On top of the below-written, I'd like to thank:
-Best Western, Hilton, and Mandarin hotels,
for their supply of ball-point pens which I used for all my examinations.
[soon there'll be pen sponsors for the best students]
-Coldplay, for
(1) naming your album X and Y, cos I believe thats the correct answer for a Chem paper1 qn on oxidation which I wasn't quite sure about.
(2) the songs in that album, esp. Fix you and swallowed in the sea, i listen to them every night, and they are part of my inspiration.
-UEFA, for breaking the standard schedule of champions league every 2 weeks to 3, so it [coincidentally?] doesn't clash with any exam.
-SHE who kept saying coastal was "easy" and "worth studying"
-Myself for knowing that i shouldn't heed her advice.
-The CE for allowing us at least 5mins to plan out essay structures for SS and history, before the exam even started since we could check the paper.

And please, feel [very] sorry for
-students who banked on coastal.
-Britney Spears, for marrying K-Fed and recording a *** tape and ALLOWING him to have possession of it.
-Old people on wheelchairs, who apparently like sweets a whole lot, so much so that the candyland in vivocity incident is absolutely blown out of proportions.
-Chelsea fans, who have the best team on the planet, yet, are so unprofessional.

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It's over.
At last.
At long, long last.
This week turned out great. Thank God for that.
It started at 12am on Monday,
Flamini, Toure and Gallas saw off sorry liverpool to seal a 3-0 win at the Emirates.
Oh, and to rub more salt, Gerrard and Riise coming into conflict, ahaha.

Then Tuesday, sigh AM. I don't quite understand why my paper 1 is always so shitty. It was 57 for preps, 50 for prelims, k la, and its careless mistakes again. Lost 6m on the matrix qn, lol. heck.

Then Wed, was physics. This was the one science i was absolutely confident about, and i didn't study it at all the night before, purely chemistry. And physics turned out ok. Geog was relatively difficult compared to our previous papers I think. But its only paper 1.

Thurs, AM p2 i was so focused, i x2-checked every qn i done, as a result only 15mins + left after finishing the whole thing. Too close for comfort, but it paid off. This should be a full mark paper to overcome any hint of shortcoming from paper 1. Then Chemistry, from a objective point of view was kinda difficult, yeah. But I am pretty sure, I ll do patricia so proud, lol.

Friday, gosh gosh. History was an absolute shocker. The essays qns were ridiculous, esp the cold war qn, goodness! And SBQ was weird too, only 3 sources, 4qns. o.O
Ai, I just said to myself 'do your best...and........' yeah, haha. Think I did as good as i could. At least the test didn't seem to end on a sour note as I had so feared. I was happy. Everyone was pretty happy. Man, finally, FIFA 07? Battle for middle earth? hahaha.

Of course, cant wait to kick soccer with the guys on monday. Ive been practising hard on step-overs [cristiano ronaldo-inspired], and I think I ll showcase them, hahaha.

Of course, finally able to thank Him for all he has done in me, not just through the Os, but throughout the year. I have certainly changed alot, and I think I ll save that for another entry this year. I must say I am a very fortunate person, not to experience much stress throughout the Os, prelims, what have you. Even so, I've faced other problems, and He has guided me through them, indeed one of them has to be the fact that my sleeping-in-class symdrome has totally went away this year, even though i CONTINUE to watch super sunday matches, as well as champions league matches, and even when i spend long hours on MSN on many occasions.

yeah, I ll spend some time to reflect of this year. For now, its another frustrating game at the Emirates. Points thrown away yet again.
Goodness, how can Thierry Henry be rested??!

Well a week down, one more to go.
Big exams are over, big ones still to come [they're all big la]
At least for me, the biggest one of em all, is done and dusted.
And here's something interesting.

I studied deforestation and part of geog, being part of natural veg and probs caused by development. And, the MAIN reason i studied that was cause bio also has a portion on it.
Well, neither paper had any qn on deforestation, sigh.
And to think, that I unleashed it in part, combined with the haze situation in SEA, on my english essay, my most important paper.

Oh well. Monday, I [and almost everyone] got off to a flyer.
EM went with the trend -- no kick whatsoever. It has to be full marks.
SS was more tricky, but thankfully, fate has it that it is our batch that get's theme ONE.
Close shave, but SS should be ok. NOW i will focus on history with more intent.

Then Thursday was the content-intensive day.
Bio was quite cool, the OAS has our name on it! lol.
Another reason why it is 458.00 and not a dollar or two less.
Oh well, I did my best, no careless mistakes, that's the best i could ask for.
Geog. in the afternoon went great. I rushed from the start, and seriously rushed this time.
3 and 6 were popped; time elapsed: 48mins.
Took awhile to DECIDE whether to do 2 human [which would mean 3 in total], or the weirdo weathering one. So i did settlements first, then hmmm, really dilemma.
Weathering was ok, xcept for 1st qn. On the other hand, development looked straightforward too. Then, a flash rang through me that I should stick to my guns. So weathering it was.
Coastal, ironically turned out to be the tough qn; understandably so, apparently something not in the syllabus came out. well, TOUGH LUCK TO ALL VICTIMS.
I am just so relieved I had resisted studying coastal since last year, despite the numerous people who have said it was 'easy' or 'easier than ----'.

Friday was totally a waste of time. Why 2pm?! And not the usual 8 start time. Oh well, didnt matter, it was no different from paper one. And to think the only 'tricky' qn that existed, the number pattern qn, only warranted 3marks of challenging qns. BOOO!

Oh well, one more week to go. History is continuously bugging me.
I can't possibly 'waste' the luck that SS gave me.

Anyway, I ll chill off Sunday night to watch the big one Arsenal v Liverpool,
at the Emirates Stadium. The first 'big' match played at that new ground.
Lets make it the fortress that Highbury so was.
The image of Steven Gerrard, of all people, making a backpass mistake of monumental proportions by playing it straight to Thierry Henry in a 1v1 with their goalie, and gifting us the match this march, is still finely etched in my head. Hopefully such incidences will continue at the Emirates. =)

[skip the italics if football bores you to the doldrums, which im sure it does for many]
Very often in life, people are made to swallow their words, and it proved to be the case during the weekend.

Aha just when I thought Arsenal were clicking into gear they came unstuck against yet another team who just park the bus in front of the goal and do nothing but defend, and everything assosiated with that [time-wasting, bad tackles...]. but what can i say? It's something the players have got to learn to deal with, and they just can't seem to scrap results like Chelsea do so well. And on the 'sexy football' theme, Liverpool finally played some beautiful stuff indeed, and hats off to them. Man Utd too, admittedly.

Oh well that's the football bulletin, haha. HCL O's and chem prac are done and dusted.
And I was worried about HCL, indeed. It was like the first year of the new syllabus [thankfully no han zi or zao ju], and fortunately it was a shadow of AND, Cres, RGS, and many other school's papers which scared the life outta me. Paper1 i did the argumentative on 'Whether parents are solely responsible for instilling the RIGHT moral values into children' haha, I'm never gna speak much chi frm now on, or pple like Meijun will keep saying I sound funny. Hey, i got distinction for chi oral last yr ok! ha!

And at last, Chinese is done. It is. I like the funny chengyus and idioms that relate to animals and objects. For example, it IS too late to fill the holes in a ship when it is halfway out at sea, but apparently there IS time for a horse to turn back when reaching the mountain cliff, haha. Mdm Chan has been a good teacher la, to be fair, she really deserves to be in some better place than our school. But looking back at this language, probably the only thing that's nice about it Jolin's voice.

Then Tues chem prac. was the easiest of the sciences. For prelims, i think i spent too much time on titration. So this time, I tried, and tried, to keep pace with candidate 0291, [and this is testament to her effiency, lol], and I was not far behind la, which was good indeed. I did it 3 times, first time 22.0, overshot la, then i started 2cc earlier than that and managed to get 20.2 quite fast, twice in a row. you know, the real comfort came when candidate 0291 also got 20.2, and when other pple like kum boon also got that, rather than when patricia announced it [proudly?] to the class. I mean, I SERIOUSLY have reservations about her as an upper sec teacher, much less one in charge of 4/7 which is the b**t class in the level. Then QA it seemed to be test after test after test, but managed to di it in time la. yeah. I even left a litmus paper in each of the 6 bench reagents to ensure that no one would screw them up, lol. towards the end, while i was wiping my test tube, suddenly about 5-7 drops of KMnO4 just came 'splat' onto my paper. And because they were fine drops, they looked pretty red, like those drops of blood you see in horror shows/ anime fighting scenes. it shocked me. Then i saw KB was cleaning her burette in front. Well I have this to say of the bottom end of the burette, "boy can it spurt uncontrollably" =p

So apparently [and i don't trust it], R was NaBr, S was NaI, and T was Na2S2O3, the compound that me, weihong and sherhan have been arguing about the proper way to pronounce it, i.e. Sodium Thiosulphate, haha.

Oh well, it signalled the end of practicals, and the last time in chem lab. Chem lab has been such a memorable place. The irritating smells of ammonia and chlorine, and the cool effects such as decolourising and litmus paper changing colours, yeah I ll remember them, as well as all the dirtied worksheets [thankfully not clothes], and also the fact that people do get hurt there, like when sherhan got her hand scalded and had to put sulphur all over it, and a whole bunch of people got "acid-burnt" when one time we had to handle conc. acids. It begs the question, why put chem labs at lvl 1 when it is [obviously] the most dangerous? Ah, after the paper ended, I just took my mind cleaning the various apparatus man. I mean, we'll probably see all those same things and much more next year, but it sure is something cool.

From a school's point of view, they must be delighted. They now have a shitload of litmus papers, filter papers, and splints to last them a couple of yrs.

Oh well, its a crunch week, having to try to make sure enough of everything stays in your head and doesn't leach away. Pray to God that it'll keep on raining!
That's my impetus for studying in the afternn.