A Much-Needed Update from My Sick Bed

Soooooo it’s been a while, dear readers. But I thought you deserved a real update. I postdated it, because I wrote it a couple days ago, but I haven't been able to add photos because blogger is keeping me from finishing my Cairns pictures upload (ARGGHHH) and I will post a real update again soooon! :)

Just wanted to put this up because IT'S MY MOM'S BIRTHDAY (In the states, it already was here, technically...)!!!!!! Happy Birthday, Mom! I love youuuu! Wish I could celebrate with you. Have lots of cake and sweets for me!

I’m sorry I’ve been so terrible at posting, I think I got out of the habit when my mom was here, and it’s taking me a while to get back into the swing of things.

Not much has been happening lately, but I will go over what I’ve been doing these past… three-ish weeks.

So the last week of springbreak was my big fat lazy week of nothing. All I did was watch tv and get my contemporary art paper done. It got done on time on Saturday, so I wouldn’t have to work on it at all on Sunday or Monday.

The reason I couldn’t work on it at all on Sunday, a usually full work-on-paper day, was that it was … Bentley Day. BUM BUM BUUUUUUM.

Bentley Day

A beautiful day in the life of a college student.

We all paid $25 beforehand, and for that entire day, we got food and drinks continuously aaaaaalllllllllll daaaaaaaaaay looooong.

Ahhhh, a magical day. It started with a champagne breakfast at 8:30 am, with cereal, fruit, hash browns, eggs, bacon, and champagne.

Then we headed over to one of our regular pubs, Dan O’Connell’s, where we could buy more drinks if we wanted (the only drinks we would have to pay for all day), and they had this one tradition where they pick one fresher (a first year at Queens) guess the outcome of each of the inter-corridor volleyball games played this year, and if he got any wrong, he would have to chug a beer. This is a role I would not want.

After the pub, we walked back to Queens to find a delicious spit roast lunch, with a ton of spit roasted meat, potatoes, pasta salad, and cole slaw, along with the drinks that would be served all day, which included alcoholic punch, which was some weird mix of cheap wine, orange juice, and pineapple juice I think; beer, or I think they called it dry and dry, but I don’t know what that means; and my favorite, slushie. The slushie had two flavors, berry and grape, and of course it had some alcohol in it, but I have no idea what kind. But it was DELICIOUS.

So we continued to drink throughout the rest of the day. There were various activities, we had the final inter-corridor volleyball game, during which most of third-north and I just started a massage line on the grass.

Then we had a band come and play some AWESOME songs. (It’s possible I thought they were more awesome because of the liquidated state I was in, but I had a great time nevertheless.) They played songs like “Dani California” and “By the Way” by Red Hot Chili Peppers, and songs by The Fratellis, and some of those old songs from the nineties that everyone still totally loves, like “I’ll Never Let You Go” by Third Eye Blind and “Better Days” by the Goo Goo Dolls. I only danced to a couple, because it was really warm out and I was drinking and kind of just wanting to fall asleep on the grass. There was also just music played after the band left, like popular songs right now.

There was also a mechanical bull. *__* I didn’t go on it. I didn’t feel like possibly embarrassing myself, and it also looked really hard to ride. But a LOT of people went on. It was very popular.

There was also a big tug of war between the old GC and the new GC, which stands for General Committee, which is the elected body of students who pretty much run the school and plan events and stuff, like student council. I missed this though, because I went to wake up Olivia from a nap that she wanted to take after the volleyball game, and I promised her I would wake her up. I ended up getting there ten minutes before she wanted to get up, so I just crawled in bed and dozed off for ten minutes, haha. It was pretty nice, the day can be kind of wearing on you.

Let’s see.

Then after the band left, they served us deeeee-LICIOUS dinner!!! Mom, if you remember that Greek place we went to, Stalactites, it was like that. Not quite the same type of oh so meaty and delicious, but still very good.

And then we had a dance (a turn!) that started at 6:30 pm haha. The earliest dance I’ve ever been to! But seriously, the day was sooooooo long by then, so the dance started at 6:30 and ended at 8:30, so we had a twelve hour day. The dance was pretty fun, but, as usual when serving booze next to a dance floor, the floor got soooo wet with spilled beer or punch or you name it. It gets like that at every dance, but it seemed more pronounced at this one.

And then we all left at about 8:45 to go to our rooms, I of course went up to third north for a bit to hang out with my homies and then went to my room, watched some tv probably, and went to bed. Huh, that’s funny, the only thing I can’t really remember about that day is what I watched that night, and I must have watched something.

So that was last last Sunday.

I haven’t done much since then. Last weekend, I went with Monika to Pug’s to catch up, I wanted to ask her about her trip to New Zealand and I told her about my trip to Cairns. At the time, I was thinking I would end up going to NZ alone, because, after a long, drawn-out, exasperated period of trip to plan with Olivia when to go, Olivia tells me she can only go in October, leaving on the 17^th (two days from now!!! Two weeks from when we were planning this!!! Geez.) which would make plane tickets soooo expensive, and she also only wanted to do a pre-planned tour that would cost more than a thousand dollars, and she wouldn’t budge from these plans, so if I wanted to go with some to NZ, I would have to go by her plan. I was like, what the eff, no. Be considerate of what I want to do, please. That’s kind of what you do when you’re planning a trip with someone. But then she completely backed out, saying it was too stressful to try to fit this in before she leaves, so she’s just not going to NZ at all. She was too set on leaving November 18^th.

BUT I have some awesome news involving New Zealand…

MY SISTER ANNA IS COMING WITH ME AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, I know you’re all jealous because we are going to be two sisters, lolloping around New Zealand having awesome adventures and re-enacting Lord of the Rings scenes, but not to worry, I will write all of it down here so you can live through me. :)

I am SO STOKED. You guys don’t even know. I’ve been wanted to go on a trip with my sister for soooo long. Even just a road trip, and we never have. And now we’re going to NEW ZEALAND together!

And I am so thankful for her being so on board for this. I know it was a HUGE chunk of change for those plane tickets, but luckily Anna has a bunch of money saved up. And I know it’s short notice and stuff, but the trip itself is just going to be so awesome, time will probably fly by and we will be waaay busy doing awesome things the whole time.

I’m so excited. We both just booked our tickets, and now I need to go to the STA student travel office to book those and figure out if I need to book Anna’s or if she should, etc, etc. also make sure we have accommodation every night. But I’ve done it all before! Easy peezy Japanese-y! :D

Alas, I have to end this post with my current state of being: sick. There is this terrible cold going around Queens, and I caught it!! Ugghhh. It really is nasty. I just got it a couple days ago, and I was thinking, oh, this isn’t so bad, I won’t let it get to me, it’s just a cough and lots of nose-blowing. Boy, was I wrong. This is the cold Olivia was complaining about a couple days ago when I was like dear lord, woman, we have the same cold and I’m not complaining! Get over it! But then she got a fever last night, and I have been hacking out some pretty gross stuff. Like last night, I would wake up to cough out some grossness from the back of my throat. And this morning I coughed up some things you would not believe. It was like snot on steroids.

But luckily it’s Friday, and I have no class and I can just sit in bed and blog and watch Harry Potter movies and drink seventeen glasses of water. Oh, and it’s raining outside, so there is officially no reason for me to go out other than to get food. Huzzah!

So that’s what I’m doing today! Updating this poor neglected blog and putting up pictures on facebook and watching movies and tv! The vacuuming lady is about to come in, and I hate always being still in my jim jams, just sitting in bed when she comes in, but today I have an excuse! I’m sick! Of course I shouldn’t put on real clothes and get out of bed. It’s like, law.

So that’s what I’ll leave you with. Enjoy the pictures! It’s gonna take me a loooong time to put them up. I will post more often, I promise!

Lots of love! Can’t wait to see everyone again soon, even though I love it here. Xoxo!

First Class Today!

Wooowww was it a party. Well, not really.

It was a lecture, so that is hard to make a party, but it wasn’t really what I was expecting either. I thought I was going to be in very big lectures, with at least a hundred students or something, which I thought was why there would be tutorials, but really for this class there was maybe about 40 I think. And some of the people in it were older, like in their forties or fifties. Maybe the class is open to the public.
Anyway, it was a lot like my Asian Art History class at Oxy, just going through slides and going over movements and periods and such. Nobody asked questions or anything, though, because the lecture is just for the professor to talk, and then the tutorials are for questions or any kind of homework to go over.
I need to buy a “subject reader” at the school bookstore, which I hope is cheap, and the professor gave us a list of books that would cover the class. She recommended some and not others, so I think I will just buy the one that covers all Australian art, including women and Aboriginal artists. Some of them didn’t! Sheesh.
I think the class will be interesting because she kept bringing up the problems with categorizing historical art here, because some don’t think of Aboriginal people as “Australian” people, and some just try to go over artwork chronologically, with whatever Aboriginal art as it comes along, and some just put Aboriginal art in its own category because it is not thought of as historical Australian art. It’s strange. I guess in America, you would come across problems putting Native American art within a history of American art, because American people are usually thought of as the colonists and immigrants who moved here over all the years, but Native Americans are the first and original Americans soooo… Yeah, that’s a toughie. Should be interesting, though.

This morning I woke up at… wait for it… 12:40. As in almost one pm. Naturally! I must have needed it. I’ve been trying to get over this cold, so yesterday I just stayed in my room, laying around, doing easy chores like washing dishes and doing laundry, and I went to bed late, but wow, 12:40? I never ever sleep that late. Good thing my only class today was at 5:15 haha. Tomorrow’s first class is at 9 am. Uh-oh. I do think my cold is getting better, though. I bought some vitamin C today, will take more soon, I think.

I’m also trying to cook healthily for myself, you’ll be glad to know. Even if I get fruits and veggies in earlier in the day, I’m trying to have a salad with dinner every night. Which is very easy, because I love salads. I picked a good salad dressing, and the rest is just easy. Tonight I had a grilled cheese with pastrami and a salad. Very yummy! Colby cheese is much tastier to me when it is melted. I guess that’s the case with most cheese. Last night, I had spaghetti with red sauce and a salad. I should get a smaller pot, so I can cook broccoli and veggies more easily. I also need to get a big Tupperware to keep all my crockery in like the other people on my floor. They just bring it in when they are about to cook. I have only seen about five other people actually use the kitchen on my floor, and when these 3 or 4 that always seem to cook together are in there, they pretty much take over. Which is kind of annoying. The counter isn’t that big, and do you have to set your big box of Tupperware up there? And bring out absolutely all your vegetables and lay them out? I walked in tonight to make dinner and there was no room for me and my tiny cutting board or plate. I had to stand at the dining table to chop up my veggies. But they are friendly and always say hi, so it’s not so bad. It is kind of nice to have other people in that giant room with you while you’re cooking. It’s just so empty and cold in there on your own.

I got to skype with my daddio today! That was fun, because I have never skyped with him before. But this annoying noise came on when we tried to use video, and then the sound went completely out. It worked for a little while, though. I wonder if it has something to do with my internet connection. Last night, I was trying to watch a movie and then I heard people talking that definitely weren’t in the movie coming from my computer, like I was receiving the sound from another computer or something. You know, like when your phone line hits your neighbors and you can hear their conversation if you’re on the phone at the same time. I wonder if that’s what the noise today was.

I am so glad I have skype. It is such a good invention. It’s really hard to not talk to your parents when you are used to just calling them every couple of days or seeing them when you’re both home. I still get little waves of sadness, though, when I hang up on skype. It doesn’t last very long, only a minute, but it hits pretty hard. I just have to remind myself that I am good one my own, that I can handle it, and that I will see them again, and soon. I am SO excited for them to come! I can’t wait to show them around and be in Australia with them.

Oh, so my internet threshold is actually pretty high. Yesterday, laying around being sick, I watched one episode of 30 Rock, 3 episodes of My So-Called Life, and two movies and I skyped my mom, and all of my internet usage for my total time here has been about 30% of what I can use. And that’s with me trying to use it up. And it includes my long skype conversations I had already had. They reset it at the first of every month, so I need to get to 100% by this weekend... :)

So tomorrow I have … um, well I just tried to access the student portal, but that doesn’t seem to work, so I think I have one class tomorrow, at 9 am. I don’t know where, so hopefully the portal will work later tonight. : /
Now I’m going to see about posting pictures and washing my dinner dishes. As just a general update, life is really good here. I found a Border’s and a Woolworth’s really close by. And the Woolworth’s is much less busy than the one in the city. But anyway, the small things like these just make me really happy and content with life here. I love and miss everyone! Xoxo!