Hot Chocolate

What to do on a cold, rainy Friday like today:

Take out a mug and some hot chocolate powder:


Boil some hot water using your roomate's mini kettle, pour a bit in and make a paste (my friend says the texture ends up better like this) :


Fill it up with water and dunk a wedge of dark chocolate in just to see what it tastes like:


Honestly, I don't know if the wedge of dark chocolate did anything to enhance the taste but it still tastes pretty good, and it's quite nice knowing there's a piece of melted dark chocolate in it!

Now to do some IHUM reading and stay indoors while outside it's dristling and cold. :)

Mendicants Online!

Oh, I almost forgot. The Mendicants website has been updated! It's not much right now 'cos we don't have a full time webmaster, but you can take a look at some of the photos and stuff. Check it out here. Enjoy!

Work's piling on!

Got my first IHUM paper assignment today. It's due next next Tuesday. It's quite a challenge conceptually because it's a history-based course, yet at the same time they don't want a historical research paper but an interpretive paper, so it kinda becomes like a literature cum sociology cum history paper. I'm not feeling terribly confident about it right now, actually I'm slightly apprehensive, but I'll get it done somehow and God will provide so I shouldn't be too worried. =)

Might start helping Aaron (friend from Chi Alpha) co-lead a Bible Study soon. I've been attending a Tuesday Bible Study with Glen on and off, but I have more time this quarter and Glen saying at Bible Study this week that Aaron's going to take over to ease the load off Glen (especially now that Glen has TWO kids) and needs a co-leader. I felt challenged to avail myself, so I emailed Glen; met up with the two of them today. So far I feel quite good about it besides the usual insecurities about being inadequate for such a big responsibility. But I'm made by The Almighty Himself and I'd think His designing skills are pretty darn good, plus He lives in me, so by faith I have more than what it takes to be a leader in the ministry! I'm still praying about it - basically it's a yes by default, and a no if I email Glen by early next week telling him no. Help me pray! And drop me a blog comment or an email if you think God's speaking to you. Prayers are much appreciated! Thank you!

Things are really changing at Chi Alpha. The sense of community is getting stronger, and the hunger for God is getting deeper. Just yesterday I led a couple of songs together with Ria (a girl in Chi Alpha from Trinidad), and people were so hungry. We spent about 30-40 mins in worship on just 2 songs, and people were singing their hearts out - something I think is quite rare in the USA. Somehow people here tend to be pretty reserved about singing in public, but on wed night people were really singing with all their hearts to God and it was just fantastic. God is truly moving and He's gonna move more!

Oh and in case anyone's worried about my time management, don't worry 'cos this quarter is relatively light for me. I'm doing prerequisite classes for music and econ, plus IHUM, so altogether it's 14 units - pretty much everything else I wanted to take clashed, plus God spoke to me through Shaowei last quarter not to take on too many units this quarter. Maybe it's for the purpose of leading the Bible Study? Dunno yet. =)

Music Theory has quite frequent assignments, though they're not all that heavy each time. But it does add up. Econ problem sets take a while to do too, and I have to be careful not to get complacent just because I've done Econ before - made a few careless and pointless mistakes on the problem set due tomorrow that my friend pointed out. So work's piling on. But I'll be able to handle it. Still, prayers are always welcomed and needed!

Gonna go finish another music assignment now. It's not due till Monday but I want to spend the weekend doing my IHUM reading (this IHUM requires quite a lot of reading!) and starting work on my essay. Plus some of us are going for a Chris Tomlin concert in San Jose on Sunday so I wanna get some work done tonight. Till next time. God bless! :)

To SoCal and Back

So like I last posted, I was down in SoCal (Southern California) with the Mendicants last weekend. It's a tour the group does every year during the weekend with Martin Luther King Jr Day which is a public holiday and falls on a Monday, so we get a long weekend. Shaowei very kindly let us use his car while he was in Nigeria. We left on Thursday, came back on Monday. I've been pretty busy this week so haven't really had time to update my blog until now.

Here's a rough sketch of what we did:

THURSDAY - Left Stanford and drove to Irvine, about 70 miles south of LA. We reached Irvine at about 1am the next morning cos of this really bad accident on the freeway that left traffic almost at a standstill - apparently some truck had exploded and in the process flattened a car along with it or something like that. One of the Mendicants, Henry (also our music director), stays at Irvine so we stayed at his house most nights of the trip. His place is REALLY NICE, it's really spacious, and it's quite high up on a hill overlooking Irvine. The city of Irvine in general is really nice. HUGE open roads, everything's far away, houses are nice etc. Solomon (from the Mendicants) commented to me one time that if you just owned a plot of land the size of an intersection between two main roads you could build a pretty nice house. ;)

A couple of photos of Henry's place:

Check out the city lights in the background:


Inside Hank's place:


Views from his place in the daytime (notice the mountains and city in the backgrounds respectively) :


The daytime photos were of course taken on another day. Just figured they'd fit at this part of the blog.

FRIDAY - Woke up at the earth-shattering hour of 8am. *yawn*

That's (from left) Joe, UB, Joey and Lance.

We left in the morning to sing for Henry's high school's choir groups (we sang for 3 of them, but there are like 7 in total... crazy...) and we also did a masterclass for one of those 3 groups. In the afternoon we went back to Hank's place to slack, then drove to a suburb in LA where we met up with Stanford's all-girl a cappella group, Counterpoint. They go on the same tour as us every year too, so we perform together quite a bit. Stayed at one of the girl's places. Wasn't a very eventful night although it was quite funny (sorta) watching Greg when he was drunk.

SATURDAY - Drove back to Irvine, went to the beach which was really nice. Lotsa seaside houses, quaint little shops, a small funfair, basically quite a pretty and pleasant family-fun kinda place.

Picture taken from a boat:

Hank (in the maroon t-shirt) discovered he could get the attention of all the seagulls in the area by throwing his french fries at them. Think it made the 2-3 bucks he paid for his fries even more worth it:


Performed at a concert at the Irvine high school in the evening together with Counterpoint. Here's a photo taken just before singing. We often run in with roses at the start of our performances and give them to whoever we want - usually girls. (Yes xmmp, I can hear the snickering...) :


SUNDAY - went to San Diego to sing at a church (not a church service). Was another combined concert with Counterpoint. Unfortunately our concert was at the same time as this big football match so not that big a crowd came. Still, it went pretty well I guess. =) After the concert we went to makan (eat), then Solomon and I went to an evening church service while the rest went bowling. Drove back to Hank's place after that.

MONDAY - LOADS of driving. Left at about 9:30am for Stanford, reached Stanford at about 4pm. But the driving was much nicer this time 'cos it was in the day so we could see the scenery around us. On the way back we saw two separate instances of cars on fire. (Saw another one on fire yesterday (Friday) - Shaowei suggested it might be prophetic. ;) )

Overall it was a pretty fun trip, good performances, got to drive around, but we didn't really get to see downtown LA or San Diego so I was a little disappointed 'cos it felt like too much driving for so little touring. Still, I'm thankful for it.

Shaowei and Ai Lin came back from Nigeria yesterday. Gonna meet Lisa, De Wen, Shaowei and probably Ai Lin for dinner later. Quite looking forward to it, miss hanging out with them. :)

Oh, and before I end this -really long- post, if you're reading this, feel free to drop me an email anytime to ask about me or tell me about how things are going for you. Non-email-list emails are always a joy to receive, especially from friends and relatives. =) God bless!!

Below Freezing Temps... in California?!?!

Check out this excerpt from an email I just received:

"Brrr!! It’s cold and getting colder. I just checked the forecast and the predicted low is 25 degrees Fahrenheit. As you know, anything below 32 degrees is freezing."

It's going to be sub-zero (celsius) temperatures here!! I wonder if there'll be snow. Oh well. I'll be in Southern California this weekend and this forecast is for this weekend so I'll just keep warm and pray for my friends. hehe.

This is quite amazing cos California rarely ever gets to freezing point.

Leaving for SoCal soon. More updates from there if I can. =) Will be busy though. Have some reading to do over the weekend for classes next week. But I'll post pictures if I can. :D

Back at Stanford

Hey everybardee! You can probably tell I'm not very creative with my blog entry titles. But it's ok. As long as they're informative.

Flew back to Stanford and arrived on Saturday morning 11am. Feels good to be back although I was quite jet lagged for the first two days (woke up at 6:30am on Sunday and 7:30am on Mon, a far cry from my usual 11am or 12nn) and missed home a fair bit more this time. The weather here's gotten significantly colder. I'm actually thinking of putting on my gloves while I bike even in the daytime - last quarter I only did it sometimes at night. The weather has been fantastic otherwise - no rain so far, and plenty of clear blue skies and nice bright sunshine.

School started on Tuesday. At the moment I've signed up for a course called Ancient Empires for IHUM (it continues into the Spring Quarter too so it's a 2-quarter long course - IHUM is compulsory for freshmen but you get to choose your preferences of IHUM courses), Econ 1A which is introductory Economics part 1 (they won't let me skip it even though I have my A Level cert in Econs) and Music Theory. That's 14 units. Almost everything else I'm interested in taking is either too many units for my liking or clashes with my schedule. I wanted to take voice lessons which would be another 1-2 units but the voice instructors don't have space, and the other alternative, group voice lessons, clashes with my current schedule.

IHUM seems to be interesting. I've attended the first lecture already - the Prof is this British guy who talks quite fast and quite eloquently and is really funny in the dry British kinda way. So it should be an interesting quarter. ;) Oh and as a side note, my IHUM lecture and discussion section locations are EXACTLY the same as last quarter's!! There's a really low chance of that happening - there's about 8-9 different IHUMs which means 8-9 different locations, and each IHUM has maybe about 12-15 sections. So it's quite a coincidence. Kinda caught my attention - maybe God's trying to tell me something. ;) Praying about it, don't have an answer yet.

Also praying about church. Wanna settle down in one church family real soon. On that note, for my CHC friends: Ps Phil Pringle's coming to CCC San Fran!! Cool huh. ;) I'm really hoping I'll catch him! I have every intention to go visit CCC that weekend even if God calls me to another church. Like i'll try to find an alternative service that doesn't clash with my own or something.

Tomorrow I'm going down with The Mendicants to Southern California (a.k.a. SoCal). We'll be heading to my friend's house in Irvine which is near LA, spending a couple of days in the LA area and then go to San Diego for a day trip before heading back on Monday which is a public holiday here (Martin Luther King Jr Day). We're leaving tmr (thu) evening so we'll skip Fri classes but it shouldn't be too big a loss cos I only have two classes on Friday, out of which one's an Econ section where they're doing an Econ experiment kinda thing so I won't miss out on any teaching.

Shaowei and Ai Lin are flying to Nigeria right now, and Shaowei was kind enough to let me use his car. :D Thanx Shaowei!! I drove it down to San Jose today to buy tickets for a Chris Tomlin concert on Jan 28th. Looking forward to it. =) Also using his car to go down to SoCal which is quite a blessing, not just for me but for the whole group since we were short of one car before. I'll try to post pictures from the trip as soon as I can.

For now, I gotta finish packing (almost done) and get organized (room's a mess right now) and get some IHUM reading done for tmr's lecture. It's already 1:15am so I think I'd better go. Miss everyone back in Singapore! God bless everyone who reads this! =)