Entries from December 2003 ↓

Against my better judgement, I lined up with a wad of friends to watch close to ten solid hours of Lord Of The Rings films at the Carousel cinemas on Sunday night. On the bright side, it wasn’t nearly as painful to stay awake through as I was expecting, not to mention that it flowed together very well, more like one ten-hour movie than three three-and-a-bit-hour movies (this probably has something to do with them all being filmed and produced back-to-back instead of several years apart). All in all it wasn’t bad, and I enjoyed it, and it might sound weird to say this, but I think there just wasn’t enough tragedy involved to really make me concerned about the characters.

On the bright side, during one of the less entertaining sections of the first film, I went out seeking my own entertainment and found some in the form of almost having a candy bar employee killed. After sufficient consideration, I asked the 17-year-old looking fellow behind the counter for a Large Sprite and a packet of Starburst Babies, and after explaining in detail that I didn’t want to upgrade to the extra-chuba-spanky-uber-large cup for only one dollar extra, he started filling my cup with Coke and dived under the desk to search for my jelly babies. He pulled a large container lid off of something under the desk, put it behind him and began shuffling around a bit before announcing he would have to go fetch some from the other counter. Shortly after, he returned with my nibblies in hand, grabbed the coke with his off-hand and began to rattle off “That’ll be ten dollars and…” before finding the under-desk container lid with his foot and launching himself ass over tit towards the ground. In a blind attempt to steady himself, he tried to grab hold of the counter, which may have worked had he not been holding a large coke in that hand, which exploded across the counter in spectacular fashion. He squirmed around on the now wet floor breifly before standing back up, looking around and announcing “That wasn’t me”, at which point I reminded him that I’d ordered a Sprite anyhow.

Monday was mostly occupied with sleeping the movie marathon off, before tuesday came when I met up with a couple of biker friends in Armadale and went for a romp around the hills. After heading out to Serpentine Dam, then through to Dwellingup and Waroona, we took off up the Nanga Brook road, having a great time fanging along some nice and twisty back roads. The roads were mostly clean and absolutely gorgeous, and it’s just brilliant fun barrelling full tilt through a column of trees and whipping up dry leaves on the road into small-scale tornados. So it was marvellous fun right up until one of them blew a rear tyre. Of course this is where riding around back roads about 50k’s east of the middle of nowhere becomes problematic. No inhabitants, no mobile service, no traffic. Over the next three hours we spent organising a way to get the bike back home, only two other cars went along this road. There was a lot of riding back and forth to the nearest town, a bit of sunburn, a lot of cursing, but eventually we managed to hunt down someone in Waroona who had a car trailer that we could use to get the bike moving on its journey home. Mad props go out to the helpful townsfolk of Waroona who help out leather-clad bikers with horrific helmet hair without question (the owner of one store even offered us the keys to his ute since he couldn’t leave the place unattended).

It’s been an interesting week, and now it’s new years eve. Oh, and as a side note, I got a pair of Hulk Hands for christmas. HULK SMASH! ARGH!

Right. So I’m in career-status limbo right about now. I got knocked back from the Dip Ed at the Uni I was applying to in the first offers, and now they’ve shut down for the christmas/new-years break until the week beginning January 5, making it kinda difficult to get hold of them and ask about what my options are. This leaves me at a bit of a loose end really. I’ve pretty much decided to go forward with finishing my degree over summer school regardless of what happens, I want to get it done and over with. But that aside, I’ve no idea whether I’m coming or going. There are other avenues I can pursue to get in with this teaching jibber-jabber, I mean I can probably apply directly to the University instead of through TISC (the designated enrolment proxy), I could apply to a different campus, I could apply to a different university! But now I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should go ahead with it at all. I mean I got knocked back for a place, and a couple of weeks back I got knocked back for a teaching scholarship I applied for as well, so I’m starting to think that maybe this is one of those not-so-subtle hints, but on the other hand, it might just be a bit of resistance. So I’m in the dark a bit really, and I can’t see what I can sort out for at least another couple of weeks.

I may as well just forget about it for this week and slack off for christmas and all. But after that I guess I’ll start seeing what’s going in the job market and make some applications and that sort of thing. I mean if it turns out the teaching thing falls on its face, I may as well have some contingency measures set up.

I figure I’ll finish up wrapping some christmas presents tonight, which’ll only leave me having to pick up two things tomorrow morning and I’ll be set. I can’t say I’ve been really enthusiastic about christmas really. It’s more traffic, more spending, less parking, more tense proles wherever I go, more annoying christmas carols piped through muzak machines. Plus the volume of impending bills I have is growing constantly. I’m seriously over the whole christmas “season” bag.

But for now, it’s back to limbo-ing it up.

Firstly, I would like to make it known that I am unsure whether or not reinception is indeed a word, but I am currently just so footloose and fancy free that I shall use it regardless!

After the better part of three long weeks, I am once again in touch with the rest of teh intar-web. It was odd going for so long without net access, I had so much extra time in place of when I usually sit in front of my PC collecting essential information for the fleshing out of odd plans for creating machines of ultimate destruction, breaking land speed records and cooking the perfect banana muffin. Obviously I needed to find additional activities to fill up my time, so I slept a lot more. As well as spending more time unconscious, I did a fair bit of reading, some pondering and shamefully, I even watched some television.

Of course all this sitting around was still driving me stir crazy so I went up to Perth for a few days to do some upcatching and so on. I ended up going out on Saturday night with Kristy, Luke and his girlfriend Kate for dinner at a Thai place and then some pub or other in Scarborough, which was great, especially since I hadn’t seen them in damn near ages. The next morning I got up at the crack of dawn and head out to Barbagallo Raceway by 8am to go do a race training course on my bike, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the most fun I’ve had in ages. It was a bit intimidating at first, but after a couple of hours I started getting right into it and had an absolute freaking ball. I’ve definitely got plans to go again, but the track is being resurfaced over the next couple of months so it’ll be out of commission. If you want to read a longer, potentially more boring bit of waffle about the track day, there’s something a bit longer here that I wrote up for some guys on a web forum I hang around.

But for now, I have an awful lot of miscellaneous time-wasting that I have to catch up on now that I’m reconnected…