Sigh

So after waiting two months for my supervisor to bother reading a draft I got it back. And he hates it. I told P1 a while ago that the worst thing you can get back is something with almost no comments on it because it means that it’s beyond saving. I changed my mind. Worse than that is something with a solid column of red down one side which is a combination of chunks being deleted and comments such as ‘what is the point of this? why did you even do this study?’

Not to mention when he got too annoyed with doing that and started leaving comments like ‘this paragraph doesn’t fit. Delete.’ and then ‘read comments for above paragraph’

Which wouldn’t be all that bad – I mean at least I know where I’m going wrong (answer, pretty much everywhere) except that I’ve been waiting so long I actually had another draft ready to go and a third one almost there.

I’m just glad that the flu made me lazy and I didn’t get much done for the last week because I was too tire. Everything else from the last 8 weeks has just been deleted and started over.

And I pay R16000 a year for this?

If it wasn’t for the gaping 5 year hole in my CV I’d be halfway to Sweden by now. Either way I’d always expected the next time I cried myself to sleep to be over boy trouble or friend drama. I expected wrong.

Oh well. Back to work.

Hoping it’s just hormones

So I’ve had an awesome couple of weeks. Busy in the extreme, but always things that I wanted to do. Admittedly, my decision to calm down on the sport and the social life and spend more time doing my actual ‘job’ (it gets inverted commas because I pay to do it, or at best beg for scholarships) has crashed and burned and right now I’m out more than I was before (if that was at all possible).

So last weekend with the kiddies was awesome. It started badly with me having to spend the afternoon teaching drunk students ,followed by arriving at the field-trip place with a busload of drunk students, and eating a luminous purple meal (yes, purple). From there it really picked up though and I had a blast, leaving exhausted, but happy and sunburned and achy but in the best possible way.

Last week was heeeeecTIC – Monday night i was out, Tuesday morning I had a super-early start to teach my kiddies, Tuesday evening i went back to Tai chi for the first time in over two weeks. It was SO nice to be back, although I was very sore afterwards and for the next day or two!

Wednesday was skating – I got myself examined which was scary and I started shaking – this wasn’t made better by the fact that they made me take three exams at once (two for classes I skipped and one for the class I’m in) which included steps I’d never heard of before. The tester was kind enough to demonstrate so i could try them out though!

From there I had to hand my skates in to be sharpened, which was sad because I’d been looking forward to some skating-in-circles-thinking time, but good because I know that they’ll be sorted out properly, and I had time to go for a run afterwards which was nice!

Thursday I skipped tai chi and went with the Oracle, the nameless one and CG to meet up with some people and play some pool. I hadn’t played in six weeks and my skills went from abysmal to totally non-existent, but I had a blast – it was really nice to see the Oracle (who is quite shy sometimes and won’t join us often) having fun and dancing and chatting to people. CG was also looking like she had fun for the first time in ages.

Of course the time flew and before I’d realised it was 1am and we were going for pizza while my mother’s panicky messages started to come through and… so much for an early night… and of course I had to be up early the next morning and considering I’d only been to bed at 2:30 – it sucked.

Friday was The Day Of Many Meetings as usual, although my students took one look at me and decided to behave themselves which was fantastic. I nearly kicked a couple out of the class and it clamed them down a bit (even though they were still annoying). The plasticine I was using to teach them stained my hands and arms (and everything I touched, like my ears) purple. After that I went off to watch a movie and was asleep within a couple of minutes.

Saturday was my first day back at work since the fieldtrips and it was really nice and quiet and good to be back! I went home and passed out for a few hours and then headed off to meet someone’s new puppy (so so cute!). From there we had no real plans so we ended up going to Pretoria for a club launch which was hilarious and awesome – it was like a scene from a movie with glowsticks and bubbles falling from the ceiling and people in the most bizarre outfits ever. I was in jeans and a t-shirt but nobody seemed to mind! heck, i even managed to get two glowsticks from random strangers so that I could play the drums on the table…

On the way home we went to investigate a potential giant hole in the road only to find that it was surrounded by quicksand-y stuff. We figured this out when I sank up to my knees and had to be rescued. When we stopped off to swap cars I had to change into a semi-strangers PJs to go home in, while I thought my shoes were beyond repair.

So once again – a planned early night ended in me getting home at 4am, wearing someone else’s clothes. Awkward.

Yesterday I spent reading and sleeping and catching up on exercise a little bit. I also went back to church (I hadn’t been in a few weeks with all the trips and stuff) and today has been a day of working, marking, puppy-sitting, teaching (I want Luke’s students, they’re so much better behaved than mine!) and general movement.

I’m just feeling a little bit low at the moment. I know that by nature I’m a total loner, and all of the craziness is exhausting, but at the same time, looking back on each experience, it was awesome, I’d do it all again…

But right now I want to go and hide under a rock and not see another human being for a while. People are exhausting. I don’t want to be around them for a bit.

I just hope I can get out of this mood soon, as I have a crazy weekend coming up!

DramaDramaDrama

Sorry to Sarah (again) but Hatting must wait, it’s been a tough week…

On Tuesday Laura came to visit! She’s been based in Oxford doing scary things like a masters in running around Columbia and a doctorate in visiting SA often and having a ridiculously dark tan for someone who lives in the rainlands…

Halfway through an awesome chat with her and The Great One (she’s like an oracle of advice for people like me who have no idea how to speak human half the time) I got a phone call from my mother to say she’d been in a car accident so I rushed off to fetch her.

She’s fine (albeit a bit shaken up), but the car isn’t, so after much paperwork (insurance accident reports and so on) and my mild freak-out at having to be the responsible adult for my mother (thanks for listening Luke), we’re also trying to figure out how to deal with being a car short, with me pulling long hours in the lab, my Dad (who came back from a business trip yesterday) working like a maniac and my mother’s tendency to never stay in one place for more than a couple of hours (her work involves lots of travelling and is relatively close to home so she’s used to driving backwards and forwards several times a day).

So I’ve been playing taxi-driver a lot, which means I have to limit time in the lab a bit so I have to focus more. It also means I’m three steps from foetal position under my desk most of the time, as my mother likes to schedule meetings in/around rush hour. There’s a reason I leave home at 5:30am twice a week and after 9 the other days, and why I never leave the lab before 6pm… People in Joburg can’t drive. Seriously!

At least nobody got hurt, the other person admitted to being at fault and has insurance and it was on a quiet street so there weren’t too many problems post-crash. I’m also hoping to use this as an opportunity to get my mom to go to the gym with me a bit and get some exercise, I nearly got her to dancing class this morning so maybe next week…

We’ll make it work, we have to, her car needs a new front axle, so it’ll take a while. I just feel like I’m living in a sitcom: “Sorry, I can’t go out tonight, my mom has the car!”

Oh and my phone died. As in the three buttons I absolutely cannot use the phone without (like the ‘ok’ button) don’t work…

Because this week wasn’t being nasty enough. On the plus side I get to use my dad’s old phone (which is like one of those nokia blackberry-esque thingies) which is AWESOME! and I’m about a year overdue for an upgrade anyway, so I’ll be phone-shopping with my father soon. Maybe me awesome cousin who knows about these things can suggest a new phone? I’m not handling the QWERTY keyboard well, I keep pressing letters more than once because I think of ‘L’ as ‘555’ and so on… I’ve also got longish nails right now so the tiny buttons are being really difficult. Any suggestions are welcome!

And Luke and Leia are back this weekend!

And I just had such awesome coffee!

Oh, and a preview, just for Sarah (and for Tamara considering you can just see the edge of one of the earrings I got at her open house last year!):

Keeping busy

Went for a quick bite to eat and a drink with two friends at six last night (to celebrate one of them getting a shiny new car) and wound up getting home at midnight. It was really nice to spend some real quality time with one of them (I hadn’t seen her since I got back) and my worries about her not getting along with the other friend were unfounded – they got along like a house on fire which was awesome!

I’m going to see these guys this weekend:

I’m so excited! I used to be hectically into the local music scene but I’ve lost touch with it over the last few years and I can’t wait to get back out there.

I got a new CD by these guys:

And I’m off to the bush on Monday with ‘the girls’ which is horrible because I had to miss a 25th (that I RSVPed to months ago) and had to cancel on, plus i have HEAPS of work to get through which I’ll have to take with me. At the same time it’s awesome to get out of the city for a little bit.

Who knows, maybe there will be lizards?

Sjoe!

So this weekend was INSANE! I spent most of it rushing around from place to place and dying of heat (never plan four different things on the Saturday after the Killers concert…), but it was totally awesome anyway.

I’m too tired to give many details so here you go:

We went to the KILLERS! It was awesome!

 

Although there were rather a lot of people. i was lucky enough to be able to see the stage (as I’m a bit on the tall side), even though we were behind about six GIaNT mutants (who were all friends, which was so strange). My friends are shorter than me but seemed ok with looking at the screens and jumping around like maniacs.

Witness the rather scary progression: from all dressed-up, to all-dressed up and rained on (sorry for the weird crop, CG would kill me for putting photos of her up here)

 

… to exhausted, rained-on and all-screamed out (and still wearing a seatbelt). I have to admit to spazzing-out completely when they started the “I’ve got soul” bit. I’m talking jumping up and down and SHRIEKING “It’s my song! Oh my gosh! it’s my song! they’re playing my song! Oh my gosh ohmygoshohmgosh!” and so on. What can I say, I have a a history with it. Note the flashing bunny-ears as well. They kept us entertained for most of the evening (the others got pink ones, I got blue ones) as well as the drive home, not to mention annoying enough of the tall people to get them out of our way…

After getting back and joining in an epic guitar-hero rock band game and generally being  bit over-tired and therefore manic we collapsed and I woke up the next morning to rush home and change, meet someone for coffee and go off to Tamara’s open house market-ty thing. It was AWESOME, the jewellery was absolutely stunning and I’ve already hijacked a Christmas present for me (they look better on me than the potential giftee anyway). Don’t judge me!

From there it was off to Athena’s braai, where I met a bunch of new people, got to document extreme pool-entries:

Appreciated some awesome T-shirts:

  

Reconnected with an old friend (who is also a blogger…). If we ever start a band i think this should be the album-cover. The angry face in my case was the product of extreme exhaustion, not unhappiness!

Appreciated Athena’s super-braai skills (she’s vegetarian, yet quite talented at cooking dead things)

Attempted to take another lab-photo

If we could stop laughing for long enough to take it…

If you’d seen attempt number two, you’d understand my grimace…

And of course, flashing (and fluffy) blue ears, while a total bonus, didn’t quite fulfil my weekend-hat-requirement. Fortunately Tom’s hat DID. Anyone in Spain who feels like buying me a hat, please do so! This one is AWESOME!

Unfortunately while the fun didn’t end there, I left my cameras at home for the rest of the weekend, so you’ll have to take my word for it!

Now to recover and face the week ahead! Which is easier when you have exciting things, like my appointment to re-blueify my hair tomorrow. And of course, visitors like this in the lab:

3…2…1… AWWWWWWWW!