Mourning for the Mouse

I'm still not getting over the death of my beloved wireless bluetooth optical mouse, which has served me faithfully for a little more than 3 months. Until now, I keep reaching to the left of my laptop to reach for the mouse and to realise that it's not working. It has already become an autonomic response (I wonder if autonomic can be used in such a way). Wanted to go to Northland or the city today after my tute at 3pm to get a new mouse. I woke up from my nap only at 3.40pm after the sms from Nicolaas came in (Nicolaas is the dutch guy from Holland, Netherlands). After making a few calls, it was decided that I'll go to Northland tomorrow after our Preston market trip. Hence, I went back to sleep, hoping that I would be able to sleep till dinner time at 6pm.

I woke up about 20 minutes later and decided not to be such a pig and go do my laundry instead. Now, my bedsheets, clothes and such are inside the washing machine and I've nothing to do. I'm not motivated to study for now. I managed to do my readings for the special senses yesterday while I was at V's house. Guess I'll just slowly do my readings and start working on my last assignment for this semester, a 2500 word essay on Monday.

Time really flies. It's already the end of the week, Friday. It's kinda considered like a weekend now. Am going to Martins house later to check out what ingredients he has. He's asking for my assistance to cook Bak Kut Teh (meaning pork ribs tea, however, it just means stewed pork ribs and people last time used to drink it with tea, in hokkien). We'll be making red bean soup with sago as well. I'll try to remember to get gula melakka (brown sugar, in malay) from the market or the asian grocery shop. Hopefully I can find it as gula melakka's really nice if you use it to make soups.

I'm waiting for tomorrow so that I can start making calls and continue to send SMSes from my mobile phone. I upgraded my plan from the $29 cap which lets me use up to $120 to the $49 cap which lets me use up to $230 worth of calls and SMSes. Currently, I've exceeded my limit by so much that I think I'll have to pay about $150 in total for my upcoming bill. Hopefully from next month onwards, I'll not exceed it. In Singapore, I have 2 phones and 2 lines, which I pay about $35 and $28 totaling to $63 per month. Therefore, if i were to upgrade to the $69 cap, which lets me make $500 worth of calls and SMSes, it should be too bad too. Oh well, I'll just see how it goes, but I doubt I'll need to upgrade again. I've been using Skype to send text messages these days as long as I'm home. It's so much cheaper. 1 message costs $0.12 to send on Skype, compared to $0.35 on my mobile. I can send 2 messages and even have a balance of credit!

Everything here is just so expensive. Even the taxi fares. In Singapore, the flagcall's $3. It's $3.20 here. For every 1km of travel in Singapore, it's $0.60 while its $1.53 here. Waiting time: $0.30 per minute or less in Singapore, $0.55 per minute or less here. Midnight surcharge's 50% of cab fare in Singapore but it's only 20% of cab fare here though. Therefore, it's still very much expensive to travel in a cab regardless if it's during the day or at night.

V passed me the driving booklet so I can study it. I'm hoping to go to VicRoads during the holidays in July to get my learner's licence. The test costs $18.10 and the license costs $18.30 and it's valid for a year. That's so much cheaper compared to Singapore, where the vocational license costs $25 for 6 months. After renewing it twice back home, I decided to give it up as it's just too costly to renew it. The cost for the lessons here is about $1 per minute as it costs about $40 for a 40 minute lesson. It's about $69 for a 100 minute lesson ($0.69 per minute). Therefore, the practical lessons is still more expensive here.

Oh well, perhaps I should stop complaining and be satisfied with whatever I have. I'm grateful for all my friends here as well as for V. I really feel so comfortable and love the presence of V whenever V's around. It's been almost a month since we've got to know each other, however, it seems like only yesterday that we met. I really treasure and value the time that we've spent together. I really wonder when I'll get bored of V, but for now, I'm not and am still loving it.

And by the way, my clothes are out from the washing machine already and it's now in the dryer. This goes to show how long I've worked on this post (oh well, I tend to blog and surf other sites at the same time, so yea..). It's dinner time in about 20 minutes. I'm famished, have not eaten anything since 8pm last night.

Cheers and you're Blessed!