The new year is six days old, and school starts anew tomorrow. My iBook G4 laptop has been out of commission since early December, which has made things tremendously troublesome, but I had since gotten kinda used to working on a plain, old-fashioned, but significantly faster PC. Comatose iBook and exams partially explain my MIA status from this blog, but my affliction with inertia, recent propensity to write ridiculously long posts (which end up half-written and unedited), among other things, have kept me from it.

Thanks to much help from The Dad, I was able to dismantle my once immaculately white, now greying with age iBook G4 (warranty’s over anyway) and take a look inside. Not easy. Lots of screws and even taking it apart requires some degree of dexterity which I obviously lack. At least that’s done, and my iBook screen hasn’t gone out of commission yet for the past half hour since we fiddled with the inverter cables n stuff.

Anyway, I went to Montreal with my girlfriend over the December holidays. It was awesome. Montreal is a really pretty city, and having been to Paris when I was younger, I was reminded a lot of it, particularly in the architecture of the place. The Montreal subway system is excellent, and in my opinion rivals the best subway systems in Asia - trains move fast, there were few delays, and even when there was a 15-minute delay during the weekday rush hour in downtown Montreal, everyone in the large crowd was somehow able to get onto the rather narrow train carriage. C’est magnifique, says Joel.

There’s this really cool thing called the Biodome in Montreal which is kind of like an indoor domed zoo thing, it doesn’t have a HUGE variety of animals, but the various flora and fauna in there seem to be extremely well taken care of. The Biodome recreated a number of environments, from a tropical jungle to a huge underwater mini-ocean… pictures should follow if time permits.

All right. I’ve got quite a few things to do before school starts, and I want to get them done so I can have a good (final?) rest tonight before the grind begins anew.

To whoever reads this, have a safe and enriching year ahead.