Where did all that time go?

It's finals week this week. Where did my whole quarter go? Was Pi day (March 14, a.k.a. 3.14 in American notation) really an entire year ago, when John Sillcox demonstrated his Mathematical prowess by reciting Pi to a HUNDRED decimal places unprepared in front of a captive Chi Alpha audience? Has it really been more than an entire month since my last blog post? Am I really 2/3 way through my SECOND (!!) year of college?

Geez. This is nuts. This quarter didn't feel like a quarter at all. Didn't really enjoy my classes, don't feel like the quarter peaked, don't feel like it's ending. Guess it hasn't been a great quarter. Like most things, it's had its good sides, but that doesn't mean it was good.

Took Indonesian this quarter, I can form decent sentences now and understand basic written stuff; still can't understand spoken Indonesian very well just 'cos Indonesians speak really fast and with a pretty thick accent. But I've made a good amount of progress that I'm happy with. Yesterday we had to take a 45-minute final (which wasn't really critical 'cos I'm only taking the class for pass/fail, not for a letter grade) and then give a short 10-minute presentation on anything we wanted. Took some photos with my computer's webcam. Photos are always a nice addition to the blog. Unless you're Gong Gong who prints out my blog pages without the photos to read. Sorry Gong Gong, but you can still come online to see the pictures!

Guru kami (our teacher), Anita:


Charmaine, setting up her presentation on her past and upcoming service trips to Sekayu, a village in Indonesia. Charmaine's also a Sophomore (i.e. 2nd year) from Singapore.


Anita, manning the video camera. She wanted to record all of our presentations for her own keepsake. Clearly Charmaine had just said something really bad by mistake...

I'm just kidding Charmaine saying something bad. Her presentation went great.


Charmaine presenting. "Musim panas tahun lalu" = (lit.) season hot year last = last summer:


Alejandro, presenting on his family:


Alejandro again:


Tidak ada foto lagi (that's all the photos I have).


If I've anticipated your thoughts well, here are my responses:

1. Yup, no pictures of me, 'cos I was the one taking the photos, using my own computer. Besides the fact that I can't click the camera button while doing a presentation (let alone in Indonesian!), I was also using my laptop for the presentation so obviously I couldn't use it to take pictures at the same time. In case you're curious, my presentation was entitled "Kenapa Saya Mau Belajar Bahasa Indonesia" which means "Why I want(ed) to study Indonesian".

2. Yes, that's all the students in the class (besides me). There're only 3 of us, not including the teacher. Actually there were 4, but one of them, Shannon, is a Anthropology Ph.D student who flew off midway through the quarter to Indonesia for intensive Bahasa Indonesia courses and on-site field work. Intense stuff. Wonder how she's doing there.

My last final's coming up this Thursday, and then I fly off until March 31st to tour the East Coast with the Mendicants. I wonder if I'll have the time/motivation to update the blog with photos during the trip. We'll be flying to D.C. (yay), then going to New York City, then East Hampton (I think that's on Long Island, which is also in New York state), then Boston (yay again). And apparently we're doing all of it without renting a single car. This should be interesting. :P

Patrick Kozey and the Mendicants sing for SABA!

SABA = Singaporean-American Business Association. We sang for their gala dinner about 3 months ago in San Francisco. Here's the smooth voice of Patrick Kozey of the Mendicants singing Hooked On A Feeling. The video's a bit jerky, sorry about that.

Durian!

Yes, believe it or not. They've apparently found a way to grow durian trees here in California.



I'm kidding of course. They freeze durian and import it to the Chinese supermarket here. I was at the supermarket (Ranch 99) the other day and saw durian in boxes. It was two pieces for 5 bucks which i thought was quite ex but decided to try anyway. Turns out they're seedless! Or at least someone took out the seeds. So it's a pretty decent amount of durian flesh for 5 bucks! Unfortunately I think I left the durian in my fridge for a bit too long so one of the pieces was a bit sour. Don't worry, I didn't eat it. The other piece was pretty good - nice and smooth and creamy and, of course, tasty. More on the sweet side, only slightly (but not really) bitter. Yummmmm. :)

Talking about food.... two weekends ago (the weekend before Tahoe) I went to SoCal (Southern California, i.e. the LA area and San Diego) with the Mendicants and Counterpoint, this all girls group that is pretty good friends with our group. We went to this ex-mendicant's house in Hollywood - he sound engineers for TV shows for a living and he's actually won an emmy for sound engineering on Ally McBeal and was nominated for his work on the X-Files! Pro... Anyway check out this HUGE pizza that he (his name is Kurt) ordered for us:



It was like 3 feet in diameter. Which is about... I don't know... 120cm?

Oh and I mentioned the Emmy... Here's a picture of one the Mendicants, Jai, and the Emmy in the background. We'd only just gotten to Kurt's and didn't dare to go touch it yet, so the Emmy is actually on a shelf in a corner of the room, and Jai is holding up his hand to just the right height so that it looks like he's holding a tiny Emmy. He's actually quite far in front of it:



Here're a couple of pictures from San Diego, which we went to on one of the days of our tour in SoCal. More specifically, Coronado, a small, very pleasant and pretty rich island just off the coast from San Diego:


That's my shadow. hehehe. Look at how nice the sand on the beach looks.


A picturesque view of my car set against the rising moon.... *violin music in the background*


I know I've been less regular with updates this year... last year everything was new and exciting. This year I'm finding rather different things important compared to last year, not all of which I'm inclined to say to myself "I wanna blog about it!". I'll still post updates when I can though. Like this one. =)

Ski trip!

Went with the Singaporean association at Stanford to Lake Tahoe this weekend to ski. Was quite fun, Saturday had really fantastic weather, and from the mountain you can see the lake and on the other side you can see the plains of Nevada surrounded by mountains. Great stuff. :) Sunday morning we awoke to find it snowing, and it didn't stop snowing the entire day. Apparently the snow was from a storm that came from the Gulf of Alaska... I cut short my skiing time 'cos the weather made skiing kinda unpleasant. The drive back was amazingly terrible - first they had chain control through the mountains, so there was stop-and-go traffic that backed up so far that we were probably in the traffic for 3 hours, maybe even more. Then just as we were about to pass chain control into the mountains, they stopped the traffic completely - apparently some car had taken a spin on the mountain. So for at least an hour, we sat in traffic not moving at all. Meanwhile the snow was coming down really heavily outside and with really strong winds. I must say it was kind of exciting to drive through the mountain during the storm though.

So we set off from Tahoe at 2:30pm, and what should have been a 4-5 hour drive became a 10 hour journey (including a 1 hr stop for dinner). Skipped my morning classes this morning to sleep, was really tired last night when I went to bed. Didn't get a good rest both nights that we were at Tahoe either. So, skiing was fun. But I was exhausted when I got back... and I'm actually still kinda tired now. Econ 52 midterm this week. Sigh. :/

Random post

It's been stormy today. Wind and rain, fallen tree branches etc. The main storm was supposedly yesterday - apparently it came out in Singapore papers. Winds of up to 70mph on the Golden Gate Bridge, gusts of wind topping over 100mph in Los Gatos (somewhere not tooooo far from Stanford) but somehow Stanford wasn't too bad. Which is good. But also makes me feel a bit like I'm missing out on the excitement. Apparently the wind was so strong at San Rafael that it blew over two to three 18-wheelers onto their sides on the San Rafael Bridge, somewhere over in the East Bay. I guess we're blessed that Stanford was spared the power outages and dangerous winds. Would've been exciting though. :P

Check it out on the news:
"Fiercest Storm in 5 Years Hits Bay Area"

Below (rather randomly) is an excerpt from today's entry into my (spiritual) diary that I've started keeping just before I came back to Stanford in Sep last year (that's 2007, for those who haven't yet adjusted to the idea of 'this' year being 2008):

Trust God. That’s different from trusting that things will turn out well. Sometimes we think that trusting that other people will take care of things is equivalent to trusting God, but that’s trusting other people. Yes, God is bigger, but somehow the whole idea of “God = everything beyond our control” isn’t entirely accurate. ‘Cos other people are beyond our control. And God gives them free will to make the decisions they want to make regardless of whether they’re the same choices He would like them to make. And somehow, despite that, it’s also true that God is bigger than other people – sometimes it seems like I can trust Him to work through or around others, and sometimes it seems like I can’t. That bit doesn’t seem too important right now – I guess God’s main point to me is trust Him. Not a blanket trust that things will always go well, but trust Him. Specifically Him.

Grades

I just checked my grades. It's funny. I took 3 classes - Econ 50, Econ 102A (stats) and Intro to Judaism. I really don't like stats, couldn't bring myself to study really all that hard for it. I really tried, but I know I didn't do all that much. The Judaism class was interesting but I started losing interest halfway through, especially with that weekly 2-3 page paper that we had to do plus a final paper. But I got it done, and I wrote some time ago about how I've been getting As for my Judaism papers even when I really don't care about them. That's grace man. Anyway here's more of God's grace to boast about: I got an A- for Econ 50 which is decent, but an A for stats and an A for Judaism!! The two classes that I didn't care much about or didn't like, I got As in. And compared to how much work I put in, the grades are definitely undeserved but I realize whether I deserve it or not isn't all that important. God's taking care of me. :)

Pictures and updates on my trip to Hawaii which I just came back from coming soon... I hope. :P

Finals

Finished one final and one final paper, one more to go!

Unfortunately that final is stats. And I really don't understand a lot of the stats stuff ever since the midterm. I just find it really hard to grasp the intuition behind a lot of the stats stuff. Plus the lecture's at 9am and lasts for 1h 50 mins, which pretty much guarantees that I either will wake up late for the lecture, skip it entirely or fall asleep in lecture for at least half of it.

Well. This morning's Econ 50 final was scary but good. I guess God pulled me through. Running low on faith now but He can see me through even when I'm faithless...

Almost there...