rain, rain....

I wake up, early morning
To the alarm clock's groaning
Buzz (silence) buzz (silence)
Lulls me back to sleep

I wake again, much later
To happy pitter-patter of water
Lazily draw back the curtains
And I'm wide-eyed awake

Like the sun that rises everyday
You are so faithful, Lord, You are faithful
Like the rain that you bring and every breath that I take,
You are so faithful, O Lord.

It continued raining the whole of today! But the rain filled my heart with joy when I got up this morning, so I was glad for it to keep falling. Rain pelting against the window-panes as I sit on my cushiony,duvet-covered bed and watch and strum guitar strings; rain plonking into puddles in the uneven sidewalk, plinking on my umbrella, splashing droplets that soak my sneakers; rain trickling down the windows of the bus, blurring the light from the streetlamps, windows, headlights of cars, into bows, dandelions and other funny shapes; rain dripping from the Sainsbury's plastic-bags onto the wooden flooring of our doorway.

I think it's stopped raining, maybe it'll snow tonight!

Spent all of this morning thinking it was Thursday the 29th of December, until kahmei kindly enlightened me sometime after noon. That feeling when I realised it REALLY was Friday the 30th was terrible! As terrible as, well having a day disappear in a snap. But it is now properly Saturday the 31st by 9 mins and tomorrow is 2006 AD. I feel like I should be making a few GOOD resolutions to KEEP, maybe I will tomorrow morning.

Emails from my family always warm my heart. I always knew daddy knew how to make the babies and children laugh, but I never realised he had such a quirky sense of humour till I came here, his emails make me laugh out loud. (I'll bet mummy loved him for making her laugh. :) )

Off to hang out the laundry now. (part of my grand scheme to get into routines of doing these essential household things instead of leaving them till the very last.)

new year resolutions?

Your New Year's Resolutions

1) Get a pet monkey 2) Eat less tofu 3) Travel to Argentina 4) Study artificial intelligence 5) Get in shape with ballet

What Should Your New Year's Resoluton Be?

it's christmas!

Merry Christmas everybody!

My room is so warm I had to turn off the heating altogether. Because the rays of warm warm sunshine are streaming in like it's summer! Yes, so no white christmas, but I'm not complaining.
Blesssings everywhere this Christmas, like wonderful dinner, laughs round the restaurant table on the other end of a phonecall, friend's mum coming to know Christ (!!), and love.

This Christmas actually felt quite festive. When I went to Sainsbury's yesterday, you could almost feel the excitement in the air amongst all the last minute grocery shoppers preparing for dinner, and trolleys all piled so high too. Maybe also because I'm now staying in an estate, and could smell wafts of other home's Christmas dinners, could hear the talking, laughter, music, could see the lights. :)

Anyway, I would like to share a Christmas carol we don't sing very much back home, (possibly because the idea of midwinter is foreign), but it's hardly winterish here now, and it's still beautiful. (And all the carol services I've been to or watched on TV had their choirs/congregations sing it!)

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, Whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, Whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

confirmed un-phlegmatic

There are days when this city is positively unlikeable, like today. These sort of days make me long for home and ask myself what is wrong with people? Or is there something wrong with me, you know, hormonal imbalances and the rest of it? I think it's both.

1. Bus drivers

I think I should dedicate a single entry to talking about bus stuff, seeing how often I take the bus nowadays and how confident I am that the randomness of events encountered on these bright red things will never cease to schock me.

BUT, today I had the horrid experience AGAIN of having the bus driver stop and refuse to drive the bus because of passengers. UGH. As far as I could make out:
someone was drinking alcohol aboard, refused to get off when asked to, started shouting at driver, driver says no get off, lady passenger no. 2 says he's stopped drinking just drive, driver refuses, passenger no.2 turns out to be not such a lady, and starts hurling the F and other words liberally at driver, who decides to voice his frustration over the PA system, "ladies and gentlemen now there are not one but two passengers on this bus arguing with me and I cannot drive till the station captain arrives""This bus will not move and I can and shall call the police".

I could not believe my ears!

Let me say first, this has happened before! And the last time it did, the stubborn driver, as a matter of principle, turned off the lights and shut the doors, and the busload of innocent bystanders to a ridiculous situation had to demand to be let out of the bus to catch another. The police actually DID arrive to talk to the offending passenger who, as a matter of principle, would not get off the bus to buy a ticket because he deemed his oyster card valid when it was not.

Both incidents happened at rush-hour, and what I do not understand is why both times, neither party felt the tiniest bit ashamed at having caused such inconvenience to all the other people squashed in that bus with all their stubborn shouting.

Thoroughly sickened by the whole thing, I could not possibly have waited for the bus and watch the police arrive and all the rest of the pointless commotion, and so decided walk the rest of the three or four bus stops home in the cold with my bags of groceries feeling quite miserable.

2. Bad customer service

It wouldn't have been as annoying if not for the fact that I had been snubbed earlier in the afternoon by the most unpleasant woman at hsbc. Entirely unhelpful, totally disinterested, downright rude, zero professionalism, shockingly slovenly...I could go on! It can't be that she had a bad day or something either because she's been consistently unpleasant each time I've been to the bank this year, and hey isn't it her JOB to be nice? Plus, not as if I wasn't more pleasant than I needed to be!

But I shall stop ranting because of the very friendly, efficient, willing-to-help lady at the russell square branch shujun accompanied me to after the horrid first woman. I feel like writing in to commend her simply because I'd rather commend than complain, and because I don't know the name of the unpleasant woman and have no wish to risk further irritation just to find out her name.

Anyway, I now agree wholeheartedly with my flatmate on how bad customer service (yes with the agents, with the phone companies etcetc) acts like a negative multiplier on the horrid feeling of being in a foreign city.

Ok, I know I still like this city and there're still a million and one reasons why.. it just doesn't feel much like "lovely" now. Walking along both crowded streets and deserted ones, it struck me that it doesn't feel much like christmas either.

phlegmatic?!

This is too funny for me not to keep.

You Have a Phlegmatic Temperament

Mild mannered and laid back, you take life at a slow pace. You are very consistent - both in motions and actions. You tend to absorb set backs easily. You are cool and collected. It is difficult to offend you. You can remain composed and unemotional. You are a great friend and lover. You don't demand much of others. While you are quiet, you have a subtle wit that your friends know well. At your worst, you are lazy and unwilling to work at anything.You often get stuck in a rut, without aspirations or dreams. You can get too dependent on others, setting yourself up for abandonment.

What Temperment Are You

Now let's look at dictionary.com definitions for

phlegm (flm) n.

1. Thick, sticky, stringy mucus secreted by the mucous membrane of the respiratory tract, as during a cold or other respiratory infection.
2. One of the four humors of ancient and medieval physiology, thought to cause sluggishness, apathy, and evenness of temper.
3. Sluggishness of temperament.
4. Calm self-possession; equanimity.

phleg·mat·ic (flg-mtk) or phleg·mat·i·cal (--kl) adj.

1. Of or relating to phlegm.
2. Having or suggesting a calm, sluggish temperament; unemotional.

And this whole thing is funny because one, I never knew what phlegmatic really meant after all these years! If I ever read a sentence describing "a phlegmatic man" I most certainly would have assumed him to be phlegmatic in the coughy phlegmy way. Ignorance!

Two, as far as I know I'm not and have never been a girl with a phlegmatic disposition. If anything I would say I'm rather the opposite, and the only way phlegm can be applied to me right now is in definition no.1's "thick, sticky, stringy mucus". Yuuuuck.

I still think phlegm is one of the grossest words ever. Sorry everyone for the horribly repetitive use of the word here.
p.s. temperament was spelt wrongly in the quiz results. ha! don't know how that makes my ignorance of 'phlegmatic' any less terrible, but it does ok.

ice-cream

I can see my holidays zooming past already, and am "counting up the calories" while "counting down to christmas" as the ad at the bus stop shouts. No thanks to sainsbury's and tesco's luring me with the offer of saving £3.85 each time I buy two tubs of ice-cream, when I could actually save £4 by not buying them at all. Consumer irrationality prevails.

It's nice that these winter days are so sunny and bright though it feels almost like some illusion, some trick being played on my eyes because the rays bring with them no heat or warmth.

Ice-cream, frozen grapes, frozen blueberries keep the winter blues at bay. Kind of like 以毒攻毒! And wonderful people provide the magical warmth, like Mr Tumnus and the Beavers did for the children in the midst of Jadis's winter. :)

at last

"Why, Mr Stevens, why, why, why do you always have to pretend?"
- Miss Kenton

"But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of "turning points", one can surely only recognise such moments in retrospect. Naturally when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at that time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable."

"Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed - why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking."

"Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in - particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth."

-Stevens the butler

The Remains of the Day. Kazuo Ishiguro

***

Now, I want to watch the film based on this work of excellence. It stars Anthony Hopkins and Emily Thompson and is supposedly very acclaimed. I want to watch it!