My Wednesday and Thursday this week have basically vanished into air (literally), and my body clock is currently in some whacked-out timezone that is neither UK nor Australian, so I’m feeling pretty disoriented. But nothing beats the feeling of being back, of hanging out in my living room with my laptop with my siblings watching telly. Daddy took me out laptop shopping today followed by a trip to the Sydney Botanic Gardens to take advantage of the awesome warm weather, and we had lunch at Masuya, a family favourite Japanese restuarant in town; I also finally managed to satisfy my perpetual xiaolongbao craving with a trip to a new Shanghainese restaurant near our home, and we made plans to hit the beach tomorrow for some good fresh fish and chips, and pancakes later in the day (why yes, I have planned my days around food)!

Speaking of new laptops, I basically presented my dad with my very few specific requirements (must be able to play Dragon Age and NWN2, must have good sound, must have Win 7, doesn’t need to be that light/portable as I mostly just leave it at home anyway, must not be ugly), and he picked out this drop-dead sexy beauty for me:

Toshiba Qosmio X500

This, my friends, has to be the Mustang of laptops or something. It’s clearly built to be a gaming rig, hence its massive size and high-end specs, and I’m just hoping that my back won’t break lugging it back to Singapore and London, but dang it’s pretty. They’ve apparently been flying off the shelves so fast that they don’t even put it out on display in shops because then they’d just perpetually have no stock. We had to ask for it specifically. Thank goodness for the internets.

My dad’s l33t bargaining skills also resulted in us getting a copy of Dragon Age, a new pair of headphones, and a Logitech GX9 mouse thrown into the deal – for less than the RRP of the laptop. w00t! :D

• too tired to do anything, but wanted to update, since it’s been a week
• the downside of an upcoming long holiday is having a ridiculous amount of work to do before jetting off
• i have been working nonstop this week
• at work, before work, after work
• staying 1-2 hours late in the office daily
• and my room has fallen into disrepair as i ignore the cleaning and the massive pile of dirty dishes (and the light in my bathroom has just gone out)
• but this evening was nice – i was working late along with another colleague, who will be out of the office till next wednesday now, and so we won’t see each other again till i get back. and it is so easy to talk to colleagues when you are the only ones left behind, on a friday night, no less; we spent our last half hour or so there basically doing no work and having a good long chat about the internships we did to get where we are now, what we want to do in future, crazy ex-colleagues, sustainable farming, regional accents in sign language, and the stupidity of the Home Office (can you tell the conversation became increasingly random?). it was the longest i have ever talked to her, and it was lovely :)
• i SO need this weekend
• and i SO need the coming holiday

I know I ask perfection of a quite imperfect world
And fool enough to think that’s what I’ll find

i had some very pensive and slightly blue musings here, involving the painful aptness of the carpenters on this cold, quiet, rainy friday night, but then i decided that no one is served by my melancholy, least of all myself.

deep breaths, deep breaths, if i concentrate on the hereandnow split nanomilliseconds of each moment and just, for that short period of time, be happy, it will all add up, and it will all fall into place.

the days are so short, now. i miss the spring, i miss the summer even more, and most of all i wonder where 2009 went.

Hello, world! My lack of updates since October 31st can be entirely attributed to the exhaustion from working on NaNoWriMo, pretty much! So can the delirium evident from my overuse of exclamation marks!

So I have been madly sprint-writing NaNo for the past five days, and already it feels like forever; it has become so ingrained into my routine to wake up super-early (5am starts to the morning, for real), write frantically before work, spend most of work alternately feeling really sleepy and thinking about my novel, and then come home from work and scarf down a quick dinner and write for another hour or so before bed.

I am writing like a maniac now to make up for my travels later in November. Now that I am sitting quite pretty on 12,725/50,000 and it seems like I am getting somewhere (25% – !!!), I feel I can take a breather and post about it. This is me, and the NaNo blog, with regular wordcount updates and horrifically rambly purple-prose excerpts, is here. Fun times. (Bed beckons. I am so sleepy.)