wow the week has gone fast. my really quick run down of all the activities i productively filled my day with.

on tuesday after work i met up with claire in the city to grab a drink at cookie. thee roof top bar. as opposed to the last time i was in that building, we i walked right in, there was no doorman to turn anyone away. the roof top was pretty packed. it was 5:30ish on a weekday. what does that say about people wanting to get the fuck outside. although by the end of the week it was raining like armageddon so, drinking outside isnt the worst thing to begin the evening with. anyhow, there were no lawn chairs for us to sit on so we waited for some people to leave and sat on the make shift seating near the back of movie theater side. we figured out we can see right into my apartment. yay, good thing to know. i was pointing out claire where i live and she says, oh do you have a red duvet. no its magenta, but close enough to know details can bee seen from not so far away. not good. we left there and went to get cheap cookies and mrs fields.

wednesday was the lab lunch, which turned out to be very good. im not sure why we went to the restaurant that i suggested, but we did. the joke was if it was bad it was my fault. it wasnt and everyone enjoyed what they had. we were at land of siam on lygon street. $10 lunch specials with tons of food. even though we ate heaps, i could not walk by gelatissmo and not get ice cream. so good. no one would go to il dolce freddo with me, so i had to try to pretend that i was okay with not getting but i couldnt get all the way to grattan street and pass 7 gelato places. gelatissimo is doing a whole bunch of christmas flavours. i cant remember what they all are, but i do recommend going to try them. huge portions too.
walking back to lab someone decided it would be a better idea to go and have a drink at PAs. yep, much better than sitting inside. and there went the rest of the afternoon.

since ive been doing so poorly at working "regular" hours i said to kate that i needed a reason to be at uni "early" on thursday. we agreed to meet up for coffee at 10:30 to at least get me there. after that we decided nadeen tried to get me to meet up for lunch with her, in the city, 20 minutes from uni. this is why i get no work done. i did both and took the tram that day which didnt turn out to be a bad idea since it decided to pour mid afternoon. i was almost done what i wanted to do that day. i had 10 minutes of printing articles left when the skies unleashed everything they had. that put me in the building until the rain let up. no way i was going outside in a torrential downpour.

all this week ive been booking stuff for going to new zealand. my mom is coming over and since its her holiday i said, book whatever you want and ill go. they tried to book NZ domestic flight from home and were coming up with something like $1500 for two flights on QF. then they tried ANZ and it was $1100USD. i re-routed the itinerary and got $800NZD. i win. now we are doing most of the things i want to do and staying at all the hotels i picked. i impressed myself with some of the hotel deals i found. although, my opinion of rack rates is that they are numbers people just make up just to have something to make you think you are getting a deal. NZ is pretty cheap, imo, you just have to get there. not so cheap.

my shoes on thursday got so ridiculously wet walking home, and that spurred me to finally clean the thongs that i wore to the music bowl last week. i dont think ive been able to get all that dust out of my lungs yet.

i decided to start the day off with strong coffee instead of tea. will see how well this goes in the next few hours.

i did heaps of work last night and was planning to get up early and keep going, but that hasnt happen. i got data coming through 8 am on saturday. naturally i saw in within half an hour since the first thing i do in the morning is reach for my laptop. it took until sunday late afternoon for my supervisor to comment on and and instruct me to do something id done 30 hours before. i was working on stuff to do with that last night so that i now have something that will get other off my back for now. i dont think it matters how much i did this weekend or that i know some of it isnt even correct, because not all the data came through in this analysis. since im waiting for more everything i did is still a draft anyways, and has to be revised. the trends are correct though, thats important and they show what i need them to.

the whole saturday morning data delivery put me in a good mood for that day. i had been so stressed out and making myself sick for the latter part of last week. after consideration of how things on the weekend went, i am decided that the source of the stress is entirely work and in particular one person who consistently reminds me how i do things wrong and fluff around too much. ive had a really fast shallow heartbeat for about a week and a half. im my mind i thought it could been medication i was on too. i stopped that and sickness continued. on thursday i left early and came home and worked from home all friday. and i still felt like shit friday night. its psychological too and since i have nothing outside of work to concentrate on (ie part time job like i did through undergrad) its sprials out of control.

friday my mood started to get better since i had a fun concert to go to, even through i didnt feel at all like going. bad religion was back for the first time in 10 years. wooo! lots of comments out of greg on how "you guys all look younger, but we look a lot older" then jay adding "yah, im dead" it was a good show, good mixture of old an new. i had no idea they hadnt toured here in so long, so they really owed the crowd a lot from the last 3 albums. one thing i love about this band is they look like they want to be there. every single person on the stage. whether it was playing "requiem for dissent" (new song) or "american jesus" for the 7,000th time, every song they were equally very enthusiastic.

watching the crew set up the stage after strung out (second opener) was somewhat entertaining. middle aged men dressed in long shorts, vans, over sized tees and wallet chains. one does not see this in australia. oh and baseball caps too. this is a tell tale sign to pick out americans in the city. been a while since ive watched bands tune their own guitars between songs. no idea how these guys do it at home or if its a thing artists do overseas with a stripped down crew traveling with them.
the crowd was pretty young, most of the people around me looked younger than i. many people doing the punk/ goth makeup and guys with mohawks. the basic warpped tour crowd. i was talking to a guy between sets who was a fan of strung out and had been hanging out with them the night before. he told me BR was doing 38 song sets.. impressive until one realizes half the songs are 2 minutes long. then the 2 page setlist came out to be taped down on the stage. lol. almost and inconvenience to have that much paper to carry.

the best part of this show was the fact that i was at the front. i showed up at festival hall at maybe 8:55. i was aiming for 9 and figured 9-9:30 show. an opening band was still on and there was no room to room near the entrances for the massive amount of people in line at the bar and merch. i was all fuuuuck, im going to see nothing. i had intended on standing at the side, back a bit, nowhere near the pit. the place was only packed at the back of the floor, once i got in a bit further it opened up and i found a decent spot. as soon the opener was over people started milling around and leaving the front. i walked up to the rail and stayed there. no complaints. crowd wasnt bad at all and i really didnt get hit from behind. i was far enough off the center that only one crowd surfer came over near me. the rest of the kids crowd surfing were so funny. theyd get put down and dance or continue to head band their way down the front walkway high fiving as many people as possible on the way out. the vibe of the show was really good, just fun.
security didnt mind the kids acting crazy dancing their way out of he front until someone managed to get themselves on stage. one kida get up from the side and runs over to start singing with greg. then goes for a setlist, unsucessfully riping it off the stage. some little guy on the crew tried to get him to move and it didnt work. jay goes over and flings the guy off the front back into the crowd. that man does not look his age.. and i am now resisting all further inclinations of gushing. the kid then got kicked out.

for the last two hours ive been ready to start watching heroes and i havent done it yet. i was hoping i was going to have the file by 6ish and i could have watched it earlier in the night. but of course it wasnt done. i worked from home most of the day today so i was ready to go in the morning when it was last night in north america. sense i make? yah been wasting time on other things.

my flatmate moved all her stuff out on sunday, as posted below. she took with her the kettle but brought a replacement from her moms shed. its so old. its actually kind of funny because its one of the ones that has to go on the stove and whistles when the water is boiled. sarah said it was going to be really annoying to have to listen to the whistling, but so far it hasnt been bad. its slower than the last kettle but it works fine. now i have my whistling kettle on my gas stove. how 1950s.

the weekend went by too fast. i cant remember what i did on friday. saturday immagine in cornice was officially released in australia, so we did the screening thing at town hall is richmond. good on ya brad for organizing that one. i didnt stay very long because i was meeting up with another friend on lygon for dinner. it was most excellent to catch up and i got to recount other parts of my asia trip that no one at work cares about. since that time i have been craving red wine. a void i plan to fill on thursday night while at the forum. this wont happen, but its my short term mental alleviation of why i am not drinking.

i had to go check that i hadnt written about this yet since i remembered writing happy birthday claire. on her actual birthday, not her birthday party day. anyhow, on sunday my apartment got cleaned out for the most part and now it looks nice since i spend hours yesterday cleaning up the rest of the shit. (not going to rant again..)
sunday night was claire's birthday party. it was pretty low key and basically what we wanted for a sunday night when everyone had to work the next day. she made fairie cakes for us to eat and we spent some time discussion how to make such mini cup cakes as they were. apparently the package mix comes with the little paper muffin cups that you use. i should make some except that i would eat them all. meh.

randome things that pissed me off on sunday include 1. the 48 trams being diverted to victoria parade because of a fire near the hilton. this meant i could not go visit nadeen at work because the route was nowhere near where i needed to go. 2. the camerahouse website not letting me upload photos for the entire day on sunday. their sale ended sunday at midnight and i did not get anything printed. boo.

my phone is working pretty well so far, know on wood. its a european model so the default setting is german for all the text. it makes its fun to write messages with the predictive text function on. some of the words that come up are really far out there compared to english. but motorolas are smart and they remember the most recent words used. and i have text-ed lots on the weekend so english words are coming up faster now.

oh and i just recalled that i wanted to comment how the coffee bean has changed all their food options. i havent been into the coffee bean or starbucks since august. i think that i got my fills of those two places while i was in korea, and im trying not to buy $4 coffee everyday.
on monday i was in lab all day and at one point i left to get sad $4 coffee. i was starving at this point but it wasnt lunch yet so i thought to myself i will go to the coffee bean and get one of those apple/ blueberry crumble slices to go with my coffee. i get there and find that they dont have them anymore. not impressed. i got a banana bread thing that was not the same and did not have the same level of sweetness as what i really wanted. i was very let done by the change in the food. today i was craving sugar. one of the new things is citrus tart that are clearly pure sugar (i cant place what bakery they are from, but they are clearly not made on site). there is a location just down the street from me so i decided to go there and get a nice suagary tart. if they hadnt changed their food i would have had to go to mrs fields and get a cookie.

i think know i have a bunch of complete randomness to post on here, where to start..

more thoughts on harry potter:
at the beginning of the movie when harry and dudley are in the swing park and it starts to get dark and rainy they run. at that point dudley's posse that began running a few seconds before the pair are not even in the aerial shot of them getting the hell outta there. how fast were they running again? AND the side by side shot on harry and dudley running has the two of them moving at the same speed. shouldnt harry the skinny dude be miles ahead at the point? for a fat kid, dudders can motor.

the kid who plays red headed nigel is super cute. the blond nigel (who george and fred console after umbridge punishes naughty children, or whatever that line is) is also cute, but not as much as the other kid.

i am now reading book number six. thanks to grant and james i know all the main things that happen :P seeing as we discussed it last wednesday night. i bought six on sunday and pre-ordered seven the same day. i only read a bit on sunday night then about 200 pages last night. i should easily finish it by thursday, maybe tomorrow if i do a lot of reading this evening.

my pre-order for seven was $30. six cost me $50. not sure how this works. when i was at borders the girl at the cash was explaining to me that it is officially released at 9:01am on saturday morning but the store is open from 7am. im all "yah, like im gonna be here at 7am" for their costumes and whatever. maybe it would be fun (neato!), but sleeping may be better.

9:01 here is 7:01pm friday night eastern daylight time.. what time is it released at home?

now i am on the borders mailing list. today i got a coupon for 20% off any one item before august 6th. too bad books are so fricken expensive to start with. again, nice girl at the cash when signing me up for mailing list explained that there are different coupons every week and they can beup to an including 50% off. when that one comes around i will be buying the one volume lord of the rings that cashes in at the low price of $250 AUD. i really want it and i did not bring those books back with me because they would be dead weight in my luggage allowance on the plane.

the coffee bean and tea leaf:
apparently this is a big american coffee chain. who knew? not me thats fersure. why? there are ZERO locations in canada. there is however a location on grattan street that i was aware of but had never been in until about an hour ago.

the sudden urge to try it out? pre empt to last weekend, maybe sunday night, when talking about celebrity gossip with lindsay and claire. lindsay bring up that perez hilton sits at a location hours on end each day doing his thing. but she, being an east coast girl, was not familiar with coffee bean either. thats when i was "theres one on grattan street" ive never been it because its always closed when i go by (at night, mainly).

i was going to go yesterday, but i totally forgot. i went today after eating lunch at thershermans and not wanting to buy their coffee, which is good, its just not big enough in my opinion therefore too expensive. i ordered a large flat white.. it was good on first sip. hot which is something that one does not take for granted when ordering coffee at a shop here. and strong so overall i did like it. they have regular brewed coffee too so maybe next time ill get that and see how it goes. but unlike home one cannot put coffee cream in brewed coffee because its not an option.

the website url is on all the cups so i came back to work and looked it up. actually, i googled it and the american site came up. this is how i found out about the lack of locations in canada, and that all the australian locations are in melbourne. none in sydney! not sure what that means.. possibly starbucks still has a monopoly on the novelty foreign coffee market.

other:
this morning because i got up late, it was pouring when i was ready to go to school. i did what anyone would do, stayed put. only for about an hour though. it was really cold and windy and complete blah this morning. when i did arrive (it was still pouring, i took the tram) one of the cleaners commented on how it was snowing outside of melbourne. i remarked how i would rather it was snowing because snow is not wet and cold. its not exactly 'warm' either, but it does not chill you to the bone like the combination of rain and antarctic winds does. brrr. oh, and the $6.22 umbrella i bought the last time there was a huge downpour- blown completely inside out this morning and one of the metal things is now broken.

michelle called me yesterday. i was very surprised when i picked up and it was her. awesome to talk thought. i miss home.

guess what? i am SO over the university of melbourne. ive been treated like crap since i got here 15 months ago by admissions, international student services, scholarships, graduate college, etc.
now it has trickled down to the level of the department- we are now losing the student room aka the "office" where 10 people sit in. the admin people in the dapartment are a bunch of fuck wits who could care less about how much room anyone has to work or if there are 22 people in the new student room creating a cafeteria atmosphere of noise and more noise. needless to say i am not the only one who is not impressed. there are not enough power outlets or internet connections or general ventilation in the new room.
im not impressed at all. every day i wonder more and more why the hell i came here.


among my weird delta phases of sleep i managed to squeeze in some very odd dreams:
1. pearl jam's next world tour starts in november. in brisbane. this completely knocking the inside joke of 'brisbane oh eight' i thought we were supposed to dream of things we subconsciously, or in this case overtly, want to happen. in my dream i was having anxiety that i wont be able to make november because, um, im not sure why. (??)
2. someone was giving me a cup of coffee that was a bunch of melted cheeses in a huge mug, topped with parmesan cheese. the weird part was i was more concerned about the parmesan on top than the mug of cheese being passed off as coffee. whoever it was, was saying 'its good, dont worry' to me about my skepticism.

its the end of the first week of june. where does the year go?

i love coffee. i really do. i am continuing my quest of finding great coffee in the city. today my adventure took me as far as the vic market, which i have been too a zillion times for food but not usually for coffee. i went to the shop that it on almost on the corner of elizabeth and victoria, i believe it is called coffea cafe. excellent beans. $4 for a take away. the price is not so impressive, but this is australia.

still hitting up crappy baretto it seems like every day now. my one frequent buyer card was filled last week. meaning i have purchased 18 coffees and received 3 free ones. not bad. their coffee is no where near as good as starbucks and starbucks is nowhere near as good as real starbucks. after a discussion with alaina recently i found out there use whole milk at sb's. or what seems to be whole milk, but its not homogenized or anything.. maybe its 2%? not sure. that is why my venti flat white fills me up any morning i get one.

im listening to tool 5.19.07:

maynard: "good evening drunk assholes"
crowd: "whoooooo!"

ok, so its oklahoma and apparently it was all drunk frat boys. but, really?

not to stray from the ordinary i as usual was almost run over today at the corner of pelham and bouverie. fuck you melbourne drivers, fuck you. this isnt even people exiting a parking lot. the university square parking lot entrance it down bouverie street towards grattan. this is assholes trying to cross a median or dipshits turning left and not looking where they are going. the person that almost hit me today was crossing the median, slowed down, i looked at them, then started to cross then they decided that since there was only me crossing at that point they should started to move while looking the other way. i wish i had a stun gun. the number of people i would like to punch in the face because they cant fucking drive gives me the shits. everyday different people.

and while thinking about walking home. melbourne is fairly windy. therefore assholes who feel the need to stand beside me while i am waiting at a traffic light holding their cigarette in my face can also go to hell. im already sick from too much cigarette smoke, among other things, last week. i cant walk 200 m down the street without walking through a wall of smoke.

im glad its thursday. this week has gone by extremely fast and i am happy about that. today i didnt get too much work done because i spent 3 hours trying to upload photos to the camera house website. this after i was in the store and found their machines would not read my usb stick. the first overly cheerful service girl told me it happens all the time and its probably because i have non photo files on my usb. i said to her if it happens all the time why dont you do something about it. do i really care that it happens all the time? no. i get the overly cheerful response of how the technicians warn then this can happen and it really depends on the usb as to if it wont work blah blah. she recommended i try a different machine. the second service girl actually gave me their business card with the website and suggested i upload them to their online service.
i went to school to do this assuming it would take about 10 minutes. HA HA HA. it took an hour to upload. on the university network. clearly it was THEIR servers that are shitty and slow. then i realized that everything uploaded twice. so one by one i had to delete the extras because i was not about to pay for two prints. there was no option to check x number of boxes and delete those files. there should be. after they were finally singularly uploaded i had to go through every single photo to recenter the part that i wanted printed. 6x4 (as it is listed, not 4x6??) cuts off the height of the photo. i had to save each file after i centered it. this took most of another hour. seriously not impressed.
once it was all done i received an email confirming my order and asking me to take their 2 minutes survey. 2 minutes eh...? i filled it out and told them how shit their website is.

i was starving when i came home today. i made a wrap with bbq chicken, avocado, cheese and lettuce. it was so amazingly good.

right, so im still loving the fact that i can browse websites OR d/l torrents, not both. its one or the other.

i caught up on tv last night starting at like 12:30. i dont know what i do that takes so long to do it, but uh it does. i went to the gym for a while which was good since i had not been all week. sarah was watching big brother for a while and i could hear her howling with laughter from the other room. i HAD to go see what the go was. apparently the housemates were playing blind soccer and fighting with each other instead of playing the game. lol. i didnt even see any of the footage and i started laughing. everybody and their mother is onto this BB thing.. on wednesday i realized that i hadnt seen it all week, oh no! the other show we had been watching was the search for the next pussycat doll. the last episode in australia was last night. we used to watch it on sunday night regularly, but then they moved it to fridays. right before the move i lost complete interest in the show. it was too many barbie dolls in one house.. kinda like BB. ooh the beautiful people that are marketed to us. anyways, i watched half of PCD at the gym then the end with sarah. on all those "reality" tv shows it seems like people always have a favourite person who they want to win. i thought everyone on the show was stupid, all bitchy and catty.

i got a phone call from beata this week. she called me on of the night when i was at nine inch nails and didnt even try to answer it. i messaged her back on thursday and she phoned me later in the morning to see if i was busy. i dont get this. people call me while i am at uni and ask if im busy. no i sit there surfing the web ALL day. turns out she wants to come in and help me with stuff on wednesdays because she doesnt work on that day. and why does she want to come in and help? apparently wendy has been telling her that my project isnt working and that i need helpt with it. what the fuck. not only is she the person who i cant stand the most in the lab but she is going being my back talking about my project with people who are not in the lab. so am i getting the sympathy vote from beata who wants to come in and "fix" things.. something she could not do the entire year i worked with her because she didnt know what she was doing. i wonder sometimes.. i spent the first six month of last year lost because i got no attention from my supervisor. now i have a better direction of where i am going and i am expected to give all of my work to wendy because her project was rearranged to springboard off mine. sometimes i hate people. i walk into lab and think what do they want from me.

this week while i was sitting outside the metro i met some pretty cool people. on of them is from melbourne and had been downing cups of coffee since before i arrive on tuesday morning. she went for a walk at one point and when she came back i asked her if she knew of any good coffee places around. she recommended palagrini's (sp?) that was about 30 seconds down the street. i went, and bought. actually i went in and asked them what the biggest sized coffee they had was. i was promptly told that they only have one size. dammit. then i bought. its was soooo good. i went back there this morning and bought two of the only only size coffee, came home and put them in a big mug such that i could have enough. so good. i was telling kim the other day that it was too bad bourke street isnt on my way to uni or i would be going there daily.

the tool show im listening to.. from like 30 hours ago. good on the taper for getting it up so fast, but geez louise, the tracklisting is so wrong! stinkfist is mislabelled. umm? it is nice to see that tool have slightly changed the setlist- jambi opening the show.

i had to go back and read my last entry for a second. i mentioned nothing real about those shows. i was fucking impressed with trent and the boys. setlists was extremely varied over the three nights, with only the obvious coming out at every show. and no closer. i really dont need to hear closer, ive heard it at every rock club every night i have gone out for the last 8 years. i would much rather hear dead souls (monday) or last (monday) or eraser (tuesday) or into the void (tuesday).

tuesday we got let in to soundcheck. that was surreal. the metro holds maybe like 2500 people, its not very big at all, a far cry from an arena show. we got in for the last four songs.. the beginning of the end, good solider, capital g, a deep tease, and wait for it, we're in this together. trent asked us what we wanted to hear and some smart ass yells out head like a hole. he laughed. then he asked again and people called out everything.. towards the end of yelling the concensus became we're in this together which i dont think has been played since frankfurt. trent said he couldnt sing the chorus and then they started to try to play deep- all the techs coming over with music/ lyrics what have you. then trent asks who from the crowd can come and sing the chorus. the kid that went up did a good job, even though he sang the 3rd chorus ("you're the queen and im the king, nothing else means anything" - my fav lyrics of the song) all three times.

they signed stuff afterwards. when rumors spread that morning that we were going to get in i ran and printed off photos from the night before. jeordie was impressed when i asked him to sign one of them when i said they were from the night before. i asked him about goon moon and all the stuff he has up on you tube. everyone else was saying basically nothing. josh freese is so funny. seriously. he comes up and asks "do you want me to sign your photo of aaron?" since it was on top. ha. and just in case anyone was wondering, josh owns hyperpower. its his song. monday and tuesday started with hyperpower and its like no one else even needs to be on stage.

the concert calendar is looking sadly bare at the moment. thats the shitty thing about australia. it comes in waves.