Weekend Home

It's been a gloriously restful weekend this week - didn't step out of the house at all since booking out of camp on saturday. As much as going out with friends can be quite a lot of fun, nothing quite beats the ocassional weekend of pure indulgence lazing at home.

Another uneventful week in camp, except for one really silly outfield where we put on our camou just for like 6+ hours of silly engineer recce, which comprised mainly of walking around the jungle, estmating some measurements and creating sketches of the area based on our imagination. One of the most pointless courses I've been to for a long time. Most of the time was spent playing card games of one form or another - taught some of my camp mates how to play bridge and hearts(a totally under-rated game, which is a lot of fun and relatively easy to pick up), which was a refreshing change from tai di. Caught a bit of the card-game bug as a result, just spent past couple of hours learning how to play texas hold'em on yahoo games. Was a game that my crypto programming partner's housemates were playing when I went over to his place, and apparently it's a lot of fun. From what I gather from the game after playing it for a bit, it's more of a betting game rather than a card game per se. Still haven't really got the hang of the strategy required to play it.

Some time mid-week, a strange brainwave came over me to transcribe Debussy's Petite Suite for piano trio. However, after rushing about during one night's off and in the end obtaining a photocopied score from the esplanade library (per kindness of Ju Dee), I realized that I'd make my life a lot easier if it were transcribed for piano quintet instead. After all, piano duet to piano quintet makes quite a bit of sense since the string quartet can take the parts of one of the pianos. And so proceeded to work on it yesterday, with some success, and got 2/3 of En Bateau down. The writing in some parts is a bit spare but I think that's better than making the string players do double stops all the time, in the case of transcribing for a piano trio. It's the first time I've done something like this and it's really quite stimulating. Unlike composition, I don't have to come up with original ideas, but there are sufficiently difficult problems to ponder over in terms of instrumentation, balance and voicing. But oh man, writing things out is such a pain in the ass. Well hopefully I'll have enough determination to see this through.