Never Established

1. How to poach an egg
2. How to flip a pancake.
3. How to make a budget.
4. How to drive.
5. How to write an essay.
6. How to do makeup.
7. How to perform CPR.
8. How to change a nappy.
9. Learn another language (French).
10. Travel internationally by myself.

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I want to start taking my own photos to add to my posts,but at the moment my camera is broken! I don’t seem to be able to get the battery to charge. I’m hoping to fix it soon, though.

Only two exams left and then I’m free for a month! I’m heading to the library today to study for my business subject. Surprising as it is, I’m actually quite enjoying it, to the point where I think I’m going to look into it as a ‘once I graduate’ area, because for me it’s just so interesting. I’m actually enjoying study! When did that happen?

On the other front, however, this is not so true. French remains a constant, poor-achievement thorn in my side. On the up side, this is the last learning French course I have to do. I have spoken to my advisers and am able to do French translation next semester. This is French into English translation — and I’m good at English! Am actually really looking forward to it.

So…I guess that’s all for now. Just a quick update to let you know that I do intend to keep updating! I’ve missed blogging.

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I had an awful dream last night.

Well…no. The dream was wonderful. But it was one of those dreams that were so good that you wake up and then realise it was just a dream, and all of a sudden you’re in an absolute funk.

It feels ridiculous that I’m so starved for affection that dreaming I’m in love can put me into this mood. It’s not even like the dream was a perfect life. This person was so right, it was one of those things where I just knew, and it all worked. But there were problems, too. At one point he got so angry at me he simply wouldn’t talk to me. I had to live in the same house and he would just be not where I was at all times, and it made me so sad but it didn’t stop me from loving him. We made up after that fight. And then his mother was such a witch and I didn’t much like her at all… it’s not like my dream had the perfect life. But it did have that connection, something which I have yet to feel.

I loved this person, completely and utterly, and was secure in the knowledge that he loved me…

…and then I woke up.

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…The stories are coming back. It’s so strange to me, I’ve lived without them for so long. When he died it was like all the creativity had been sucked out of me. I wanted to deny at the time, tried desperately to write something, anything, but it was all just…crap. My heart wasn’t in it and the passion I once had for it was gone.

But now…I haven’t written anything yet. But I get flashes. Dialogue. Scenes. Ideas. It’s like the story is waiting for me. Waiting for me to be ready.

And maybe I will be, one day soon. I like to think so, anyway.

God, I just want to go travelling so badly. So badly. I want to get on a plane and go somewhere….anywhere. I don’t care. I want to meet new people and get out of this funk and be so tired and content with life. But instead, I’m just treading water and I’m not really making any progress. I’m not being the person I wanted to be. I’m completely scattered and I just need to get my shit together but I…haven’t.

Instead, I’ve got a cold and I’m sitting in my house watching What Happens In Vegas and eating wedges with obscene amounts of sour cream. God, my life is interesting.

God, I had a great Easter weekend but it’s proving to be most expensive. My friend and I went out and got a little trashy but more to the point, we lost our purse (since we were sharing). And by ‘we’ I mean ‘I’. Thus, I need to replace not only my ID and bankcards, but also hers — and her phone. So the expenses keep mounting up and I can tell already that it is going to be a very tight month. :/

One of my best friends, my flatmate actually, had her 21st birthday party, and that was the theme. She actually went as a guitar — there’s this brilliant dress you can get which is shaped just like a guitar. And if you actually dressed up, you would get free drinks at the bar all night. Any drinks, spirits included.

Which was fun, incredibly fun, but also a little deadly. It’s 7pm now and I’m still not quite ‘right’. I’m just drinking some more water and I think that’s helped with the shakes. Eep.

So the theme was Sex, Drugs, Rock n Roll. We got completely dressed up. There was a love guru and a pimp, I went as a crackwhore, there was a guitar and someone dressed as Russell Brand, Meatloaf, Kurt Cobain, punk rockers, and one friend came as a vicar’s wife.

It was absolutely brilliant. I’ll put photos up if I find any.

Yeap. We have a winner.

I arrived at the dental surgery and went in to see the nurse. She had me hold a basin and then rinsed out the wounds and got me to spit the water out, so that we knew it was clean. Then she got a funny metal thing to hold my cheek back and started prodding around. “Does this hurt?” she asked. “This?” I shake my head. At one point I feel a twinge, so I shrug. She took it as an affirmative: she said she needed to ‘dress’ the wound. She took out some dressing coated with clove oil, and before I knew it, she’d forced it into the hole. I flinched, whimpered, but it was over quickly. My tooth was throbbing. What the hell? This hurt worse. She mentions she needs some more, then gets extra and pushes it in.

I can’t help it. I start crying, and I just don’t stop. Partially it’s the pain now — because holy fuck, it was worse than when I walked in! — and partially the wear from an entire week of pain. The tears keep leaking out and I just want to sit down and have a cry somewhere.

The nurse felt awful, but I just couldn’t stop. It just kept going and going, and I was upset too because I was worried I’d scare away the customers. I managed to calm myself down enough to get outside of the surgery, then I called my Mum and cried to her for a good half hour. The pain was just so intense and so much worse than it had been before I even walked in. How was that fair? Finally I made my Mum distract me with trivial news, so that I could calm down enough to get home.

An hour and a half later, the dressing had completely numbed the pain from the tooth, including the throbbing that was previously there. I felt so much better, almost as if I were completely back to normal. What a miracle oil! I guess sometimes pain is not necessarily a bad thing.

(Now I think I need to get the nurse a card or something, because I made her feel awful.)

So I called this morning at half 9 and have an appointment for half 3. The nurse seems to think she’ll need to dress the wound? I have no idea. I don’t understand it much at all, to be honest. I’m truly hoping that this is just a problem with the stitches, because it seems like Dry Socket requires a lot of work to get through, and I don’t have time for that amount of work.

I’ll let you know what the result is afterwards.

I would make the worst spy. Really. There would be no James Bond heroics, no honour in the face of torture. I’m quite confident that you could simply show me pictures of torture and I’d break. You wouldn’t even need to touch me.

Right now, I’m just waiting to break. In approximately 9 hours I will be calling my dental surgeon and asking him what the hell is going on with my mouth, because I’ve had enough. I had my post-op appointment on Friday and he said everything was fine, fantastically clean and I went on my merry way. Friday night, and I’m in an agony. My left cheek is just pulsing, it’s all swollen on the inside and I don’t know what to do. I have to wait it out until I can have Panadeine, Panadol’s stronger cousin, and then with a combination of that and Ibuprofin I finally get to sleep.

I wake up Saturday morning with a slight throb; I take some more Panadeine and then I’m fine on Panadol for the rest of the day. Until about 5 when the pain starts up again, same place, same pain, and I get to the point where I feel physically sick. I call my Mum in what is basically tears, because I don’t know why it hurts. Everything I’m reading about is saying ‘Dry socket, dry socket’, but if it’s that then why does it only hurt at night? Mum says that it’s probably my stitches, which apparently tighten before they begin to dissolve. Apparently Mum does not dissolve stitches. She says that if it still hurts by Monday-Tuesday, then I should contact the dentist; perhaps I am the same as her.

The pain starts to subside at about 10:30 – 11pm, which is around when I can take another tablet anyway. I get to sleep and wake up at 5am with the same throbbing. Get up long enough to take tablets, then back to bed.

Wake up this morning. No problem. Panadol and ibuprofen. I am now at the stage where I can eat (!!) things. Real foods. I chew eggs and pasta and even hot chips (!) no problem. Until about 8:30. Then the throbbing starts. I took my last painkiller at 8 and, foolish me, I was cocky and took Panadol. I cannot have Panadeine until 12 as a result. So I’m sitting here nursing a cheek that feels like someone’s just hit it with a frying pan, counting down the hours until I can call the stupid dentist to find out what’s wrong.

Although, knowing me, I’ll wake up at 8 or 9 feeling fine, and will forget about it until 8 o’clock tomorrow night. And then curse myself at a volume which will be heard worldwide.

Because sometimes that’s all you can do. And I mean this in the completely physical sense, for once.

I am 3 and a half days into the process of wisdom teeth removal. You’d think once they were out and done with, no problem, right? Oh god, was I mistaken. The first few days were fine. Tedious, but fine. Tuesday night was particularly bad, but Wednesday was fine. Today, right now, is bad.

It’s not the chewing, so much, as it is the throbbing. I can feel my cheeks throbbing and though the swelling isn’t as bad as it has been, the pain is worse. I just wasn’t expecting this. I’ve given up trying to fix it. I’ve had ice on it — still throbs. I’ve taken painkillers, and they helped for a while, but then the  pain is back. I’m supposed to take more painkillers at — oh. In 2 minutes.

Well.

That might be why, then. I’m going to go and pop some more pills and hopefully feel better.

We’ve been back for a week and I’m already tired. Back for a week, and I’m already feeling guilty about the idea of sleeping instead of working. Already I’m beginning to stress about the amount of work I have to do.

But maybe that’s a good thing? Maybe that means that, instead of doing almost nothing until the exams, I’ll be freaked out and stressed (and therefore working) right up until exam time, and then exams will be easy? Because that’d be great.

So we finally have internet at our house, just in time to knuckle down for uni. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I would have loved some time to just veg before uni, but it’s certainly a great thing now to have it for the study, since it’s all very internet intense this semester. My french class requires me to log on and watch at least one video a week — which sounds like fun, but they can be quite complex, so it’s necessary to watch it a couple of times and space it out in order to actually understand what you’re watching. Meanwhile, my law class has decided that it will no longer print anything, in order to save paper. Which is fine, but also incredibly annoying, and since I can’t print on double sided pages, I end up using more anyway.

Must dash, talking to my sister, but expect an update soon.

Just a quick post to say that after tonight, I’ll be disappearing for a while. I’m going back to Sydney and we still don’t have internet. Not least because we just haven’t organised it. And , I suppose, there hasn’t been much time between Christmas and New Year. I’ll have to research it tonight and find out the best deal, because otherwise it’ll take another few months.

So I’ll be here, I just may not be posting.

1. What did you do in 2009  that you’d never done before?
Lived in Scotland, cooked for myself, moved into an apartment, achieved a credit for French, turned 21, spent my birthday in Paris, visited Nice, became a size 14…

2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next this year?
I don’t do resolutions, I make goals. The difference being that one is negative (“I will not smoke, I will not eat all the Tim Tams”) and the other is measurable. Did I meet them? Most of them. As for this next year, it’s going to be the year of discipline. My goals are: 1) Lose the rest of this weight, 2) Achieve 3 Ds or higher and a Credit for French, and 3) Save as much money as possible. No splurging, no ‘oh, x won’t matter that much’….just discipline.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
My sister! I now have a niece!

4. Did anyone close to you die?
My granddad. Exactly a week after my 21st, while I was in Nice.

5. What countries did you visit?
The UK and France.

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
More money!

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
8th January: The day I left for Scotland.
26th January: The day I moved into my apartment.
20 June: My 21st.
27th July: The day I flew home.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Making soup! I learnt how to do it from scratch. I even peeled the tomatoes and everything!

9. What was your biggest failure?
Not getting to my goal weight this year. But that’s all right — I had other stuff going on.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
I caught the flu, then had a respiratory infection that the doctors didn’t pick up for about 3 months.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
My laptop!

12. Where did most of your money go?
Travel. All of it.

13. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Fitness! And feeling strong.

14. What song will always remind you of 2009?
Don’t Trust Me.

15. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder?
Happier? Less stressed, anyway. But also more stressed in a way. I’m not sure.
b) thinner or fatter?
The same! Maybe a little thinner.
c) richer or poorer?
Poorer. As poor as poor.

16. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Healthy eating, looking after myself.

17. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Eating! Spending money.

19. Did you fall in love in 2009?
Nope.

20. What was your favorite TV program?
House. Always.

21. What was the best book you read?
No idea.

22. What was your favorite film of this year?
I don’t know! I didn’t really see any.

23. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I had a party with my family and friends, saw a play, then flew to Paris.

24. What kept you sane?
Myself.

25. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
No idea.

26. Who did you miss?
My Mum and my friends in Australia, and then my Mum and my friends in Scotland!
27. Who was the best new person you met?
Duffy.

Hi everyone! Just a quick note to say Merry Christmas, hope you’ve all had an amazing time, wherever you are and whoever you’re with. Enjoy the holidays and the giving. I’ll be seeing you all soon!

Yesterday I went into the city and did my Basic First Aid course with St. John’s Ambulance. I’d mostly decided to do in for this job: I really, really want it and the second I realised I needed a First Aid Certificate I found the soonest course and enrolled. It helps, of course that I’ve been tossing up doing this course for a few months now.

The basic first aid course essentially equips you for the scary stuff. Heart attack, bleeding, how to bandage, how to give CPR, how to use a defibrillator. You can do it after the course, but would you really want to? I think the motto I took away from it, personally, was ‘treat as much as possible (i.e. stem the bleeding) and then get help quick smart. Full stop. I mean, it’s not like I’m a doctor.

So I complete the course, get my certificate and am driving home. It starts to drizzle – nothing horrible, just enough that I have to turn my windscreen wipers on. Enough to realise that half my wiper has somehow disappeared. How do you lose half a wiper, I wonder? The short wiper was on the driver’s side, and the rain was beginning to mess up my view. I slow down. It’s the beginning of the Christmas road toll; I don’t want my biggest achievement to be ‘another casualty’.

I’m driving along quite happily, pulling up to a light behind a green car. I’m not thinking or singing or doing anything, really. I’m mostly just staring into space. And so I’m shocked when suddenly I here a car horn followed by a smash. I look up, and in those 2, 3 seconds, three cars collided and then skidded off in different directions. A side mirror skidded and then stopped, just in front of the car next to me.

I stop. Holy shit, I think, I’m not actually able to handle this, I just did the course. The car in front of me sees that there’s enough space, and slowly inches past. He wasn’t involved in the accident. No damage. I move further forward. I stop just long enough to check the participants. Everyone is standing upright, everyone looks fine, they’re all talking and looking shaken, but fine. I bite my lip, wonder whether or not to offer help. I check the cars. Front and back bumpers, all of them.  Glancing blows.

I look at the people again, and make my decision. I drive past.

The words of my trainer at St. John’s come back to me: “If you aren’t already involved in the accident, then you aren’t legally required to help. Whether or not you do is entirely a moral decision. You can put your head down and say, ‘I can’t see you, I can’t see you’, and that’s fine. If it’s fine with you.”

Part of me wanted to jump out and be helpful. The other part was thinking “Everyone seems fine, and is one day of training really enough?”

Long, LONG overdue. I’ve rehauled the entire back of the website, so it’s all up to date and done. And, as you can tell, I’ve also played with the layout. More updates will follow — and more pictures, hopefully. There’s still some tweaking I want to do to this layout — I’d like a picture up the top, to begin with, and some colour, etc. But we’ll get to that when we come to it.

Have to go. Mum needs the internet. Will be back in about an hour, still messing around.

From this point forward, we will be cleansing, toning, moisturising, exfoliating, shaving, waxing, buffing, and primping — many of these daily — until winter shows her refreshing face. We will use products to make us look like we’ve got ‘beach tousled’ hair…and more products to stop us from really having beach tousled hair. For those that didn’t start waxing their legs in winter…too late, the razor is now your best friend. There will be layers of fake tan followed by sunscreen (because real tans are bad), artless hair that took hours to achieve, flawless complexions that have 6 layers of makeup…

Don’t you just love Summer?

I am claiming this title. I officially consider myself a domestic goddess. I’m unsure of the exact requirements for the position, but I feel that, regardless of how one defines it, I am one. I can cook, I make chocolates from moulds for Christmas, I am sewing the Christmas presents, and just generally am loving the zen that comes from being homey.

This sewing thing is wonderful. It’s like doing maths — there’s tricks and patterns, and it’s similar to doing a problem or equation that you think you can’t handle and then getting it right…that feeling is wonderful. But it’s more rewarding, too, because you can see it take shape as you go, can see where it all works and how it works. I love it.

It’s also become this wonderful creative outlet, because you are being creative, but it’s also structured. I’m thinking of taking up scrapbooking, too, but then I realised that it is actually very expensive to do so. I’ve restricted myself so that I can’t do anything of the sort until such time as I’ve found myself a job. I need the extra income, and as a reward, I can look at delving into the realm of creative practices.