lil vampire is going to have a new tuition teacher next week. his mum says he's wary of indians so she hired an indian tutor to scare him. she kept apologising and saying "sorry ah, so paiseh"... made me feel so bad. not her fault that she wants to change tutor... any sane person in her situation would want to find a new tutor! sighz... who would want to see their children fail so badly. and worse, when u tell him he has to work harder so that he won't continue to fail he tells you that it doesn't matter if he fails. and i just can't convince him that he has to start passing soon or one day he might just get expelled. glad to stop having to worry about him but i'm missing the cute and sweet side of him already.

i'm back in school again. think teaching general music is both easier and tougher... haha easier cos i don't have to prepare much, since the materials will be prepared by the other music teachers. tougher mainly because it's totally... eh... how shall i say. it's quite different from teaching mep i guess. but their programme this term is quite interesting, and at least there's some objective rather than just playing recorder and all that crap. (monica toh!) hmmm... i like the timetable! especially the rather-empty tuesdays. okok, i'm such a slacker right.

tuition with the now-milder-vampire was not that bad today. it started out quite tired cos i was sleeping before that... i'm so not used to having to wake up early now! woke up with a headache, ate dinner and walked there in a grumpy and stoned state. when i saw he only took out his science and english assessment books, i felt super listless... he always only takes those two out! sometimes i force him to get the other two from his room, but today i only made half-hearted attempts at that... hope he sticks to his promise and prepares the other two books on wednesday. but then i became a bit more cheerful when we started doing the english assessment, he actually did it! hahaha erm well, needed lots of nagging to do the compre, but still completed 8/9 of one paper. did science too. he's so convinced that science is the hardest subject, even though his chinese is the worst of all. but i was surprised when he said his best subject wasn't science, it was english, followed by maths, then science. but what a contradiction from last week... he said science was his best. ???? may just be his little trick to convince me that he should do science every week.

okay, going to sleep... gotta wake up early again tmr. *yawnz*

woke up this morning thinking there was something wrong with my eyes. everything outside the window seemed to look blur... not the out of focus kind of blur, more of like everything was veiled in mist. except, i discovered it wasn't mist when i smelled the burnt smell... like when people burn incense during hungry ghost festival. *chokes* haha hope it'll get better soon, weather is becoming a bit cooler but there's still the haze.

little vampire was quite nice today, we actually completed 1 chapter of the science assessment! his favourite subject... cos he scored the highest for science during CA. but still fail la. and it's not the borderline fail kind, his marks are all around 25%... scary! think must be his english screwing up his science and maths... during tuition he can always tell you the correct answers for science. but of cos they need major rephrasing. like today, "Why do some animals lay up to thousands of eggs?" and he says, "because when the fish eat, then got one more. when the fish eat, got one more. fish eat, one more." i wonder how lenient his teachers are with his weird sentences in science? during tuition i'm there to help him with reading the question and spelling words for the long answers... during CA maybe he doesn't understand some questions, and his script is probably full of wrongly-spelt words. words he can't spell includes simple things like, "head", "fins" etc. we did two simple pages of english... when he argued that the dining room has no door so it's not a room, can only be called "dining". hahahaha :D

going to sleep. tmr shall be the practising day, since it's holiday (wouldn't have realised it if nobody mentioned it! haha that's the side-effect of not working) and so everyone will be home, and so there won't be any computer available for my entertainment purposes.

met debbie and shini for dinner at j8 (our fav section outing hangout) today. jiehui was working OT... goodness, until 10pm! whoa, super busy eh. yiting was doing project, and she's probably also very busy preparing to return to taiwan for hols. debbie was caught in traffic jam, so shini and i were supposed to start eating first. after walking around and a few sms-es to debbie, we decided to have dinner at cafe cartel. at first we were undecided over sakae and cartel, but since debbie wanted only dessert due to a late lunch she had earlier, we thought cartel would be a better place to go. we sort of flipped through the menu trying to decide what to eat... (took us quite long!) when debbie arrived.

haha the reason why we took so long to decide was cos we... or rather, i... also felt like eating ice-cream/ice coffee with ice-cream. so we were trying to decide what we could possibly eat but still have enough space for dessert later. both of us ended up eating the grilled dory with sambal. quite nice, worth it to pay that little bit extra than to eat long johns silver's grilled fish, which always turns out to be too soggy (at least at the jurong point outlet). debbie ordered fried calamari and scallops... haha after first deciding very firmly that she'd like to try the kangaroo baked apple (a sort of dessert... like apple pie).

for dessert i was totally tempted to order the chocolate fantasy... yum! chocolate ice-cream, chocolate chips, chocolate pieces (or whatever u call it), vanilla ice cream and chocolate fudge arranged in layers topped with whipped cream. super fat! hahaha. shini settled for her ice mocha with ice-cream. looked delicious too. if not for the many tempting varieties of chocolate ice-cream in the menu it'll probably be what i'd have ordered. and of cos, debbie ate her kangaroo baked apple. the kangaroo is, i suppose, just some fancy word... or maybe it has a special meaning that's only apparent to the chef who created the dessert. it turned out to have some bitter taste. at first we thought it might be the burnt top, which was concealed by the generous amount of icing sugar on top. but it was the filling... most probably some sort of spice they added to the apples and raisins inside. so debbie ended up eating just the crust, the whipped cream and the scoop of ice-cream.

ET (euphonium and tuba) section rocks! i think we're like the only section left that's still so close after so long... yea! see y'all sometime soon, when debbie gets her next off-day?? haha... or when jiehui's not so busy at work and yiting not so busy in school.

piano was alright... or should i say, as usual. started with beethoven. i had sorta expected her to want me to continue after first movement, but even though i practised the other movements i wasn't so secure with them. so i only played till end of second movement. it was quite bad, and guess i could have done an even worse third movement... slow funeral march that can be sight-read. nah, better not torture her further. :P

shall work on my phrasing, tone, shading and colours. feeling super enthu now cos of the effects of chocolate... hahaha by tmr i'd probably be pessimistic about achieving this feat. too bad i just can't practise now. sighz i work better at night! in my dream world, all flats are sound proof... or at least one room in each flat :)

i'm so dead... piano tmr. for last week's class lesson, i think i can expect to hear the same comments again. i think i sound stupid. for goodness sake, if you keep getting the same comments shouldn't you do something to change it?! sighz, i just haven't managed to change that... except for an occasional "it's better", which will still be followed by the same comments. same comments because there were no colour changes... prelude didn't sound lively (kk said the fugue sounded more lively than the prelude!!!) my other prelude and fugue is worse off... and surely i'll need to play it tmr, can't stick to one single prelude and fugue for ages right. guess i'll start with beethoven first, takes up more time. :P heh i'm just so good at wasting money... BLEAHHHH!

at least i can look forward to seeing my section mates again! yay! that also means i can postpone tuition... and gladly too. will meet debbie and shini for dinner first... hmm jiehui and yiting will be late, wonder if they're planning to do something for debbie's birthday? think i'll shop for a belated birthday present after piano... hahaha good luck to her if i'm in a bad mood! i suppose i can safely predict that we'll go to some coffee place... we just need somewhere to chill out and chat. and enjoy coffee of course. our favourite past time :)

AAHHHHH so irritated after tuition... he seems to like being naughty on mondays and then being nice on wednesdays. at least that's the trend from the past two weeks. i thought he was just lazy during tuition but it turns out that he's also lazy in school! everytime i ask him whether he has school homework to do, he'll say he finished them already. however, today serene said she got a note from his chinese teacher with a list of chinese homework he hasn't done. and it's really quite alot, considering that in primary school there isn't that much homework for each subject each day...
Dear Mrs ____, could you please help to check on the following:
zuo ye pg 15-18, 20-37
hao gong min pg 1, 4
Please check for his dan yuan lian xi (1), which he has not done.
dan yuan lian xi (2)
Please file his dan yuan lian xi (1), (2) and CA in the purple file.
Thanks! Mdm _______

sighz. in the afternoon serene already made him do some of the zuo ye ... think she didn't go to work today, made soyabean milk, which was yummy! okay, i think today's tuition was quite effective but it was one of the most teeth-clenching ones. his teacher already complained to his mother and yet he's still nonchalant about it, claiming that the teacher didn't tell him about the homework. and then feigning that his hand didn't have anymore strength to write. ha ha ha. very funny. so where did he get all that strength to resist when i took his chinese textbook from him? (he was doodling in it and disfiguring all the pictures...) so he tried to waste time by writing with his left hand, which i erased and made him do it properly. bleargh... get scolded by mother still not enough, must get scolded by tuition teacher also.

even so, he kept bargaining... "8.59 you go home ok?" haha i know 9 is his playtime so i threatened to stay there for the total amount of tuition time he wasted. his chinese is really atrocious. i dunno whether it's because of the "learn to read before learning to write" teaching tactics now, but he just can't write anything without me writing them on scrap paper first. except things like wo (me), ni (you), ta (him) etc... simple words. but i also discovered today that, after not writing in chinese for 2 years, my brain has become rusty! easy words like zhe (fold) and shou (keep) i had to rack my brains for eons before i recalled how to write them. in a sense i've become like him, can read but cannot write. yep, he can read some chinese... read at least half of his compre by himself, all the words he doesn't know he'd just look at me. (oh man, he looks so sweet and angelic when he does that! *melts* hahaha) but he totally doesn't know hanyu pinyin, there was a section which was completely in hanyu pinyin and then he has to fill in the blanks with a word from the helping box. had to read all the questions for him. i'm totally surprised... thought now they're taught to recognise words from hanyu pinyin. the whole textbook is printed with hanyu pinyin below every word.

today the vampire turned angelic! he's so different every lesson... unpredictable. after monday, i decided not to borrow any more books since he's not interested in them. when i reached his house, the first question he asked was, "today got storybook?" haha so cute... and when i said no more storybooks cos he didn't want to read them on monday he took out his own storybooks. i didn't mind, but i thought better make him do other subjects too. so we did two pages of the science assessment... ok, we cos i had to write the answers he dictated for me. i think i would rather do that then have him draw illegible squiggly lines when he just can't be bothered to write long answers. two pages of structured questions was much better than when he refused to understand why plants in wooden boxes have no sunlight. haha think i spent almost that whole lesson arguing with him about sunlight and wood! how spastic can tuition get...

after science i read a chinese book. hmm most of it, he only read the first page... dunno how he's going to pass his chinese oral lor, or worse still his written. at least he can recognise some words when reading but doing assessment all his answers will be wrong. and then when i asked for his maths homework for the hundredth time he flipped open three little pigs and started reading it. erm not bad, at least he's reading something rather than sitting there refusing to do anything rite. halfway through the story he discovered a small cut which he just had to show his mother. sighz he cannot sit still... and then he added, "i finish my work already, can read story book?" serene wasn't quite happy about that, think she still prefers him doing things directly related to his school subjects.

so after three little pigs i told him to get his maths assessment and do the forever-never-do homework. he refused to budge and flipped open his dinosaur book. blearghz... then begins that tug-of-war that occurs every lesson. haha i didn't want to snatch the book away from him in case it'll tear... oops most of his assessment books are tattered cos of me... so instead i tried to pull him out of the chair to his room to get the maths. and then he says he lost all his assessment except the science. ya rite, of course, science is the one subject he dislikes the least. and he's also scared of getting scolded for not taking all his books out before tuition. in the end there wasn't anything to do but complain to serene. luckily serene wasn't that fierce this time... i was worried she'd be cos before that she was screaming at the brother for not preparing rough paper before lesson and using the opportunity to slack during tuition.

the rest of the lesson proceeded more smoothly than previously... he obligingly did his maths, which was a miracle cos he just hates problem sums. lazy to read and understand the question i suppose, frightened off by the words. and then there was still time left so he tip-toed to his room to get his english assessment... haha adorable... serene was in her room. english was funny and i realised that his english is not that lousy in a way too. we did a page of matching simple words to form compound words... i was reading out each pair, like "grandball? grandberry? grandfield? grandman? grandmother?" and he just made choking noises at the wrong ones. haha i was happy that at least he knows which are wrong... and after the first few he completed the rest by himself. with a little help sometimes, "what is battle?"

i was expecting serene to tell me she'd engaged a new tutor but she didn't, must be that cheeky vampire trying to trick me... maybe he hopes i wouldn't turn up on mon and then perhaps his mother will be angry and fire me. dunno whether to feel disappointed or happy that i'm staying... if every lesson was like today's, then good la. but from my experience i think all the today-i'm-a-good-boy lessons occur like once in a blue moon... who knows how he'll make me angry again next week? on the other hand, today's lesson made me realise that he's just plain lazy. he's smart... all his maths sums were correct, and he knows his science quite well other than his atrocious phrasing of answers! "mouse eat cheese and not eat meat and need house" ???!!! though his english may not be up to standard, it's still not that hopeless yet (i hope)... since he has that "sense" of which compound word is totally ridiculous. dunno about his chinese, it seems quite bad. but i dun understand... he speaks chinese to his parents at home, he watches chinese tv dramas all the time, should be an advantage, not like he comes from a totally english-speaking environment.

went JB with emily, ms chew and ms sim today. the taxi driver is not the normal sullen uncle u usually get in cabs. he had so many stories to tell! even though they were not exactly interesting, i was just entertained by the fact that he could talk so much. haha yar i know not everyone's like me rite. as usual, emz and i didn't buy much... though she bought three toe rings. three!!! haha and it was so amusing when she said cos have alot of toes so must buy more rings. :D even more funny was that all the four shirts she bought were black! hahaha she insisted that only black will do even though i always thought she's more adventurous in her dressing than the always-black-or-dark-blue-or-brown me. we also went to the supermarket where even more hilarious incidents happened... like emz trying to compare the thickness of two different brands of serviettes by telling ms chew, "u squish that one and i squish this one". hahaha emily is just so funny. i suppose most of the time it's her choice of words. like... squish??? with her sometimes weird sense of humour and her contagious laughter, she was the kai xin guo today. we tried to find decent earrings that kk would like but most of it didn't look like the type she would wear... or at least before her taste started changing recently ;)

i finally touched my dearest piano today... after a six-day separation. that's so totally not me. well after last week's lesson i just felt like, what's the point in practising anyway... since she says i'm just playing it the same way week after week. tried to figure out how to play it the way it should be. bleah. i just dun get it. i know how it should sound, its character whatever... how can one not know after listening endlessly to many bach cds?!! the problem is, i just cannot get that sound out of my hands and the piano!!! so what difference did today's practice make? none i suppose. other than giving my fingers that little exercise on the keyboard. class lesson on friday... to them i'm just that boring girl playing notes on the piano. sighz. miss ching says if i continue to play like that i will cannot make it in nafa next time.

going to sleep... shall continue my finger exercises tmr. bleah. :(

quite a happening day... first i was expecting to meet kk at boon lay mrt at 10 cos she needed to use my computer to do her nus application. their server is crazy, she tried like 10 separate times at home and still they showed the "unable to process application" message. secondly, i was worried about the moe scholarship application. i only knew on sat that we're supposed to submit the sec sch cca records and SAT results by today. by then i wasn't sure if it could still reach on time by post so my mum volunteered to fax it for me today. but shortly after 8.30 she called to say the fax couldn't get through... and by 9 still couldn't.

so we decided i should go down to her office to get the documents and bring them personally to the psc office. kk was also running late so we changed the time to 10.30. just when my train reached clementi... two stops away from my destination... my mum called to say the fax got through. what to do? went to her office and took the documents from her since she was going for some stupid healthy lifestyle function thing in the afternoon and not very convenient to bring them along. so crappy. one of her colleagues in the group is pregnant so cannot go for such things and the other said she'd get headaches in the hot sun, so left with her to represent their small group of three.

the nus application was dumb. somehow it just happened that when kk came to my house they still showed the cannot process message even though i succeeded last nite. after pressing the back button and the verify button many many times, we decided to call their admissions office. the person on the phone was rude, impatient and unhelpful. in the end we were prepared to go down to the admissions office when i suggested that we should close the window and redo the application. this time it worked! yay! saved us a trip down to nus.

by the time we finished with the application my stomach was growling and so we headed to jurong point. even though we now try to avoid fast food when we go out together... after all those mushroom swiss-es we always eat when we used to go out... we still went to mac's cos both food courts were full. we also walked around jurong point, kk bought one black and one white tanktop from giordano. i bought a black top from double index. we decided to go to orchard since she wanted to get the haydn sonatas.

bleah... i've been spending quite a considerable amount on cds recently. yet i still went ahead and bought bach's english suites by angela hewitt... and the lang lang live at carnegie hall dvd. just had to have it! anyway i felt that $36.95 for a english version of it was worth it, saves me the trouble of going to bras basah for the cheaper china import version which i would need to decipher the words in the information booklet.

although at first we said we wouldn't step into kinokuniya today... haha old habits die hard. we couldn't keep ourselves away. between watching ray and browsing at kino, the latter still won. the funny thing was, this time we surprisingly didn't buy any books! cos kk called her sis asking if she already had those books and her sis said they were cheaper at mph. but we were both quite tired out and decided to go home. good thing too, i really needed a break before tuition. chatted briefly with melissa online, haha we decided we're really quite similar and so we should be sisters like emz and di. but we won't be as crazy as them... we're sane! ;)

argh speaking about tuition... i dunno what to do with the lil vampire! before going home i went to the library at jurong point and borrowed two english and one chinese book for him to read. decided that it was quite useless to make him do assessment when his language was alreay so far from that standard. thought it may be good for him to read more to improve his language. well... i think i was wrong. he read the first book quite enthusiastically... yes, we took turns to read a sentence each. and he was absorbed by the story and the pictures. but... the chinese book, he went, "i dun want to read. u read for me. very difficult." bleah. after some half-hearted attempts to read the first paragraph at my prompting he just totally gave up and flipped through the books looking at the illustrations! the other english book he declared as "not nice" because the pictures were in black-and-white. ok, whatever, so i told him to get his assessment boks. he complained that doing work everyday is very sian. like i dunno that! scolding him twice a week is also very sian! i asked to see the homework from last week and he said, "huh got homework? u never give!" !!!!! last week he was the one clamouring for me to give homework and when i asked if he'd really do he promised. :( so fed up with him.

went out to meet melissa this afternoon after lots of pursuasion on her part. haha she sure is pursuasive man. i actually wanted to go out early in the morning to hmv, grab a cd and reach home just on time for lunch. haha but by the time i woke up late and finished breakfast i decided to go on monday instead. bleargh i just love to procrastinate! so melissa managed to convince me that i should head down to towers for my cd and then i could "wander aimlessly" with her whilst her father was at the computer fair.

we decided to meet at esplanade cos i wanted to find a book on french overtures... argh! there were none in esplanade! after esplanade, we headed towards suntec. the staircase up to the escalator of the suntec overhead bridge was super crowded and the up-escalators were all not working. in suntec, one narrow corridoor was swarming with pple and it seemed like eternity before we managed to squeeze through the crowd.

the outing was still going fine... until i got my cd. okay, so what are two not-so-opinionated pple supposed to do to kill time? we ended up really walking aimlessly around suntec. when we decided to head back to "the other side of suntec"... yes, the filled corridoor is the divide between the two sides... we tried other routes and ended up in some deserted corner of suntec with one security personnel behind a counter. that was when i realised someone was following behind us. when we took the escalator down from that ulu place, the grey-shirted man stood on the step directly behind melissa though there were no one else on the escalator except us. i tot maybe he was in a rush and wanted to walk down but he didn't say excuse me or make any signal. ok, so maybe i was paranoid. then... my phone rang just when we were about to plunge into that mad corridoor... i decided to stop for a moment and the grey man stopped too and stood immediately beside melissa. i typed a msg in my phone to tell her, and when she turned around he quickly walked away. and after that we decided not to join the crowd with that weirdo behind us... and took a route outside the building instead.

finally found time to find a host with enough space for radioblog. but still trying to figure out how to make it work, followed every single instruction but still didn't work leh. =X maybe i misunderstood some of the instructions... or my host doesn't support php. whatever... nitez!

i was expecting to return from a tiring date with my little vampire this evening, but it turned out the other way! seems like tuition on mondays is a good thing... maybe it's the beginning of week so he's more attentive, or it just happens that he decided to be good for one day. well, we shall see what happens next monday. at first when serene asked to change tuition days to mon and wed i was a bit reluctant cos wed would be the super bad day... piano and tuition on the same day is a terrible combination. that's not to say i dun like piano lessons, just that i keep messing up and after being demoralised i dun want to face that little terror in the evening too. then i thought it wasn't a bad idea cos tuesday nights free would mean more time to practise... and hopefully one day they finally help me not to mess up.

hmmm today the vampire was so cute and sweet. he actually wanted to do his science assessment! and instead of asking me how to do, he flipped open his textbook to search for the answer... and even more suprisingly, he wrote neatly! ok, not exactly neatly... but compared to the past few weeks of illegible scribbles or even squiggly lines meant to take the place of words that he's too lazy to write, it's neat enough. i was glad to let him read his chinese textbook instead of doing chinese assessment, which he hates, since it was better than if he just sat there stoning with the assessment in front of him like some weeks ago. and he was very interested in a science magazine which i had to read for him because of his poor english. i suppose the magazine is targeted more at upper primary students but for pri 3 students who are not bad at english, it shouldn't be that hard to understand. it was only because of his fear of long paragraphs with lots of words and especially relatively small fonts... he only reads things in large print or with illustrations, like the little cartoon characters' speech bubbles at the sides of the magazine.

i ended at about the same time as his brother's tuition teacher and we were in the same lift when she told me the brother had failed 3 of his subjects for his CA. i wasn't that surprised cos my own vampire failed all his subjects for last year's end-of-year exam. ok, abit unfair of me to judge them equally just because they are brothers, but both just seem equally naughty to me. and we ended up complaining about how they always write random answers when we give them homework. i had always thought that the brother was not as hyperactive as him, but she was especially frustrated about how the brother always walks about the room and looks out of the window etc. for me, i'd rather he keeps fidgeting in his chair than falling asleep... like last thurs! that was the ultimate man, i couldn't stand it. if he really fell asleep i can understand... and ask him to wash his face (hahaha ;) i'm a sleeper too!) but he was just pretending to be asleep... when i tried to wake him and pull him out of his chair to the kitchen, he was resisting with all his strength. a sleeping person would have jerked awake, even though i tried to use minimal force in case he fell out of his chair! sigh... hope every tuition session will be like tonights'.

i'm getting that feeling again... the one where u just wake up in the morning and dunno what to do, dunno how to spend the rest of the day... bleargh. not like i have nothing to do, i suppose i could have spent the day doing lots of productive things... just wasn't in the mood to do anything. and then i remembered what my physics teacher told us once, she said "don't waste your time girls, u wake up in the morning and stare into space, before u realise it it's lunchtime already!" so i tried to practise piano, but after ten minutes i just couldn't continue. mostly i was just feeling sian... and occasionally mixed with apprehension.

i can already hear in my mind the shrill voices of the san gu liu po asking, how was your results? eurgghh. although that may be because i answered their calls today asking for my bro's results. haha i was still telling him yesterday that i'm sure they'll call... and here i am, ending up answering those calls! oh well, as usual that slacker-but-still-smarter-than-me bro scored better than me... 8 pts. okay la, he's becoming a bit (just a teeny little bit) more hardworking... after going to ajc.

i'm also feeling quite lost. i dunno what to do... as in, i dunno what i want to do after getting my As. and then there's that feeling that i wasted two years in jc... though it was the most enjoyable years in my entire student life. hahaha enjoyable that's why i became so lousy mah... totally wasted the two years slacking away. now it's too late to regret it... i guess i shall see what to do after doomsday.

ended up taking a long walk around the neighbourhood in the morning. (huh? walking around the neighbourhood? has she gone crazy?!) walks just make me feel better. especially alone. hahaha still remember me and debbie always walking from mac's to ang mo kio mrt after band pracs on saturday. and then i bought a chocolate ice-cream and a big bar of chocolate from the convenience store... for lunch. (oi! cannot eat chocolate for lunch! not healthy!) ya, watever... and i continued snacking on new year goodies in the afternoon.

okay, shall go sleep... and hope i dun get weird dreams like last night! hmm... doesn't this eat-and-sleep routine just remind you of a particular member of the animal kingdom? ;D