13 hours, 4 cities, 2 trips, 123 photographs, 6 continents (made of corn), 1 pair of dirty pants, 68.6 + 102.6 = 171.2 kilometres. In the first trip, I suddenly decided to go to Elora Gorge to see what exactly does the “post peak” condition look like for the “fall colours” (as described on the weather network website). I was utterly disappointed to find that most of the “colours” had fallen off the trees, leaving only the green ones to see, and coloured ones to stomp on. So that wasn’t really good…but at least I got some exercise out of it, I guess. In the second trip, the felloship went to Ontario Maze. It wasn’t too bad, actually, despite all the random rain and mud. The best thing about the trip was spending time with Kevin & Ray. Ray was constantly complaining that we didn’t go through enough deadends, and Kevin was making strange noises. The mini-golf was ok, I guess, I’m not a fan of that, certainly. The roads leading up to the maze were unpaved gravel road, so that made for some “interesting” driving… Kevin was the navigator for the car, and on the way back, we became unwilling volunteers that lead the rest of the cars back to Waterloo. The funniest thing about that is that when I made a wrong turn, everyone turned with me, and eventually I had to do a U-turn on a T-shaped road, and everybody followed that as well, making quite a hilarious scene in the middle of the night. So anyway, those were the adventures of the day.

I’ve been in a pretty foul mood recently, actually…don’t know why exactly.

Something’s wrong with my eyes.

It was a weird day yesterday. First, I missed a class. Yeah, that’s probably the first time I’ve done that accidentally in quite a while. I overslept, maybe because of having a really tough week. I did eventually go to school, got the notes from Carlos and all is well. Alex paid a visit to my office, which is quite a surprise. Always very nice to see him, but too bad I didn’t get to participate in much of the conversation because a 350 student came in almost right after he came in to ask for help…sigh. Good luck to Alex, who is going to work for Amazon…nice. Later talked to Carlos for quite a while, actually, and it was really nice. That sort of carried over to the Tutte seminar, which I haven’t attended in ages. Went home, and then probably the worst evening in recent memory happened. I don’t know why, but I simply could not do anything that I have planned. My head was woozy, wanted to sleep, but couldn’t. It was painful…anyway, that’s over, so I’m fine now, maybe, I don’t know.

Started watching some of the huge ocollection of TV-DVDs that I bought recently. They are nice…too bad I don’t have much time to watch them. I also want to watch them on the fourth-floor giant tv…

My computer has been very slow these days, even slower than the slowness that is already happening before. Not sure what to do there…maybe one of the security downloads from “automatic update” slowed things down, I don’t know. Also, the wireless connection in UW is really frustrating to deal with. Strange disconnections all the time, and most recently some downloads just suddenly disappear for no reason. Hmm…

I woke up today by the alarm clock (and not by waking up naturally), this is so that I can actually go to school and do some reading before supervisor meeting. And surprise, I actually did read something, and that turned out to be very important as what I read in the morning is exactly what I presented during today’s 1.5-hour supervisor meeting. Not too bad. Felt like hastily prepared, but still ok, I guess.

Received the goodies from Amazon today. Weeeeeeeeeee! Saw a bit of Amazing Race DVD, and man is it different from Amazing Race today. Very little background music, things clearly out of order, and there’s even a guy holding up the race flag in the Johannesburg airport (which is kind of odd). Anyway, they have these additional material embedded into the episodes, which is nice. But from the jacket, I see that these additional material decreases as we go along the race…so that’s kind of the editors doing a lot of work in the beginning, and fading towards the end. That kind of sucks…but that’s only a minor complaint.

I found out that the voice of Yakko and Pinky is also the voice of Carl from Jimmy Neutron! That is so cool…

Marking madness #1 for this term is over. Conclusion: 4 straight days of marking isn’t good for the mental health. Again, it’s not the brain power that is draining, it’s the sheer volumn that’s scary.

I went for a walk around campus again today. While that’s not really surprising, what’s new this time around is that there was a light rain going on while I was walking. It wasn’t too bad, actually…now see if I can walk while it’s snowing…

I have one morning to prepare for the supervisor meeting…yikes.

One note about the Wallace & Gromit movie (and I don’t think this is a spoiler, really): The bad dog in the movie looked very familiar to me…and then I realized, that’s the same dog as the bad dog in Chicken Run! (I think…) Anyway, the soundtrack is coming next week, and looks like I’ll definitely get it for sure. Speaking of shopping, I’m expecting a couple of packages to arrive from Amazon some time this week…should be exciting…or not.

Marking all day long, and marking all day tomorrow. This kind of marking is different from the previous terms’ because this time, it’s just brute force and endurance. Before, it takes brain power, so it was more fun that way. Not having good days, I tell ya. Also, the very sad part is that now that I have finished marking about 80 papers, I realize that I have about 140 more to go…yikes. And there’s the looming supervisor meeting on Thursday which…well…let’s just hope it doesn’t go too badly…

Amazing Race was pretty bad tonight…so not going to say much about it. The one thing I got out of it is that I remember how I really really wanted to have a brother…anyway.

The Wallace & Gromit movie rocks. I don’t think I have ever laughed so hard for so long in any occasion. So…go watch it. I just hope that they release a soundtrack. Good to see Elgar’s Symphony No. 1 made it…I always knew it would be good movie music. Anyway, this marks the 6th movie that I have ever watched in a movie theatre.

I have an idea for the homework due tomorrow, so that’s good. I marked one question out of my pile…one more question to go, plus another pile. I think I panic too much before this kind of pressure. Trusting God isn’t an easy thing.

People found a special way for locating my car…it’s about the same as Finding Nemo, if you know what I mean.

Photos of yesterday’s trip to Collingwood and area are up on the web now. By the way, Windows zipping is really slow…should have used WinZip much earlier…

Yesterday, for the first time in recent memory, the temperature of my room dropped below 79 degrees Fahrenheit on its own (i.e. without the help of air conditioner). Sign of things to come, I guess. The high temperature for yesterday was only 12.

I’m in my office right now, doing marking and homework. I’m really frustrated with both. I can’t solve the homework problem (there’s only one…), and the marking is just so tedious. I’m not having a good evening, am I? Oh well…at least I cooked another pot of pork this afternoon. It tastes great, actually…

12 hours, 5 cities, 5 people, 5 (or more) times lost, 202 photographs, 377.9 kilometres = the trip around a little bit of Southwestern Ontario. It began at 9am, and after picking up the people, we promptly got lost using the Mapquest system. I think they have pretty old maps there…so…not a good start. First stop: Orangeville, where we needed to use their fabulous service known as McDonald’s. After the short stop, we were off to Collingwood and the Blue Mountain. It is a pretty short mountain, really, but still, in Ontario, that’s kind of rare. We took the open-air gondola up, spent about 2.5 hours there, walked around, had some exercise, enjoyed the beautiful sea (which is not green…but the sky is blue). We were hoping to see the so-called “fall colours” from the trees, but all we saw were mixed-coloured trees. It’s still a great view, but not as spectacular as we had hoped for. It was all downhills from there…literally (as we took the gondola down) and figuratively. Our next stop was Craigleith Provincial Park, had a picnic, and walked around the “shale” coastline. People were fishing (although what they caught were a bit questionable…including that black thingie), lots of dead ladybugs around, and my camera battery went dead. That’s never happened before…so there was a minor panic, but that sort of resolved itself when I took the battery pack off, played with it a little bit and then put it back in. Next stop: Eugenia Falls. It’s a waterfall that looks more like a water leakage…very little water coming down from it. We then learned that it’s better in Spring, so I guess that’s when we’ll come back again… Disappointed by the water leakage, we backtracked a bit to visit Beaver Valley Lookout that we passed by earlier. It wasn’t too bad, except the sun is at a particularly awkward angle that makes photography almost impossible. So anyway, we returned home after that, passing Swiss Chalet on the way. Interesting how it took about 2.5 hours to get from Waterloo to Collingwood, about half an hour from Collingwood to Eugenia, yet only about 1.5 hours to get from Eugenia back to Waterloo…hmm… Anyway, at least we figured it’s not that far, so it’s kind of feasible to visit again. Overall, I really enjoyed this trip, and mom would have enjoyed it immensely with the driving around country roads.

No, I don’t trust my balance, hence the inability to do anything involving perilous heights.

Eating Swiss Chalet two days in a row isn’t really good…especially when the chicken in the second day’s SC is overcooked…

I really need to stop the urge to do some online shopping………. As a trivial note to myself, the most expensive single purchase that I have done online cost $556.55.

The thing about the supposed “fall colours” here in Ontario is that it really isn’t spectacular in the Waterloo region. Usually the trees change colours at different times, and because it’s also windy season, the leaves are gone soon after they changed colours…so, not so good.

I’m afraid I’m wrecking my sleeping pattern again…need to say no to long afternoon naps…

A surprise for me on Jeopardy today. The lady that I met during contestant tryout back in April, Helen, who just happened to come from Waterloo as well? She was on the show today. Too bad she didn’t win, but at least she had the lead after Jeopardy round, so that’s something good. So now I can claim that I have talked to a contestant (in person) who had been on Jeopardy! Woooo!

Supervisor meeting went fine today. I guess my meetings are always pretty short…

Thinking of going to Blue Mountain this Saturday…still not sure, though.

I’ve been thinking about the physics of opening a door. Suppose you are faced with two doors. Somebody passed by from the other direction, and the door that he used is half-opened and closing. Being my size, the opening is too small for me to fit in. So the question is, which door should I open: the one that’s closing, or the one that is already closed? My answer (and I could be wrong) is that I should actually open the one that is closed. The reason is inertia: to re-open the door that is closing, you need to reverse its inertia to close and then push (or pull) it in the opposite direction. For the door that is already closed, all you need to do is defeat its inertia to stay there and push (or pull) it open. So that should take less initial force to open the door. Does that make sense?

The current battery life of my computer: 3 minutes.

The Wallis and Gromit movie is coming out tomorrow. I looked forward to this for a while now, but too bad it’s a Halloween movie, which makes me hesitate a bit on whether I will go watch it or not…

Surprise visit from Aaron this evening, and we had some exercise, weeeeeeeee! It felt really good, the exercise part…of course now I have some pain in my left arm…

Apparently the udon + pork soup lunch was a moderate success. Now I am a cook! Sort of…

Only 55GB left on the 160GB external hard drive. I’ve been downloading too many things…

In Dan Younger’s class today, he was in a reminiscent mode and started telling some history behind the problem we are learning. Among the history, he passed around a group photo of a conference in the 1970s. He made a specific point that we can look for him, he’s on the right side of the picture with a tie on and stuff. So I tried to find him. I had to go to the list of people before locating him. I looked at him in the picture, and I almost (and it’s very tempting) made the joke that he looks a lot “younger” in the photo…

I forgot to do my daily Bible reading this morning, again. It’s been a bit difficult to remember to do that since I have changed the regular reading time from the evening to the morning since last week. I guess it will take some time to get used to it. And on a pseudo-related note, I forgot to bring a bottle of water to the office, again! This is like the 3rd day that I wanted to bring the water, and I just keep forgetting about it… All of these remind me that my memory is indeed deteriorating…

Things to do: read the difficult papers, do homework assignment, marking. I’m not having an easy week this time around…

So there was a Bible study yesterday. 6 people came, including me. Not too bad, I guess. We had some interesting discussions, and Francis just happened to sleep during the study. Oh well, not my problem.

After serving the Lord for so long, I gained the “insight” that unexplainable difficulties are bound to happen while doing work for the Lord. Today is another example. I tried to work on the audio files from the past weekends. I needed to edit them, essentially cutting off segments from the beginning and the end so that each has one sermon and nothing else. Well, the sound editing softwares that I found all have trouble dealing with one of the huge files: 120mb in mp3, but 1.2gb in wav (and apparently all of them turned the mp3 into wav before I can do work on it). Plus I don’t have much disk space in my hard drive. So…after many attempts at converting the files, editing them, many times unsuccessfully, and about 5 hours later, I finally got it done. Really, it’s as simple as chopping off small bits from the file, but it took that long. And surprisingly, I wasn’t really panicking or gotten angry or anything. I was mostly calm, knowing from experience that this kind of thing happens a lot. So…I did indeed learn a lesson in my life.

It has been very warm this week, up to 27 degrees with the smog advisory. Really, 27 degrees in October? Yikes… Also I finally noticed a difference the high temperature makes with the sky. With the high temperature, the sky is grey, with no clouds in sight. With the low temperature, the sky is beautiful blue, with extraordinary cloud formations sometimes. So…smog bad, clean air good. By the way, I made another attempt to walk around the campus tonight. It was slower than usual, since my legs started to get a bit tense and I couldn’t walk fast. I saw some fog developing, so that was interesting…

I just had a pretty embarrassing office hour. I thought the assignment was easy, based on duality and complementary slackness, so I didn’t really look deep into it. I didn’t have the official solutions, obviously. The first half hour of the office hour was quiet. Really quiet. The calm before the storm hit at half past three, when a group of 4, led by the guy who came to visit me last week, came into my office to ask for help. Later another guy came in, but because I was mainly dealing with this group of 4, I didn’t have time to help him. So anyway, I was flustered here and there, claiming that I misread the question or I simply couldn’t decipher their solutions. It was bad. But the half hour was over soon…I would have been able to stay past 4pm, but they left anyway. It’s too bad that they will probably never visit my office hour again, because that guy with the Sesame Street t-shirt is really funny.

I made an unprecedented move today by going home…just for lunch! Yeah, kind of a first, actually. I guess I can do this while the weather is still not too cold…which means I can only do that this week…

I downloaded and uploaded way too much with the wireless connection here in the office today. About 800mb, which is normally more than half of my weekly quota at home…