Diamonds are Forever

Gees, I must make it a point to update my blog more frequently in future. Now, I have to rack my brains on what I did in the past 2 weeks. This back-tracking thingy is a no brainer. Ok, let me refer to the calendar first. I went for the PD hunt on the 2nd Dec, had food poisoning on the 3rd, and took an MC on the 4th. Right, then I worked late on Tues and Wed, which meant no gym-ing as I had to rush some stuff for a meeting on the Thursday. Since I didn’t manage to take my leave on the previous Friday, I intended to postpone it to the coming Friday and Saturday to prep for the Mensa hunt on Sunday, 10th Dec. However, again I had to cancel my leave as work was not finished and I was left feeling ‘burnt-out’ and brain dead for the hunt.

On the sat after work, I went to Atria to look for my dictionary cum thesaurus as advised by a pro-hunter. However, after trundling through all the floors, I still couldn’t locate Payless Books but instead chanced upon Big Bookshop clearance sale. They didn’t have the dictionary that I had ear-marked so I didn’t get to buy it but another book titled “The Lazy Girls’ Guide to Losing Weight and Getting Fit” caught my eye instead. Since it was a steal at RM10, I got it as my bedtime reading material. Ahwell, in moments of desperation, any glimmer of hope is pounced upon. Hehehehe…One of my ex-uni mate buzzed me and wanted to pass me a wedding invite so I loitered around for a little longer than necessary while waiting for him to come.

The next day I got up earlier than my norm working days and proceeded to head towards the Mensa hunt flag-off point, which was in Sri-KDU smart school, a private school for the filthy rich or the ‘ambitious parents’. CC replaced LM who was down with chicken pox and not food poisoning as initially diagnosed. I and CC reached early and sat waiting for Workaholic and hubby to arrive to round off our team. As expected, the questions, which were set by the Mensa past chairman were mentally challenging and we cracked our brains trying to solve the questions. I supposed he had to make the questions tougher as the best of the hunting fraternity all joined in the fun, including some CoCs (Clerk of Course, who sets the questions for the hunts)

The theme this year was “Diamonds Diversion” and most of the questions revolved around this theme one way or another. I never knew the word diamonds can bring about so many meanings until I googled it through Wikipedia. Luckily, my colleague had hinted to me of the central theme otherwise I wouldn’t have done so much preparation work. Oh boy, this felt like sitting for my year-end exams during my school days with me doing a last-minute ‘mugging’.

The questions were ‘intelligently-set’ and I marveled at his expertise and learned ways of constructing the questions with seemingly innocuous signboards, with some of the questions testing on current affairs. On top of that, he managed to throw in some red herrings along the way and we, being inexperienced newbies fell hook, line and sinker to most of them. The highlight of the hunt was the laundry ball which was given as a treasure to us this time as opposed to the usual way of breaking a puzzle and figuring out what the treasure is. When we looked at the treasure, we were totally stumped and fortunately, CC managed to ask the right person in a shop selling household wares who knew of its usage. I reckon we didn’t do too badly as we were just a few points shy of the team in the 20th slot, which happened to be my colleague’s team.

This is as my colleague puts it, our 'baptism of fire' in the hunting game as it represents one of the tougher hunts around....and like its namesake in the song, Diamonds are Forever, this hunt is very memorable and proved to be an invaluable experience.