One Cold Night

I was going through my pictures folder and I found the folder which I kept my old homepage. It was a website I had maintained back in 1998-1999 when I was student in the US. This was like the in thing before blogs were around.

You had to subscribe to yahoo's free website. However, my university provided free hosting so I had the website on my university domain. I had to take it down once I left university. I read back some of the things that I wrote and I find that some parts of my life still hasn't changed. I reproduce what I wrote on 30 December, 1998:

One Cold Night

Here I sit, 3:32A.M. in the morning. It's -15F outside and it's +80F inside.
It seems that my apartment's thermometer heater has gone nuts. Feels like back
home inside and it's freezing cold outside. My room window next to me has gone
all foggy. People on #mamak21 are blabbing away about their New Year celebration
and sit here listening to the local station while I type this.

So this is how the rest of my Spring Break is going to be like. Hiding from
the cold and spending my existence in a tiny cramped room. I sleep when the sun
rises and wake up when the sun goes down. I've turned nocturnal like the vampire
I am every holiday season. I have everything within my reach. I cup of fruit
juice, my television (with cable!), my phone, my computer with Internet
connection and my bed. Life couldn't be any more sluggish.

I could have sworn the frost on my window was forming some sort of cryptic
symbols with all it's zigzagging lines. Maybe it's telling me it's time to get
out. Then again, getting out into the cold is no fun. It's been some time since
I've experienced below 0F temperatures. Kind of feel like old times again. First
time I came here, it was about -20F. My nose was bleeding from the cold. My face
froze up and I hibernated a lot. I when into a slight depression and had food
poisoning. How 'fun'.

I still shiver when ever I think of the cold. Not many people know that I when through winter depression in my first few months there. I had arrived in the middle of a winter blizzard a month before Christmas. I wasn't acclimatized to the weather yet as it was my first winter experience. I was really depressed, I wasn't used to getting so little sunlight and spending so much time indoor.

This is the view from my apartment window. It was on the ground floor but it felt like we were in the basement as the ground outside was the same level as my window.

My small little room. Computer on the left with my TV. My bed was an inflatable bed. It was fun to sleep on... until too many people sat on it at the same time and punctured it. After that, I had to pump it up every night. By morning, I was sunk into the bed already as it had half deflated. I miss my old TV, it had an alarm clock feature in it. CNN headline news used to wake me up everyday.

The lower window on the left is my room. Notice the snow they piled up right in front of it. That's what I think of snow, it's all dirty and yucky.

This picture I took when I visited Chicago. This is my trusty Colombia sports jacket. I bought it on sale as I needed something for my skiing class. It was really durable though it was one size too big. I think I still have it somewhere today. I wish I had the chance to use it again. It would feel like Batman putting on his costume again haha!