Manager material

I had an interesting work shift this morning. It was my first (and possibly last) time I've (figuratively) donned a FOH manager's hat, but as I didn't have any other staff on with me this basically involved wandering around looking at antiques and chatting with people for 5 hours. I was anticipating a dull shift, with possible highlights of drinking a coffee or checking out the ducks in the reflection pond, but it turned out to be much more interesting. Some of the antiques were pretty cool and I spent a bit of time pretending I was rich and could afford to have nice old walnut desks in my mansion, which I lounged around in wearing diamond rings and owl broaches whilst playing with old tin cars.

Super amazing fastness!

Thesis woo! Thesis yeah!

I realised with a shock the other day that semester two begins two week earlier than I had been planning for, which means I have two weeks less to devote entirely to my thesis before heading into the overloaded joy that is semester two. This realisation seems to have been a good thing for two reasons:

1. It is much better that I realise this now as opposed to two weeks into first semester .

2. It has spurred me into writing like I have never written before!

I seem to have somehow put 6441 words into my literature review, and have pictures and everything! It is finally coming together, hooray! All this research and writing is also helping me to figure out just how exactly I am going to do all the many many hours of lab work I have looming over the horizon. If only people wrote journal articles for people who have only done one unit of post-school chemistry though, it would make things much easier. They do seem to delight in throwing in words that have me frantically asking google to define.

Another exciting installment to this whole thesis story is that I have a section in the water research lab now, and you can tell that it is mine all mine by the piece of masking tape stuck to it with my name written on in texta. You can't argue with that. It is even spelt correctly, which is amazing given that I didn't write it myself. It must be a sign!

I hope those of you in the northern hemisphere are enjoying summer. I really do. I just wish it didn't mean we were freezing to death down here. Time for a hot cup of tea, methinks...

P.S. Still no news on the mysterious abdominal pain. I am booked in to see a gastroenterologist on Wednesday, so of course the pain has gone now. If I cancel the appointment though I am sure it will return, so I guess I'll just go and see if he can succeed where everyone else has failed.

Snot Box, that is I

Ahh winter. Beautiful and white and snowy in Sweden, cold and wet and miserable in Perth.

I admit that my perception may be skewed somewhat by the copious amounts of mucus currently residing in my head.

I can console myself knowing however that I do not have laryngitis, as does my mother at the moment, or a lingering on forever flu as my father currently has. Clearly I have fabulous genes at my disposal with which to fight off illness in this weather.

I also have a mysterious abdominal pain which refuses to be diagnosed. After having a second ultrasound today, no further knowledge has been uncovered. This is despite the terrible things they made me do prior to the ultrasound. I really worked hard for this un-knowledge.

Firstly, I had to fast for 6 hours prior to the ultrasound. Now this wasn't too difficult as the appointment was at 11:30am and I slept in until 10:00am. Regardless, I go a bit stupid when I go without food for extended periods of time and was a bit lightheaded when I got to the hospital (I didn't crash my car though - hooray!).

I also had to drink 1.5L of water in the period from 10:00-10:30am, and was NOT ALLOWED TO GO TO THE TOILET! Now my bladder is quite pissweak at the best of times, so I was a tad nervous about this whole part of the operation. I actually cheated a little and only drank about 1.3L just to be on the safe side of busting. Unfortunately it wasn't quite safe enough as they made me wait for half an hour in the waiting room before attending to me. By this stage I could no longer sit and was pacing about with a pained expression, much to the bemusement of all the old dears waiting to get their varicose veins examined.

I must admit though, that about 20 minutes into the wait I realised that I just could not hold on any longer and the lady at reception told me I was allowed to go to the toilet "for the count of 10" but no longer. I felt like I was cheating a bit, but given that I had to keep waiting for 10 minutes I was busting again by the time the radiologist saw me. I wonder if small bladders are genetic too? Though you would think that my bladder would have grown from all the long car trips we had when I was little when Dad wouldn't stop for me to go to the toilet.

Oh and the cars have finally dispersed from the house on the corner! It only took them around 5 days. My joy at seeing them gone and being able to turn the corner without fearing for my life was dampened somewhat when I saw the piles of rubbish littering the street and footpath from the mysterious people that had been hanging around. Rubbish always seems to be blowing up the street from their place and somehow ending up in our driveway. Damn those people and their mysterious guests!