Exam Post

My sister was asked by one of her customers (rich malay pro-government guy living in huge bungalow and owner of 5 cars, including 2 Mercedes; go figure...) to cater for a function at his house for around 300 people this saturday. Apparently his guests include many, many orang kenamaan, so everything, from the toasted bread to the nasi lemak and butter marble cake dessert, has to be perfect. Not that my sister and brother-in-law care about the many tetamu kenamaan, they just want the money and customers.

Since my mum is the official cake supplier of my sister's kopitiam/restaurant, cakes have been flying out of my mum's oven so fast and so many that there aren't enough oven mitts to go round. Well, that's a bit of a stretch, but the bottom line is that my mum has been baking around 7 cakes a day since tuesday.

Many, many cakes... there were actually more than these, but my sister had already taken a few earlier in the day and yesterday.

I am still trying to recover from yesterday's disastrous chemistry practical exam. So many things went wrong that I'm not really sure how to elaborate. From the fact that I couldn't figure out the final answer from my titration experiment, to the horribly untidy and unclear observations for salt analysis, to my own careless stupidity of forgetting to write down the chemical properties of the unknown chemical FA5, and that somehow the range of everyone's answers was from the minimum of 1 to the maximum of 10.

However, I am slightly consoled by the fact that I'm not the only whose practical was one unreactive mess. There were leaking burettes (new, or so they said); one of my friends (who would probably prefer to remain unnamed) had to use her mouth (!) to fill her pipette because her pipette filler couldn't work. The worst case was when someone else ran out of chemicals for the titration experiment, and they weren't any extra, and she wasn't allowed to take any from anyone else! The icing on the cake (or salt rubbed on a wound) was that this was the AS exams, the big Cambridge exam which everyone had preparing for the past year, and an exam which could significantly affect one's academic future or even career. So absolutely no pressure whatsoever. Ironically enough, I actually thought that chemistry would be my best practical. Clement, Dennis Toh or Saran, if you're reading this, shut up!

Today we had chemistry lecture, and this is the advice my lecturer gave us (paraphrasing):
"You must all focus on your next exams, don't worry about the practical otherwise you won't be able to sleep wan... don't ask me the answers for the practical, if I told you even more cannot sleep wan..." '__'

And then there was pure maths. I actually thought I had done decently well, until everyone got into an intense discussion about the paper and I found out that I had made grievously, minid-numbingly stupid mistakes. Let's just say the mistake could have been averted if I had just cross-checked my answer with the question. It still hurts to think about it, to be honest. Lesson learnt, though: never, ever discuss a paper after the exam.

That's only 2 exams done, I still have 9 (I think) to go. Up next week: Bio practical and applied maths (statistics).....

On a completely unrelated note, I found this article on yahoo which takes to a whole new level the saying 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned':
http://videogames.yahoo.com/feature/online-divorcee-jailed-after-killing-virtual-hubby/1259111