Between a rock and a hard place, + grade treat September 12, 2009
Posted by tian in Life.Tags: fish, food, friends, grade treat, hamlet, health, icecream, lessons, Life, morals, movies, philosophy, photos, radiohead, restaurants, school, smile, swordtail, sydney white, the hangover
10 comments
Ughhh…I’ve just come back from dinner at a restaurant and I’m SO BLOATED. AGAIN. It always happens, even if I’m not that hungry.
The thing I don’t really like about eating out generally (and especially in Chinese restaurants) is that the food is EXTRA OILY, in comparison to what we have at home. I guess that’s to make the food delicious (you gotta admit, oily food = yum), but it’s also pretty gross too. Especially when mum’s going on a health food campaign at home. She has a point in doing this though – if you don’t take care in maintaining your health now, you’re going to have to deal with it later on in life, with possibly worse consequences. (Which, I guess, applies to study as well. :P)
But, I absolutely HATE wasting food. Hatehatehatehate. I’m pretty tolerant of a lot of things, but I get really angry and upset when I see half-eaten food lying around. Just be happy that you have something decent (and edible) to eat. If I get something I don’t like eating, I’ll force myself to eat it (or at least share the pain with a friend xD), because I can’t stand the thought of throwing it away.
Which is when my dilemma today at the restaurant surfaced. For some reason, this particular restaurant (whose name escapes me right now) charges extra money for plastic containers that we use to take our leftovers home with. Since we didn’t have that much food unfinished, dad thought there wasn’t much point asking/paying for a container which wasn’t even going to hold that much food. But then we were all moderately full so what were we going to do with the extra food? Leave it for the restaurant staff to throw away?! I didn’t want them to throw it away, so I started eating the food despite being full. In retrospect I guess it was kind of stupid of me, since the dish itself was quite unhealthy (it was vegetables, yes, but oily veggies aren’t that great either!), and I was getting bloated, but I ate some of it anyway, simply because I didn’t want the food to be wasted.
I remember what mum said to me some time ago, in regards to this kind of thing. I think she was throwing away some fatty BBQ chicken skin (which is pretty oily, ugh), and my sister and I were expectedly upset (the skin is delicious :P). I didn’t want her to throw away the food but then she said something like, “I know it’s a waste but it’s not worth your health if you eat it”, and I guess she had a point.
I hate this dilemma though. I don’t want to waste food but I might have to forgo the unhealthier ones so that my wellbeing isn’t jeopardised. It kind of reminds me of those moral situations where you have to decide to kill one person to save 5 others or risk having all 6 die. Which begs the question… is it better to commit a crime (like murder, for example) for the greater good? (Who dictates what “the greater good” means, anyway?) Is it ever okay to commit a crime? Philosophical stuff, won’t be going into that too much right now, but definitely will in the days/weeks/months/years to come. Which suddenly reminds me of Hamlet – “I must be cruel, only to be kind”.
Yesterday was the grade treat, hosted at school by the prefects of 2008-09. At first I was reluctant to attend, but I ended up going anyway. It felt like camp, but in a surreal kind of way. Which, all things being equal, is a good thing. Since I’ve pretty much run out of my uploads this month on flickr (I’m not pro, unfortunately), I’m going to upload a few photos on imageshack and move them to flickr next month. Bleeehhhhhh. Flickr would be better if they gave us a *bit* more free storage. But I digress. Here are some photos (scaled down, click to enlarge):
After the bell: went to the common room and chilled for a bit. I think Lucy had just finished doing star jumps on the table. The common room is a mess, but we like it that way
Pizza & soft drinks in the quad! And later, icecream 🙂
Group photo for everyone who turned up at the treat
Watching The Hangover inside the gym
Leaving through the carpark, I know the shot is quite bad
The remains of my salad after I'd eaten most of it: chicken, capsicum, beans, pesto pasta - yum
I ended up missing a lot of The Hangover because we went out to get dinner (still hungry after the pizza :P). When we got back it had already finished. Since there was still some time before the treat was supposed to finish, another movie was put on, Sydney White. Sydney White is the usual chick-flick kind of movie, and although we didn’t finish watching it because we all had to go, it was rather predictable. Some of the things in it were sooooooo cheesy, but it was still entertaining and hilarious to watch, otherwise.
As a side note, I HATE HYPOCRITES! Especially the stubborn, self-satisfied ones. GRAAH. Okay.
Oooh, something cool. We have two tanks of tropical fish, right, and one of them is this orange/red one called a red swordtail (so called because the males have this sword-like point in their tails). This is a good picture of the male swordtail. Yesterday one of the females had babies! (okay, wait, that sounded weird…) but yeah, she gave birth to lots and lots of little swordtails. Some of them got eaten as soon as they were born, but dad managed to rescue about 20-30 of them and put them in a separate container so they can grow up! Awwww.
They're a bit hard to see, but you can see little fishies swimming around in the container
I leave you with an amusing and cute Radiohead picture. Thanks again for reading 🙂
If we smile, can we go eat icecream? (:
Today, the 9/9/09, + UNSW open day September 9, 2009
Posted by tian in Life.Tags: boost, chemistry, friends, happiness, hsc, Life, noodles, open day, phoenix wright, photos, progcomp, random, school, tldr, unsw, usyd
20 comments
Okay, so I was going to do just an UNSW post, but a lot of random/interesting things happened today which I’d like to share & comment on. So I think it’s fair to say that this is going to be another long post. (Definitely lots of photos coming, plus more on my Flickr photostream.)
09/09/09
Hmm, I remember a similar hubbub about 07/07/07 and 08/08/08 (not any other dates, for some reason…maybe my memory fails) – I think there was even a news item on channel 7 about 07/07/07. But I digress.
A lot of strange/funny things happened today, and luckily I happened to bring my camera along to capture some precious snapshots of them. (I wonder why I didn’t do this earlier, and why only now when there’s 16 days of school left…)
Morning physics – not much to speak of. The standard model of matter…just got WAY more complicated. (What exactly does a pi meson [a fermion] do? Jacaranda says it’s the exchange particle for the strong nuclear force, but today we learned that only bosons [different from fermions] are involved in the exchange of the four fundamental forces [strong, weak, EM, gravity], and the one responsible for the strong force is the gluon, not some pi meson. So what the hell? Anyway.)
P1 – english. Not much happened here, our teacher marked the roll and…left. Okay…what the hell. Since I really couldn’t be bothered doing more chapters of The Justice Game, and because I’d just finished a physics lesson with no break, I ended up playing Scramble and Tap Tap Coldplay on Jax’s iPhone. Ahhhh…Tap Tap Coldplay is oh-so-fun. 😀 I got completely owned by Lovers in Japan (Osaka sun mix) on Extreme though. O_O seriously, that is INSANE.
P2 – chemistry. Woot! Saponification. This turned out pretty badly, but I still thought it was funny. The cleaning up was rather nasty though. SOOO much oily stuff to wash off. The photos should hopefully tell the story…
The start of the prac: hot plate is warmed up, copha, NaOH & methylated spirits in the beaker
Things are going well: constant stirring
Oh sh*t: the mixture bubbled higher and higher until it overflowed, we put the watch glass on top to try and stop it, but it was too late...the watch glass is oily & a fair bit of fatty stuff is literally cooking on the hot plate. Oops.
My prac sheet happened to be right next to the hot plate when the stuff spilled...so some got onto my prac sheet. Hmmm, oily paper. It eventually went curly & crispy. I still have the sheet. Gotta love my incoherent scribbles xD
Just afterwards: the watchglass is seriously gross by this point, as the oily liquid solidifies slowly. As you can see we tried to scrape some cooked fat off the hotplate...
Taking a quick stop at the back of L6: bottles which have probably been there for ages. Is zinc oxide really poisonous?
No time to start again, so we have to keep going and hope we didn't lose anything crucial...the beaker is pretty icky now, eh
Stirring...apparently, this is what the thing is supposed to look like after a while
What IS this?! you ask. It's what we got after the white mass dried & cooled. We added a blue food colouring but it turned RED on contact with the solid, and a purple colouring turned PEACH. WTH. After adding saturated NaCl solution, this is what we get...so much for soap, this looks absolutely gross
Okay, filtering the liquid part. It is kind of pretty, but definitely not the blue we had hoped for
After this was CLEANING which took AGES. And we were supposed to have a meeting for all year 12’s but we completely missed it cleaning up all the oily equipment. Argh. And what was the thing about getting EVERYONE in the grade to bring a date to the formal? Are they serious? :O Btw, thanks Amy for helping out with the cleaning up 😛 The experiment was quite a fail but there were lots of laughs to be had by all 🙂 (except perhaps my chemistry teacher, who was somewhat alarmed)
P3 – meet period! (aka FREE for all year 12s) second last ever, I think. I was planning to go up to Crows Nest to get something to eat, but ended up joining a large portion of our gang down to North Sydney to get Boost. MOAR photos, methinks >D
The view from the bus stop: Pacific Highway
The classic Rufus pervy grin(TM). Disclaimer: no damaged incurred by author for any trauma that may be caused by this photo
The view from inside the bus...turning the corner at Berry St, I believe
Berry Square up ahead...everyone is busy during lunch, obviously. And there's a subway, oporto and boost nearby, so...
A selection of healthy wraps, yoghurts and salads...yum
maFIa, hi-fiving the guardian of Eckersley's
oh dear, this doesn't look awfully comfortable...
Boosts! Rufus had the smallest one, muhahaha
Phantom ninjas from inside Eckersley's...Rufus?!
Is it Doodles Noodles (as the sign tells us) or Oodles Noodles (as the outside of their shop tells us)? We might never know, but...interesting reminder of an Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney case here
Awwww, there were 2 giant bears but one got blocked by Rufus... 😦
Walking to the station bus stop to catch a bus back to school, and...CADBURY TRUCK?! No free chocolate however 😛
Back at school, 8 minutes until P4, and a friendly reminder of what's to come shortly...
P4 – physics, again. More questions. TONNES of sheets, phew. Pep talk by Ms Foley. Funnily enough, every time she gives us a pep talk, I feel so motivated to work, but then that wears off after a while. Time really is running out, isn’t it… wonder what I’m going to be like in a few weeks’ time. CRAP WHAT TO WEAR FOR LUNCHEON. *breathe* okay, crap, not worrying about that…FOR NOW. *stress*
P5 – free. Looked through ALL the physics textbooks in the library but none gave a satisfactory answer to my pi meson question. It’s really bugging me.
And that was my awesome 09/09/09. I guess the stuff we did was pretty mundane, but it’s not often that we get together as a group and have a chance to just do whatever and have a few laughs, so today was special in that regard. Thanks for the great day everyone ❤
UNSW Open Day
Alright, now onto what I had originally planned to post about. 😛 UNSW open day, on the 5th. This is kind of lame because it’s, what, 4 days late? Arghhhh. I’ll try and be more prompt next time, promise. 😉
Before this, I don’t remember having ever been to UNSW before, so this was a completely new experience for me (unlike USyd, in which I recognised a number of places). Decided to meet up with Amy & Amanda at Railway Square – when we met up, realised we had to go over to the Eddy Avenue bus stop instead. Guh. Met up with Callan at Central station (what is with the hairdo, man). There was a bit of a wait at the bus stop…it was about 12.30-1-ish, so plenty of people wanting to go to UNSW. The bus trip was fairly mundane, like any other bus trip. I thought the length of the journey was quite long, in comparison to USyd. I don’t like long bus trips – I get motion sickness on buses and cars especially, so the longer the trip, the more chance I have to get sick. 😦
The entrance of UNSW...
So we finally get off the bus. Free stuff at the entrance! Mostly just the bright red bag though…which I don’t really like the design of. The straps are too short, so if you’re wearing it like a shoulder bag you can’t just let down one strap to grab something from inside the bag, you actually have to take the bag OFF, get whatever you wanted, then put it back on. Gaaah. I just find that rather annoying. 😛 At least the UTS bag had an adjustable strap. Well, it WAS free, and so I’ll just accept it as it is, dodgy straps or no. xD
From the entrance, walking into the uni, it feels like one looong walkway. (Well, I guess it is.) The law building, which we came upon early in our trek, was quite nice. There’s a lot of grass on either side, with trees and random people. It was a pleasant day as well, which is always good to have.
We got free icecream (was it really icecream though? It was more like a viscous supersaturated sugar emulsion, with pink colour) from some engineering people. It was SOOOO sweet. Ugh. I’m not much of a sweet tooth, so it was a bit too strong for me. Luckily the serving was much smaller than the USyd one and so I didn’t have to endure too much sugar. Bleh. Around this area was a lot of people – there was a fairy floss place, and some various things being held. We dawdled a bit here, but then went on along the walkway, towards the progcomp building.
At the progcomp building entrance, I got a call from Anna, who told me she was lost. Oh dear. Amanda and I decided to go back and fetch her from near the fairy floss place. On the way there we bumped into Milo and chatted briefly. He was marveling at how much we’d all changed. Interesting, huh? Finally back to the progcomp building, then we go inside and upstairs where the finalists are doing the grand finals. It’s reallllly quiet here, and hardly any people appear to be around. I was too scared to go in from the back so I detoured through the kitchen-y thing and popped out of the side of the room to get a better look at the scoreboard. I took a few photos, had a look at the questions, lingered a bit, and left.
So after that we (Amy, Amanda, Callan and I) wandered around the other parts of UNSW (we also ran into Jo!): we left the progcomp building and went back onto the main walkway, and walked up to the engineering area. We had a look inside the computer science room, with the cool robots. They were sooooo cute! ^o^ There was one which was close to the goal and could almost kick the ball in, but it kept looking around itself and walking clumsily AROUND the ball. Awww! Then they released another one onto the field, which walked quickly (well, quick for those robots) towards the ball, and stood there for a bit. The first robot suddenly decided to kick the ball in, and the second one stood there looking speechless, wondering where the ball went. Then they both got confused…so cute.
First robot: hmmm, I wonder where the ball is... Second robot: I think I see a ball! *starts running awkwardly*
After that, it was wondering around the commerce area, I believe. Bumped into some Ruse friends and talked for a while. Afterwards we went back to the progcomp building, since it was almost 3pm and they were supposed to be finishing then. There was a guitar thing going on at the electrical engineering stall (I think it was), and there we ran into Gio.
Back at the progcomp building, it was about 5 minutes to 3. And MedLawUMelb was finished, which was why Mank (lol) was wandering around the place. CCCP were also really close, at 91. I’m pretty sure I saw one of the guys in another team look like he was giving up. Didn’t seem like much time left for any major change in the scoreboard. Hmm, the seminar room was a lot smaller than what I’d thought it would be like. I had always imagined the room for the grand finals would be larger. So after a lot of awkwardness (which was all my fault, sorry everyone), we left (Callan left before this though). On the way out, there was a Jenga game going on near where the fairy floss place was earlier. It was soooo nerve-wracking! Lots of FML-ing on the girl’s part, though. xD In the end the girl in the photo managed to pull out a block. The guy after that lost.
Very tense game here - check out the part near the bottom of the tower - how unstable, wow
After this, we walked out of UNSW. Didn’t manage to attend any talks though, although choco tells me that the comp sci one was quite worthwhile. Dang… anyhow, the next problem was getting back to Central among the SWARM of people at the bus stop. (And I thought the bus stop the station in the mornings was bad…) eventually managed to get on a bus, had to stand for the journey back though, since there were too many people. I get to Central and then what happens? Train comes in 2 minutes. Crap. Not going to make it. Next train 30mins at the least. We decide to get an Easy Way… Amanda got this Green Apple thing (can’t remember exact name), Amy got a Pina Colada (I think)mango milk tea (sorry, another clue that my memory is melting into mush), Gio had a grape smoothie and I had a blueberry smoothie, something I hadn’t had before. I didn’t really like it much. It was mostly just small flakes of ice…didn’t really taste any blueberry or anything. I felt kind of ripped off, and wanted a taro milk tea instead. Well, at least I know not to get it for next time 😛
Was surprised to find that a fast train which I thought would obviously not stop at my station actually did, so I ended up getting home earlier than expected. Thanks to Gio for the surprise LRLRL cd. 😀 I honestly had no idea, seriously…
And that was UNSW open day. I didn’t stay at UNSW for very long, but I thought it was alright overall. The place seems quite nice, but the thing I don’t like is the location – I’d prefer it if it was closer to the city. And why are so many UNSW cutoffs lower than USyd ones? Is it because not that many people want to do them, so they lower the cutoff to try and get people to enrol? Please enlighten me. xD
I hope you enjoyed reading this, this was much, much longer than I expected it to be. So long, in fact, that I’ve not done any homework because of it. Gaah. But if you liked it in any way, then I’m honoured 😀
I leave you with this, a photo taken & drawn on by Amy, with Phoenix Wright & The Justice Game references (obviously).
OBJECTION! this blog post was too long, so I didn't read it. Geoffrey Robertson rocks my socks
I rest my case. Thank you for reading. 🙂
the feel good drag 