Down The Rabbit Hole

Annnnnnd I’m back from the dead! Happy Chinese New Year everyone (nevermind that Chap Goh Meh is coming right up). Sadly, I fell sick two days before the reunion dinner and we had to cancel eating out and settle for a simple home cooked dinner. The throat infection + flu then proceeded to take the entire week afterwards to disappear, so I spent most of the week at home. Darn. I guess it was just as well that I took the entire week off (though I had wanted to spend those few days cruising around an empty KL town. Grrrrrr).

This CNY is also notable because this is the year I started handing out angpows (yeah, I wanted to blog about my marriage registration buuuuut I got lazy… so, um, hey guys, I’m married! Woot!). Boohoohoo, no more collecting money for me. Giving your friends angpows is such a SURREAL experience.

Halfway through the week I suffered from a horrible nightmare. I was dreaming about something (can’t remember what now) when all of a sudden my boss popped out from nowhere and asked me if I could cancel my leave and come back to work on Thursday & Friday. I promptly told her that I already took leave, already made plans, couldn’t cancel them, yadayadayada… which is what I would have told her anyway if it happened in real life LOL. My colleagues’ reaction? “Wow, you must be damn stressed.” While on a week-long break? Hmmmmmm.

Another wet yellow puddle greeted me again on Monday morning.

I was not amused.

Grumbling, I cleaned up the puddle, refilled her food dish, and rushed off to work. I couldn’t concentrate the whole day because I kept thinking about the rabbit. Is Phoebe ok? Does she seem more settled in? Is she drinking her water? Eating her pellets? Am I letting her out enough? Did she spray pee outside the cage again? All day the only thoughts running in my head were rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit rabbit. Rabbit? Rabbit! Rabbit??! RABBIT!

When I finally got home I decided to try out my friend’s remedy and rubbed some vinegar onto the spot she peed on. To be on the safe side, I placed some newspapers over the spot as well. Feeling rather smug, I went off to shower before I headed out for my movie. As I was leaving the house, I decided to check on the rabbit again.

Lo and behold, there was another puddle of pee outside the cage… IN ANOTHER SPOT. WHICH ALSO HAPPENED TO BE RIGHT OVER HER FOOD BOWL, SO SOME STAINED THE SIDES OF THE BOWL.

I was quite ready to turn Phoebe into rabbit stew. But first I complained to my friend.

Me: SHE PEED IN ANOTHER SPOT. GYAHHHHHHHHHH!!!
Friend with two rabbits: Well, you just have to keep on rubbing vinegar until she stops.
Me: Really? *pause* Wait, how long did it take you to housetrain yours?
FWTR: A few months?
Me: *collapses on floor*

Man, I REALLY hope I have the patience to see this through.

It is advisable, when you first get a pet rabbit, to let it settle into its cage for the first few hours and let it pee there. Once a rabbit chooses a spot to pee in, it will return to that spot whenever it needs to pee.

Those were the facts running inside my head on Sunday when I checked on the rabbit first thing in the morning and was greeted by the sight of viscous, yellow fluid puddling on the floor right outside of the cage.

Why was the rabbit peeing outside her cage? How the hell did she even manage do that when she was inside the cage?!

“Male rabbits do that,” said a friend with two pet rabbits. “They tend to spray their pee outside the cage.”

Yeah, but Phoebe is female?

“Well, females do it too. Although most of the time it’s due to missing the mark.”

Ah.

“You can stop them from peeing on that spot by wiping some vinegar over it.”

Hmm.

I wiped the pee off the floor, stared at it, and observed the rabbit for the rest of the day. She didn’t seem to spray over the cage again, so I let her be. She was getting more well behaved as well, as I let her out again and she hopped back into her cage without me having to attempt getting her in. Yay, progress!

Hello! Meet Phoebe, the one year old albino rabbit Significant Other and I decided to adopt to save it from potential doom.

We just picked her up yesterday, and settled her into her new home on my porch. It is important to note that Significant Other and I had no prior experience with rabbits, so what “settled in” really means here is that we spent yesterday (and today) exhausted from stressing out over whether she was ok or not in her new home.

Our first impression when we saw her was simply WOAH, SHE’S HUGE (but totally adorable. Also, she is a white rabbit XD). After we got her to my house, we went out to buy her the necessities – a cage, food, some hay, and a water bottle – and placed her into her cage. I lined the tray with newspaper to prepare for what I was sure would be a bombardment of rabbit poop and pee.

After awhile we decided that maybe we should let the rabbit run around the porch a bit, as it had been stuck in a car and a styrofoam box for more than an hour. This turned out to be a mistake. Once the rabbit was out, it simply refused to go back into the cage. Every time we got near her, she ran away from us. Every time we managed to get close enough to her to pick her up, she panicked the moment we touched her. In frustration we called the girl who gave her to us to ask for help. She advised us not to let the rabbit out yet as it needed to get used to its new living space first… which was a bit too late. Whoops. Could she offer any advice on getting the rabbit back into the cage? Besides picking her up and putting her back in, nope.

So Significant Other and I spent the better part an hour trying to coax Phoebe back into her cage. Significant Other finally managed to grab ahold of her in a manner which she didn’t struggle… then she struggled the moment he reached her cage and scratched him -_- I was getting tired from trying as well, and it didn’t help that I had a dinner to go to in 15 mins. In the end Significant Other managed to grab hold of the rabbit again and bring her to the cage. She struggled again, hopping free of his arms… right into her cage! We shut the door before she could run out again. Phew. Significant Other quickly declared himself to be a champion rabbit tamer. I decided not to argue out of sheer exhaustion of chasing after the rabbit.

Well, of course I would rather jump into something less hazardous, but I’m getting really desperate here. And not to mention depressed. God knows how long more I can keep this up before I snap. Or go insane. Wait, maybe I already am insane.

Two days ago, I dreamt of insects. Yesterday night I dreamt of circles. I dreamt of things going around in circles, of circular shapes in every direction I look.

I related it to the same friend who interpreted my dream yesterday, and he told me that the circles represent infinity, going around in a loop without end, a monotonous existence… in other words, I’m stressed. Crap.

There was a museum, in a mall. They were holding an exhibit about insects, and I decided to explore it, along with a few other people. It did not turn out the way we expected it to be. I remember a huge mound of maggots on the floor behind us, threatening to engulf us. Streams of cockroaches scuttled all across the floor around us. We ran further into the museum to escape. Its path was like a maze. One of the “exhibitors” unleased two giant bees from one of the rooms we ran past. Strangely they did not bother us, although they were frightening. After some harrowing turns following the signs in the museum, we managed to escape to the carpark.

And I woke up.

When I related my nightmare to a friend, he pointed out that it fitted the description of my current office.

“It’s telling you how you feel about work,” he explained, and he recounted to me the numerous things I told him before about the place. And surprisingly (or unsurprisingly), the pieces clicked.

Hmm, maybe it’s time I put my escape plan into action?

It was a few months ago when madhatter and I were discussing about redesigning our main site that I looked through my own blog template and realized how old, ugly, and in dire need of changing it was. It was horribly dated, and the more I look at it, the more horrified and embarassed I was at how bad it was, and how I knew that I could do a lot better. Then procrastination set in and I sat around mulling how to redesign my blog template for a couple of months.

Few days ago I finally set myself down at my computer, determined to at least start working on a new template. Since I had been very interested in typography lately, I decided that the best way to start was by going to dafont.com to pick out an interesting typeface and see where that would take me.

It was a very interesting journey, as I ended up making a template that I felt was very much unlike my personal self. This isn’t to say that it was bad. I actually really like it, even if it feels a little at odds with my personality. Surprisingly a lot of the elements of the current template also made its way into the new one, and it gelled together really nicely.

Now all I need to do is to code in the changes and make the new template come to life! Well, um, hopefully I’ll get to that soon-ish. Until then I’ve only got this header to show XD

I meant to write this right after I came back last week. And then a week passed by… oops :p

Anyway, last Saturday I flew down to Singapore with some really great people to catch the Asian premiere of Final Fantasy: Distant Worlds. Since madhatter has already written a good post about it, for a better description of the concert I would refer to this.

In short I would say that this concert was much better than PLAY, which I attended two years back. And of course it was made a million times more awesome by Nobuo Uematsu’s appearance (although being the complete blurcase I am, I had trouble spotting him even after two people pointed out exactly where in the hall he was sitting. And of course I also missed the brief moment when they shined the spotlight on where he was sitting -_-).

Some of the pieces they played were so good I forgot I hated the game it came from (I’m looking at you, FFVIII). Some I didn’t recognize since I’ve only played FFVII onwards on the PS & PS2, and the remake of FFIII and FFIV (which I have yet to finish, because everyone keeps dying and I just found that really depressing -_-) on the Nintendo DS. I enjoyed them anyway

The concert was also really awesome because it was filled with rabid Final Fantasy fans who screamed their lungs out every time a song finished playing, and especially when they announced the encore songs (which were really, REALLY fantastic!). I swear half of them must be Malaysian too, judging from what I heard from a friend who attended the Q&A session, who said that a lot of people screamed when they said they were in talks to bring the concert to Malaysia. I sincerely hope that they will because that will be SO TOTALLY AWESOME XD

I missed the Q&A session to line up for a chance to get Nobuo Uematsu’s signature but sadly I did not manage to get it as they cut the line off shortly before it would reach our turns T_T The concert organizers didn’t allow anyone to take photos of him either T_T But at least I got to see him up close, because he passed by the line after he was done with the signing… which was how I knew we weren’t going to be getting his signature lol. Oh well :/

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

1. I am agnostic.

2. I am an anarchist. If this horrifies you, then perhaps you should read up on the subject.

3. I find the base beliefs of LaVeyan Satanism interesting (if a bit corny). If this also horrifies you, then perhaps you should read up on the subject.

4. I think I suffer from mild OCD. So far, attempting to treat myself hasn’t really gone anywhere, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up anytime soon.

5. I tend to think too much, which drives me crazy sometimes. Come to think of it, it could be due to #4.

6. I learned all my Cantonese from watching too many Hong Kong serial dramas. I can usually understand what people are saying, but don’t have enough vocabulary to speak it without sounding like an idiot.

7. However, I can speak Hokkien fluently.

8. I once let some random guy pick me up at a bus stop because I was bored. We went out on one date, after which he expressed a wish in seeing me again. I didn’t let him since I was never serious about it in the first place. Subsequently I lost my phone, so I couldn’t even tell him no if I wanted to. Whoops?

9. I grew up playing videogames, and still am (quite) a hardcore gamer.

10. I am SO not a morning person. I get a lot more things done at night then I do in the daytime.

11. I try not to sleep at ungodly hours anymore because it is really taking a toll on me.

12. People who like to read books while they are pooping baffle me. Hellooooo people, it’s not healthy, you can get hemorrhoids!

13. I love trains. I think they are romantic (not in the sense of romantic love, but rather the romantic era).

14. I am horribly impatient. When I want something, I usually want it right now! Some of it is due to worrying that I will forget about it later.

15. I hate being the smartest designer (academically) that I know of. I loathe telling people my SPM results and then being asked why I am doing graphic design. It’s because I love design, you dumbasses.

16. Despite being overworked and underpaid, I have no regrets about my chosen profession (despite bitching about it nonstop) and harbor hopes of finally making it one day.

17. When I was young, my ambition was to be a scientist and create stuff. Well, as you can obviously tell, my aims have shifted, although I am still creating stuff. Just stuff of a different kind.

18. Although, perhaps you get paid more being a scientist. And less overworked and underpaid.

19. I dream in colour.

20. When sleepy I sometimes tell people very random things, which usually result in totally hilarious conversations.

21. I am usually a very calm or collected person, and it is very hard to piss me off. However, this trait is not to be mistaken for being a pushover, because if you ever do piss me off, my advice is to run like the wind and never appear in my line of sight ever again.

22. Ignorance annoys the shiat out of me.

23. I love makeup, although I am too lazy to use it most of the time.

24. I never think I am good enough at my job, and admire others who are. I use that as motivation to improve my work.

25. I have always wanted to do a pixie haircut, but sadly I have the wrong kind of hair

You’re tagged if you feel like doing this.