Goodbye August. Hello September

Now that I am few minutes away from the 1st of September, I took sometime to look back at the month of August.

To me, the August has been pretty much a holiday month. It was indeed an enjoyable month, and a memorable one.

At the beginning of the month, I took a leave from army to go to Overseas Academic Link, an overseas studying agency, to meet with this head of art branch fom Monash University. After some talk, she granted me a place in Monash University. This has casted a bright light unto my then dark uncertain future, I suddenly felt I had a goal to work for. This was the most significant happening in the month, which somewhat set a course of my life.

Then in the following weekends, my family had a stay in Oriental Hotel, to see some fireworks. The stay in the hotel was very luxurious, letting me temorarily forget all about stressful army life.

On the following Friday, I had a wisdom tooth extraction, which granted me 5 days MC. Though 2 days of MC were wasted by weekends, I still enjoyed my MC on Monday and Tuesday. On Tuesday, I tried my first attempt of airmailing a stuff to overseas, which was a birthday present to my friend studying in Australia. I was told it would take the mail 14 days to reach him, but it turned out it only took like less than 5 days to reach there.

Immediately after I came from my MC, I was spammed with 2 duties within a week. It was stressful, yeah, but I made it.

Next week was my storeman course, which was held in Sembawang Camp, and it lasted for 1 week. I had to say the course was damn slack, boring as hell, but still I enjoyed the time there. Anywhere outside my MT line is a good place. There were so many breaks, such as machine break, canteen break, smoking break, sleeping break, you name it. There was a gym in the block I was training in, it had a nice sets of free weights and new machines. I made full use of it, using
it during a break time after lunch. And another good thing about the course was we usually could book out early.

I was sad to go back to MT line after my course, but on the first day I went back, I was made to join this heritage tour, where together with other SSU people, we toured around the places like Little India and Chinatown, getting to know more about the cultures and heritage of Indian and Chinese. At the end of it, we falled out at Chinatown by around 4pm. Wonderful.

So then, August was really a blissful month for me. Perhaps for me to get ready for future sufferings I have to endure till my ORD.

Looking at my duty forecast for September already makes me feel depressed. 6 duties in a month, never before I had such a number of duties in a month. Maybe I had in SCSC but those duties were nothing compared to the in MT line. It is so easy to cock-up in this duty, every duty specialists must be on their balls to keep themselves from getting extras duties.

Sigh, another 7 more months for me to go before I can start to clear my leaves. I must stay strong to endure through this. My watch already long ago has ticked past 12, signalling its the first day of September. 287 more days to ORD....

I can see a storm coming from the horizon, the inky black clouds with streaks of lightning flashes, the mere look of it fills one with dread and awe; now I am ready, to run through the maelstrom of thunder and rain, and keep running, to my promised land of freedom and glory.