Friday, April 29, 2005

Moving stuff day

the semester ends abruptly when i came out from lorch hall after taking my last exam. looking back the days of the winter term, it was as if the only thing i have ever done during this period is study, study and study...so pathetic. and even so, i can't imagine what my results will look like...
it was supposed to be fun considering all the academic pressures have been removed. yet, there are still a lot of things to come. to name a few, the impending chaos upon moving out, the still cloudy prospects of getting the jpa full allowance (crucial for my getting a car), a writing test and a road test to be taken, and the ultimate concern of my which dwarfs all the previous events...my SOA first exam...(which will be held on the 25th of May). so there goes my supposingly carefree and relaxing post-exam period. more tension and cruel realities are awaiting me in a not so distant future...

so, as for a poor freshman like me, (who has no car, and not of a gender which has assets to get assistance from the opposite), moving out to a new place is almost an ordeal. first of all, i have to pack all my stuff into boxes, and that itself had already given me enough headache. then, i have to get transportation to move my stuff from north to central campus. i am truly grateful that a senior of mine (wei heong is his name, a sohpmore) was kind enough to let us share some space and time of the truck he rent (with eric driving it).

we (renjie and i) started moving out our stuff at 1pm. i had a total of 16 boxes (not all of them in the same size, in fact most of them were quite small), 2 luggages, and a fridge. with the assistance of qunfeng, we managed to finish it in quite a short while. after moving our stuff, we proceeded to help ivy moving hers. we loaded all our belongings on the truck, and set out without any delay. we went to ivy's house first, then to mine and renjie's. oh yeah, i forgot to mention about my new place. it's on the third floor of a house, an attic like place. the ceilings are low, but it has 2 bedrooms. the apartment is quite cool as there's a window which you can crawl through it to the roof, which is connected to downstairs by a series and flights of stairs. (i will show it in pic later) upon moving all our stuff to the living room, we paid the owner (a sweet looking but typical american girl in her junior year) 210 dollars by check (my first check!! 200 for rent, 10 for utilities)

after settling all the things, we went back to baits 1 to stay for another night. we visited wei heong's room on our way back. got to know a lot about couzen hall. informative trip i would say...haha.

my room again...

my room

living room

kitchen

my house for a month...

Saturday, April 23, 2005

snow in april??!?!?

it's april. end of april. spring equinox has long past. every single sign seemed to show that winter was officially dead. yet, today, the temperature took a sharp turn down, and it snows again...YES, IT SNOWS AGAIN, IN THIS END OF APRIL. man, this is insane. the accumalation reaches about half a foot i think. totally incomprehensible indeed.

so, again, we have to put on our inch-thick winter jacket on...and the funny thing is, some of my friends have already nicely packed their winter gears in their bags...hahaha. but despite having enough of this stupid weather, i took my camera out when i was goin out for lunch, hoping to freeze the last moments of winter in frames. actually, it was quite fun....we pull the low-reaching branches of trees so that the snow accumulated on them rain down on us...stupid but fun!! haha....

does it look like spring? can you imagine that this photo was taken in the late april??

poor tree...

Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Geosci field trip day

after the seemingly endless months of snow.....finally spring comes!! today the weather is just fine. highs 20-24. it started to feel like malaysia already...but heck, who cares? now i like the warmth (actually hotness) so much. for the past 2 weeks i had already cycled twice to the central campus. (to me it's a feat because of the distance and the damnable slopes. now i know why there are such slopes around UM..tell you guys later in the post).

as for today, i went to class as usual. 9-12, 3 classes back to back. after that headed to east quad for lunch (they serve 5 types of desserts today :) ). 1.00pm got one appointment with the econs advisor. didn't help much. went to CCLittle building to meet for geosci discussion.

for today's discussion, we had a field trip around ann arbor to examine the glacier features left by a continental ice sheet that covered michigan around 15000 (hmm..if im not mistaken) years ago. finally knew that the central campus was built on the outwash plain, in between two morraines on the east and west side respectively. now you know about the slopes. (they are still so damnable, regardless of what). not much fun from the trip though.

after coming back from class, i played frisbee at the thieme field (fully utilizing the excellent weather) with 5 of my friends. (eric, renjie, voonseng, putt, chiachye) had a good time there.

now it's 11.34 pm. got a linear algebra hw due on friday, but seriously have no mood to study...what has happened to me??!?!?! maybe i should just sleep...hahaha. i need some motivation. (but wasn't my sucky 425 marks big enough a motivation for me??!?!)

good night world.

Saturday, April 02, 2005

DP (Detroit Project) Day!!!

a few weeks ago, i had signed up to do voluntary work on a day called the detroit project day. until a day before the day had i received the letter of assignment. all i knew was that i would be assigned to a site named v3, but little did i know what would i do....

so here comes the day. we were supposed to meet in angell hall at 8.45 am. i woke up at 8, and after much of delay, i found myself missing the damned bus (again!). as a result, me and renjie had to run down to pierpont commons, hoping that we would be able to catch the missed bus. we were disappointed, and had to wait for another bus...but when we reached central campus, we noticed there were swarms of people coming from all sides of direction, heading towards the building. apparently...michigan time still applied. after standing in a line for a while, we were notified that we did not need to wait...we could just grab our t-shirts and go our bus. i got a medium size blue t-shirt, put it on, and yup, ready to start the exciting day.

as i was in group v3, renjie and i seperated as we went to search for our bus. after much trouble, i finally found my bus. upon aboarding it, i had to sign a paper (must be like some live-dead contract..haha), and was given a named tag. as there was already quite a number of people in the bus, i had to sit quite far back. after some moment of silence, conversations were started in the bus, and me too was able to engage in a small chat with an arizona girl (shawn, graduate student).

the bus left ann arbor quite late (9.30am) and we reached detroit (actually the place we went is not the city, i think it's a suburb of detroit). as our bus had members not only from v3, we splited into groups. earlier in the bus, i had known that my work would be related to setting up a library for a middle school. so there we went to a building (owned by blight what what, a charity-voluntary-work group) and gathered in a soup kitchen hall. as an ice-breaker, we played the link, and after hanging out for a short while, we were told that the truck with our books had arrived.

unloading the books was nothing a task, and upon receiving the books, we had to first divide them into fiction, non-fiction, and inappropriate books. then we had to label them. that was when i thought, oh gosh, books again!!!! (fyi, im a librarian) we worked in groups of 3, and we chatted while working. (some other groups play some naming game, say name a city starting with alphabet a-z)

lunch sucked. i just had a turkey sandwich and some pop. people from other groups came join for lunch too. there was a big crowd in the hall...and after that, it was in such a mess that we had to clean it up. cynthia, one of my senior was there too. cool and remote as usual (i mean to the juniors).

we continued our work after the cleaning up. then when it was around 2, we stopped. hopping in the same bus, we headed to a park and there, all the volunteers gathered together to hear speeches from 3 speakers (ended up having more than that). one of them, a black, was rather cool as he rap through his speech. (seriously) there too they gave out free t-shirts by throwing them out to the crowd. i manage to grab one :D, as my arms were fast and long enough..muahaha. it was quite a cold day, and we were quite impatient waiting for the speakers to finish their speeches (one of them was late...the senator)

the event was wrapped up with the speech of the lady senator, and we walked our way back to the buses. nothing much in the journey back, except i accidentally stepped on a pile of shit (shit!!!)