Rilek y'all.

One Miss Adeline Lee + mum in tow arrived in Melbourne safely on Monday. She's currently hanging out at Caulfield doing the orientation thing. She's currently unhappily taking 3 minute showers in her apartment. Hee.. That's something I'll let her rant about when she gets her broadband up and running.

My schedule is out for Semester 1 2006. And all you people can just keel over and die in awe right about.... now. It's fantastic. Perfectly constructed so that it's impossible for me to miss any tutorial or lecture (read: the majority four out of five days I start at 2.15 pm) and there's still time for me to work and play (Friday's off plus all that extra time in the morning). *Insert cheesy smiley with extra broad grin*. Factor in my oh-so-busy 11 hour week and there you have it: I so rock.

Yeah, I really do.

Commonwealth 2006. There's enough of us here now to make a perfectly respectable noise level to cheer on the Malaysian badminton team, hello Ka Seong, Alex, Ivy. Jenshen, Daryl and I calculated that with all the badminton bigwigs out there unable to compete due to ya know, not being conquered by the English in the past, we might actually have a pretty good shot at making it quite far into the tournament. After much debate about the state of Denmark (Embarrasingly, it took us quite a while to figure out that they're not part of the Commonwealth nations. Sejarah-shmejarah) we sussed out that our biggest competitors would be England and Singapore. And Singapore's only a threat just cause our Southern neighbour has that Indon guy, pfft tosh. Plus, tickets are like $15 per head, which is what, the price of a movie ticket? Boleh larh. That is assuming of course that Malaysia cracks it's usual 'Tim Henman' syndrome (Why oh why do you keep doing this to me, Timmy?) and doesn't lose those easy matches and win random hard ones.

Should be all systems go. Anyone want to go support your home team, jump on the bandwagon. The more, the noiser eh?

Just almost.

Oh, the almost cleverness of me!

I have corrected 1 (Statscounter link) and a half (comments is up!) of the grievances stated before and I'm currently feeling pretty smug. Yes folks. It is indeed a work in progress. I don't think anyone can post comments yet, cause I know nothing happens when I click the comments link, but feel free to prove me wrong. Apparently if you have any kind of Internet security system or popup killer thingymajig, the window just won't open and although I have corrected that with my Norton, I have yet to leap out of my bed screaming 'Eureka! Eureka! at this present hour due to a case of abso-fucking-lutely nothing happening. Yes, I might be a tad bit frustrated too.

Today marks the first time in my life my money's mysteriously disappeared and oh, does my heart hurt. Even when I lost my wallet that one time, there were no bills or coins inside, which, come to think of it, is probably why the police officer seemed less than impress when I reported my wallet's value at 6 bucks (which is the price I paid for it, but boy was it pretty). I withdrew AUD$70 today when I went for lunch. And somewhere during the time when I paid for a Italian B.M.T. at Subway to when I paid for a Chocolate Frappe at Macca's (you tend not to think of the calories after an 8 hour shift), 50 bucks went missing. So I've narrowed it down to two possibilities.

#1. I simply dropped the 50 when I was taking out the 20 to pay for lunch, which is actually pretty possible considering my wallet type (just one note/coin space).

#2. Someone at work took the cash out of my wallet and pocketed it, which is also not entirely impossible as I had left my wallet in the pigeon hole in the changing rooms.

And although this completely bites and blows my budget for tomorrow (the arrival of a certain Siao Cha Bo, who holds the number 2 position, quite proudly if I may add.. Hello Ad!), life goes on and you can only glower for so long. Therefore, to the fella who might have found a 50 note on Elizabeth St today, consider yourself a lucky bastard. And to the co-worker who might have stole from me, there's no doubts that you are one fucking bastard.

[/Edit]
I know what's wrong. To comment you either need to turn off your popup window murderer or configure it to allow Haloscan to open. Heh heh. I was, err... careless before. My bad.

I am quite the genius! Golly gee and knock me over with a tumbleweed but I think I'm actually done fixing up my template. There you go folks! This is Who gives a rat's ass? year 2006.

Screw the fact that the entry page is slightly aneroxic and that the titles suffer from a slight case of invisibility. I mean... at the end of the day, who does give a rat's ass, eh?

One Sunday idled away and a brand spanking new layout beckons

4 things I'm not too crazy about:

#1. I can't get my Statscounter link on no matter how I fiddle around with the template.
#2. The entry page could be bigger.
#3. The title doesn't come up in the contents area.
#4. And as you'll soon find out, I can't put up the comments page. I have fiddled and diddled but it ain't showing up. Oh heck. Guess the tagboard sure does come in handy right about now.

Nonetheless I'm completely digging the layout, enough so that I actually dared to confront my fear of HTML and apply the skin to my blog. Take that HTML! Although in retrospect, I suppose it did one four up me. Huh.

"It came from below." ...... "What? You mean the third floor?"

My Top 5 weird/random admissions:

#1. What is weird? The polar opposite of normal, maybe. But then what is normal? Who determines where the line is drawn between normalcy and weirdness? If you go by the opinion that normalcy is dictated by how the majority acts, what then happens when the majority is wrong? For instance, through one man's powerful words and extreme brain-washing (plus, one hell of an obedient army) one race was persecuted. How is that normal? But then I suppose death is normal. "The only thing is ever certain". Can anyone ever come up with a cure to prolong life? So much so that by your 600th year of living you find that death seems more appealing than ever. Hey isn't that something out of Harry Potter Book #1? Something about how death is the next adventure for the living, who was it that mentioned that... the guy who created the philosopher's stone? Wait, but then again that could have written on the back of a cereal box due to it's extreme cliche-ness. Hmmm... I wonder if anyone else reads the back of cereal boxes? That reminds me. Don't ever bother try to find some new cereal brand even if it promises six more vitamins and additional acid folate than Crunchy Nut, cause even if CN is less healthy it sure as hell packs a whole lot more taste, being of course it actually has some taste to it... Ugh. I detest yogurt. It looks like diarrhea warmed over with some fake strawberry flavouring inserted to make it seem edible. Must be the 97% (well, insert your chosen ninety-something percentage so long as it's higher than the competitor's, but make sure it goes no higher than 99.99% cause no one would believe that something is 100% fat-free, except maybe cardboard. But then again no one would admit to eating cardboard due to fear of being cast as a social pariah). (And that kid in Special Ed is excepted, because goddamn, he's in Special Ed!). I bet so long as you slap a __% fat free sticker on a food item, somewhere some sucker will buy it. Hee. I live with one.
Sometimes my mind goes off into tangents like this. But then again I'm sure yours does as well.

#2. Just in case your eyes glibbed over the paragraph above, here's the one important fact you should know about me: I detest yogurt.

#3. I had a four and a half years sabbatical off pork. In Costa Rica/America, I started eating it again. Goddamn. Bacon is goooooooooood.

#4. When it comes to music, like many others I know of, my biggest musical influence is, well, me. Now, while my brother is 3 years my junior in terms of age and lightyears behind in the case of maturity (at times when we're hanging, it's unclear who's actually ahead), he is the person I turn to for new suggestions. Don't get me wrong. The songs friends have suggested are usually alright but they just don't sit well on my playlist resulting in my finger clicking the delete button (sorry guys). E.g. The Bravery- Honest Mistake. When Jon suggested it to me, I thought, 'Oh dear god, is he losing his touch?' only to realize that soon I was bopping along to the song. Jesus Christ, does that kid wield some sort of power or what?

#5. I have the same bed sheets as Sammy Snakes. Who coincidentally almost owned my other sheets, had the shop not ran out of stock. Snakes also almost owned the identical pair of sheets that Charmie-Charm-Charm has (the paint-splattered one) until, if I remember the story correctly, the shop ran out of stock too. With reference to the first identical pair of sheets Sam and I own, what are the odds eh? We didn't even know of each other's existence yet. I mean, afterall, we only got it from this shop called IKEA.

---------

The holidays are almost coming to an end. School starts on the 27th apparently. It's so strange to think that come this year I'll be walking down the halls and pathways of Melbourne Uni as a second year student, and in a year I'll be doing so with the label 'GRADUATE' gleaming slightly in my shadows. I'm kidding. Of course third year art students don't walk around with the word SOON-TO-BE-GRADUATE stamped on their foreheads. Number one, there simply isn't enough space to write all that. And number two, DESPERATE will already be imprinted on their foreheads, furrowed brows perfectly highlighting the rising panic in their eyes, which in turn provides a great complement to the jittery movements the high-strung, highly-caffeinated (cause big kids drink coffee, hell yeah) students make as they realize the time has come to face the music, and we're talking the BIG music now, not just the miniscule one that cropped up during the end of primary school and again in secondary school.

Or am I the only one who thinks that perfectly encapsulates the final year student's being?

Can't be. There's a hell lot of blogs out there reiterating what I just said (except with less amusing imagery, if I may say so myself).

How do you rehash a month's worth of memories into a reader-friendly post?

Answer: You don't.

Hee.

Real answer: I don't know how to.

To say that it was 'really good' doesn't do my memories justice. Neither does saying it was 'mind-blowing, god-awesome, effing-brilliant stuff'. By the end of the one month, I've become so used to the travelling life that waking up in my bed the day after I got back evoked a momentary but pretty potent sense of disappointment, empty refridgerator not providing the least bit comfort.

I suppose the difference with Costa Rica compared to any other place I've travelled to so far, is the fact that it wasn't an English-speaking country, thus, providing me with very little choice but to actively immerse myself in the local language. And while I was practicing mis-pronounced Tico Spanish, whether consciously or not, a lot of the local culture became
ingrained into my life. Be it from adoring pinto (rice and beans basically, but don't let the blandness of the description fool you into thinking that the food was sister to cardboard) to setting my natural body clock to Tico time whilst on the Caribbean Coast (essentially a lot like Malaysian time - never punctual, constantly late) to understanding the basis behind the Nicaraguan jokes (like Malaysia and Indonesia, a lot of Ticos blame Nicaraguans for taking up local jobs although these are the jobs that the locals don't want), the hardest thing about leaving Costa Rica behind is having all these new ticks within me with no outlet to express it or any conceivable way to sustain it either.

Oh heck. But then I guess (in Southern Belle accent) "tomorrow is another da-ie", innit?

Here's my attempt at giving a run-through of my trip.

First two weeks
Were spent on the volunteer project. The head of our host family has been working with the Costa Rican Ministry of Agriculture for 25 years plus and he uses his house as an example of how organic farming works. Hence, he gets quite a bit of visitors, mostly local farmers who want to learn the techniques and he works with the government on advising local farmers on
how to apply an organic method to their farming lifestyle. What we did was help out around the farm, providing a hand to physical tasks, while personally learning why Costa Rica was pushing for organic farming around the country.

It wasn't all work and no play. We (there were 10 of us) travelled occasionally to the local town for Internet, headed out a couple of nights for dinner and clubbing, and even hit the tourist beach for a day of sun and souvenir shopping on our day off. Plus, the good camaderie between the ten of us made it so that work and life went by easier. What we all were
taken back by was the facilities provided on the farm. The TV on the farm, which had cable access provided us with entertainment. Eg. countless moments were spent debating whether MTV's Laguna Beach starred actors or real kids (my verdict: Like Arrested Development, I maintain it's scripted reality. But goddamn is that show an excuse to play today's latest hit
songs or what?). For those who were under the assumption that I was staying in this ulu-fied place, suffice to say that we actually caught the Golden Globes live on TV.

Last two weeks
Were spent on the adventure tour. We travelled along both the Pacific and Caribbean Coast, staying in some of the best resorts as well as some of the more dodgier ones (think cockroach on the mirror). Allow me to take a second and mock you by saying I have now swam in both the Pacific and Carribean waters. Ha! Among other things, we went kayaking in the rain, horse-riding in the mountains, zip-lining across the forests, white-water rafting down Class 2,3,4 rapids, bike-riding to the beach and snorkelling in the Pacific Ocean. I know. If I were you I'd be jealous too.

Last day before flying out
Were spent in LA. The night before, while flying from Costa Rica to LA, Yoong Mei, you won't believe who was on the same airline parked up in Business Class. As your friend I say you deserve every right to smack my head in when you see me for I failed to get you Sting's autograph. However, I do have something to atone for my mistake. How's a picture of
Sting's star from the Hollywood Walk of Fame sound?

LA was pretty damn fantastic considering the short amount time we spent there (just one night and 3/4 of a day). Charm and I by foregoing a trip to Disneyland instead, flew home with a bunch of decent shopping in our hands. Of course, we did a tour of LA as well, and really, the only thing that put a slight dent into my memory of that day was the fact that I
didn't meet Seth Green. Or Ethan Embry. I did meet Elmo. But who the hell gives a damn about that retarded, annoying blob?

To sum up: you can't go wrong in life my making a trip down there someday.

And yes, I have your souvenirs, kids. Go crazy.

-[edit]-

February the 8th, today a perfect specimen turns 32. Whaaaaaaaaat?!? That's not TOO old.

Also, to the people who have been calling me and leaving me messages. My phone's kinda momentarily screwed right now. It's got, what phone doctors would consider, a mild case of 'overdue-billitis' which unfortunately led to a severe case of 'line-gets-barreditis'. Huh. So apparently I'm only a "worthy customer" so long as I keep my payments on time. Therefore to the lovely people who have contacted me, be patient. Why am I not calling you on my home phone? Ahhh. Sadly the above mentioned disease was pretty lethal and my home phone got afflicted with it too. Damn dirty technology! However, while my phone is unable to make outside calls, it has excellent receiving skills. Feel free to give me a call. And Sammy, sorry I didn't pick up; had a shift.

Brokeback Mountain, first movie of 2006. And hot damn, it's an excellent start. Sets a pretty high bar for this year. I was watching the first quarter of the movie wondering why the hell everyone was raving about Heath Ledger's performance, when it was pretty neat but not buzz-worthy material. Come the end, gee whiz, I am floored.

Finally, Crazy Woman Who is Obsessed With Rent. Breathe. It's coming out here on March 2 (or possibly 19).

Hunt for Seth Green; results? 'Unsatisfactory'

Hey folks.

I'm back.