The Lovers, the Dreamers, and Me

 I am back after 7 or 8 months without internet at home. I have been surviving with basic internet access at work (edumail, banking, news) and making a weekly visit to my parents.

To make a long story short: when I moved in 18 months ago I was told that repeatedly that ADSL was not available here. I went through 3 unsatisfying suppliers of mobile wireless that crawled, only allowed 4 gigs a month and didn't shape. My house is in a blackhole for mobile reception and it got to the point where I had no reception at all for my wireless. After arguing with 3 for about 4 months (during which they continued to charge me for a service I wasn't receiving) I was finally released from my contract. My father has helped set up naked ADSL and voip and now I have 150 gigs a month!

I can't wait to hit youtube again...

Phoebe, as long suspected, is a freak.

I took her to the vet for a major service a few weeks ago (manky ears, itchy rash) and had them look at a strange lump on her ribcage. I had noticed it about a month prior because it was bleeding. It didn't seem to bother her too much. They took a biopsy (she didn't like that at all) and couldn't really see anything except inflammation. They wondered if it would reveal itself to be a wart once the inflammation went down and she was given a shot of steroids.

She presents her belly to me on the couch and I give her a tickle. I start counting nipples. The lowest pair, then the next higher pair, then I find one half covered by fur below her rib cage. I look for its partner and.... nothing. I remember her mystery lump and check it out in its less inflammed state. Bingo.

The Colbert Kid..
.

...who was then shown on The Colbert Report.

His little sister sings They Might Be Giants songs:

Be still, my beating ovaries.

( Spoilers for Precious/PushCollapse )

Christmas decorations are appearing in stores! I know most people find it annoying how early in the year the shops start stocking Christmas stuff, but it is the time I feel most Christmassy. I always peak too soon. I love Christmas in September/October and wish I could put up the tree and that the TV channels would start showing the Christmas movies. By mid December I am just kind of over it all. I can't be stuffed decorating, I realise I have some last minute shopping to do and don't want to fight the crowds, and it dawns on me that I will soon be seeing my extended family again (it's not that they are bad people, I just resent having to act like we are family when we see them once a year. I see my dentist as often as I see my cousins.)

Maybe this year will be different. I have my own house now which means I can get a real tree (no more crappy fake ones). I can start my own traditions, like my Ugly Ornament Scavenger Hunt.

I started it 2 years ago, but for some reason I can't find my first winner, so maybe I should call this the second annual Ugly Ornament Scavenger Hunt (or Ugly Ornament 2: Electric Fugaloo). Last year's most ugly is still at my parents' house. I'll pick it up next visit and post a picture. It truly is a site to behold.

It kind of speaks for itself, but with a few provisions:

• It must be unknowingly ugly (someone somewhere must have thought it was a good idea)
• It can't just be a standard ornament in non-traditional colours (today I saw an all-black tree: black plastic fir, black tinsel, all black baubles. Ugly by my taste, but not ugly enough for the sake of this Ugly Hunt).
• It must be tangibly Christmassy (ie. Not just any old thing with a loop of ribbon around it, like 80% of the stuff I saw today. Little high heel ornaments, little Dora the Explorer ornaments (at least stick a santa hat on her head or shove a candy cane in her hand!), etc). Unfortunately that rules out something awesomely awful I saw today: a little Hawaiian shirt ornament. Not even Christmas colours: orange and green Hawaiian shirt to hang on your tree.

That narrows it down quite a bit, but there are quite a few gems out there. If anyone on my flist wants to join in, we can make a competition of it. Now that I have a credit card (how long will it take for the power to corrupt me?) I can buy paid accounts/more userpics/some other goodie for the winner.

I didn't manage to pick up my winning ugly today ( I usually prefer to wait and survey my options before settling on the ugliest of the ugly). I did pick up some non-ugly stuff in anticipation of hosting my first ever Christmas. I am dealing with some job uncertainty (more on that later) so I think I will try to spread out the Christmas ornament shopping otherwise my tree will be very bare and my first Christmas here will be quite colourless.

Today I picked up: (my camera has decided to crap out on me)

• A novelty jumbo santa pen. It's quite goofy looking but I find comically oversized things so...comical. I look forward to nonchalantly whipping it out to write a note at school and my students will be all "um...what's with the pen?" Tee hee.
• Little 'holly' thingies. I'm not entirely sure what their purpose is. They are little plastic sprigs of holly on little stick things. I don't really know what was going through my head when I got them other than "hey that's my name! And they're only $2!" I think I had vague ideas about how my friend went to Europe and took little Aussie flag tooth picks and stuck them in things to 'claim' them for Australia, except I could claim things for me. ALL FOR ME.
• A '12 Days of Christmas' bauble set. I think they are just plastic rather than glass. (The box doesn't say, although it does have "For decoration only" on the bottom. No shit, Sherlock. What else would I use them for? Oversized anal beads?) Each bauble has a little illustration of one of the lines of 12 days of Christmas. I like the idea of having some kind of base set of decorations. I could have these for years and I'll always be able to say I had them for my first independent Christmas, and maybe the 'Pipers piping' one might get lost somewhere along the way and Holly Jr might break the 'Geese a-laying' on her second Christmas and it will all become part of the family mythology.

*Sigh* In September, I still just love Christmas like I was five again.

Elly May and Bob Dylan

The election is creeping up and I have been surprised by how little campaign advertisements I have seen. It might be because I don't watch much in the way of television anymore or it might be because Howard knows he is as doomed as a virgin on a date with Tommy Lee to not really care about ponying up the dough. My predictions are more optimistic than nomnivore's: Labor will win the federal election, but I do think state Labor will lose the next Victorian election. Brumby just doesn't impress many people, and while I would never vote Liberal unless Voldemort himself was on the ballot for Labor (although I think Voldy would run under a One Nation ticket), I think many of the less devoted Labor voters could switch. There also tends to me a lot of pressure for a change for the sake of a change. I think a big part of Howard's diminishing polls is just people wanting to give someone else a go, and the same factor could easily come into play at a state level. My only hope for the coming federal election is that Howard makes such an arse of himself (preferably with a pissy concession speech) that it ends up on the Daily Show!

We are having our traditional big Sunday meal and my father is making Orange Semolina Cake. His recipe has cornflour, and I can't stand touching a bag of cornflour. It has this strange feeling, similar to cotton wool, when it is compressed. There is this horrible friction that is to me as distressing as fingernails on a chalkboard. Someone really needs to invent a verb for the horrible squishyness of cornflour/cotton wool so that I can actually express it to someone without looking like a loon.

( The Friday Five (+2)Collapse )

Puppy is all better. I feel like ass. I had a cold about a week ago and had three days off work and now I have something similar and just as irritating. I slept for 14 hours last night. I'm not sure if I coughed up blood or if I had blood in my throat from an earlier nose bleed (caused by rapid sneezing). Eugh. I feel like a zombie.

Harry is doing okay. He still has diarrhea but ( cut for those eatingCollapse )

I had a nice birthday. I got a new motherboard (I'm going to get a droolworthy quad core CPU) and my sister gave me the PostSecret book. We had pizza, cake and lemonade. Fine cuisine in my books. Thankyou to sonneta, aphephobia, and nomnivore for birthday wishes.

Rather than preparing for tomorrow (which I will begin soon, I swear), I have been contemplating a sims family in which every child has a name of a keyboard symbol. So far my names list is:

• Tilda


• Solidus


• Apostrophe


• Asterisk


• Dash


• Ellipses


• Ampersand


• Hash


• Hyphen


• Bracket

and one I just discovered:

• Interrobang

Best French & Saunders video:

Why do I get the feeling Australia gets ripped off when it comes to DVDs? I've been ebaying to expand my documentary collection, and so many searches will come back with international auctions with the films available for AU$10, AU$15, and $AU20 (including postage and after conversion), and yet to buy within Australia you are looking at AU$35-$40, even before adding postage.

It is inspiring me to finally get organised with a PayPal account so I can get involved in the international auctions.

I got one wrong. I'll bet it was the one about US capital cities. Stupid cultural bias.

While writing my last post, I googled 'capitalisation' and 'west' as I can never remember when and where to capitalise the directions. (Turns out you only capitalise when referring to regions. ie Eastern medicine, Western world, Northern bastard). Doing this, I stumbled across this article about educational ideology in US schools after the 9/11 attacks. As a wannabe (and hopefully future) teacher, I was intrigued. Apparently there was some controversy surrounding the curriculum taught for social studies as it explicitly stated to avoid blaming the terrorists and to try to understand the criticisms leveled against US foreign policy. I can understand why this was met was anger. It was (and still is) a touchy time after the attacks and jingoism was all the rage. No one wanted to hear any implication that America brought it upon themselves.
If I become a teacher, I will try to teach my students the difference between empathy and sympathy. I will try to show them that we can strive to understand a person's position and identify with their struggles while still condemning their actions.

Woot, I have air-conditioning!
Kind of.

I was so sick of dreading every summer because my room faces the west and I can never sleep well at night, so I purchased a 11 litre Portable Evaporative Cooler and Heater.

So far me likey.

I took five units this semester, which was a cause for mild alarm as I have been known to neglect my studies when I had only 4 units. It all ended up alright. Two high distinctions, two distinctions. The fifth unit was a pass or fail only unit, and involved all the official business of teaching rounds, lesson planning, and lesson analysis. I passed that.
Both semesters next year will have 5 units. I had more semester one classes to complete than would fit into a normal schedule, so that is why I added one on there. For the second semester, I figured I could try to keep up the workload and then have an easier time in my final year with a lighter than average load.

It's nice to be here right now. I know exactly where I am and exactly where I am going. I haven't been able to say that since high school.

I was reading something about homosexuality in animals, and it got me thinking. Could there be an evolutionary advantage to being bisexual? Think about it, men have prostate glands that are stimulated pleasurably by anal sex (not really sure what women are meant to get out of anal sex, not having prostates, but let's forget that for the moment). Few things in nature are mistakes, and for men to have prostates that are capable of being stimulated in such a way, this must have been passed down through natural selection. Early men with such glands must have also had heterosexual intercourse to produce children, and so the joys of butt sex was spread throughout the species.
I guess we are not all that different from Bonobos, and we probably used sex with both genders to keep the peace and encourage groups to live together to combine forces to raise offspring.

( Stress-relief simsCollapse )

I've noticed that I often use my livejournal as a place to vent or express anxiety due to some unpleasant event, and then I rarely write after the situation has been resolved. It doesn't really create a flow, especially for myself when I try to read over my past.
My most recent stress had to do with my teaching practicum, which finished over a week ago. It actually turned out quite well. I started to become firmer with the kids, and slowly gained a bit of respect. I made the really bratty girl cry, and I am far too proud of that fact. I got a very good assessment, both from the supervising teacher and the university assessor. I actually am missing the kids. They made it clear I can visit whenever I want, so I might go back after the primary school holidays (a fortnight from now).

I've been dealing with a horrible cold for the past week, no doubt given to me by the preps. It's hard to sleep through constant dry coughing and green phlegm that threatens to completely seal off my oesophagus. I also have the most painful pimple ever, in the crease next to my nose. This zit could star in its own campy Japanese horror movie, I swear to god.

It's my 22nd birthday tomorrow. Scary. 22 sounds so very much old.

My computer keeps wigging out. Explorer.exe starts sucking up 100% of the cpu and then I just have to shut it down. I'm hoping it is a windows corruption rather than a hardware issue. I can't afford to spring for a new cpu right now, especially since my car is begging me for its long overdue service, and I'm sure I'm looking at about a grand of repairs.

Next week is a study week, so I don't have any university classes. It is meant to be a mid-semester break, but in reality it is far past the midway point. In the week following, I have my practical music test (singing and playing instruments all on my own!), then I have most of my major assignments due the week after, and then exams the next week. It's serious business for here on in.

Shit, I better get studying.

I just had to force Chloe to come back inside because she was standing in the rain staring out into space. She always has loved being dried with a towel. I guess it's the doggy equivalent of a full body massage. But this time she was shaking and holding her tail between her legs. You would have thought I had just given her a thorough beating with a 2x4. I gave up and now she is half-wet in the corner of my room, lying on a pile of DVD cases and staring into the wall.

She's slowly becoming a dog I don't recognise.

Nothing will happen soon. I'm holding out hope that she is just pining for my parents, even though she was already like this before they had left. I think we'll probably let her make it to 11 (early November), but too long after that probably isn't fair on her. She is clearly miserable.

The bloodwork and urine came back pretty good. There is some inflammation in the kidneys that she is now on medication for. The dementia is really the bigger issue, and that isn't so easily dealt with.



On a more cheerful note, I had a successful case study presentation today and submitted two assignments. I have a 2000 word essay due on Monday (350 words done), and on Monday I also commence my three week practicum. I'll make a list of all the cruel names which are afflicted upon my five and six year olds. To prepare yourself, just imagine that Britney and Kevin had nineteen children and they let loose with their kre8tive juices.

Right now I am procrastinating working on a case study for child development. I find it far too intimidating, especially since it requires a presentation and full report (both due Friday).
Tonight I took the pooch to the vet. Awhile ago I thought she was drinking and urinating more frequently, but I had thought I was being paranoid. Tonight she was very strange, shaking violently and cowering from me. The vet took some blood and gave us a speciman jar to get a urine sample at home. They want to rule out diabetes, Cushing's disease and kidney disease, but they highly suspect she has doggy dementia.

Everytime something happens with Chloe, I declare it is the beginning of the end. But then I get used to it, and I go back to thinking she will be here forever. She seems reasonably happy. About 80% of the time she is just quiet and sleepy, and then 10% of the time she is bubbly and outgoing. That other 10%, when she is bewildered and disorientated, is what concerns me. How far do we let it go? What if she is fine 75% of the time, is that acceptable? Is 50% happiness/ 50% unhappiness unfair on her?

We should get the bloodwork results tomorrow, and hopefully I can get the urine sample and drop it in before work, and they can run that quickly too. I'm trying not to worry.




And that little yodel I mentioned? It was the ipod! I had accidentally set the alarm somehow. Mystery solved!
Now if only I could work out who keeps eating my newspaper. (I suspect Elly May)

There is something in my room that does a little yodel at the stroke of midnight. I have no idea what it is, and where it is. I now know it isn't the phone, because it is uncharged right now.

Maybe this is just a sign I should clean my room.

Someone once told me that culture is everything that we do that we need not do. We need to eat, so eating in itself does not constitute culture. What we eat, where we eat it, how we cook it, how we present it, the rituals and ceremonies involved in sharing a meal with others; these are factors that make up culture. The same goes for how we shelter ourselves, how we raise kids, the rules and customs we create for ourselves revolving around sex and reproduction, and of course everything involved in entertaining ourselves and creating a community.

In my SOSE class, culture was simply defined as "the way we live". As small groups, we were given a task of making a poster depicting Australian culture. The end result was unilaterally a Steve Irwin-like character, complete with swagman's hat or akubra, beer, BBQ, Australian Rules Football, cattle dog, jar of Vegemite and rusty old Ute. The tutor was quick to point out that we had all presented the stereotype of Australians, and rhetorically asked us if we actually knew anyone like that. That stereotypical image is cringe-inducing to most of us. So why did we respond to the task in that way? It was the obvious, easy path to take, especially considering the task wasn't being graded. But more than that, it is the only culture we have that we don't share. We leech literature, film, music and television shows from America and Britain, our food comes from as many countries as our immigrants, wider social and political trends imitate those of the States, we even latch on to American colloquialisms.

When critics of Australian multiculturalism criticise certain groups (mainly Lebanese immigrants) and implore them to assimilate, I wonder what culture they expect them to adapt. It is unreasonable to expect them to be Steve Irwins when no one else is held to that standard.

I'm currently killing some brain cells by watching the Big Brother finale. They actually included something I found very interesting. I had always wondered how the ex-housemates react when they return to the outside world and saw all that had happened in their absence. To my knowledge, this year was the first time they showed the final housemates a video of news events. Watching them gasp as they saw clips of the latest Middle East crisis and the recent Indonesian earthquake, I caught myself gasp also. As news unfolds around us, it is sometimes hard to be shocked. Details trickle out across days or weeks, tragedy here, many feared dead, death toll reaches 100, death toll reaches 1000. I seem to remember it took almost a week before the world really reacted to the Boxing Day tsunami.
Seeing the housemates watch the video of tragedy and disaster without the context of a timeline, it reminded me to be shocked. There is a war going on, it's probably going to get worse. Howard is talking about sending Australian troops in greater than token quantities. These are shocking days.


Go Camilla! You are the lesser of two evils.

I have this one adorable client, Mrs R, and she is so short that I was thought that she must be a little person (she is 4 foot something, so i guess she would be a tall little person?). Anyway, I got to talking with her yesterday and it turns out she was short because as a child she broke her back at 2, again at 5, and her back and neck at 8! I had always wanted to ask her if she was a little person so I'm glad she brought it up in the conversation and I didn't have to work out how to broach the subject politely. I doubt she would have cared if I did ask, she volunteers information about her bowel movements and former sex life. She's pretty laid-back.
It's been about 6 degrees in the morning lately, and I can't find my work jacket, so I have been going without. Mrs NotLittlePersonTechnically took pity upon me and I scored a cool cardigan. Woot!

In other news, this is the shit (so take a big wiff).

1,600 / 1,600 (100.0%)

This assignment is due in less than 1 hour and I really just can't be bothered. Usually a deadline scares me, but I think I am a little burnt out from having exams this week. I am going to be really mad at myself if I let myself hand this in tomorrow and get a late penalty.

Edit- Done and submitted! I got it in at 5:02, so there is a small chance it will be considered a day late :(
The office was already empty so it might not get date-stamped. I emailed my tutor with the assignment attached to show proof it was done, so hopefully they will be lenient.

This is the funniest shit I have seen in a long time. Man, I just laughed so hard I pulled a neck muscle. *wipes tear*
Have I told y'all I spoke to a ragdoll breeder and can get a kitten in December? I said I had a slight preference for a girl, but will love a boy too. So if anyone thinks of any cool cat names, let me know.
Of course, nothing is certain yet. I could lose my job and therefore not move out, or Caitlin could decide that living with one cat (Elly May) was enough and didn't want another one, in which case I would have to respect her wishes.
I'm going to go hunt down more kitty wackiness.

Well I've gone and done it. I've lost my voice.
*sigh*

Eugh. I can't watch this election coverage. It looks like Liberal will win, judging by the Tasmanian results.
*sigh*

I have my first therapist appointment in a couple of hours. "Eeeeep!" would be an understatement for how I'm feeling right now.