Sweet Nothings

So yesterday at work, I discovered that if you scroll to the very bottom of an Excel spreadsheet, you can only reach a maximum of 65,536 rows. My excuse was that I had been mentally and physically exhausted from previous days and just wasn't able to function, and that's why I ended up playing with Excel.

Today I also picked up a kit for the Thailand trip on behalf of church and I've just set it up in my lounge room.

I lurve it.

GO AUSSIE!

Plugging Away

"I just can't do it cap'n, I don't have the power..."

I'm so not a Trekkie, I'm actually a Star Wars fan, but I always remembered that line mostly because it's done in a Scottish accent...haha.

So I've only got a week before I leave and I'll been struggling to take time out to even breathe. Study all day today, exam tomorrow morning, work for the rest of the day, work Thurs then farewell dinner at Ayame, work Friday then early start at YG because my cell is leading P&W, 8am Saturday morning for PPP, then after lunch straight into Thailand preparations, then dinner with the team. Doesn't stop Sunday because it's church in the morning and rest of day set aside for meeting up with friends, work all day Monday followed by Missions team dinner with all our parents and then comes Tuesday, most likely to be spent packing, then head to church at 7pm to load the cars and get a send-off from the YG before heading to the airport at 9pm.

Where am I gonna get the time to have a haircut, revise my Thai, prepare bible study, research and buy the electronic drum kit for the trip and exercise?? Argghhh GG

As Time Goes By

...and once again i've been slack with blogging!

i can't really ramble on too much though, since i've got a final exam on Wed - forever! so looking forward to that, but not really, i mean who actually looks forward to an exam?

but last night was good, spent the night watching Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain (1952) at Anna's with the usual mah-jong players. If some of you are saying, "Wait a minute, you don't play mah-jong..." then you would be correct! I only went over since I'm a self-confessed procrastinator and probably would've ended up emailing ppl or watching the soccer all night. But instead, having ppl there willing to watch the movies with me was helpful for my study, and during Rashomon in particular we had a good time dubbing over the voices (even if it was all toilet humour).

while studying for this exam on wednesday, i needed to find the films we saw during the semester to study, and they are by no means easy to find. i only managed to find four of the thirteen or so films that we went through in class at a whole range of Blockbusters, Video Ezy's and Video Busters. but last week after work while driving through carlton i decided to have a look in Video Dogs, which i remember walking past that night at Brunetti's after the iDream thingy. and lo and behold, i struck a goldmine! Video Dogs is, without reservation the best video store i've ever been to. they have almost every single movie you can think of; old, new, classic, cultish, mainstream, arthouse, hollywood, foreign they got it all! so here's a plug for them: 178 Faraday St, Carlton - Open 11am-10pm 365 days. Check out www.video-dogs.com for more info.

Having said that though, they aren't that cheap - $4.40 or $7.70 depending on popularity for one DVD over 3 days isn't that great compared to the bigger chains, but they do have specials like 3 DVDs (2 x $4.40 and 1 x $7.70) for $12...which also implies you have to watch them all over three days.

i also managed to have a look around at the ERC library at melb uni and they have a lot of the films i'm looking for, but they're all "Reserve" items, which means i can only loan them for 3 hours. if i was more prepared i would've booked out an audio-visual room and watched them in the library but that's not an option anymore given i really only have tomorrow to do that.

ah well...i think being busy has had a mind-numbing effect on me, i'm so much more out of it now! like yesterday i was meant to play soccer with the DBB, but as they would know by now, I wasn't there. It was my fault since last week when I saw them, I was told it might've been an 8pm game. so being the complacent me, i looked up the fixture only at 7pm yesterday, as Hennerz suggested I do so last week, only to find out the game was at 5:20pm! oh man...

In other happenings, there's only 8 days till I leave for humid Thailand. It's funny how this year has worked out, I missed out on a good 7 weeks of the Melbourne summer in place of a biting cold New York and Toronto, and now I get to brave a bit of a hot tropical summer in Thailand and KL in place of the Melbourne winter. Works out just nicely if you ask me.

Queen's Birthday 2006

Yikes! It's been 2 weeks since I've blogged and I was only alerted to the fact by good ol' Dave in Tassie. I guess Hobart doesn't really have much to offer that my blog becomes an activity worth looking forward to? Hehe

Well, my excuse is that I've been ultra busy. Yes, it's exam time and although I only have the one on the 21st, I had to do a 2000 word essay (which we'd been given 9 weeks to do) in 2 days! Hehe so that was my fault.

Aside from Uni though, which is but a small part of my schedule, a fair amount of time has been spent preparing for my upcoming Thailand Missions trip at the end of this month. My Saturday mornings are now spent learning Thai as well as rehearsing dramas, mimes and songs.

I've also had to balance all that with part-time work and a social life. Don't get me wrong though, I'm not complaining but justifying my lack of blogging.

Anyhow, while I was researching for my essay, I actually went out to the Melb Uni and Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) libraries which was refreshing. I hadn't been to a library in ages before that and there was definitely a healthy amount of nostalgia. Seeing as the VCA is on St. Kilda Rd and I had a bit of time to bum around before meeting Anna, I went for a walk in the Botanical Gardens which eventually led me to the Sidney Myer Music Bowl. That was fantastic, I thought they closed it off when there were no events, but I walked to the top of the hill looking down on to the stage and realised I could go all the way down there...and I did! In a moment resembling that of a dream, I walked up on to the stage and just sang which was really liberating, an awesome feeling. Haha yeah, maybe I pretended to be some kind of superstar, or even just a performer for the annual Carols by Candlelight but I loved it! Although I doubt I'd love it as much if there were actually people there but oh well...that was cool.

Also, in my clumsiness this week, rushing to type this and that up, doing an essay, or prepare for meetings or bible studies, I managed to spill some milk on to the keyboard. Which was really annoying and continues to annoy me because the 1-4 and 7-0 keys on the row above the QWERTY line don't work! Which means that if I'm using exclamation marks or brackets, I have to copy and paste from a previously written document. How annoying is that! Haha...silly me. The "End" button also doesn't work, which means when I want to go to the end of a line, I have to either hold down the right arrow key or use the mouse. Moral of the story: don't take your keyboard for granted!

So today is the Queen's Birthday holiday and I'm happy to have an extra day off. But there's no rest for the wicked because I've got Vic's birthday dinner on tonight and work all day tomorrow, followed by a Hepatitis A and B vaccination on Wednesday. More importantly though, I'm spending the rest of my time today tracking down films we watched for my cinema subject to research for my exam. They're really hard to find! So Wednesday I'm going to try and locate the rest of the ones I don't already have at the ERC, but chances are they've all been borrowed out since there are like 300 other people doing the subject.

I've also got World Cup fever, but there's too much to ramble on about so I'll save it for a future post. Go Aussie!

So that's life as it stands for me on this Queens Birthday 2006, and June 12 also happens to be mummy's birthday so, Happy Birthday mum!