On Top of the World

I’m in NYC this week, so I may not be able to check your blogs (it depends on whether we have free internet access in our hotel room :)). I’ll be back in 2 weeks though!

I couldn’t decide which photo to post this week, so I’ve gone with two. The first one is a cool clock in Darling Harbour, Sydney. It tells you the date, time and current picture of the sky!

And the second is a huge sundial at Tower Hill station in London.

We’re off to NYC again! We’ve both spent ages packing; I don’t know why - it wasn’t this hard last year, but for some reason I just didn’t know what to pack and I was worried that I’d forgotten something. I’ve got the essentials, though - passport, money and underwear - so everything should be ok.

This morning M went to get his hair cut. He’s got a regular guy that he’s been going to for the last goodness-knows-how-long, which used to be local but now is considerably not local. I went with him because we had other stuff to do in preparation for the holiday, and while he was getting his hair cut I decided to get a coffee to alleviate my Caffeine Headache.

I never used to drink coffee until I was in year 11 (16 years old). My mum didn’t let me have coffee when I was growing up, only tea. I remember before I was of school-going age, she’d make herself a cup of coffee before watching Days of Our Lives, and I used to love the smell of the empty coffee cup, even though it was only instant coffee. I still love that smell today.

Going to an Anglican school, we had Religious Education classes right through primary school to the end of year 12, but we’d heard that years 11 and 12 were different, because instead of having the usual R.E. classes, you got to sit around and drink coffee and eat biscuits in the chaplain’s office, with not much education of a religious nature taking place at all.

Thus, I was quite disappointed when the school chaplain left the school before I got to year 11. By the time it was my turn for coffee and biscuits there was a new chaplain and, much to everyone’s dismay, our first R.E. class was held in a classroom and had decidedly religious content.

I really can’t remember how it happened, but in the end we did get to sit around in the chaplain’s office. I think at first it was because we said we’d talk about relevant material, but that soon stopped and was replaced with whatever entered our teenaged heads.

After I left school, I didn’t really drink much coffee until I started working, and that was just because it was something to do, a reason to get up from my desk and walk around. And now it appears I’m addicted. I have tried to cut back though - my routine now is one cup as soon as I get to work, another either straight after or mid-morning, and another straight after lunch.

I’ve tried to quit cold turkey but the headaches have meant I’ve always gone back to that one soothing cup… and then another… and possibly another after that. But now that I’ve started trying to make sure I drink more water thoughout the day, not having a coffee isn’t so bad. So, trying to replace coffee with water has not only been good for my health, but the ridiculously frequent trips to the bathroom have meant that I still have an excuse to get up from my desk.

This is a teddy bear that my husband gave me for Christmas a few years ago. I’d seen him for sale in the Post Office previously, and commented how cute and soft he was, and he bought it for me. I was so happy - it just goes to show that the best presents aren’t always the most expensive.

I’m going to be in NYC for the next 2 weeks of the Photo Hunt, so I won’t be able to come and visit your blogs, but I’ll still be playing!

This week you get two Photo Hunts for the price of one! I missed the one a couple of weeks ago, which was “Safe”, so I thought I’d post it under this week’s theme.

When I’m not sure what to post for a theme, I usually find a way to incorporate my cat, and I almost did this week but then I found this instead. These photos are from when I fell down my stairs. A couple of days after, a nice pink bruise was forming:

And a couple of days after that, it had grown into this!

And now for the theme from a couple of weeks ago…

My house backs onto a national park, and just before fire season starts the fire department does burnoffs. We’d been out on the night they were doing it, and came home to the heavy smell of smoke, which was ok as we knew it was going to be happening. What we didn’t plan on is that not all of the fires had been put out. Well, of course there were embers burning all over the place, but this was large enough and close enough to our house that we got a slight case of the heebie-jeebies. We watched it for a while, thinking it would go out by itself, but it didn’t. It even seemed to flare up every now and then (click on the photos below for larger versions):

My husband called 000 and let them know of the fire, and he was told that someone would come and have a look. We waited a while, and saw a truck drive up behind our house and we thought they’d come to check it out, but they just kept driving and didn’t come back. Two more calls to 000 later, a fire engine finally turned up - they probably thought we were suffering from a case of paranoia and came to shut us up. The fireman was really nice, and said that the fire was bigger than they’d like to leave burning. You can see the little strip of fire next to the fire engine.

Then the cool part happened - a fireman got out the hose and blasted the fire, and it was gone in less than a second. Spiffy! I included this last photo because a) I think it looks cool, and b) this was the ’safe’ part I was getting to - the fire was put out and everything was ok.

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

I’m back after another long break of not writing anything. I’ve had plenty of time to blog, but I just haven’t had the inclination. And since all I’m really doing is thinking out loud and not being read by anyone, my absence didn’t really matter. But now that I’ve just had my domain renewal payment automatically taken out, I figure I should write something.

Well, the last thing I wrote about was my iMac and the pixel trouble. The good news is that Apple have agreed to replace it, and hopefully it will be shipped sometime soon and won’t have anything wrong with it. The bad news is that M spent ages talking to people from Apple, and then the Office of Fair Trading in order for it to happen. I’m trying not to get my hopes too high about this one not having any problems, though, since 3 out of 4 iMacs we’ve looked at have had at least one dodgy pixel. But we’ll see.

It’s just under 2 weeks until we go to NYC. I suppose I’m looking forward to it, but just like the holiday last year it feels like something we’re talking about and not actually doing. I’ve put some new stuff on my mp3 player (although I wish now that it had a higher capacity), so it’s pretty much ready to entertain me for the 24 hours it’s going to take to get there. I’m sure M will be fresh as a daisy after travelling in business class, but I’m assuming I’ll be feeling a little worse for wear. At least we arrive towards the end of the day so I won’t have to try to stay awake for too long. It was really hard trying to stay awake all day when we got to London at 6am.

We’ve got a list of things we want to do - there are one or two touristy things that we didn’t get to do last time, but other than that we’ll be trying to do some different things, and since we’ll be there for 2 weeks we won’t have to rush around too much. M will be at a conference for 2 days, so I’m still trying to work out what I’m going to do by myself. My mother, of course, wants me to stay in the hotel room all day. Errm.

My work had its annual “outing” the weekend before last. It was dinner in a location in the middle of the city, which made a nice change from the outings we usually have in some far-flung place or other. We got a taxi with the view to drinking a lot of alcohol, which I did. I made myself a little ill, but fortunately only after we got home, and so the next day was a total write-off. Last weekend M’s niece got married so we went to her wedding. Fortunately we knew people there, so it was good. More alcohol was consumed but there must have been some effect of the previous weekend still lingering because I really didn’t like the wine and I didn’t even finish my beer. So that was a bit disappointing, but it did mean that I was free to go shopping in the city with M the next day. He bought a couple of suits in preparation for the trip, and he also got some really nice shirts and ties.

That’s about all… oh, we bought tickets to see Little Britain live in February. Unfortunately the only good seats were individual ones, so we’re not sitting together, but it’s not like we’re going to be chatting during the show anyway, so I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I’m quite looking forward to it! The Pirates of Penzance is coming in January, and I wouldn’t mind seeing that as well, but after paying $130 a pop for the LB tickets, we might give it a miss.

I am rather late with this Photo Hunt, but hopefully late is better than never, although I also missed the Photo Hunt before this one which was a shame because I had the photos all chosen… so maybe I’ll post it later anyway, even though it will be out of order and way too late. But the theme last weekend was Window(s), so here is my offering:

I’m sure you all know what this is, but in case you don’t, je vous présente… Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris!