I’m typing this blog post on my iPad, listening to post-rock music in the dark while I sit – or slouch, really – in bed with my headphones over my ears. I’m wearing marshmallow socks – that is, fluffy socks, and they’re yellow – and I’m wearing a big red hoodie.
It’s cold. And I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that the weekend is nearly here. Because of Easter, Monday was a public holiday, and I didn’t work or have class until Tuesday. On Tuesday I finished all the class work in ten minutes. It was very easy and involved some simple PHP that I was already familiar with. I left class early.
Yesterday, I didn’t go to class. I went straight home and picked at the code for that idiotic PHP shopping cart. I just can’t get it right. Once I’d figured out something small I just let it go and went to sleep. It doesn’t help that I get home at around seven-thirty most days; sometimes later. By the time I shower and eat dinner it’s nearly nine, leaving just an hour to brush my teeth and do any homework for the next day.
But I’m not really complaining. I’m not stressing out, though that shopping cart has been driving me mad and I hope I get it all done and fixed by Sunday at 11:59pm. That’s when it’s due and I suppose I’m glad the weekend is nearly here so that I can work on it.
Earlier tonight I had a class on business process modeling. I regret doing a business-related subject. It is the most boring subject I’ve ever done and to be honest, information goes in one ear and out the other. My lecturer is great though. He explains well and he isn’t boring. He jokes from time to time and he answers questions and relates things to everyday situations. It’s a shame the subject is so dull.
Mid next week my study break starts. I am looking forward to it for so many reasons… I mean, I get to have a break, above all. I get to catch up on all my assignments. I am really looking forward to that. I still have to go to work, but that’s okay. I probably have a bit more time to read blogs and blog and photoblog myself.
I guess I just need a break. I’ll be happy when I figure out that PHP shopping cart thing, really I will. Wish me luck.
I’ve decided that tomorrow I’ll be taking photos to document my day again. I’m just doing it for fun this time, to make up for the lack of photos on my photoblog in the part week.
I guess I’ll go to bed now, goodnight.
Hmm. My iPad still doesn’t have a name, so I think I’ll be spontaneous and call him Kevin, after one of my favourite musicians, Kevin Mitchell.
Full time work and full time study make for a very tired, somewhat grumpy, mildly relieved, but mega awesome Georgie.
Today I finally finished my 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle, therefore completing another item on my 101 in 1001 list. I’m very proud of the achievement. I’ve taken a photo of the completed puzzle. People have been asking whether I’ll be gluing it together and framing it, or just dismantling it to do again another day. To be honest, after nearly three gruelling weeks of looking at all that green, I don’t think I’ll want to do another puzzle for a while. I’d frame the puzzle, but I have nowhere to put it. Our house is a bit unstable in terms of wall mounting, so drilling holes in the wall to hang something isn’t the best idea.
It’s the first 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle I’ve done – in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever done more than a kiddish jigsaw puzzle. Ever. I’m thrilled. I suppose I’ll keep it and one day when I have my own place, there’ll definitely be a spot on the wall for the puzzle. I can dismantle it, but at least I can do it in bits so it’ll be easy to piece back together again. I’ll take some better photos later.
I’ve been having work and university day in, day out, and perhaps I was a little too arrogant to think I could do it – but I don’t care, that’s obviously my problem. I just think that maybe I was being a little bit too determined thinking I could work and study at a postgraduate level. Well, so far it’s not bad. I just have less time for other things, I’m a little low on sleep – but I’m not stressed. That is the number one thing. Last year and the year before, I’d often get stressed, my time was awfully managed, and I was just all over the place. Right now I’m finding a good balance between work and play, even though most of it is really work. A lot of the time I come home, too tired to do anything. I’ll manage, though. I sure like a challenge.
Today I nearly fell asleep in class; very uncool. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me before. I was positive I wouldn’t fall asleep; it was just that I was extremely tired. I can recall quite a few times when I’ve nearly dropped dead, but it’s only been at work, never at school or in class. It was 8:30pm though – I was just tired.
I was so tired I shut one eye and tried to sleep with my eyes open. It’s possible, but apparently you have to be really tired; so tired that your mind shuts off into sleeping mode before you get a chance to close your eyes. It’d be silly to try. I think if it happens, it happens. Nonetheless, I was listening to the lecture with one eye shut, and it reminded me of something I learned in high school. If you walk around with one hand over your eye for long enough, you’ll start seeing things two-dimensionally. Yes, I would assume it’s very bad for your eyes. Whatever cool effects you think it may render, it’s something I wouldn’t recommend. Similar to “let’s see how long I can go without sleeping”.
Some people try some very odd things. It seems like something fun to experience, but probably because seeing things normally, three-dimensionally, is just the norm, and anything out of the ordinary tickles the mind. Do you know how many times I put my iTunes on shuffle and come up with a song I never expected would come up? That tickles my mind. Sometimes too much that I have to keep pressing “next” until a good song comes up.
If life had shuffle, I wonder where it’d take me next. Hopefully bed. I’m tired.
The other day I only got three hours of sleep, thanks to the wonderful concoction of too many apples, procrastination, the flaws of a perfectionist (oh, the irony) and the beauty of an assignment. Mid-week, now, I couldn’t be happier.
Well, maybe I could, considering I had a rough day. The morning was bad enough; I thought I was running early but it turns out that my analog clock lost time overnight and was actually fifteen minutes slow. I had to rush to make a sandwich and run out the door, only to see the bus pass as I reached the end of my street. Of course, I ran for it without giving it much thought. The thing is, it’s always an instinct to run for the bus when essentially it doesn’t matter; there’ll be another one soon – alright, but for me, not soon enough.
Last night I slept at 11:00pm, which was a reasonable time. Just as I was falling asleep, my phone buzzed and it was my brother… in the same house… just in the other room… he sent me a message asking if I was sleeping. Well, the hell I was, so I replied the affirmative, to which he responded, miffed, “omg I REALLY NEED TO PRINT :/”. Now that’s the thing that sucks about our household: we have a beast 4-in-1 machine that prints, scans, photocopies and is a fax machine, but it’s not a wireless piece of technology. It’s in one room, which happens to be mine, and there are no cables long enough for my brother to connect his computer to it. He always has to email or send me the files somehow, and I print them. (This is a pain in the ass if my computer is off and I am not home or I am just, you know, sleeping.) James said it might be possible for the printer to be connected to the wireless router… but really, that’s for another day.
I was running after the bus thinking I would make it to the end of the street, especially since it stopped there and picked up some passengers. Alright, if I run fast enough, I’ll make it and I’ll be fine.
No, I wasn’t. It disappeared around the corner and by the time I got to the corner I couldn’t see it. The sun was in my face. I was facing east for a while and after some time walking the bus’s route I checked my phone to see if there were possibly any other buses to catch. My guess – usually a correct one, at that – was that there wouldn’t be any for a while, and not from where I was standing. Yuck.
Since I would have to wait close to 40 minutes for a bus to come by, I decided to walk to the train station. I say “the” because at the time I really did not know which way I was going. The thing that sucks about where I live is that I don’t live close to a station at all. If I wanted to walk, it would take forty-five minutes to the closest three stations. We’re stuck between all three, not really within reasonable walking distance of any of them.
I thought I might make my way to the quieter station, as it was closer. After five minutes I changed my mind and turned around and walked in the other direction, to my normal train station. I changed my mind because of the fact that not many trains stop at that station, and I’d probably never make it in time for work.
The thing is, I wouldn’t have made it in time for work going to any station at that rate.
I walked north.
I listened to It’s Nice To Be Alive as I angrily stormed up the hill towards the main highway. Well, I wasn’t angry; I was just wiping beads of sweat from my nose. I realised when I reached the highway that I was the same distance from two different bus stops – going in opposite directions. I just walked in the general direction of the train station. At this point my toes were feeling rather painful from my heeled work shoes, and I had to keep adjusting my skirt because I was walking so vigorously and it kept twisting about. Ugh.
Eventually I just stopped at the bus stop near one of the local high schools. I was about ten minutes’ walk from the station but I couldn’t stand it anymore. I just sat and waited for the next bus.
I felt really drowsy throughout the day. I really hate depending on coffee or caffeine like I did two years ago. I used to drink so much coffee. At work Dan offered Coca Cola but I just refused. I know apples keep you awake but mine wasn’t doing me much good. Rarrargghh. Because I was so tired I started getting a headache.
I sat down in class for five minutes, decided I couldn’t stand it and just walked out. Lucky they were just learning CSS… crap that I already know. Sigh. I can’t wait for Friday, damn it. It’s like my favourite day now.
Two weeks of university have come and gone. I don’t quite know what to think. At this rate, I’ll be alright. Heck, I’ll always be alright, who am I kidding. I’m not behind yet; I’m going to spend the next few days working on my proposal and working ahead. I already took a peek at next week’s stuff for one of my subjects. It’s looking good so far.
And work? Work is fantastic. I get irritated every now and then when I’m working on something that does my head in – which isn’t all the time. And I still haven’t finished my jigsaw puzzle, which is sitting in the kitchen at work. Work is like my second home now. In the mornings, I find that sometimes I skip breakfast because I’m in a rush. The other day I drank soup at my desk. Luckily, it was beautifully raining, so it was very fitting. Beautifully raining and I chose to wear a different, real leather pair of boots too. Because of that, the rain didn’t soak all the way through my boots and to my socks. I was a happy girl that day.
It’s not often I wear jeans and ankle-high heeled boots. Okay, so I hate jeans, but it was a very cold and rainy day, and somehow I think it is better to deal with rain in jeans or pants than in a skirt/dress and pantyhose/stockings.
Thursdays are getting dull for me now. Class from 6:00 until 9:00 in the evenings. I finish early sometimes, but still around 8:30. I get home around 10:00. My dad has to pick me up from the train station because it’s late and there aren’t any buses that can take me home from there. He ends up being late for work. (He works night shift.) I think that maybe I could finish up class earlier, it’s no big deal, but after July, I can’t do that anymore because pretty much all my classes finish very late.
I thought of this crazy idea to go back to work and sleep in the office because there’s a sofa and a kitchen and enough for me to just sleep on and then get up in the morning. It’s a crazy idea. I just don’t like the idea of arriving back home at 10:00 only to shower and sleep, and wake up at 6:00 just to eat, brush my teeth, and go back to where I came home from. It’s like I’m just going home to sleep, plus the ridiculous total of three hours of travelling. Yuck.
I sure like my mornings, and I don’t mind my commutes, but I don’t like my commutes. I’ve gotten addicted to Jewels Maze on my phone again. I’m trying to get three stars on every level I’ve unlocked. Just trying to do the best I can, of course.
Every Friday James and I just have this thing – we play Friday Come Five by Bob Evans in the car while he drives me home. The lyrics are fitting.
On Friday come five, it is the weekend
Well, for me it’s really six o’clock and not five o’clock, and James finishes up maybe around 5:30, but it’s still a great song to welcome in the weekend. Better than Rebecca Black’s song, too.
I’m rather tired now, I think I ought to go to sleep. I slept early quite a few nights in the week, but towards the end of the week I started sleeping later again. I’m getting very tired. I just watched a video lecture for class and I want to watch another one but I’m yawning madly. Am I turning into a workaholic? I spent most of today cleaning my room and throwing out a lot of stuff just to clear up space on my desk and in my shelves. I think I did a pretty good job. I found a lot of old notes and things that I know I won’t look at again, so they went in the trash.
Pressed by my friend Sashin, I watched KONY 2012, a short film and campaign to get Joseph Kony arrested before the end of 2012. By virally spreading information about his crimes of humanity, hopefully there will be enough support from the American Government for ambassadors to visit Uganda to assist the Ugandan military in the capture and arrest of Kony. As leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Kony and his army have abducted and forced thousands of children to fight for them. Kony must simply be stopped. Spreading the word about this is the least you can do, but it’s something small as well. Educate yourself on the situation. No one should have to experience what Kony has done to others. Watch the video, pass on the message.
I’ve got bruises on my left arm from the Grates’ concert last Friday. I also have a strange bruise on my right hand – I think I might have accidentally banged the door or something, but it’s an uncomfortable spot to have a bruise. I’m pretty pale skinned so it looks odd.
The jigsaw puzzle has been driving me insane. I kept getting distracted by it at work. I don’t think it was the best idea to have it at work, but I don’t have much space at home, and when I opened the box at work, it was like the be-all-end-all… that was where the damn thing was staying. The thing is, with me being distracted by it at work, there was no way it was going to stay on my desk forever. It was already taking up half my desk. Even though I had enough space to put my bag, and the keyboard still had enough room, the fact that a half-finished jigsaw puzzle and its pieces and box were right next to me were just excruciatingly painful for my ticking brain. I would constantly look out of the corner of my eye while typing code on the computer, and then spot a loose piece and the place it was supposed to go.
It was very distracting.
Lilian reckons I can code in my sleep, but I think I can only go so far as to do it with my eyes shut.
I had this conversation yesterday with my boss…
“Georgina…”
“Yes…”
“Have you finished?”
“No.”
“Are you stuck?”
“No…”
“…”
“I’m sorry, I’m just so distracted by this puzzle!”
Yesterday in class I was on the 27th floor again, with beautiful sunset views. The weather was lovely that day. Most of the class was the tutor going through HTML, text editors and the like. All stuff I was very familiar with. I really wanted to turn around and face my computer but I didn’t want to be rude. I joined in the discussion anyway, and chipped in a bit when it came to webhost suggestions and text editor suggestions. I apparently came up with the best suggestion in the class, that is, Surpass Hosting.
I finished the tutorial exercises in five, ten minutes… too easy for me. Really too easy. I aim to give myself a challenge with the proposal we have to submit. That’s what I like about subjects like these – you learn, but you have the opportunity to push yourself as well. It’s really for your own benefit though. I know some people suggested to me “make a website” as a proposal, and James even suggested I propose something I already created, and just not tell anyone until later. That would be a splendid idea, but as flexible as this subject is, I really do want to try and learn something new while teaching staff are around to help me and while I’m paying for this education, haha.
After class a boy named Yu came up to me and asked if I was Georgina; he said that he really liked my blog and its layout and found my tutorials useful. I was so thrilled. I didn’t quite know what to say but thanks; not many people have ever said that to me in person.
This morning I came to work about an hour early just so I could work on the puzzle before my shift started. My boss helped me move the puzzle to the kitchen… dun dun dun… and Georgie was no longer distracted. Dylan, who works in the office too, joked, “How much are you paying her to do this per hour?”
I am probably about a quarter of the way through.
I slept at 10:00pm last night. I’m going to sleep at around that time every day now, or where possible. I find myself tired when I get home late these days, but I guess that’s the nature of full time work and full time study.
I still have to go to work, but that’s okay. I probably have a bit more time to read blogs and blog and photoblog myself. 
I just think that maybe I was being a little bit too determined thinking I could work and study at a postgraduate level. Well, so far it’s not bad. I just have less time for other things, I’m a little low on sleep – but I’m not stressed. That is the number one thing. Last year and the year before, I’d often get stressed, my time was awfully managed, and I was just all over the place. Right now I’m finding a good balance between work and play, even though most of it is really work. A lot of the time I come home, too tired to do anything. I’ll manage, though. I sure like a challenge. 
I spent most of today cleaning my room and throwing out a lot of stuff just to clear up space on my desk and in my shelves. I think I did a pretty good job. I found a lot of old notes and things that I know I won’t look at again, so they went in the trash. 
Dylan, who works in the office too, joked, “How much are you paying her to do this per hour?” 
