Half-dreams

The fire alarm at number 7, Marlborough Buildings rang loud and clear at 3a.m jolting me from my night’s rest. I got up immediately and was pacing around like a trapped Pacman to and fro my door to the kitchen, unsure of what I was supposed to do first. To grab my mobile phone, slip on my slippers and get out or to turn off whatever was triggering it.

A peep in the kitchen showed no indication of overcooked item, and I don’t know what or where the switch for the fire alarm was (is there supposed to be one?). My housemate came out and said we were supposed to get out so I went back into the room to put on my glasses, take the phone and keys. Just as I got to the first landing of the stairs the alarm was switched off so I returned to my room, to the bed, under the duvet.

Eyes shut, but not fully asleep, I thought what would happen if I was in a very, very tall building on the 62nd floor and a fire breaks out several floors beneath. The fire escape staircase is the standard exit route. Then I imagined if there were poles like the ones in fire brigades’ headquarters where the officers can conveniently slip down onto the brigade trucks when a situation arises.

To slip down a pole 62 floors high is an opportunity to slip to death, your bare hands would be blistered and you’ll need to organise some sort of human traffic if a single pole is to connect all the rest of the floors together.

Why not have lengths of fibre-glass or carbon steel ropes  and sets of harness so you can abseil down the side of the building? Maintenance would be a nightmare and total rope length for the capacity of the occupants of the building multiplied by the height of the building might extend from South China Sea to the Indian Ocean. And training would be required before handling the equipments to minimise casualty in the escape process.

The next dream was something related to HAZOP and safety mechanisms and procedures in the engineering industry. I vaguely remembered some step change, Laplace transform, rearranging to get the transfer function and process gain, inverse Laplace. I might have done some calculations in my dreams.

Exams begin on Monday afternoon and as composed I may appear to be, my confidence is a fraction of that of the particle size of a dust.

Time to crrrrraaaaaaaaaaammmmmmm!

God bless me, God bless us all.

 

 

Productivity of the Non-academic Kind

Today I took a stroll in the sun, did my groceries, renewed my library book loan, cooked lunch, and baked brownies.

Revision = nil.

A little writing assignment (non-academic related, this is an external project) = nil.

Giving room for a little positivity, perhaps the 24-hour break would do some good.

The recipe for the brownie is adapated from Chasing Delicious, instead of 4oz (approximately 113g) of dark chocolate I used 200g (a whole bar) of Sainsbury’s dark chocolate for cooking and decorating and tapped whatever remnants inside my package of Green and Black’s cocoa into a bowl of decadent chocolate concoction which is then poured into a cake tin and sprinkled with leftover chopped nuts. Mmmmmnnmmm. . . .

This was while it was still warm out of the oven. Shiny, gooey, chocolate indulgence. Mmmmnmmhhh.

Cat Off My Chest

Imagine a humongous furry being stuck on your chest refusing to get off as you try to get on daily life normally with furs smothering your every orifice on your head and claws sinking into your shirt as it attempts to resist gravity when you stand up. Imagine doing work every single day of the year with that humongous being stuck on your chest.

2011/2012 have been a wonderful year of keeping my head up with that humongous being stuck on my chest while treading water in the calmest of the seas. I did a crash course on organising food parties in the last minute while coping with multiple deadlines, proposal writing while my neurons were being deep-fried in preparations for and the end of year exams, almost an entire summer worth of effort gone down the drain because of undue circumstances from left, right, front, back, above, and below, my first time to playwright through dozens of writers block and trying not to mess it up with technical reports, sacrificing precious times planning and leading rehearsals instead of brushing up my Matlab skills, and potentially screwing up my chances of landing a job after graduation by forgoing three company offers for summer internship and a careers fair combined with deteriorating academic performance.

I failed to keep the main thing the main thing.

I did not listen to advice.

I should have slept less.

I should have cared less.

I regret not going all out from the top.