Saturday, April 30, 2011

Easter Break


Sorry for the missed post…  Besides general laziness and doing-other-stuff-ness, having school off means it takes much more effort to drag myself to campus to use the internet for things like posting blogs. 

So, miraculously, I lucked into not having to spend last Friday night home alone! :D I went to uni, despite not having classes, to putter around on the internet. After I was done, I walked down to the Unisfa clubroom to see if by any chance I could return my finished books (Star Trek novels = happiness) and borrow some new ones. It’s really best to have a book at work for the slow times up on the 6th floor, and facing the fact that I had (er, still don’t have >_<;;;;) real plans for the week long break, I knew I needed some serious reading material. It was my lucky day, because not only was the clubroom open for me to grab more books, it was open for a pending party to which I was graciously invited! (You know, along with the entire rest of the club). I felt like an enormous dweeb for a while –I didn’t really know anyone and those I didn’t sorta know where off doing other things. But I managed to make a few new friends over things like nanotechnology and the importance of good beer (life is too really short to drink shitty beer). Dear students considering study abroad: don’t go unless you can legally drink in that country. Socializing would be hard without the help of a leeetle bit of liquid courage for us shy girls (never fear, I’m a one-drink girl, and I only dance on tables when I’m sober). Speaking of dancing, zomg, I need to meet whoever made that party playlist, because I had about 80% of the songs on my own party playlists, so I had the best time dancing. ^_^ Greenday’s “American Idiot” came on, and I was both thrilled (I love Greenday) and a bit….. Weirded out, actually, like I was afraid someone was going to come make some pointed remark regarding the song and my nationality.

I worked Easter Sunday, having traded shifts with a coworker so I might be able to go on an international student trip to Rottnest on Saturday. Despairingly, all the tickets for the trip sold out before I had managed to trade the shift, but at least I gave some other girls their mother for Easter Sunday. Luckily it was an early shift, so I got home with enough time to make SUPER SPECIAL EASTER BREAKFAST BURRITOS. :D Okay, so I’m still going straight to Duran’s or Frontier the moment I get off the plane in abq, but hey, with half a bottle of the chili sauce Nic helped me find, it definitely alleviated some of my homesickness. Even though I had to use regular ground beef because I couldn’t find the right kind of sausage, and bacon here is weirdly enormous and fatty, and I think I maybe need to bake the potatoes next time since the pans in my apartment stick way too much. >.>

Monday morning (though some might call it Sunday night....) I got up at 4am to catch a special train and bus to the Anzac Day Dawn Service at the top of Kings Park. I have some pictures of the parade, but I'll have to wait to post them, as it's possible I'll get in trouble for "excessive" use of internet already...

Then I just lazed around. This was both good (om nom books nom! Mommy, you will love Tales of Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin) and bad –distractions are the only remedy I know for this homesickness. I did get myself a card for the local library! As if I needed another source of books when I should be writing papers, but I have uni-apathy like whoa. >.> It hasn’t helped that it started to feel pretty cold here; you all know how grumpy I can get when I don’t feel warm enough. The rain on Tuesday and Wednesday were a large part of why I barely got out of bed. I can’t even get a space heater since my landlord already warned us that utilities would go up if we didn’t reduce our electricity usage. D: Solution: hot tea. A LOT of hot tea….. And a home-made bed buddy when it really starts to freeze.

Cold and homesickness aside, I got to see a cool movie yesterday! Ben (who I met at the party last Friday) invited me to a showing of the new movie Thor with a Perth SF/Fantasy group called Genghis Con (cheaper group tickets ftw). IT’S FILMED AND SET IN NEW MEXICO. And co-stars Natalie Portman. And Thor himself is summed up neatly in the quote: “Does he need CPR? Because I totally know CPR….” It took monumental effort to contain my squeals of delight. Not gonna lie, in every outdoor scene I paid zero attention to the people, and instead studied the scenery. I scanned the horizon, aching for those familiar purple mountains, whose shapes I know better than the freckles on my face; I drank in the blue sky and even the stubby little junipers in the desert scenes made me happy because they were the trees I know. Even the goofy fake town reminded me of Moriarty, as it was when I was little, and Daddy and I worked in Dave’s Harley shop (I think it was the silly 1950s spiked ball thing on top of the buildings). Unfortunately, this did mean I probably talked poor Ben’s ear off trying, once again, to explain green chili on the way home. ^^;; Australians, I’ll figure out how to get real chili and make burritos or enchiladas or even pizza or something and just show you what I mean, since I’m clearly sounding like a crazy person at this point... I did manage to find this site, so I can better explain chili next time it, inevitably, comes up.

3 comments:

  1. Speaking of Star Trek/Sci Fi books, here is a funny site about bad cover art (Star Trek then... something else):

    http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/2010/12/honourable-mentions-7/

    http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/2011/04/web-of-angels/

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  2. lol Heck, ppl in CA thought I was crazy when talking about green chili! no worries! ;p

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  3. What's a "bed buddy"? Sounds sexual.

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