gave school a miss on thursday only to return on friday to find out that the chem test has been postponed to monday (and coincidentally, we don't have an SL1 period on monday week A, so i'm sure how this is gonna go), math investigation has been pushed to august 14 (so i can't do it over the long break), and there was a practical period i missed...
so i went with sean to do a makeup pract with joshua the lab tech, and it was quite a fun practical involving the water and ice (because water is the most advanced and complex of all chemicals, no?)
for once in a long while there wasn't anything to do, and after looking around the sac/anglo-Os, i just went back home...
and on the way home i had the most delightful exchange with someone from midc regarding the forced attendance at the debate finals on saturday...
i could have just skipped it really, seeing how many ppl didn't even bother to show up...

the weekend (or just saturday really) was much more enjoyable, despite having to waste 5 hours at singapore power building...
met up (or just saw) many debaters whom i have not had a chance to talk to in a long while...
miche/val came along to support acjc (or just al to be more precise), but they lost to rj in the end (rj was good, congrats especially to aaron for being the top ranked speaker of the series)
paul was joint 5th (yay paul!)
but before the thingy itself, sean/paul/me met at cine for lunch at pastamania, then dropped by cheers to get survival materials for the waste of time ahead (namely bottled drinks and magazines)
i should have just brought my work like paul did, but oh well, FIRST movie reviews are productive in themselves...

the latter half (or third, more accurately) of my saturday was more fun, not only because it was FOP, an event which i attended from 2003-2005, but skipped last year coz hillsong weren't there...
but i decided to give it a shot this time round because miche told me delirious? was playing...
so met sher/rachh/quonian at kallang for an early dinner before heading to the stadium... unlike the friday slot, saturday night was way more crowded...
they did the batch-entrance thing again, which was really well organized, but that meant we had to make do with the overflow room and not get to see the thing live...
met gerald (who was reading harry potter 5) in the queue, and i assumed he was meeting friends (i feel bad for not asking, especially since he asked me if i was there alone, which should have been some indication), coz he had went with joash the day before...
(i also feel bad for not asking him to join us during the thingy itself, considering i was sitting 2 rows behind... sorry!)
the best thing about FOP this year was martin smith (no surprise there), and he is one HECK of a singer... i still get chills remembering the contemporary/spiritual candlelight setup he did near the end of FOP'05, and that note he held for goodness knows how long...
he really knows how to work a crowd...
the second best thing about FOP was the way delirious? presented their song lyrics... no usual yellow subtitles beneath a live video feed, not even the strobe/LED panel that hillsong used in their DVDs...
they actually had their lyrics embedded in things like bus stop ad signs and newspaper headlines... i especially dug the one for History Maker...
i'm so needing to re-obtain The Mission Bell, World Service (both of which i lost went my HD crashed a year ago) and get Now is the Time: Live from Willow Creek...

week 7 is the short week, and by short i mean 5-odd hours out of our usual 44-hour work week...

stuff to do:
1) chem pract 11 report
2) chinese individual oral script (21st august, 140pm, boarding school hall 8 music room)
3) chinese project (or what is known as an exercise in copying and pasting)
4) english A1 strand 2 written commentary - Death of the Naturalist

and before i end, allow me to lament the absence of SYTYCD on singaporean TV...
it is such an amazing third season, and i can only get it online...
this week was superb, with neil/lacey's contemporary routine clinching the best dance of the season thus far...
and the group dance this week was to ciara's Get Up (with a Matrix motif), which had a beginning that was oddly similar to the one the dance folk at ac did for te lle event this year (the chest thrust thing, which was really quite nice, despite the fact that the dance lasted all of 1 minute)...
the top 6 are lacey/danny/neil/lauren/sabra/pasha...

paint this big'ol town red,
John.