New Beginnings

I often find this time of year very reflective. The crazy busyness of the holiday season tends to bring out hours of thought and assessment of the year that will soon be over and the new one just around the corner. 

For awhile now I've been looking for a change. A new challenge to sink my teeth into. So I decided to apply for uni. I'm very excited to say that I have been offered a place next year to undertake a graduate diploma in arts management! I think this is the intellectual challenge that I've been looking for. 

While I don't remember the enrolment process being quite as involved last time round, largely to do with the questions asked for their statistic data collection, it was relatively easy and I'm looking forward to it. There seem to be a few people I know who are going back to or are already studying so I'm in fine company.

So now that I've enrolled it's time to start getting ready and also to enjoy a bit of pre-studying time as I'm sure I'll be busy next year!

Melbourne's weather has held up its reputation in the last couple of weeks. After a scorching 38˚C day followed close to a week of low twenty degree days. Sadly the respite is over and tomorrow we are expecting it to warm up to 37˚C. Of course Melbourne being the fine city that it is... Monday we're expecting rain and the temperature to drop back to 20˚C again. 

My plan is to drop the blinds in the house, crank up the fan and hope that the apartment retains the lovely coolness that we've cultivated over the past few days until the cool change comes through. Sadly I don't think I can haul all the plants back in off the balcony to do the same... something about most of them liking sunlight.  I really hope that they'll be okay in the heat as it was the heatwaves that decimated our balcony garden last time!

Our garden has grown a little with the addition of borage, soapwort, woad and some alpine strawberry. 

The borage is looking a little worse for the wear after spending two days in transit before seeing the light of day. Luckily the latter three are quite hardy and have perked up quite nicely after planting, a good water and some sun. 

Today we had our first harvest of spinach:

This was happily eaten for dinner along with some delicious wagyu burgers. 

I was also very happy to see the first zucchini buds for this year:

There really is something quite soothing about spending time tending to plants. Not to mention the immense satisfaction of harvesting your own home grown produce! 

Mainly Palms

Amazing how a couple of shifts at work can totally take over your life...

I've been working at my old-new job for a week now and the people are really wonderful there. They've all been showing me the ropes as the majority of the staff work part-time. Apparently I'm in the minority in this workplace as most of the staff members are mums and I think that's amazing. I can barely get my head around working and studying... these ladies are working and bringing up kids!

I spent the weekend trying to decide if I was going to make the marathon effort to study and work full time or go to part time study and full time work. Either way the work was going to be full time. So I've decided to be sensible and go to part time study. That way I can try to get good marks in one subject as opposed to just scraping through two subjects. It means I'd also get a little time to see my friends and family which is even better :)

Gene and I went down to Geelong on Sunday (after not making it to the house moving ) and visited his parents who are house-sitting his aunt's house. I love visiting different Aldis and Kmarts. It's amazing how different stocks can be between stores. We ended up buying miscellaneous things in Aldi - ranging from half a kilogram of wool (purple and bright red) to secure digital and memory stick reader/writers. Kmart saw us leaving with the Tawny Man trilogy by Robin Hobb and some lipstick.

I've been getting into lipstick again lately. I particularly like the long-lasting lipstick that virtually tattoos itself to your lips for many hours. I'm a terrible lip chewer when I have lipstick on. I tend to just eat it off apparently. With these "new" lipsticks I don't have to worry about it. I'm also finding that it makes me look slightly healthier after my latest trip to the hair dressers where I had the blue re-touched, a fringe cut and the rest of my hair dyed a jet black. Without a little colour I tend to look a little washed out. :)

Can't remember if I mentioned that Gene got a Palm too recently... but I have now. He got the PalmOne E2 and it's pretty cool. A newer model than mine but it's a little confusing for me because the buttons are in different places to mine. We've spent most of our spare time together playing with them to try and synchronise the two lots of information on our calendars - the whole point in both of us having Palms - and it's been harder than we expected. Definitely a niche market for programmers the whole "syncing two pdas for two people to share information on their diaries". I spent four hours trying to find a program to do it but we eventually just renamed the categories in Datebk5 and everything seems to have worked itself out. At least our icons and categories are right now. There's still the conflict thing to solve. Apparently if we can get the HotSync to sync off a shared database that would solve it but I'd need to edit the HotSync software and I'm not game to try that with my limited knowledge of programs.

Sorry for that rather boring last paragraph... I'm going to go and watch some Farscape with Gene and finish my dinner. We're having curry tonight. Then I think it's off to bed!

Study? I think not!

This studying thing is definitely not what I remember. Mainly because I didn't really do that much studying last time I gave this a shot... more procrastinating and drinking and hanging out in ex-toilet offices. As a result I'm madly trying to catch up on my history homework - the different spellings of names and places in Greek myths are driving me nuts. I'm still what feels like a week behind when I'm closer to a week and a half. The readings look deceptively short, however I've discovered that the paper of my textbook is rather thin.

I felt bad about the lack of writing lately although in all honesty I didn't really have much to say over the last few days. The weekend was fairly uneventful. I tackled as much Greek myth as I could fit in my head until it hurt...

Oh hang on! On Sunday I went with Nick (not Naomi's Nick) to see the first piece of theatre that I've gotten to in ages at Red Stitch called Bug by Tracey Letts. It was good! I found the pacing of the play a bit strange though. The first half seemed to be a little slow and then it ended rather quickly. Great story though and great story telling and that's what counts for me. As a side note, Last Minute.com (who I just linked the title of the play to just in case someone wants to get tickets for it) have different prices to what Nick and I paid on Sunday... more expensive by two dollars... so maybe call Red Stitch to book...

Monday was a bit lacking really and it's all my fault. When I chat to Lisa we talk about "girly moments". Times when you know that you're being irrational or picky or simply not reacting to the situation like you usually would (ie. in a calm and sensible manner) but you can feel the hormones raging over and clouding your judgement and making you do things that you actively know at the time will make things worse - or if you're really lucky just make things not get any better at the time. Anyhow Monday was like that. So I wasted the better part of my one day this week with my darling man having a "girly moment". (Note to Naomi: I'm trying your theory on publicly acknowledging the situation that I appear to have unwittingly caused in assuaging guilt... would probably help if Gene saw this though!) In the end we went to the video store and hired eight movies and watched two. We watched King Arthur and Erik the Viking. I didn't hate King Arthur and I found it quite engaging although I would have liked to have seen a little more about where they got their references and all in all found the making of the film rather lacking. The costumes were cool though... and Clive Owen's pretty... Keira Knightly was pretty cool too (although rather under-dressed for the weather I would have thought). Definitely going to have to look into this Sarmation army thing though... Erik the Viking was great and I really enjoyed it. Tim Robbins is funny :)

I'm sensing this post is getting rather long... but I'm going to keep going anyway because I have a gripe to voice.

Yesterday was a beautiful day so Gene suggested we go for a bike ride. Just a short one. He was on his way home on the tram in a wonderfully good mood. By the time he got home though, he wasn't in such a good mood. He'd just had a ticket inspector call him a liar. The ticket machine didn't print on the back of his daily ticket (as I've recently noticed happening) and when the ticket inspector re-validated the ticket it printed "expired" on the back. As a result said inspector made a report (which is fine) but then refused to give Gene a replacement day pass for travel (as they are meant to do when you have a ticket confiscated for evidence) but only gave him two hours saying that Gene was using an expired ticket so why should he get a daily? What happened to the innocent until proven otherwise?! I've noticed on a few of my 2hr x 10 tickets that the machines skip lines or more annoyingly within the two hours that you've got before it is supposed to use another ticket it uses another ticket anyway. So all in all the fare evasion campaign that they have is currently pissing me off because their ticketing system is ridiculously unreliable - I've been told by a Metlink person at a premium train station that tickets supplied at newsagencies aren't that reliable so they weren't willing to give me the replacement tickets and that I'd have to pay out the old faulty metcard. Give me a decent ticketing system and tram inspectors who don't just give tickets but can answer questions - I couldn't even get an answer about concession cards from one of them. They didn't stop. They just hopped off the tram. Oh and Gene's infringement notice says "none-valid ticket" so it's good to know their spelling is up to scratch.

We're getting our bikes serviced tomorrow so hopefully we won't have to worry about stupid tickets for a while. It's part of our "get fit" plan as well.

Oooh.. now what I really wanted to achieve in today's post (aside from the rant) is to share my excitement of having my first shifts as a venue operations officer this week! Yay for having work! I'm working tonight and Friday night and tomorrow during the day. I'm actually really excited about tomorrow because it's the police brass band and they were awesome last time I saw them -which was admittedly when I was twelve but I'm sure they can only have gotten better!

So on that much brighter note, I'm going back to my study of Greek gods and their origins.

Reaching for the Stars

I have decided to take a proactive approach to digging myself out of this rut of gloom. I am fully aware that given my current state of apathy this may be a little ambitious, but you've gotta reach for the stars right?

Firstly fitness, or lack thereof. I will join the Carlton Baths as soon as I get paid out from Salesforce. In the interim I'm going to give one of those pilates DVDs a shot. There's something that I don't like about them, I'm not sure what, but I figured I needed to start while I'm still keen.

Today is not a good day for cycling. I discovered this as I rode to the shops to get some notebooks for uni and the aforementioned DVD. It was rather windy and I was getting blown across the road a little. Perhaps if I get fit I can gain some weight and not be so easily swayed by the wind.

I also returned the DVDs that I'd hired last week and got some new ones that I'm looking forward to watching. I bought Closer from our video store for a bargain $19.95 and it's barely scratched! Love the language of that film. Some really great lines. Damn I'm glad I bought that!

Anyway... due to a miscalculation in funds transfers I've got to wait till tomorrow to buy my textbook and despite my fast reading skills I'm concerned that I'll be behind in my first week of studying Myth in the Ancient world. I've actually got readings to do for that subject. Two chapters. I'm hoping they're short... I've tried searching the libraries in Victoria but no one seems to have it.

I'm expecting a plumber to show up at any moment now. Would you believe that our hot water has died again?

On the bright side I've discovered that I can go to the Melbourne City Baths and have a swim, spa, sauna and a shower for just under $15.

Time for some food and cleaning. I can barely see the desk at the moment and studying in the kitchen is bad for me. Too much food!

Wallowing

Today has been a little emotionally challenging and for once I seem to be soothing my day with a delicious icy cold glass of Bailey's & milk - even though I can't really drink much milk and I'm feeling kinda cold.

It started off as most days have lately, a struggle to wake up and not feel exhausted. I've decided that when I eventually get back to being able to fall asleep at night my moods should settle down. I'm also trying to get some more exercise because that usually perks people up too.

I ended up jumping out of bed pretty excited because today's my first day back at uni. I logged into all of my subjects and read the course guidelines and I'm even a week ahead for the legal framework readings. Admittedly that's because Week 1's reading was about how to study so I felt an urge to get a bit of a headstart considering I'll probably be behind for Myth in the Ancient World because I've got to get the textbook sent from SA. I called most of the bookshops in Melbourne this morning in an attempt to get a copy of said textbook but to no avail. I'm quietly confident that I'll do well with Legal Framework. It's kind of exciting. Always had a vague interest in law.

I even achieved my task list for today, lodging our tax returns and cleaning Herman's cage. Herman's a little confused because his cage usually smells faintly of citrus after it's been cleaned but we've changed to a vanilla scented cleaner as it's "food safe" and less strong smelling. It was exciting today when he let me pick him up without too much fuss. He's a good rat that one. I think he's having fun re-decorating his new hammock. He'd chewed the back out of the old one that Mum made him. I don't think she'll be thrilled.

So why am I melancholy? Of the three of us who applied for a tech job I'm the only one without an interview. I'm really happy for my friends but as I don't have much to fill my days at the moment I'm feeling a little down. Doesn't help that they're both boys and I always feel exceedingly female when applying for tech jobs. Anyhow I've decided to indulge my wallowing in disappointment for tonight and tonight only. Tomorrow it's all smiles and moving forward. I'm definitely going to go for my first aid again and test and tag as soon as my tax return comes in. I'm going to be the best damn tech that I can be and I know that I can get a job doing so. Failing that I'll work towards my own theatre and make my own work.

Well, I'm going to make the most of my wallowing time :)

Hot water, textbooks and comments

Hazaar! We have hot water again! Okay, we always had warm water (which is better than some people have I know) but today the lovely plumber came and fixed our hot water system so we now have decent water pressure AND lovely hot water. It was amazing, he just turned a couple of knobs and hey presto we had scorchingly hot water. I can't wait to have a shower tonight. It'll be the first time in a week and a half since we've been able to use the cold tap in the shower.

Double hazaar because I got two comments on/from my blog in the last two days. I feel all special now!

Suddenly I'm concerned with my spelling of hazaar but I've been finding that I'm not confident in my spelling at all lately and Dictionary.Com isn't working as well as it usually does... it's just not loading!

Anyhoo, today has been less productive than I would have liked but I'm on strict order by Gene not to crochet until the pain goes away (damn sensible boyfriend). So having nothing better to occupy my time with I was just going to have a lazy-in-bed-reading day until I realised that I start uni on Monday and have no textbooks from which to study. I was about to dash out the door when my phone rang. It was the wonderful plumber trying to arrange a time to come and fix our hot water. It was destined that I would have to get out of bed today. So I sprinted out the door even faster and jumped on the second tram that I saw (the first tram I watched as it left the stop as I arrived). Due to the Anti-VSU protests a the trams were diverted from their usual travels. But more on the VSU later. I visited three bookshops for two textbooks and arrived home with just one textbook and a case for my Palm (yay!).

Today I relieved the joy that is being broke after buying your textbooks. It's my first "serious" textbook in a while... Australian Business Law. Part of me considered getting the study book that goes with it but the $60+ price tag dissuaded me.

Okay VSU. While I'm not a student who's going to a physical university campus, I strongly believe that the services supported through the payment of these general service fees are incredibly important to the well-being and enjoyment of students at universities. I suppose it's hard for some people to see the services that are supported through these fees, but I certainly wouldn't have gotten to where I am now without them. When I was at Monash I was a highly active member of the Clubs & Societies (mainly the theatre ones, but I did join a couple of others), I saw the counsellors, took advantage of the medical facilities more than once, enjoyed having many serves of nachos at the various food places and that's just the things that I can think of off the top of my head. Oh wait, there's the whole student union fighting for friends who, due to an admin bungle, had not received their re-enrolment details and then when they went to challenge it on the date specified in the student diary (another subsidised resource might I add) were told that the date printed was incorrect and they were no longer a student there. Hundreds of students were affected by this, but with the support of the union and their legal staff these students were re-instated. Without the extra-curricular activities students are really missing out on what makes uni the "best time of your life". I still remember when I was in first year uni I caught up with some friends from highschool and we were talking about our experiences at Monash & Melbourne Unis. I mentioned that I'd made lots of new friends through the Clubs & Societies while my friends who hadn't really looked into it yet were just heading to class and back home and wondering what all the fuss was about. Yes, you're at uni to study and hopefully that means studying something you're passionate about, but when you get out into the wonderful scary "real world" you need other things to make your life complete. Hobbies, socialising, outside interests to help you wind down after a busy and sometimes stressful day at work. These interests set you apart from others when you look for work or even just when you're meeting people. Clubs & societies at Monash provided me with the opportunity to explore different enviroments and activities. I really with that I'd taken advantage of things like the Skydiving club. While students should be given the choice of how to spend their money, I think that a general fee to maintain these services and give students the choice of using these services is crucial to maintaining student life and culture. Like they said in the meeting I attended earlier in the year, think of it as if it's personal tax, it helps to support the infrastructure that we enjoy in our everyday lives. It's a matter of the greater good versus the self.

Okay I'm almost done with the ranting... While I'm really excited about going back to study. There's no way it's going to be as fun without the other stuff to keep life interesting. I'll definitely miss ambling down the corridor to Student Theatre to see who was there and who was free to grab some food/coffee.

Herman's loudly crunching away at his kibble which is a signal that he wants to be fed. So I'd better do so before he starts throwing a tantrum (it's amazing how much noise a rat can make with one food dish).

Yay for hot water, textbooks and comments!

A bit of a rant surrounded by lighter notes

It's amazing how three days of solid reading can generate a migraine when you haven't been wearing your glasses... okay perhaps not that amazing, but consider my lesson learnt.

I feel like I've been folding clothes forever even though it's only been a day. Believe me when I say Gene and I have many clothes... mostly black so they all look relatively similar. So many shades of black. It's almost like that scene in Notting Hill where Spike and umm.... Hugh Grant's character are having that discussion about never having clean clothes... we really should do cleaning more regularly.

Discipline. Great word. Fantastic concept. We should try it some time!

I've had a flick through my uni stuff, or half of it anyway and it's exciting and scary all at once to discover that my exam falls on the last day of NaNoWriMo... at least it's at 2pm so I've still got the rest of the evening to finish my novel... ahem.

Yesterday I did an online survey because a) I like doing surveys b) there is a remote possibility that I might win something. It worried me, however, how biased the survey seemed to be. I appreciate how painful a long winded multiple choice survey with a zillion answers can be, but it's better than offering too few choices. In particular it's question asking about issues that are important to me. There were about 8 choices on terrorism issues and Australian relationships with other countries and that was fine. However it had one option to do with Muslims and the only other option to do with religion was "Lack of Religion". I find that really upsetting because it's so blatantly targeted at one religious group. Lack of religion?! I honestly feel that in today's media we have a rather biased religious view being presented. Now I don't claim to have answers to any of the larger political issues and honestly I haven't followed current news as carefully as I should, but I believe that everybody has the right to chose their own beliefs and I think we should respect that right.

As for the whole terrorism thing, I don't condone hurting innocent people to prove or present a point. At the same time, I do wonder (thanks to good ol' high school debating) if we would listen to them otherwise. Would we listen if they wrote us a letter or even a hundred letters? I don't know. I don't have the answers so sue me for it. I just don't think we should let ourselves and our society be paralysed by fear. The number of televisions sold has increased significantly over the years since the September 11 bombings and people are venturing out less and less. I really think it's sad that we're now so scared to get out of the house and see the world and enjoy the short years that we have on this planet because we're worried we'll be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sure it's a survival instinct, but in some ways I guess I believe that the people who are doing these things will have won if we're all huddled in our houses watching the world go by on our televisions.

I was speaking to my Dad just after the London bombings and he was saying that even when he was in London, bombs were a daily threat. If you saw a pillar box you crossed the road. So when he watched the news reports about the subway bombings he felt that it was terrible, but that the people of London were probably slightly less shocked than everyone else was making them out to be.

Okay ranting done now.

On a lighter note, Mum called last night from Singapore and it was great to chat with her. It's funny how the futher away I am from my parents, the closer it seems to bring us. I think that when I was in Perth for a month I spoke to my parents more than when I was still living in Melbourne but not at home! Anyhow, it's great to see that she's discovered the world of internet shopping. It'll be great for her craft stuff. She's already bought knitting needles online and she's looking for some special ribbons for her jewelry work. Mum's coming home on Saturday morning in time to teach her bear-making class. She's feeling a bit bad at having missed one already. Usually I'd try to visit her the night she gets home but it's Kieren & Loz's 21st birthday in Geelong so Gene and I will be heading down there on Saturday evening. We've arranged to catch up with my folks on Sunday. Mum's got a tool holder for Gene and she's pretty excited about having found it.

I'm really glad that my parents get along so well with Gene. It's painful when your family and your boyfriend don't mix well.

Part of me is thinking that I may need to get rid of some of my wool... Sorry I'm back on the cleaning rant again. Another part of me is thinking another bookself would be a wise investment. The only question being where would it go... A topic to discuss with Gene I think. Either way we need to look at our storage options again. It's a little sad when at 22yrs I'm thinking of heading to the Home Show to see if they can offer some better storage options...

Just over six weeks to go until NaNoWriMo and I'm starting to think about my potential novel at night. I'm still try to work out what genre to attempt! While I've immersed myself in the realms of sci-fi and fantasy for as long as I can remember, I don't think I have anything new to offer to them. Or at least anything that wouldn't make me cringe and hate myself for a long LONG time. I just wish I had a little more than a couple of joking ideas involving giant squid and bad lift music. I've already started work on my magna carte. I've promised myself no crappy romance lines eg. Oh woe is me, he/she's so cute and wonderful in my dreams but he/she's betrayed me. How will I live? No I hate them. No really I do. Oh okay. They're a bit of all right. Woe is me I am tormented by my conflicted feelings. Eugh. It's my current pet hate in books.

Speaking of books I'm going to do a little more folding and them I'm going to crawl back into bed and continue reading "Ilium" (winner of the 2004 Locus award for best sci-fi novel) which I started reading last night. It's wonderful so far and has an opening sequence that you just want to read out loud. I love novels that make you want to read them out loud. Such wonderful language!

Student again!

Woohoo! My confirmation of registration letter arrived from Open Uni. I am a student once more! (I am sensing many exclamation marks in this entry) Legal Framework here I come... well as soon as I can get the text book anyway. I've only got a week and a bit to do so too . I'm hoping the State Library of Victoria can help me out there. Failing that there's always those academic bookshops in town. As much as I love a new text book, my finances are telling me second hand is definitely the way to go.

Now on a side note... I've noticed that when I sit at my computer (as I am rather obviously doing so now), my right hand always gets really cold. I mean REALLY cold. Mucy colder than the left hand, which still feels kinda warm. It doesn't seem to matter if I'm typing or using the mouse or the keypad. I tried wearing gloves, fingerless mitts, hunters mitts and nothing seems to work. Guess this will make NaNoWriMo an interesting and fun time of year. Particularly as I have an exam in November for Legal Framework. I'm sensing a rather stressed Sarah then.

Today has been a good day so far, although my dreams last night were a little stressful. Can't even remember why I was stressed in them. I just remember they weren't half as pleasant as the ones from the night before.

I've settled happily into a semi-nocturnal state. I'm more than happy to go to bed around 2-3am but seem to be rising at 8-9am. Oh well, I guess I'm out of my exhausted phase and back to my usual 6 hours per night!

Went into town today and got the rest of the "Rockery" wool I needed to finish my current scarf. Also bought another two balls of wool for another scarf... they were just so soft! Here's hoping I've got the right needles.

Depending on which way you look at it, I'm a great or terrible shopper. A frequent impulse buyer but also one that deliberates for ages doing so. Crazy. I ended up buying another John Varley book "Red Thunder". It was only $17.95. Much cheaper than the others. I keep thinking if I repeat that often enough that I'll convince myself it was a sensible thing to do. I have a feeling that "The Black Crusades" may have to wait. I'm such a fickle reader at times. Too much selection at present!

I hear my wheat bag calling me... or more accurately the microwave calling my frozen right hand. Also Nick, who I haven't seen in what feels like ages, will be here soon for coffee. Yay!

Apologies for the poor grammar. This is something I'll need to work on soon...

Jobless-ish

I'm unemployed at the moment and feel this is the best time to take advantage of the spare time to write! Besides, it's good training for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) in October. I figure I start with mere few hundred words a day and build up to the 1600 words I'll need to be writing by then. Wish me luck!

It's a little depressing looking at my home page for MySpace at the moment. I only have one friend according to the site... I like too think that in the real world this is not the case - and that I have at least a couple more. For example our pet rat Herman who is currently chewing through his new hammock. I'm not sure why he does this as it will only result in him falling out of his warm little nest one day, but he seems keen on doing so and I don't want to hold him back.

Outside it's a sunny blue sky day and it's still an ice box in our house. I'm curled up in front of our little space heater and I'm strongly considering turning it up to full sun (which I believe is the highest setting). I've had a quick look at the jobs on Arts Hub, called about a stage management gig and have been advised that I'll get a call this evening. Aside from that I've received nothing in the mail, both electronic and regular, that is of note. Unless you include the electricity bill, but I'm hoping to ignore that until after I've done my tax return and actually have money again.

I'm not totallly unemployed. I'm volunteering at MIFF at the moment which has been great fun so far. This is their last week though and tonight's my last night but hopefully this stage management gig will go ahead. Failing that I'm looking at some lighting op jobs and hopefully my letter of offer for the venue officer job I got offered last week will arrive in the near future. I'm always a little unsure how often to follow up on paperwork for a job. After all I want to give the impression of enthusiasm and organisation while not appearing to be desperate or harrassing them. It's a fine line I think.

Aside from the lack of funds I'm actually enjoying the lack of work. I've finished more books in the last week than I have in the last six months - which is a big thing for me. I usually read at least one book a week even during busy weeks.

I'd like to note that production week on a show does not count as a busy week. In fact I don't actually include it as a week in my time as I disappear from the world as we know it and don't surface again for the duration of the "week".

At the moment I'm trying a different approach to job hunting. While it's a little idealistic, hopefully this will avoid me being sucked back into the call centre world (a.k.a my personal "Hotel California"). After 11 months of work in a call centre I feel like part of my soul has died. Perhaps that is exagerating. It's more like part of my soul/spirit has taken industrial action until I made the decision to fully commit my time to employment in the arts where I want to be. I think I've managed to negotiate with myself that I may need to go into some casual soul-sucking work again just to get past the whole rent problem but nothing permanent if I can help it.

I'm also going back to study through Open Learning and I'm looking forward to the intellectual challenge of that. It's been a couple of years since I've really studied and I'm actually a little nervous about starting again. I'm not sure why. Perhaps it's because I'll be using parts of my brain that have been dormant for a while.

Okay, enough procrastination for now. I'm off to read. Mmmm... good book and a nice warm bed.

A Pinch & A Punch

One month down, eleven to go...

I promised myself this year to have a break from my various study attempts, yet I found myself carefully studying and planning out a BA(Communications) through Open Universities. I think I'm hooked... I think I'm also learning to work out what I want to study and why I want to study it and make sure that next time I start that it's definitely studying for my sake. Not my folks.

Physically I'm still not feeling so good, but I'm planning on seeing a doctor about that soon. Just need to get an appointment.

Tomorrow sees my three year anniversary with Gene and I'm pretty excited. I have a feeling much of the day will be spent sleeping - as he finishes work late tonight - but at least we'll get some time together. Besides, we've got the weekend for that!

I keep meaning to send out the Chinese New Year Party invites but I've been slack. I wanted to do a little design and put some effort into it, but I think I'll have to settle for a multi-coloured email.

On that note, I'm off to write the invite and then I can run it past the others.

And so this is Christmas...

I was about to say that 2004 has been a big year, but I still haven't really decided whether or not it has.

I suppose my biggest achievement would be having made a decision about what I was going to do with my life, more specifically with respect to my studies. It's one of those significant decisions that will never seem quite as bad written/spoken as it was to make.

2004, the year of the Monkey, saw my:
- first secondment to a professional show (which was awesome and a great learning experience)
- first taste of daily "long" distance travel between two jobs and what it's like to live in a car
- first paid gig on a festival
- first three months of Spiegel
- first debit card
- first festive season without my family
- first full time job (which lasted all of two months before I had a minor epiphany and remembered that I didn't want to work in a call centre for the rest of my life, regardless of how great a place my work place is)
- second dispute (unsuccessful) with a university
- second discontinuation from a university course
- second house move with my better half and our first housemate

Looking back on that, it has been an eventful year, but no more eventful than any others really. It certainly isn't the most eventful year. that would have to have been four years ago when there were a few deaths in quick succession of people that I knew, some more surprising than others.

I'm ready for the new year, as ready as I ever am. Armed with my new organiser with its lovely blue ball point pen and the hope that I will achieve a few of my goals for the year. I'm looking forward to making the most of my year off study.

Having said that, we'll see how I fare when the year actually begins...