done.

I actually took the effort to check my friendster account and took the initiative to look up old friends and attempt to add them.

Yes, I’ve always been lazy. I started my friendster account sometime ago ’cause everyone else asked me to start one, but abandoned it after putting up my profile. Occasionally, I get invites and so I approve them. But I’ve never ever bothered to look up old pals from my primary & secondary school days through the network of people.

Well, not until yesterday.

Few days ago, I got a nice surprise when a friend from wayy back, Diana, found my blog and left me a message. That got me thinking, and I realized that ever since I moved to Singapore after Form 5, I’ve never really kept in touch with my old friends. And I really have not much of an idea where most people are now and what they are doing in their lives.

So yes, I decided to finally move my lazy ass and started my hunt for old school friends through my existing network, busy clicking on friend’s friend’s friends etc… And I’m not quite done yet. Mainly ’cause there’s a whole long list of friend’s friends to go through to find the people I know, and also because friendster’s pages don’t quite load properly most of the time. (boooo..)

But I’m working on it. Still looking for more old friends to add and send a ‘hello’ message to…

And coincidentally as I was checking through my friendster account, I saw that an old friend from Samad had left me a message. Another nice surprise! I guess I really have been quite bad an keeping in touch with people.. :s

Anyway, to anyone out there whom I haven’t spoken to for a long time:

HIEee! What’s up?
Hope you’re doing fine..

The weather’s been really great these days. The sun is out, the snow is gone, the temperature is going up to the 50s. And I see green peeking out of everywhere, and the animals have all woken up (including the pesky insects).

The lake by the chapel has thawed too. So I stopped by today after lunch to hang around a bit, and I took a few photos!

The lake by the chapel…

Some ducks swimming around…

no more snow on the ground…

and clear blue skies…

Lovely! When it gets warmer, I’ll go sit by the lake and read or something.