Last week I was drying my hair with the hairdryer our family has owned for many years. Supposedly due to the heat, the unit decided to explode. It only exploded on the inside, so there was a bit of fire, a lot of sparks, and some remnants of the unit made their way down the sink. I wasn’t injured but my mum decided to look for a new hairdryer. Since it’s been a decade or so since we got this hairdryer, it was surprising to find that these days we’re apparently going to have to fork out some $100 for a good hairdryer. I don’t dry my hair a lot – most of the time I let it dry naturally, but because I hated the poofiness that resulted from this old hairdryer, I sometimes used the hair curler instead. Now I like killing two birds with one stone. Curly hair and dry hair… fantastic.
My mum isn’t a fan of buying online, even though it’s cheap, shipping is free, and it’s generally quite safe. I keep telling her that the shock stories she hears about using credit cards online and getting money stolen is often reported on television as a result of people’s lack of common sense, or just the media trying to make you crap your pants. The media is ridiculous in the way it tantalises minor issues in society in order to gain more viewers and hence higher ratings. What’s this I hear about sashimi making people lose their legs? … come on. I got salmonella in a country where hygiene is terrible and health conditions are below average (not joking – and it was horrible). That’s not hard to believe, but in a relatively rich country where raw fish is stored at very cold temperatures giving them a certain appearance and flavour – I highly doubt that you would get some life-threatening disease like gangrene from eating sushi that isn’t cold enough. Ugh, moving on.
After contacting the eBay seller to retract my bids, I received no reply until two days later, upon which the seller threatened to open a case against me. After that they said that they had already sold the item to someone else… but still demanded payment. Now I got myself into this mess and I used James’s account and felt like a complete fool, but he was nonetheless willing to help. He contacted eBay and they dealt with the situation, though we were not given any information about what they did to the seller. The seller still opened a case saying I was a non paying bidder. It’s funny that the warning is that I “may not receive the item” if I don’t pay… yeah well, even if I do, I won’t get it because the idiot seller sold it to someone else. Ooooh, that hurts so bad.
The reply James received from eBay was promising though, and assured us that appropriate action would be taken and the issue would be resolved. The representative reassured us that it would be okay and even apologised for the late reply. Meanwhile, since I was outbid on a number of iPads, I chose one (just one, hahaha) and went for it. This time I made sure I read through the listing and was okay with it. Right, so I’m not desperate for an iPad but one would be useful for my eBooks, more of my music, and for web testing.
I’m getting bored of this layout; I feel like the colours and fonts are dull and it’s time for something new. Working on a number of websites at work has made me keener to dabble in HTML5 and CSS3. I should be thinking simpler; that’s just what I had in mind when I designed my free themes and they turned out wonderful. I feel like I put too much effort into things sometimes, that if I stop poking around and look at the bigger picture, it would make things a lot easier.
Today James took me to a Japanese restaurant for lunch to celebrate Valentine’s day. There were some heart-shaped decorations hanging from the ceiling but I was most amazed by the avocado, tuna and roe sushi that were shaped like flowers. I’ll be posting some photos to my photoblog. Valentine’s Day is a special day for some, and a day of whining about being single for others. Please, stop. It’s a holiday that was originally meant to celebrate romantic love but for crying out loud, it doesn’t mean that if you don’t have a partner you have to feel like you’re drowning in rose petals. It’s rather pathetic; I think that people should be able to treat it like just another day if they’re in that predicament. Some people don’t celebrate Christmas but they don’t complain about not being Christian. I don’t complain that I get nothing on Mother’s Day… because I’m not a mother, duh.
I’ve got to be up early tomorrow to go to work again, so it’s time to sleep as early as possible. Catch you in Dreamland! I’ll be playing my guitar under the tree with pink leaves.
The other day, Thursday… was my last day at the education centre. I gave my boss one of those mugs I got for my mum. She was pretty touched, haha. I know she doesn’t really like chocolate because she’s always trying to lose weight. She thanked me for all my work and told me to keep in touch and email her and tell her all the gossip. She said, “tell me when you get married and have children and everything”. Haha, I will… but that isn’t happening for a while, I can say.
I miss it. Just a little. It was my first ever job, and it was hard to let go of… but towards the end of it, I guess I knew it was time to move on and focus on my job in the city, and I knew that this didn’t fit with my schedule so well.
I told some of the children it was my last day. I guess I’ll never know if they’ll miss me, though others have been saying that they will. Sometimes they don’t know what to say. It’s not like I hope to be remembered or anything. I just sort of wonder how they’ll do. I think I was pretty approachable to them over the four years I was there, and the newer students got used to me being the only one there for English. Now that I’ve been replaced by Andy, I hope he does a good job. Of course, he’s hell new, but he’s been doing really well. The kids might take a while getting used to someone new, but then again they’re kids… kids tend to love anyone, really. I will remember a lot of the kids there especially watching them grow up and seeing them progress. Some have done so, so well. Others not so well. But some I will remember for their politeness and smiles. Others I’d rather forget because they annoyed me. It wasn’t a job entirely for me, but I didn’t mind it that much.
So I’ve passed on the torch.
I think it was rather idiotic of me to bid on so many iPods on eBay. I changed my mind and decided I didn’t really want or need one at the moment, but I had bid on about 20 iPods. I ended up winning one of them shortly after I realised it was actually faulty. The status was set as “Used”, which didn’t bother me too much, and I was sucked in by numerous “GREAT DEAL”s and “GOOD CONDITION!” Except, unknowingly, this damn “good” condition was the physical state of the iPod, whereas the touch screen functionality did not actually work. I’m probably going to be criticised, and I totally agree that it was my fault. Soon after I realised my fault, I realised there were at least ten hours left until the auction ended so I immediately contacted the seller saying I had changed my mind.
Worst case scenario: I get ignored, I don’t pay, I lose a couple of points for bad rep. It’s just eBay. I’m cool with that, and if someone can’t accept that I am simply human and changed my mind, then that’s just one less person to really care about. I guess it goes to show I’m still a bit indecisive and impulsive. I thought it had changed, but I guess not. Looks like old habits creep back up on me. I’ve started sleeping late again, which is really nasty considering I have to get up early to go to work. This leaves me a bit drained on the weekend. I’ve become lazy again and I just arrive home and surf the internet. It’s relaxing, sure, but there are some things that need to be taken care of. I need to clean my room; my desk is a mess again. I cleaned it up for my new computer but now it needs a clean again.
I’m getting annoyed at the cluttered arrangement of my photos on my wall (photos of me and my friends) and I want to reduce the number or arrange them nicely. I need to throw more stuff out from my bookshelves. There are some things I want to get caught up on before university starts, like watching Futurama and Sherlock and just… other things. I haven’t watched any of my YouTube subscriptions in three or four months and I’m missing my weekly dose of comedy. I’m also behind on reading my favourite blogs and seeing how my blog buddies are going.
Again I’m trying to make my train rides more useful with books or planning or listening to new music. Travel time is the absolute best time to listen to new albums you just bought. I have been listening to Foster The People and Ball Park Music lately, and I guess I would describe their music as very alternative and unique. I’m seeing Ball Park Music at the end of March; yesterday I just had to buy tickets to their show. I think I’ll love their music live.
Things are going great, though. I often can’t wait until the weekend for pick-me-ups. I get a bit disorganised every now and then, but I always look forward to when I can unwind and pick things up where I left off. So it’s 12:14am… and I’m going to brush my teeth and head off to bed.
I think most people know that my favourite colour is red, or have found out otherwise.
The other day I took a mug to work. My mum has a little collection of mugs, which all have different designs of sea creatures on them, including starfish, fish, whales, turtles, and so on. I wanted to choose one of these to take to work and keep on my desk. The other day, after I had already taken the mug to work and left it on my desk, I said to my mum, “By the way, I took one of the mugs so I could keep it at work.”
“What? You took one of the mugs and you didn’t ask!”
“I’m sorry, I was in a rush and I really just wanted to take a nice mug, not a crap one.”
“But I counted those. There were an even number of each pattern and design… you could have asked me first.”
My mum was just joking but I thought that for fun, she should try and guess which one I took. After doing a bit of counting she couldn’t remember exactly how many we had of each. She counted three with a blue handle and three with a yellow handle and concluded that I must have taken one of those.
“Come on,” I laughed. “What’s my favourite colour?”
“Purple?”
Of course, that was the case many years ago. I know people’s favourite colours are inclined to change, but I’ve only had about three different favourite colours. For the longest time my favourite colour was blue, blue, blue. I always told everyone when I was younger that my favourite colour was blue. One of my friends got me a blue shirt for my birthday. It was unusual that at the age of nine someone would give you a shirt for your birthday, especially since this friend was a male friend. I did like the shirt though, and I don’t know if he just happened to remember my favourite colour was blue, or if it was just a coincidence.
I loved the colour black throughout high school, and still do – but I don’t really like to think of black as a colour – rather, the absence of colour. So taking black out of the story, there was purple. Since 2005, that was certainly my favourite. I got dresses in purple and jewellery in purple. The guitar pick necklace I’ve worn all the time since 2006 (and still do) is purple. But I guess, at some point, purple and red became one… and red, ever so majestic, became my favourite colour.
I guess it’s something that’ll stay. I feel like it’s been a part of me someplace, that red was meant to be my favourite colour. I guess I don’t see myself getting over it any time soon.
I spent the last few hours on eBay bidding on items. I have an 8GB iPod nano (the third generation, the fat square kind of ones), which is a hand-me-down from my brother. That’s cool. I did give him my iPod touch before he lost it. Anyway, I would like a new iPod. I could listen to music on my phone, but I guess I’m too lazy to get around to buying a new memory card.
I wanted at least 16GB, so that’s what I looked for online. It then occurred to me that I really, really wanted a red iPod. Red is just special edition so they’re really rare now. But I can’t seem to find many on eBay for an affordable price (or maybe I’m just a cheapskate), and some of them don’t even ship to Australia either.
It also occurred to me that I could just get a small iPod, with just 8GB of space… and then I could lug two iPods around (that doesn’t bother me at all, promise!). It certainly sucks having some 40GB of music.
Today I bought these armwarmers for only $2! Well, James paid for me, but yeah.
This morning I woke up with a sore throat. It hurt like hell to talk. Okay, let’s just say I had reached the point of untalkableness. Making any vocal noise was rather painful and swallowing the fluids that my mouth naturally produced also became rather unpleasant because it felt like someone was rubbing a cheese grater against my pharynx.
I’ve had laryngitis and pharyngitis before and they have both inherently sucked. My mum takes to giving me this ridiculous Asian stuff called watermelon frost. I instantly think of an land where the ground is made of watermelon crust and I can make pink snowballs and untouched ice is the pale lime green that the edges of watermelon slices are like.
In fact, watermelon frost is the complete opposite. It’s this… powder that looks like someone probably coloured heroin a green colour. Not the pretty green colour of the exterior of watermelons, but the green that the colour of your stool is if you ate too much spinach the night before.
That’s often hard for me to imagine, so sometimes I imagine I’m a cavewoman with a crummy mortar and pestle made from two really sketchily shaped rocks. And I just crushed some leaves into a powder until it was… powder.
Nonetheless, this crap is horrible to put in your throat. I dislike unnatural remedies a lot of the time, especially when it comes to things like headaches, sore throats, and colds. Whenever I’m sick, I opt for honey tea, vitamin C, warm soups, and my personal favourite – water. And maybe some grapes. I don’t like taking painkillers because I’ve had experiences where they don’t really help.
I developed a headache throughout the day, which was really unpleasant. For the most part, watching Futurama cured it. I took apple cider vinegar for my throat, and I can tell you it burned like hell. Probably just as bad as chugging down plain vinegar. I can tell you though, if you think salt water is bad, this burns about a hundred times more than salt water could ever.
I’m listening to gypsy music now, since James told me about Armik, a flamenco guitarist with over twenty albums under his belt. I have listened to some gypsy music and it’s the kind of music that puts you to sleep. I dearly love instrumental music, and I really love listening to orchestral versions of classic songs or sonatas. Songs are very lovely when they can put you to sleep, and they can be very relaxing. I find that a lot of music from Japanese animation can be very lovely as well (think Laputa and Naruto – I don’t even watch Naruto but the music is beautiful). And then you get to artists like Explosions in the Sky, whom I saw last year with James. When you get to things like shoegazing and post-rock, it’s where it starts getting interesting.
I begin to see the structural and melodic similarities between instrumental post-rock and Mozart. Not all music does that, I guess.
I don’t feel like I hit many dead ends. I can sleep to heavy metal. I’ve tried dancing the Macarena to a rap song. Surprisingly, it works. I plan to develop a theory out of that.
Until then, I need to make sure my nose stops running and my throat stops feeling like it’s being poked with a flamethrower.
I quit my first job. Ooaohohooh. So. I haven’t exactly quit, but I told my boss that I can’t work after the 16th February.
I don’t remember exactly when I started this job at the education centre, but I remember that in early 2008, shortly after James and I began dating, I was happy to receive this job at all. James told me it was going to suck and the pay was going to suck, and he seemed to know what to expect. I went ahead with it, really unsure of what to expect for my first job. I didn’t like it in the beginning and I had to get used to their rules of marking papers, and I had to deal with little children, which, to that date, I hated.
So it’s been about four years since I’ve had this job. I can’t say I love it, but I’ve grown to like it over the years. I was close to quitting at one point because I wasn’t really enjoying it. I guess what held me back from making this decision to quit was the fact that they needed me. For a small centre, I was the only English marker, compared to many of the other girls and other staff who worked with maths or with the younger children. There wasn’t much change over the years but I found myself tolerating the children with less effort. I grew to like some of them. I felt so attached to the job, as my first job ever. But it was time for me to quit, having another job with more demanding work and one that I thoroughly enjoy, not to mention the fact that my classes will clash with my shifts over at the education centre.
I loved having a job near home, I loved that it was rather easy work and not so intensive, and that it was close to public transport so if I needed to travel there and I couldn’t get dropped off by my dad for whatever reason, or if I needed to go to university in the morning, I could still get there somehow.
That said, I have received my timetable for the duration of the year. I don’t know why people post their timetables on their blogs when they get them – I usually don’t like sharing that kind of thing, but I’ll have you know that I am in class four days a week.
Well, more like four evenings a week. With the exception of Fridays in Autumn semester (February until July) – I have a 9am-12pm class. I’m planning to go to work afterwards. All my other classes start at 6:00pm and end at 8:00pm or 9:00pm, so during the day, I’ll be working. I have this strong feeling that I can do it, that I won’t be dead by the time I get home, that I’ll have every ounce of energy I’ll need. I don’t start classes until the end of February.
In my last post I mentioned my new computer Kepler, and he has consequently been added to The Cavalry. James and I managed to sort out the operating system (Windows 7 64-bit!) and install absolutely everything I needed. Well I haven’t installed WampServer, but I’ll do that eventually. James pretty much spent the weekend at my house.
We had wraps for lunch (on both days!) and between him, my brother and myself, we probably ate four bags of chicken strips over the weekend. Although we had problems installing some things, a few restarts did the trick. I had prepared myself pretty well by downloading the installer files for most of the programs I needed prior to buying the computer.
iTunes, as usual, was a pain in the backside to deal with but thankfully this time around I did not lose all my play counts and playlists and library history. Ah well, I have Last.fm to found for most of the plays. On the topic of music, James encouraged me to look in my record collection and find something to play. My favourite records are by the record player and my others in my bookshelf, and usually I just play my favourites… but I put on some Stevie Wonder and I realised how great that was.
I think you can see some of the physical photos of Kepler in the enlarged screenshot. I’ll post them on my photoblog shortly. Yep, I went and hid the taskbar so I can use the icons in RocketDock as shortcuts.
Also, I just washed my hair with new conditioner and not only does it smell nice but it’s left my hair so very soft. It’s specially for damaged hair and since I’ve had some split hairs (not ends, but hairs ) lately, it’s leaving me with the impression that it’ll do well.
I’ll be posting some photos to my photoblog. Valentine’s Day is a special day for some, and a day of whining about being single for others. Please, stop. It’s a holiday that was originally meant to celebrate romantic love but for crying out loud, it doesn’t mean that if you don’t have a partner you have to feel like you’re drowning in rose petals. It’s rather pathetic; I think that people should be able to treat it like just another day if they’re in that predicament. Some people don’t celebrate Christmas but they don’t complain about not being Christian. I don’t complain that I get nothing on Mother’s Day… because I’m not a mother, duh. 
Sometimes they don’t know what to say. It’s not like I hope to be remembered or anything. I just sort of wonder how they’ll do. I think I was pretty approachable to them over the four years I was there, and the newer students got used to me being the only one there for English. Now that I’ve been replaced by Andy, I hope he does a good job. Of course, he’s hell new, but he’s been doing really well. The kids might take a while getting used to someone new, but then again they’re kids… kids tend to love anyone, really. I will remember a lot of the kids there especially watching them grow up and seeing them progress. Some have done so, so well. Others not so well. But some I will remember for their politeness and smiles. Others I’d rather forget because they annoyed me. It wasn’t a job entirely for me, but I didn’t mind it that much. 
So it’s 12:14am… and I’m going to brush my teeth and head off to bed. 
I have an 8GB iPod nano (the third generation, the fat square kind of ones), which is a hand-me-down from my brother. That’s cool. I did give him my iPod touch before he lost it. Anyway, I would like a new iPod. I could listen to music on my phone, but I guess I’m too lazy to get around to buying a new memory card.
Although we had problems installing some things, a few restarts did the trick. I had prepared myself pretty well by downloading the installer files for most of the programs I needed prior to buying the computer. 
) lately, it’s leaving me with the impression that it’ll do well.