~JcZw

I've said it before, I'll say it again, St. John is really one thing you cannot get out of the system... Its been more than two years since my team last trained together yet we still have telepathic connections haha...

Wei Quan and I were waiting for farewell to start so there we were standing in the drizzle on the stage looking at the layout the banner etc, when we noticed our posture - hands behind our backs, feet a shoulder-width apart... he suddenly said "why are we falling in" and both of us were like "....."

Well, apart from that, as I said, it was nice to see everyone again.. Though of our squad only my AA team (of which I consider Xuan Ming a part of) turned up, but yar...

Farewell was thrown a little off balance cos of the rain, but I guess its not bad... The standard of dancing with St. John seems to increase with every year haha

Well... Squad 3 performance

And their squad 2 counterparts.... As Yiyang said, the trend has definitely progressed to wearing one uniform colour... I remember in Squad 3, preparing for our "take-my-hand-take-my-whole-life-too" dance (or was it "take my hair"? or something) we all wore... very colourful stuff... heheh... Oh well....

Anyway during squad interaction... All the junior-seniors gathered around n talked all sorts of nonsense... from anime, to the fact that the time which takes for a germinal epithelial cell to morph into a sperm was the same length of time as BMT.... Incidentally, only Wei Quan and I are going in in Jan... The rest of my team gets to earn money, learn to drive etcetc haha... Anyway it was really really fun... For once it was stress free haha!

The only drawback about the farewell was the *ahem* teacher incharge who is so terrifically qian bian (or "kiam pah" in hokkien), to rush everyone to clear up when the programme wasn't even done, then stood by with his umbrella while everyone was rushing in and out of the rain cleaning up, without lifting a finger to help, but who's mouth muscles somehow managed to keep moving... With all due respect to the person-who-cannot-be-named, in AHSJAB everyone should pull their weight or leave...

Ok... so about the graduating squad.... Just some memories and thoughts regarding them... Squad 1'03 and Squad 2'04 (for thats the years we knew them while we were part of the division) was a really really fun squad to be around during our two years in the division... Memories include:

Whacking Melvin with the flag during Camp 2003 (this was the first documented incident of me jerking awake from sleep)

Hannah and Joyce who used to beg, bribe, coerce or threaten =D wei quan and I to help carry their stuff down the hill for them after CCA

Kok Keng, who, when playing street soccer against a combined scouts and NCC team, had 13 one-on-ones, but only scored on the last attempt haha =D And the rest of their AC team, who played soccer with us all the time after CCA, celebrated Xuan Ming's fourth birthday on 29th Feb 2004 haha, and whose praises at their skills at first aid and footdrill etc were regularly sung by Xuanming, David and Soo Yee during debriefs... an who's stretcher opening time came periliously close to my own team =D....

Yuan Ling, whom I remember carrying the water bottles during the final tekan session of Camp 2003 of which I was the COS IC

Pinru and Hoyan who once came to play badminton with us and some seniors during an early part of St. John life... Also Hoyan and Boonkai, both from Harconan in 2003, who's first aid skills were highly lauded by Wei Quan and Joanne (who commanded that HP group), and who were predicted to set up their own clinic

Joycelyn and Xinhui (the former of which was in my HP group), who recently scared me to death when Joycelyn borrowed my waterbottle for a drink, took one mouthful and inexplicably began laughing and laughing, laughter which eventually infected Xinhui and to this day I don't know what was so funny about the water in my bottle -_-'"

Squad 2' 04 was.... quick to learn, good friends, loyal division mates, and it was a real pleasure to be their OC, as well as to be one of the seniors fortunate to be active when they in turn became NCOs.. Well, they are now part of seniors as well, so all the best to them in their St. John life, or otherwise... There is still much to do (especially if one goes to OTC, or, not being free on Sundays, becomes a SNCO).

Yup shall wrap it up for now... blog about hospital attachment in the near future then...

~JcZw~ at 5:48 pm

Monday, November 27, 2006

Wahoo its over and I'm alive and still have all 4 limbs heheh... Still no exhiliration... still just relief and a desire to start fencing, playing soccer, badminton, running, first aid and all that rot...

Bio S was actually not bad for me... at least I had stuff to write for all 2.5 hours and wrote 3 decent length essays... But of course, if you consider the smart people who take Bio S then you start feeling like... well... a speck... And of course, I actually learnt quite a lot of interesting stuff about behavioural ecology...

Bio S together with Chinese has given me much pain but hopefully it pays off...

Anyway St. John farewell '06 later. Guess I'll be going by to take a look, and xuan cheng, xuan ming, weiquan and etc are all going back later so haha... I'll get to see the non-VJ squadmates again! That is, face to face, not just through MSN...

We've all grown up a lot... its been a long time when we still could stay back after CCA and play soccer with [then] AC2 and all...

On the other hand, hope I don't fall asleep or anything... Severe insomnia meant that I slept for only 3 hours last night (I slept more during the World Cup Final than last night). So well, cheers for now....

~JcZw~ at 1:15 pm

Saturday, November 25, 2006

(Fall, fall)

Fall in love
Fall in love
Fall in love with you

Fall in love
Fall in love
Fall in love with you

Falling in love again, falling in love again
Why couldn't I, why shouldn't I fall in love with you
Why must you lead your heart and keep we two apart
Why couldnt I, why shouldnt I fall in love with you

Mm mm, mm mm
Dont tell me, I know
Its late, our date
Is almost over, its time to go

Please, give me one more chance, this is my first romance
Why couldnt I, why shouldnt I fall in love with you

(Fall, fall)

Mm mm, mm mm
Dont tell me, I know
Its late, our date
Is almost over, its time to go

Please, give me one more chance, this is my first romance
Why couldnt I, why shouldnt I fall in love with you

Fall in love
Fall in love
Fall in love with you

Fall in love
Fall in love
Fall in love with you

- Fall in Love With You, Cliff Richard

Haha this is such a nice song... as in its the kind of moderately fast, but not noisy song which I like... I haven't liked a song so much since I was introduced to "All I have to do is dream" haha.. Well, okay, this song was produced in 1960, which makes me a super lau gu dong, but who cares... Old songs suit me =) And my father says he'll be getting more old CDs in the near future! If there was one good thing about As, its that I learned a lot of new oldies (oxymoron!) due to my father digging up all his old CDs to let me listen to while studying haha... See! After 2 years in JC I've learned all the wrong things...

Anyway its Bio for now.. I didn't know the cytoskeleton did so many things -_-""

~JcZw~ at 1:37 pm

Thursday, November 23, 2006

Well, core papers are over... Although there's still Bio S on monday, but I guess its not so important (although it would be nice to do well) since going overseas is not one of my pursuits... Just relief, not much exhiliration yet I guess... So its Bio over the weekend... Shall build on Growth and Development, Ecology and Cell Bio...

Anyway pictures from our trip on tuesday and other stuff..

Enjie and Alon on the road on the top, and Christl and Enjie on the bottom (with Alon a distant speck in the foreground), cycling along the AHS 2.4 route... it was a pretty hot day to boot...

That's my table circled in red... D25, located in the fourth row, just behind the white line of the badminton court and aligned with the red.. Also recognizable due to the legs being unalinged such that a piece of paper folded twice is not good enough to stop the rock, and a piece of paper folded thrice causes the other two legs to rock -_-"' I'll be long remembering the number of times Prata, Liling and I have walked down the aisle jabbering about various weird exam questions.

Celebrated the culmination of cores by heading back to AHS to take a look at the division, pushed off after lunch, watched Battlestar Galactica (and I'm finding the Marine uniforms more and more cool really =D), slept a bit...

Oh yea, nearly forgot... borrowed a couple of Bio books as well as an Autobiography of Peter Shilton (the England 'keeper) and "Flight of the Intruder" by Stephen Coonts, so now I've watched the movie and now I'm gonna read the book =)

Went to Marina for dinner with classmates and sort of celebrated Vibha's birthday at Billy Bombers...

The staff there were really nice! They were very friendly n all, and gave us free cocktails somemore... Which tasted and looked like glorified 7-up, but its the thought that counts haha! The food was good too, although the portions were huge (they were not designed for us dimunitive asians)... The root beer float is supposed to be really good (or it was, the last time I ate there with my parents), but being a financially and stomach-cally constrained student, I didn't try this time... haha... anyway we really had a lot of stuff to drink, what with the cocktail, the ice lemon tea that came with the set, and the complimentary ice water... our DCTs were given a workout heheh...

That said, the music there is also quite nice... all the relatively old songs, which is stuff that I like haha...

Then went to walk around in orchard for a while, took some pictures and all, then came back home... Tomorrow think I'll just stay at home and start on Bio...

One last chance to wear the school uniform on Monday... Who's collar pin shall I wear? Mine, or my sister's? (I've been wearing my sister's one since the last week of school, just to give it some fresh air until today heheh)... Well cheerio for now...

PS found a new found interest for Cliff Richard's songs heheh... wonder why I didn't discover my father's CD before...

~JcZw~ at 11:02 pm

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Went cycling with 4 classmates yesterday... Which was quite fun... also quite funny cos I still have 2 papers left haha.... while everyone else has 1 =/ except a few others who also have 2 or 3... Shall post the few pictures I took while cycling in the near future or something...

So we (Enjie, Alon, Christl n Gerry) went to Dunman High, played around at the playground there (monkey bars... I believe I was much better at them when I was, say, seven, rather than now!).. Alon treated us to grass jelly and stuff at the hawker centre there... prior to cycling back and skidding off the kerb, falling over, and giving all of us a general fright...

Then it was my turn for suay-ness when a bird chose me to target with a well-aimed blob of... stuff.... I believe I have been hit by bird s*** at an average of once every 6 years... the last time being walking with my squad to Basic First Aid, wearing half uniform for the first time, and a bird sh1++ing on my black pants!! Thereafter, that part of the pants was slightly less reflective than the rest of the cloth, so I kept failing my UI cos my ICs thought there was white stuff there when there wasn't... scandalous tsktsk...

Alon and Enjie were, of course, very comforting in the way they immediately asked me to say 4 numbers to buy 4D.. hahaa... but it was quite funny...

Anyway ate at some Japanese place, which Christl says we've gone before on the last day of term 2 last year, but I can't remember, so I think I must had church or fencing or something on that day...

Then it was back to St. John, and watching farewell rehearsal and training.... Hmmm.... the standard is like whoa! Its not so much that I'm scared that we cannot win Zone Comp (cos being such a relatively unorthodox senior, Zone Comp has never been my priority), but that if one day the first aiders are thrown into a real first aid situation, there'll be hell to pay.... Its like, we joke about "as if we'll really approach a case", but there's always the "what if" element... I mean, when I was a cadet I never dreamt that one day I would treat someone who really had breathing difficulty, but it happened, although luckily nothing bad came out of it.... Still, we're only, about a third way through competition training, so there's room for improvement yet....

As I was taking AC1 for stretcher, I was thinking about how we used to train under Dijun, who really pushed us like mad, and didn't give us all that many breaks, and if he saw that we were dying he'd push us even further until one of us collapsed, or dropped the stretcher or something... But we really enjoyed his training and there was always a sense of fufillment after we finished.. If Wei Lun talked to us, and we were a second too slow in replying, it was "Knock it down" at once, no matter if the floor was hot or cool... We were like fleas, carrying casualties who were like one-and-a-half times our weight haha (though admittedly the load was shared between 3 or 4 people)... The thing is that this kinda training cannot be achieved without discipline or dedication at very least.

And you're talking about a division, which for, say, running from the classroom block to the parade square to fall in can cause as many casualties as running through an open field laced with Claymores....

Alright its back to Bio.... so many ambiguous questions... Still cannot breach the 37 mark barrier pah.... and for some papers I can get like whoa 31... grrr

~JcZw~ at 4:07 pm

Monday, November 20, 2006

Just caught up my sleep cycle and touched my TV.. Can't resist making a second post cos of what I saw on it...

Was watching Mission Impossible 3 (the dvd which my father got). The CPR scene, supposedly sad and all, nearly cracked me up.... Ethan Hunt's wife

didn't look at the casualty's face
didn't compress 4 to 5 cm
gave a variety of compressions that ranged from 15 to 17
gave only 1 blow per cycle (although its hard to see cos her hair was covering)
compressed too fast
compressed with the ball of the palm rather than the heel of the palm (which would have given orange lights on the CPR dummy)

ANDDDD to cap it all off, she's supposed to be a doctor! Oh my goodness, badness and medium-ness.... A fine way to save your husband indeed... Then again, movie CPR is never accurate =D

~JcZw~ at 6:08 pm

One knows one has been studying too much when one tries to log into blogger using one's Blackboard username and password instead hehh... oh well...

Happily, Bio 3 is past, although not many hormones and instead a huge chunk about the structure of the uterus came out tsktsk... Anyway, I hope what I wrote was sufficient, cos seriously, the bit about binary fission of an E. Coli in the textbook is barely half a page, let alone worth 6 marks... In the end decided to add 4 diagrams which hopefully helps it a bit =) cos it stretched it out to 1 page.

Then there was the 55 incident when all of us were at the bus stop, and everyone thought everyone else was going to flag the bus but no one did, so the bus whizzed past leaving us with our mouths agape in shock...

But now the fear of i've-run-of-stuff-to-study and what-am-i-gonna-do-now is beginning to creep up on me... Hmm maybe for starters, I should start learning to watch TV heh... but for now, I shall contend myself with SEASON 2 OF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA! Whoo! But must also control.... Bio 1 and Bio S especially, and for Bio 1 I shall aim for nothing less than 40 =) although the best I've done so far is still 39, and that was only for CT2...

Anyway... My mother and I have been revising the new CPR and choking formats... among other useful first aid skills... she's going for her revision for her Basic and Advanced Cardiac Life Support these few weeks, which I cannot go, cos I still have papers... and the next course will be just before I enlist, so it's still iffy...

And I must find an appropriate outfit to wear to SDD which people won't call out of fashion heh... Well, at least for AHS grad night, the range of clothing choices really ranged from jeans to tuxedos... So people like Wei Quan and I were sort of in the middle...

Of course, to my intense horror and disgust, my grad night photos and Mount Kinabalu photos got wiped out by one of the evil computers =((( A stack of really good memories down the drain...

Alright now I've progressed into rambling so I shall stop... Cheerio all! And all the best for Bio 1 and S-papers and etc...

~JcZw~ at 11:26 am

Friday, November 17, 2006

Whoo!! 3 down 1 to go! Although the big big BIO 3 stands in our way, but ah well.. Anyway with the end of paper 1 of chem comes the cessation of the constant trying to figure out what reacts, oxidizes, reduces, methylates, brominates, hydrolyses, and all that stuff.... Though hopefully my chem can do well, since i errr fouled up an easy paper 3... and paper 1 can be considered weird as well...

Heh well, at least, its the kind of paper when you're at question 8 and of those you've already done, 4 have the come-back-and-check-later circles/stars/asterisks/triangles/geometric shape.

My favourite one by far was the one asking if the platinum electrode should be "platinized" or "polished". Rightly or wrongly I put "platinized" cos I had a disturbing mental image of myself sitting against the sofa, watching Discovery Channel and using Kiwi to polish a [then] size 8 electrode =D Oh by the way, its platinized according to several internet sources, so i've got one mark i hope....

Anyway its on to Bio now, and the various hormonal cycles and etcetc, so cheers for now

~JcZw~ at 4:56 pm

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Whoo physics is over... although I'm not awake enough to really go hyper over it... that will come later... 1 chem paper and 3 Bio papers to go and we're through... Physics 1 and 2, as most people know, was kinda weird, but anyway its over, and hopefully they will moderate or something whatever... Physics 3 was sort of okay, but I hope my explanations are good and didn't make careless mistakes..

And after all those hours of mugging, op-amp, AC (a bit in MCQ lar) and EMI didn't really come out...

Went back to AHS to look at their training today.... Suffice to say that its completely different from when I was a cadet... Then everyone RAN around with harried, agitated looks on their faces and everyone was like so wound up until after CCA heh... Now... sigh... too much ahem squad spirit doesn't bode well for the future of the division either.. like how many team members can boast of sharing a telepathic link with each other now? hahah... Speaking of which, I realise I'm very old, and a lot of my skills are out of date...

For those interested parties, CPR is now different in the following ways:

30 compressions to 2 ventilations instead of 15
1 round = 5 cycles instead of 4
1 round to be completed in 2 minutes instead of 1

So, a lot more work for the No. 4s and No. 2s to do, depending on the conformation of the team heh... Happily, our team got through when it was still the old format... Little people like me cannot do CPR for prolonged periods of time.. I'LL have to be resusicitated x)

One a happier note, the application for an attachment at the physiotherapy dept of SGH has come through! haha... So hmmm I'll be spend the two days right after Bio S kicking around in another hospital... Hope this time its more informative.. Not that the last time it wasn't, but last time it was a lot of sitting around, and watching doctors dress and undress a lot of grusome injuries =/ although in the grusome injuries department, the physio dept doesn't lack much either yike..

Then there'll be FM open, and some fencing tournament organized by RJ right before church camp, which apparently National fencers can join, so it'll be a good experience fencing them hahah... I wish I had my blade to practise with... that said, I need to get my grip sawn down and re-taped!

Oh by the way, took this test:

You are a foil fencer.

Foil is a weapon of calculation and passion. You glide easily between attack and defense. You can flick to the back or thrust to the chest.

What Kind of Fencer Are You?

Oops... wrong weapon x) But its actually quite apt, which is why I thought foil (actually I still do) was such a nice weapon haha...

Right shall stop here... until there are better things to write about...

~JcZw~ at 2:54 pm

Friday, November 10, 2006

STRESS ARH!

Cos I'm scared for every paper except maths (which I'm also kinda scared for, but its anaesthized, however you spell it, with happiness that its over heh).... And physics always has ONE MORE QUESTION which I cannot do... its like a "one-more-question" rule or something... Hopefully everything will fall into place by Monday... and hopefully chem goes okay too....

My body is reacting violently... sometimes I can get severe throbbing headaches that make me feel quite literally like banging my head against the wall... And now I've got a sore throat and had better not be coming down with anything. And don't forget, I'm only accident-prone. I'm not hypochondriat-ic

Well, back to phy then...

~JcZw~ at 9:48 pm

Thursday, November 09, 2006

One of the bad things of having a photographically clear visual memory is that for days after the exams, you still can remember all the stupid mistakes you've made... As far as I'm concerned, the faster Chem 3 is ejected from my system the better... Unlikely though, cos I can still remember stuff like my PSLE index number (36511F)... Sigh really must do well for Chem 1 and 2... espcially since my Chem SPA isn't too hot either...

As for Bio 2... well, hopefully I wasn't overly incoherent... I wish the examiner had appeared behind me 10 seconds later... All I needed was time to write the three letters A-T-P but unfortunately I heasitated too long =Pp

Thank God maths is over, and everything went relatively smoothly, although I've lost some marks here and there (much like everyone else, actually, except for the really smart ones heh)... Got tricked by P & C, as well as the inequalities question which I'm kicking myself over cos I knew it was an assymptote blahhhh

Alright... its R&R for maybe one night... then on to physics...

~JcZw~ at 6:37 pm

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Great are you, Lord
Mighty in strength
You are faithful
You will ever be
We will praise you
All of our days
It's for your glory
We offer everything

Raise your hands all you nations
Shout to God all creation
How awesome is the Lord Most High!

We'll praise you together
From now and forever
How awesome is the Lord Most High!

Where you send us
God we will go
You're the answer
We want the world to know
We will trust you
When we call your name
Where you lead us
We'll follow all the way

Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
How awesome is the Lord Most High!
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
How awesome is the Lord Most High!

-How awesome is the Lord Most High

Wah I love this song.. We sang it in church mebbe a month back? I was hoping we would sing it again soon... heh seems like a short while really... Similarly, hope the next month goes past fast, then hope Dec goes by slowly =D

I forgot to add to my list of things to do after As:

1. Convert to DVD all the obscure disney cartoons that we have at the end of our tapes which are really cute, and really cannot be found anywhere else in the world now!

2. Cycle to Changi Village!

3. Christmas cards (I hope). I'd clean forgotten about Christmas!! Tsktsk...

Anyway, as I shared in church today, if I do well for GP, it will be entirely thanks to God, and partially thanks to my cousin, who just took his PSLE, but he already saved the backside of his cousin who's taking his A-levels =D

Its such a drag to be taking exams... I want to do something like go back to fencing or St. John or something... Sitting down and melting my brain just doesn't appeal to me... Oh well haha... futile complaints.. since we've already gone to "V1" and are presently through "rotate". Speaking of which, I found "Flight of the Intruder" among our old tapes. The quality and sound is really bad, but its still watchable, and so is going to be the antithesis of mugging the next few days haha...

Cheerio!

~JcZw~ at 1:36 pm

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Well. As the general JC Year 2 population is saying, "The moment is here". Actually it passed with a rush of adrenaline to the head this morning. Compo was still okay, just that together with what seems like about 90% of the school population (which, to my chargin, but not really to my surprise, included PoYing heh nah just that I feel her compos are really whoa) I did question 3 on technology.

Compre took the biscuit, with firstly the summary then the AQ being phrased in such a WEIRD manner, and the questions not having the paragraphs from which the answers come from labelled... And there we were for two years of GP being told to "stick to the paragraphs that are labelled on the paper". Talk about up the proverbial salt creek without the proverbial paddle. Of course, the questions and vocab were no mean feat either. So I shall now pray for a miracle (but then again, getting into medicine is never anything but a miracle anyway heh).

Still, on the way home messaging my squadmates about this year's farewell (which happens to fall on the same day as Bio S for me), I discovered from first Xuan Cheng, then Wei Lun (who's birthday it is today heheh Happy birthday No. 1) that TJ and MJ were equally hard-hit by the GP typhoon. Incidentally I also just found out that my tuition teacher's daughter who's from RJ also found it hard, so it looks like its more or less across the board. All I need left to complete an unbiased survey is to interview some Arts students. Though I admit that I worry what their answers would be heh.

Well, anyway I got 73.5 for 2002 Maths and have just got 80 for 2003 Maths paper one. The problem of course, is that this is neither of those years. Okay, well, though it does boost confidence a little. Now all I have to do, as they say in Galactica, is not to "frak up the other papers".

Right back to work then. And best wishes to those taking their Chinese papers tomorrow. Don't follow my example.

~JcZw~ at 9:37 pm