I’m ready to burst. We went out for dinner tonight for the Festival of Food, which is where you pay $20 each for a 4-course meal. It was quite nice, although my steak was definitely not the medium I’d requested, but more like well-done. Still, yummy and now I’m ready for a nap.

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In the last couple of months I have developed an obsession with Boston Legal. I left work early today because I read on the BL site that I visit that there was going to be a live webcast of “An Evening with Boston Legal” which was held in Los Angeles. It was due to start at 3pm my time, so I left work at around 2:00 to ensure I had plenty of time to get home and ready.

It was quite good - it was just a panel of the cast members as well as the show’s writers and directors, moderated by Camryn Manheim who asked the panel various questions. It only went for an hour, but I think it was worth leaving work for. And hey, it’s Friday, so given the option of staying at work or going home… well, it wasn’t a difficult decision.

I found out a couple of weeks ago that James Spader is going to be on The View on November 21, which is when I’ll be in NYC. I went to the website to see about getting tickets but it said they’d already given all of them out for the next whatever months, so I’m going to try to get standby tickets. M is already aware of this and has been informed that he can do his own thing if he doesn’t want to come :) I would ordinarily have no interest whatsoever in going to see The View - way too much oestrogen for me - but I’m sure I could manage it if I actually got tickets to this one.

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Another year of tafe is nearly over. At the bridging course last night there was a guest speaker, who came to talk about the interpreting course being held next year. If you pass all the prerequisites of the course, you are awarded NAATI accreditation as a para-professional interpreter, which means you can get work as an interpreter (NAATI is the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters and accreditation from them is essential if you want to be an interpreter in any language in Australia). She succeeded in completely scaring the crap out of me and virtually everyone in the class, so I don’t think I’ll do it. I still have one more year of my current Auslan certificate, which is 2 nights a week, and the interpreting course is another 7 hours on top of that. So if I did both, I’d be studying a total of 13 hours over 4 nights a week, and I don’t think I’d be able to cope with that in addition to working full-time.

And, unlike the tafe course I’m doing at the moment which is has virtually no work outside class hours, the interpreting course does have quite a lot of extra work involved, and as much as I don’t want to fall behind my other classmates who would be doing the course, I think it would be too much for me.

I felt a bit depressed, realising that I wouldn’t be able to do it, but I guess when it really comes down to it, I’m not studying Auslan with the goal of becoming an interpreter - it was just to learn a new language and hopefully become good enough to be able to communicate most things I wanted to communicate. Of course, fluency would be fantastic, and it’s something I would love to have, but I have a job already and it’s not as though I’m trying to start a career. There’s no rush for me to do every course available to me just because it is being offered.

But the main reason I won’t be doing it is that I don’t think I’m good enough. The guest speaker said that it’s not a language acquisition course, and you’re expected to be fluent or near-fluent in both languages when you start, which I’m definitely not - it’s why I’m learning the language after all! I don’t really have any confidence in my abilities, and I think that taking the year to finish off my certificate and hopefully gain some more confidence will be good, as well as the much lighter workload. And if the course is offered again (apparently they haven’t had an Auslan component in the course for 5 years because they didn’t have the numbers), I might do it then.