Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Give and take...

Ok once again i've a backlog of things that i want to talk about over here, thanks to the need to clear work first, so humor (American spelling cos am in America) me here while i go about the process of trying to recall all the stuff...

Well, this was like from two weeks ago, but anyways i saw my first wild deer since coming here - It was when i went running in the nearby woods (believe me it's much less dangerous than it sounds) two Sunday mornings ago and went off the main trail onto some rougher trail up a slope when i heard a lot of rustling, then i turned to my left and said "Oh, deer!" (ok so i didn't say that =p) as i saw the rapidly bobbing away backside of a white tail, either a female or a juvenile methinks (If it was a female then i wonder if when she saw me she went "Doh!" (geddit? =p)... Well, anyways i was thinking that the deer was a little kancheong, cos i would not even have noticed it had it not decided to flee in fear of its life. If i were a hunter, it would so be dead meat now (or more specifically, venison)

Speaking of running, i've sort of decided to do so every Sunday morning somewhere around UNC cos the church service that i regularly go to (i.e. i've been there twice so far) is at 11am, and my ride only leaves campus at earliest 10:30am; so there's more than ample time to exercise in the morning before service. The weather is also way more condusive for running, at least 10 degrees celcius cooler and way less humid too - which means that i don't end up with a shirt that carries a wading pool's worth of liquid in it. And talking about pools, maybe one Sunday i'll try out the indoor pool here instead, if not just for the been there, done that experience of swimming in an indoor pool...

And from the way i've been eating here recently, i think i'll need all the exercise that i can get. It's especially so whenever i end up eating at one of the two dining halls, which basically offer buffet-style stuff all the time. Thankfully i didn't get a meal plan, or i'd be eating from these places far more often... The problem is that, true to the url of this blog, not only my language (dis)abilities, but even my food preferences also are very angmoh-oriented (including potatoes), so i have no problem with wolfing down burger after burger, pizza slice after pizza slice, wrap after wrap and then some - you get the picture... Even when i hit the salad bar the veggies are inevitably smothered in ranch dressing - heck - i even smother my pizza in ranch dressing... Yes, i know for many of the readers of this blog it's basically the same old same old, but ah well i guess this will be a constant lament of mine...

I just had my first two midterms on Friday and this afternoon - they were not the best of papers, but they're definitely passable - though honestly i am still aiming for something higher than that - but will make do - i don't want to be obsessed over grades again - it would be really toot of me to do so when it's pass/fail after all... In other academic news it was quite a surreal experience just now when i went for my Monday 5-8pm class only to find a note pinned on the doorpost saying that lesson was cancelled for the week - this is the class that i'd been having loads of problems with before, and that i've to do a book report and a presentation of the report + of the other readings for the week of too - and did i mention Monday 5-8pm? Of course once it hit me, i was pretty happy - and i celebrated by eating a giant steak burrito (about a foot long) for dinner at Cosmic Cantina (oh gosh that makes me sound like a real glutton doesn't it... well in my defense, i had a voucher...)

Oh ya, frisbee - did you know that they (i.e. IV) play ultimate every friday here? And the attendance when i went was really big - like more than 40 people over four teams - and each game definitely had an abundance of people as a result. We should do that back home - though i have the feeling that the attendance would be pretty bad if not solely cos of work - which is quite tragic given that on average there definitely is more work to do over here than back home - yet over here the people still come down for an hour or two or de-stressing... It was great fun [even though i re-aggrevated my left pinky injury (kinda like Joce's from Mongolia only far less gross-looking) that i obtained two days earlier while i was playing ultimate with some of the guys on my floor; and had also just recovered from another finger injury obtained a few days earlier when i was, you guessed it, playing frisbee at the beach during the IV new student retreat - thankfully all the affected digits were on my left hand so i could write properly...].

Ok think i should do something about my food issues - right now all i can think of is the bag of day-old bagels that i'm planning to buy tomorrow from Alpine at only $1.70...

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