Word to the wise

Word of advice: don't be me. Weird things happen to me and to those around me (IF I happen to be there)...

So anyway, after an awesome Christmas in July celebration on Friday (being in the southern hemisphere, our Christmas is boiling hot and eating Turkey and pudding is unpleasant - we do it anyway - so we celebrate it in winter as well!) I dragged myself off to work on Saturday morning.

It was a quiet shift, made interesng by the fact that we had the world's cutest puppy looking for a home, and it stayed with me all morning ion order to be more visible to potential owners. It was exhausted from crying all night (missing brothers and sisters I assume) and so quite often someone would hold it and it would fall asleep and they would sort of look at it and melt. As for me, I was a big pile of goo by the end of my shift!

At the same time I was working on some nuclear physics problems I have to solve in order to get the people in the radioactive science department (name of department, not a description) to let me use their equipment. I asked the vet if he could help, but after about half an hour of brainstorming he ran off and got his old textbook. Bearing in mind that he studied at the only veterinary science usiversity in the country, which happens to be bilingual, I guess it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did that the book was in Afrikaans.

The vet is fluent, and I'm not bad, but between us it took about an hour to find the right chapter and once we had we were pretty useless, so we played with the puppy instead! I'm hoping to get a chance to talk to a physicist friend of my parents tomorrow or so and get some help there.

After all that I went off to Bobbi Brown and had my makeup done (the staff were being evaluated or something and I'd been invited along to guinea-pig) which was a lot of fun as usual! And from there I headed off to a birthday party. This was also awkward as I knew very few people (I think I had met the birthday girl once before) and the music was so loud that we were limited to talking to the people right next to us, rather than the table. Birthday Girl was quite annoyed that we weren't mingling, but she wouldn't understand that a big group was impossible at those volumes!

I met a few cool people, heard some really dodgy jokes, caught up with La and giggled at the male models on FTV and the random camera angles they use, and found myself confused as to why on earth the bathrooms are at the top of some really steep stairs... Towards the end I had included myself into one of the dodgier in-jokes, with my friends apologising profusely for exposing me to such awful guys (not realising that I was giving as good as I got because I'm pretty used to that level of humour - we're biologists for heaven's sakes!) and giggling helplessly.

And then I wound up spending half an hour chatting to a pretty cool guy. I was completely thrown five minutes later when he took my hands, stared into my eyes and asked me out. Of course I couldn't hear him so I said "WHAT?" and he had to repeat himself about three times before I said "WHA-Oh!"

So before The Date I visited La and we were panicking about the whole situation, while shrieking with laughter at the fact that the guy she was working with was wearing a thong (under white pants) and reliving the dodgier stories from the night before, only to look up and see BOTH my bosses had come to get movies. With their kids. And they were looking mildly freaked out!

For the record, it wasn't all that bad, I had fun. Which I guess is why you should give people a chance before freaking out about spending time with them!

And I did Tai Chi this mornign and there was no instructor so we basically went through all the forms, so I got to join in the 24 and 42 hand forms! It was insane, there's so much going on and htere were some high kicks and I fell over a lot, but I also had a bunch of the advanced students helping me so it was a lot of fun!