Gunpla, teachers and a whole lot of off-topic-ness.

For those of you who don't know me that well, you'll probably be surprised at the fact that I've spent some thousand dollars on Gunpla. What is Gunpla, you ask? I honestly don't know how to explain to you without sounding like an idiot, so I'll shamelessly give you the 'official' definition from Wikipedia.

"Gundam Models refers to plastic and non-plastic model kits depicting the mechas, vehicles and characters of the fictional Mobile Suit Gundam universe. These kits have become popular among anime fans and model-lovers, especially in Japan and in other nearby Asian countries since 1980s. The popularity of Gundam models increased in the 1990s with North America and Europe being exposed to Gundam through television, video and manga. These Gundam Models may also be called Gunpla (ガンプラ, Ganpura?), a portmanteau of "Gundam plastic model". "Gunpla" more commonly refers to the practice of building Gundam models, rather than the models themselves."

Sounds much more impressive than saying:"It's building small models of robots which are ridiculously expensive", isn't it?

Anyway, during Christmas, I netted about five such models from various people. Last time, I used to just break the parts off the runners, and just snap em' together. Now I actually use clippers to cut the parts off, and paint the models so that they look more like their animated counterparts. I (used to) fix about one body part everyday, so I estimated that I would finish building everything by the end of January.

Well, it's the end of January, and all I've built so far is a model with half it's body missing. It's all because of the HOMEWORK. It's increased by about 100% at least, compared with what we got in Secondary 1. Especially maths.

Thanks to my homewrok, I've got almost zero time left to concentrate on Gunpla. Some might think it's a waste of money, and some, like my mum, think that they all look the same.

To all those people, I have one thing to say: at least it's more healthy than computer gaming.



After a whole day spent at Orchard road shopping for New Year clothes with my mum, my writer's block hasn't gotten much better.However, I did see a decent bit of recently released new Gunpla's at Ngee Ann City, such as PG 00 Raiser (this REALLY AWESOME model that costs like 530 bucks), Nebula Blitz and some others.

After writing all this, I realize that all I've really done is copy an article from wikipedia, and rant about homework and not having enough time for Gunpla. It's actually kind of hard to teach something to someone who practically knows nothing about it at all, and still try to make it interesting. If there's something that's come out of writing this admittedly pointless post, it's learning that teachers have a much harder time teaching than most think. Hopefully this rather late resolution will help me appreciate teachers more.

...this post has gone off topic in ways I never imagined. Honestly, how did I get from talking about scale models to talking about teachers?

Since I can't think of a poetic and eloquent way to end off this post, I'll just
end.

To start the day...

Yes, I understand that it is already 4.30 in the afternoon and not a start of the day by any measures.But I couldn't think of a better title, so live with it.

Well, for lack of a better or indeed more interesting topic to talk about, I'm going to reflect on the start of the school year, or any significant events that happened since then. The first day of school went as I expected, with plenty of talks, briefings, etc. But it was when lessons started that I got a really rude shock. Yes, I did expect some homework, but not the torrential cascade of Chinese and Math. Most of the teachers seem nice enough, but I s'pose it's only a matter of time to get used to the others.

Oh, and I suppose I should give some introduction to those reading this who don't already know me. (Unlikely.) Oh well. I'm called XXX XXXXX XXXX from XXX XXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX,( don't know if we're allowed to reveal the school name yet, or indeed our own.) from the CCA judo. 4 days of training a week. Tough, but it could be worse...or so I'm told.

THe two good things that did happen is that I managed to get in a project group for our annual Project Competition, and I'm not the leader, so I won't get blamed if anything goes horribly wrong. The other great thing is that I finally got myself a very cool HP Mini netbook, which I'm using to work on this blog post. I'm quite satisfied with how it's performed so far. However, I'm looking to upgrade the OS, which is quite limited. For example, you can't even change the wallpaper. I recieved mu netbook only yesterday, and this is only my second time using it, so you'll forgive me if there're any typos.

Oh, and in addition to all that, my tooth just broke off on Friday. More on that later. I hope.

Well, that's my very first blog post(on this one, at least.) Hope you didn't fall asleep. Hopefully future entries will be at least marginally more interesting.

~XXXXX XXXX(What, you didn't think I was going to fall for that, did you?)