the post i want to write at the moment is a big fucking rant about how gym membership didnt get canceled like i was told it was going to be and i am still being charged for it. I FUCKING HATE PEOPLE THAT LIE. however, i am not surprised which is why i asked 545678451651 questions before i signed the contract in the first people. lies lies lies. from stupid assholes.

i will chose instead to write a positive comment about the show i was watching earlier tonight on tv. the hour with george snuffleupagus. i dunno if the show has changed its format or what no cause i thought it was more news based that it is. but whatever. guest number 2 tonight was moby. that guy is fucking funny as. my gosh. he quote anchorman, then he quoted south park (paraphrasing) then he made simpsons references. the whole time he was making fun of himself about how he is a bald guy who wrote 'play' in his bedroom and he speaks really well. he's one of those smart people who gets it. thats nice to see in an artist. it was a good interview and i gained some more respect for moby than i had before. i will be sussing out that new album of his in the a.m.

i tried to convince myself to get out of bed early today by planning to make pancakes for breakfast. i used to do this bribing myself with trips to starbucks like a year ago to make myself wake up early which didnt really work that well either. anyhow, apparently i am a little out of practice at making pancakes. they didnt quite turn out as expected so the first try went in the bin. oops.

i just had chocolate chip cheesecake for dinner. and it was excellent. anyone who knows me knows that i get random cravings, especially after seeing other people with food that i want. while walking home i saw a girl with a take away coffee and a bag that very clearly contained a baked good in her hand. that was a cake craving right there. coffee and cake sounded like a brilliant idea to me.

its okay though, im going to the gym (fully aware the worst thing to do is eat glucose/ fructose before doing cardio). ive also had two red bulls this afternoon and i cant stop yawning.

more later on, i fully plan to be working tonight and will be distracted.

--

funniest contest ive seen in a while is on youtube make out wit chu. oh LOL. the first post back to the discussion section is "Can I get Mikey to enter with me? We'd be a shu-in for the top prize." funny pun, or trying too hard?

and the most awesome V-DAY ecards are over here. oh boys.. so silly. yet so awesome. ive sent two so far.


work is going.. i was very productive until my flatmates came home then i was talking to them for a while. the problem with living with people you like is that it becomes very hard to work from home when your not alone. too much good conversation ensues.

i was going to post a photo of the draft that was returned to me today, but i didnt. its quite entertaining i find. the number of advised edits in some parts is enormous. i was showing M some of them earlier, she read a page or so not trying to understand the science but just looking at the english. so many of the changes are personal style. i had used "put and placed" in a sentence that was then changed to "placed and positioned". M thinks some of it is silly but, oh well. im changing it anyways. the other amusing part to alter was one of the protocols. the RA who last re-wrote the protocol a year and a half ago was given an extremely hard time on everything to do with the content and then on the formatting. if the content is corrent, then.. that stuff was in a earlier version of my methods section that was given a skim over and okayed. apparently not so okay anymore, it had the most changes to it, and i was the one that wrote a lot of the protocol with the RA back in the day. im not complaining thought, because i wanted to have a draft that was as marked up as this one is, since ive had no instruction to date.

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.

a couple of things to address

1. holy crap am i sick of making graphs and charts. and even more sick of sitting in my lab where there i no natural light. today was another day of mostly graph-making instead of a combo day of graph-making plus stats. i will be doing stats tomorrow and friday though. i had a whole slew of tables that were in a very basic draft form from about 2 weeks ago. i was told to make them pretty, which i think isnt the priority at this time, i can pretty things up later. i reformatted a few of those and changed alignment and things like that. all those tables correspond a methods chapter of my thesis.

i had not begun working on the tables for one of the results chapters until today. i decided to start making those in excel because i already have massive spreadsheets in excel and i wanted to delete a heap of unrelated things and copy/paste the rest. i did this and it worked out well. then i started noticing all the little things that are incorrect. so, it took most of the afternoon to fix a bunch of little things. i got up to table 3.13 while skipping 3.1-3.4 because i dont have all the data that will go on those back from the other lab yet. pretty good, and all the titles and labeling is consistent across chapter 3 tables. however, it now means that all the previous tables from two weeks ago that i made in word, will not be consistent with these newer ones. oh shit fuck. it was so much easier to move things around in excel because i have heaps and heaps of numbers plus or minus blah blah blah etc etc. im thinking that i will go back and redo the other ones.. sigh.

2. i am addicted to cordial. coridal, since i didnt know what it was until someone explained it to me, is like the jello juice you get a summer camp. sugar water. the last flatmate (thewhore#2) drank a lot of it, most than juice or milk or anything. i started drinking it. basically to make cordial according to the directions on the package, you pour 1/4 cordial into a glass/ bottle/ whatever and fill the rest up with water. i dont do full strength because its way too sweet. im now at the point where i cant drink plain water when i go to the gym. possibly its just the tap water that i dont like the taste of on its own, because bottled water is fine (im going to go out on a limb and say tap water is over chlorinated due to massive drought conditions, SA and WA were doing this last summer and i was warned of the poor taste when i was there). but, im not about to buy $2.40 water multiple times a day.

months ago i bought the "coola" flavour of cordial because it was green and my head went ok green = lime. nope. not even close. coola doesnt taste like anything except sugar. i dont know why i didnt throw it out or still dont. i am making my way through it slowly. for the sugar water that it is, i think cordial is expensive.. see i am addicted im complaining about the price. i ran out of all my other stock over the weekend so i was stuck drinking this crappy coola one. on monday and lunch i went over to the lygon court safeway and bought myself some more cordial. lemon crush flavour. i started drinking it that afternoon at the lab, and it hasnt made it home yet. i had to get another cordial one last night for home drinking use. i almost bought another one of the lemon crush but i thought it would be overkill. lemon crush tastes a little like home brand frozen lemonde from concentrate. if i drink too much i get that sugar taste on my teeth.

since i have been in the lab all week, it means im drinking more water. the last couple weeks while i was working from home i was never without a huge cup of tea beside me. im not sure what is worse A. tea with milk and sugar, multiplied by about four or five times or B. 1.5L of cordial water. probably the cordial. on the plus side, my insides are well flushed with liquids. and sugar.

i did read the package last night, the first ingredients are 1.water followed by 2. fruit juices 3. sugar. there is no fructose listed. if im only ingested heaps of sucrose thats okay. well, better.

3. im weird when it comes to listening to music. i can hear an album by a band i know i really like and think its only ok. then a few months later when live shows start to appear and the same songs are being played live, ill like them a million times better and go back and like the studio versions a lot better too. this was the case for the last pearl jam record. i liked it, a lot, at first listen. but i loved the live versions of the songs when they became available. wait maybe pearl jam was a bad example, but anyways.. the general idea was maybe its the flow of how a band decides to put the new in with the old on the setlist and the energy that is put into them live or something that grabs my attention and makes me appreciate what was already there.

where am i going with this.. in the last three days ive been listening to era vulgaris non stop on my ipod. the ipod does not contain that much in the way of live music or i would be listening to a recently acquired show when i walk around. im lazy when i comes to doing .flac --> .wav --> .mp3 so i just dont put shows on my ipod. its too full to put .wavs on there anyways. i acquired a few queens shows recently and have been listening to them while doing my boring graphing work this week. (i had to install winamp to be able to do this and its so getting deleted when one of the IT guys finds it. we're not allowed to install our own software on lab computers!) id go out at lunch or for a break and put the head phones on with not so new queens. ive had this album for six months but didnt listen to it over and over until now. in my defence i was busy being obsessed with other things.

oh, happy halloween. im supremely jealous that i dont get to celebrate it for the second year in a row. i miss going out on halloween weekend!

of course another weekend that went by too fast. since its near the end of my "work" day i felt the need to go waste some time and browse a message board. oddly i stumbled upon a post about bridge this weekend in a place i did not expect. the last time i saw leigh, he says to me "ill go if you go". oddly enough leigh was in town over the weekend but i didnt get to see him and to go back to where i had been heading no one in my networks said anything about bridge this weekend. consensus was it was good?! yah?

friday night we headed to dawns place for the regular craziness. see post about stupid flat mate and comment in post about cornell show below to see what i was all for drinking on that day. i was late to dawns place (surprising?) because i felt the need to dance around my apartment for half an hour before i left. it was my last weekend of living alone, sigh, so i had to make the most of it. finally i left and made my way to brunswick and nadeen and fabien were already there. it still amazes me why fabien likes hanging out with crazy girls. dawn made us dinner and the best nacho dip ever that we devoured before dinner. so good.

on saturday i finally got meet claires sister. her and a friend had decided to come down with the boys this weekend because their band was playing at the espy. one of the kids in the band had bought a 1983 tarago van that they drove down. total lol @ the tarago. just like real rocks stars, only they get chauffeured between venues and hotels, not all the way from canberra. gemma wasnt quite everything claire had described her as, maybe just 97% :P. much like any younger sibling, the whole "whoops, i didnt bring and clean clothes, because i decided 30 seconds before we left that i was going to come to" mentality was there. awesome. when i meet friends younger siblings it always makes me laugh cause my brother does the same thing. doesnt plan. although i think he is better now. we hung out at max brenner at qv for a while. the service was pitifully slow. then we headed up to my place to admire the view/ waste time.

later i was on msn for the first time in about 7 months (okay blatant lie, i used it while i was korea). for phone calls its about on par with skype and its free. skype is only on one of my computers because it wouldnt load on vista the first time i tried and i was too lazy to try again. after the phone call i had 503 message windows pop up to people i hadnt spoken to a while, because i dont go online. that was fun. back to the days of high school chatting until 3am to people that i spend my entire day with.

ive decided recently that i am going to act more like a tourist in melbourne for the rest of the summer. read: take photos. i tried on sunday morning. went to the queen vic market, and remember why i hate it. too many people. it wasnt that busy because i was there mid morning and the clocks went forward to it was almost like it was early morning. i got over pretty fast and left to walk down to flinders. and oh my golly gosh geez, it is fricken spring. pollen and flowers and buds on trees everywhere that cause my sinuses to act up as i was walking through the city. note to self: avoid city street and trees with flowers until its full on summer and they have blossomed and are done looking pretty.

for the second week i tried to visit nadeen at work. this week the 48 and the 75 trams werent running because of construction on the line. there was buses on the route instead. so i got there. they sell "happy harry" cookies at her bakery.. i suggested that they get some sort of baked item and call it a "naughty nadeen" because she deserves it.

i watched gumball 3000 miles SF to miami this weekend. it wasnt the video that i thought it was going to be therefore it wasnt as funny as i thought it was going to be. regardless im copying it for sonia because her favourite jackass is in it. they werent even that funny either. it was too doco instead of comedy. but, i did like the fact that there was a lot of hot women in the rally who all looked better in their cars than the middle aged men. hah.

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.

its the early hours of sunday morning i am just finished analyzing data. ha. i could have done it on friday when i got home, or even before i left lab but i chose not to. and of course, it dones look right. i had 3 plates of stuff going on this week. 2 plates fit on a bigger plate to do the analysis. since i had to do 2 bigger plates anyways, i decided to run the samples of from plate number 1 twice. the results are different from the same samples run on big plate 1 and big plate 2. fab.u.lous. i could pretend i never did it twice and use the original analysis result. but, the data from original plate number 2 is off. so um, not sure whats going to happen here.

i spent a lot of time cleaning today. i have the place to myself this weekend. i didnt clean the living room because the cut up pieces of paper that are all over the floor and/or anything fallen off the coffee table does not belong to me. and as usual, sarah left without cleaning up her stuff. the desk in the living area and a meter it in each direction around it just mess. mess mess mess. paper and arts and crafts everywhere.

i uploaded more photos to camera house today. i had them on there before 4pm so if they abide by their 24 hours from the first business hour after the upload i should get them tomorrow afternoon. the last set of prints i put in were all 4x6's. this set was 4x6's, 4.5x6's, 6x8's and i think one 8x12. the problem with the 8x12 is that one cannot find a frame made for that size. 8x10 exists and the photo gets cropped, but not the size that fits a digital print. frame makers, please catch up with the times.

monday is apparently going to be the world premier of touring van australia (and europe?). i dunno what he put on there. jason messaged me earlier to tell me that the people he showed it at the hostel who have nothing to do with pearl jam tour really liked it. then he is leaving on tuesday.. weird. another person who i see once in a while, but it will be strange when they are gone. too many canadians and going back to the homeland.

i was at the gym tonight and this asian lady started talking to me really randomly. she was there working out too, and i was trying to do cardio. i had headphones in which is a "dont talk to me" sign. but she did anyway and me not being rude talked back to her. when i came back from the gym i made a full dinner at 10:30pm. i never eat that late. i was only going to eat the chicken that i bake for 15 mins and its done fast, but then i decided to make roast veggies too. so there i was eating dinner at 11.

there was a really great television show tonight about medical marvels- people that have had recoveries from accidents or have had surgery to help correct nuerodegenerative issues like the shakes from parkinson's disease (that part was very interesting). one the people who had a segement was a boy who while riding his bike was hit head on by a car, internally decapitating his head. the x-rays were weird to see. the c1 vetebra was detached as were the tendons and ligaments holding his spinal cord in place. anyways, being on a show like this, there was a happy ending and the kid was back in school, walking 4 months after the accident. the body wants to heal itself..

in my surfings tonight i was somehow linked to this.. a very interesting video.

happy may two four to all my canadians. i completely forgot that it is a holiday today until was listening to the radio in lab.. streaming a sunday night broadcast from the t dot. then i thought about how i should have observed the occasion and stayed home. oddly enough the queens birthday is celebrated in australia the second monday of june. i believe its the 12th this year.. as i am going to see sloan on the 10th and i think that is a saturday. (sloooooooooooo-aaaaaaaannnnn) my friends at home are probably all out drinking tonight getting ready for a big day off and the kick off the summer.

i think i have stated recently that winter is almost upon us. this last week has been chilly, although it is still warm enough during the day time. example: today i walked to uni around 8:30am with hoodie and jacket on. was warm enough but had cold hands. at lunch time (1pm-ish) i walked to the other side of campus (to threshermans bakery) with the hoodie as my outer layer and was hot. it was sunny then and the sun bakes everything. after i got back to uni in the arvo, it rained. coming home at 5:30ish it was again cool but not as cold as the morning. 10 minutes ago when i looked out the window it was pouring rain. the city looks awesome in the rain and all the lights.

on the way back to lab at lunch i randomly ran into lindsay on grattan street. i believe that is the first time in 16 months i have run into her on campus. weird. found out a mutual friend moved into one of the super expensive apartments down the street from mine, that i looked at when i was looking back in janurary. our discussion turned to the "big salad" that one can buy at threshermans. its actually a bowl of salad but i must admit that they do a nice job packing it in the dish and i usually get quite a lot of non lettuce in there. main/ entree sized salads are hard to find here. the hard rock cafe is about the only place that does good large salad, and surprisingly the hrc is cheap compared to most other restaurants. threshermans does their salad for five bucks. great for lunch, and it gets me to what is technically off campus.

and i must share the the recent email received from alaina who had such a way with words. describing a possible dining establishment: "it looks a bit like a new orleans brothel from the outside, so clearly it's promising."

and since photos are fun.. here is mt self portrait last thursday from cameryn's birthday pizza dinner extravaganza at bimbo deluxe. i cant do this on my camera since its so fricken slow.. part of the reason that i want a new one. since i was sick i did not was consume alcohol thus shelled out $11 for two cans of red bull. totally made the $4 pizza not a bargain.

i was really feeling like some milo, but i dont have any at home. my stash is kept in my filing cabinet food drawer at school. i do have cadburys hot chocolate mix which i decided would be a fine substitute and hopefully more chocolately goodness. milo is much sweeter than what i am now drinking. is that i good thing when milo is what kids are fed? (milo is the equivalent of nesquik.)

i got to leave lab early today (or should i say i just left) because the network went down. no internet at the end of the day when i want to send emails.. wtf?!? this happened last thursday too. its a university, the internet is supposed to work ALL the time. not just sometimes. how irritating.

i missed ujam. how annoying was that. i was 4 kms away at the time. i asked everyone i knew if they had extra tickets and told them that u2 and pearl jam were going to be there. i got only skeptical responses. the show was "free" but you had to win tickets from the radio station or oxfam or some other charity. i had planned to sneak in later that night, but since they were on first there was no point in going later.


in less than seven days all the fun will be over. then i can go back to being bored by drinking as the only activity when going out. before i went to sydney i tried to eat all the food in the fridge and did really well at cleaning it out. this time not doing so good. there are a bunch of things that are going to go to watse because i cant eat them before tomorrow morning. fruit, which is hella expensive, i hate throwing out.

i have work to do tonight too. one of the feeding experiment is not working out as it is supposed to. unfortunately that means things need to chnage in the middle of the experiment causing other problems.. like there is not enough feed because the supplier didnt send enough when it was ordered. my supervior sent an inquiring email to them today. conveniently she was gone while i was gone and the nothingness that occurred was just overall not productive.

tomorrow involves getting up too early, going to lab, then going to the airport. then maybe getting to take a nap at some point before the show.