From the University of Wisconsin Urban Horticultural Website

Been a pretty busy week. Dance practice was on practically every evening night for about two hours right up until the performance and even on the day itself as well! We got the hanboks and fans on Monday night and practiced with them on all the time. The fans were easier to handle than I thought, after having been told by Q that we would have to practice a lot opening and closing up the fans. Poor Q, Sh and Jess were hard pressed for time to change in and out of their costumes before and after the fast dance, and it's been amazing how they managed everything in the end, with the help of Q's sis, mum and Flora, of course. Thank goodness for them, for those ribbons on the hanbok can be tricky to tie sometimes and even more so if one had to hurry!

The rehearsal for ours on Thursday was scheduled at 5.45pm, and we had a practice before that at 4.15pm. Stupid me I decided to walk to SH and had to rush back in the end so that I could have a bit of dinner before going. Ended up having to shower as well after the heat and all that running *wince*...

The performance itself went great. No mistakes, or at least none that I saw anyway, and the audience was very appreciative of the whole dance (*Lots of awww... and I think I might have heard wolf whistles as well during the fast dance*). I did find it very odd and almost hilarious though that the audience would be so impressed when we did the mountain and ravine moves with the fans (I was dancing, it was only afterwards looking at the video that I was impressed by it all myself! *blowing our trumpets here lol*) that I nearly laughed out loud. Certainly did a very ungraceful-all-teeth-showing 'smile' then, but not that it mattered, my fans were big enough to cover up my imperfect attempt at demure-ness :P!

We were lucky too that night that we were after interval. For one, we (except Sh who I think was a bit too worried) got to sample the foods (*reminder to self, must grab the recipes for some of the kuih I saw from Iza and the rest!*), and had a good floor to dance on. Before interval, the floor got really oily from the Samoan dance and the girl doing the sword dance after them nearly slipped and fell. Thank goodness the backstage crew got onto it and cleaned it up, for the dance floor was already slippery enough without having to add more oil onto it lol!

A big thanks for Flora as well for doing our hair and makeup as well. I wonder how on earth she manages to do her own, since it's long enough, and the short of styles she does really require quite a bit manipulation. I bet she has an extra pair of eyes under all that hair of hers at the back. Hmmm... hmm.... I didn't know that opera singers had to take make-up lessons as well as part of their course. And never noticed before as well that eyelids and eyelashes are so very variable. I'm not too sure if I get the theory why some eyelashes are still not suited to mascara though *something I think is a blessing, for mascara is sure damn hard to remove as I found out later that night*.

Earlier this week we had a venipuncture session as well. I skipped my own stream and joined A1's, with good Markie's blessing of course. And by doing so, managed to skip B2's pathology stream. Muahahaha. And not have to listen to that idiot's teaching. Muahahahaha *louder this time*. As I had expected, it was shit hard to venipuncture someone. Hard as in I get this horrid sick feeling right down in the gut when it comes to having to drive something into someone. All that they put into the instructions on what could possibly go wrong didn't help either. And so my first attempt ended up with Sh having a nice big painful swelling around her vein. A big swelling with two holes actually, since my second one missed the vein. *eeps* Being of two minds when trying to venipuncture someone doesn't work. Switch around and Sh expertly drew blood on her first attempt. T_T makes me feel kinda inadequate, and evil since I couldn't even deliver the same for her. Feel kinda in awe and happy as well though, since after being jabbed twice by me she still had enough confidence in me to let me try again on the same arm. Lucky thing I was third time lucky... not sure if a third failure would be well tolerated though, since she certainly didn't look too pain-free when my needle went in. And poor Markie as well, based on what I got from Sh and T afterwards, he was kinda embaressed by my non-responsiveness when he tried motivating me while I was drawing the needle out. Tried to explain with an email as well, but no replies came back. Not sure if he's still offended or no *cries*. Not that this is going to change the fact that someone is still going to have to call him 'baldy' at the end of his next class/ year. *evil*