Blog Post #23

Blog Post #23

It's June Holidays now but im still very busy what with all the projects, homework and revision. Aish. My results were not as fantastic as I expected and hoped i would get but I still managed to get a GPA of 3.9 which I felt was not a very accurate depiction of how well you are doing in school. I suddenly get a sense of how hard english would be in jc and my principal even mentioned, during the analysis of our results, that there is quite a large group of J1s which had to stay back and repeat the year again. To be honest, I am quite worried about my future and it is starting to look a lot less bright. We had a career exhibition and talks in school but I havent really thought about what I want to be next time or what my strengths are and which courses i should take. And it's been changing quite a lot. For some time, I wanted to be a dentist, then an engineer or even a professor teaching undergraduates on medical science. But deep down, all I want to do was to open a shop where I sell cute DIY stuff I made and I could even hold workshops for kids and adults! But the idea seems quite far-fetched and impractical. I guess i should just concentrate on my studies for now.

Now that we have step down from cca, I find school kind of boring. At least last time, there was cca to look forward to. And honestly I think i cant stress this enough but it's really about the people you interact with and not so much of the things we do. We could be doing crap work like washing the toilet and it would still be fun. I guess it beats having your passion but dealing with shitty people all day. And i miss all my juniors especially my sec 3s. They were all super funny with all their stories and jokes. And i miss having meetings with my president and my cca teacher. Gosh what a bundle of fun they are! I guess this one year of leadership has changed me a bit. Now I find myself more appreciative of the effort of initiatives organised by the school since I am now part of the behind the scenes and have put in a lot of effort. I still remember the CCA day where all the sec ones get to experience the different kinds of cca. We conducted a workshop teaching them how to make milk carton boxes and plastic flowers and we had to repeat the session again and again at least 8 times and it was quite tiring but it was cool because when i was a sec 1, we had this kind of thing except we only got to try 2 ccas and imagine what our seniors went through. T.T And as the vice-prez, I feel that I am responsible for the welfare of the club and that I suddenly care a lot more about the members in my club. I mean back then, I did care for my juniors and seniors but now I actually care about things like giving them a platform to lead and giving them a platform to share their ideas. I felt that I did not contribute as much as I wanted to my club but okay it was still quite a lot of things i did.

Recently, I decided to refurbish my old phone casing. It was just a simple light blue phone casing which is old and the paint has kinda peeled of and it looks old. So i decided to make it new again! I was originally planning to make a lollipop phone design like the one in Sea Lemon's video: https://youtu.be/ec14jKPrmjM but then i got a better idea and decided to do one of my elephant paintings as the design of my phone case instead. The picture is below.

Elephant

Yea but when i attempted to paint it, I got the whole shape messed up and the elephant butt looked lopsided and compressed so I tried to improve it. But when I know it cant be salvaged, i give up and just let the paint brush guide me. And somehow the shape reminded me of a crocodile so then I started to paint it in that direction. But after a while, I started to think if there are any crocodile characters and I couldnt think of any. So I went down for a walk and I suddenly realised that there is that crocodile from Peter Pan who ate this clock and so it tick tocks in his tummy. Extremely satisfied with this idea, I painted the crocodile with a slightly confused look and one eyebrow raised as the words beside him: tick tock complement him. Here's a picture of it:

Crocodile

I know it may not seem very clear here but I did do my very best to take a photo. So after a few days of leaving it alone on my desk, I realised that some parts got dirty very quickly and I had to repaint them again. Which unfortunately I couldnt make the exact same colour of the paint so the background colour doesnt look uniform like there's slime from the wall which made me a little upset at first. You cant see it from the picture but then i thought of the game Where's my Water? which has a crocodile character in it and the game is situated in the sewer which often has slime on the wall so I guess it works too.

Then, I realised that since the phone casing could get dirty just by sitting on my desk, it would  definitely get very dirty if I actually use it so I decided that I need a protection cover. At first, my target was those thin plastic folders. 

Plastic folders

But then I couldnt find any around in the house and it would be quite a waste to destroy one folder just for the phone casing. Eventually I found some clear plastic and decide to use it instead and oh my it was such a difficult task to get this right. First I did a general template which looked something like this.

Draft 1

Draft 2 looked something like this:

Draft 2

For Draft 2, I cut out all the holes necessary but not in very accurate precision and while I folded it around the phone casing, I realised that at the corners, there are always this unwanted extra portion of the paper so i improvised a third draft.

Draft 3

This is Draft 3 above and it actually looks quite decent so I was pleased and decided to trace it out on the clear plastic using purple highlighter. I cut out the template but not the little holes and parts since I wanted to make sure that the position and shape as accurate as possible. So I just position it around the phone and tape it down to the inside of the phone casing where the unglam cant be seen. When I was satisfied, it actually looked good on my first try. I thought I was going to need to try again, I even calculated how many of such template I could draw on the clear plastic and it was only 3 so I was extra careful not to waste it. So yay! Afterwards, I cut out the holes which wasnt very perfect since I was limited by the phone casing but everything was still pretty okay. It doesnt look very pretty and the cuts werent very clean but at least i could take a picture or charge my phone just the same as before. One other thing i realised was that this clear plastic tears very easily and as long as you cut a little extra and accidentally pull on it, it would result in a tear which then you would have to tape it. And it also has this crinkly plastic sound when I use my phone which I'm still not very used to. So yup that was my experience redesigning a phone cover and i would say it's fun. Dont throw your old phone covers away, you can always revamp them by painting over.

That's all for now. I will be writing more this holiday I guess so till then! Thanks for reading.