my new favourite

I have discovered my new favourite chocolate of all time...

Ritter Sport Fondente

Oh My Goodness Me!

It's dark but slightly sweet, not bitter and way too easy to consume.

Thank goodness I got it overseas (I am slowly making my way through my stash!) otherwise I'd eat it all the time. 

expectations vs reality

You know when you build yourself up, thinking about how awesome is going to be, and then afterwards you're like "that was not what I expected"...?

It happened to me at Christmas - Mum had built up my expectations of my big present to be something hilariously large and ridiculous; it all came about because I said I wanted a robovac so I could sit the cat on it, and her comments made me think that maybe she was finally going to panda to my weird sense of humor (come on, who doesn't love a cat on a robovac?); or maybe it was when we walked past an ice-cream machine and she mentioned something about now knowing how much it cost (also, at this stage I had seen the present box, and the ice-cream machine was about the same size).

So with all these crazy ideas and expectations running around in my head, and with my amazing imagination, opening my present to find a Nespresso machine was not what I expected.

This weekend was that same experience.

I went on two dates this weekend, both that I was kinda excited about - one was the cute bartender at uniclub and the other was from internet dating.

The first one, well in hindsight I probably was tipsy with free alcohol when I said to my friend "gees he's cute" to which she obtained his number and I ended up having coffee with him on Friday morning... which will never be repeated. "Why?" you ask... well when discussing John Mayer his outcry of "wow, I can't believe primary school was ten years ago" basically shut any possibility of the non-smiling Tom to ever win my heart over. Sure, age shouldn't be a barrier, but that my friends is cradle-snatching.

So, onward to the second one. Surely I couldn't have two awful dates in a row, right?

True. But false all in the same breath.

On paper (or more accurately, his online dating profile) he seemed exactly what I was after - an engineer retrained as a doctor who has a passion for infectious diseases, taller, older, has a foreign passport... perfect right?

Well, our conversation was fantastic and lively, but that's about it. There was no spark, no chemistry on my end, he was wearing hiking boots in a cafe in Fremantle, he contradicted my opinions on basically every topic of conversation, and asked if I had chosen my first Masters degree because of the research of by one of my most disliked teachers... and he was shorter than his profile said. He then proceeded to find me on fb (to which I will not add him) and contact me in three different ways to say he had a great time.

Lesson of the weekend - there are plenty of fish in the sea but most of them you'll throw back.

And as for my coffee machine - I love it! I don't know what my mornings were without it.

statistics show

I paid $600 for a three day course on basic applied statistics. 

I'm sure you're thinking either one of three things - 

1) you're a student, why on earth is it costing you that much?

2) you're a student, where on earth did you get $600 from?

3) you're an epidemiology student, shouldn't you already know all this?

And to that last question I answer yes, but I didn't know that when I signed up for my epidemiology course... bugger eh? But I am learning an incredible amount and I think it will be money well spent. 

So whilst waiting for this mornings session to start, I scanned the news.com.au website and came across this gem of an article... 

Wow.

I love this line here: “You’re not getting any younger, but the competition for the men you’d be interested in marrying most definitely is.”

It's not all bad, in fact I believe she strikes gold in this statement: "Could you marry a man who isn't your intellectual or professional equal? Sure. But the likelihood is that it will be frustrating to be with someone who just can't keep up with you or your friends. When the conversation turns to Jean Cocteau or Henrik Ibsen, the Bayeux Tapestry or Noam Chomsky [or in my case, outbreaks and humanitarian crises and the bureaucracy of public health...], you won't find that glazed look that comes over his face at all appealing. And if you start to earn more than he does? Forget about it. Very few men have egos that can endure what they will see as a form of emasculation."

Oh dear. Seems like I'm not doing myself any benefit in doing this statistics course, let alone my Masters degrees and I'm screwing myself over with the thoughts of doing a PhD at some stage... although she does say  "if you fail to identify "the one" while you're in college, don't worry—there's always graduate school"... phew!

What do you think?

ooey gooey

Here is the compulsory blog entry regarding Valentines Day. This year I am happily single and hosting a party where we are watching that "Valentine's Day" movie and playing the drinking game that goes with it.

Rather different from last year's Valentines Day, where I was happily in a relationship and riding on the high of being incredibly spoilt on my birthday 5 days previous. As our birthdays were either side of Valentines Day, we decided not to really celebrate v-day; but I had been waiting a very long time to have a boyfriend on v-day (since I was 17...) and so I had said that I was going to be giving a really stupid present.

What was this stupid present you had been waiting ten years to give?

I can feel your tension! Well, it was...



GONORRHEA!

*imagine me falling of chair laughing*

Yeah, well, suffice to say it didn't go down well, and he hated it. Actually, hate is probably not a strong enough word. In hindsight it probably wasn't the best idea - he gave me a card full of the most beautiful words and I gave him a toy of a sexually transmitted disease.

Our relationship didn't last much past this point...

Lesson learnt: if a guy can't find this present funny, then we probably are not on the same wavelength. I have a freaking Masters degree in Infectious Diseases! However, it is important to note that I would NEVER laugh at HIV/AIDS. That shit ain't funny.

don't take it personally

Remember when you were a kid and you would build a lego house, with windows and walls and bedrooms and kitchens and even a toilet (although not in my brothers house, he just had guns and a crocodile)? Remember when it was time to pack up and you carefully put it back into the box, or on the shelf, so that you can play with it the next day? Remember when you come back to it and someone has stolen your bed/kitchen/toilet/gun/crocodile/favourite yellow person, or it was smashed up, or the baby ate one of the pieces? Remember how heart broken you were? All that time and effort just gone...

That's how I feel pretty much every time my supervisors open their mouths about my work.

I spend my days writing and researching and thinking that these pieces of work are up to scratch, only for my supervisors to knock it back, scratch it out, write all over it and renege on their previous comments.

Thank goodness for my workmates who continue to hold me up, for my friends who take me out, and for my Mum who answers the phone.

I keep picking myself up, brushing it off, tell myself to stop being a princess, to harden up, and to continue working on it. I keep telling myself that they are pushing me to get the best out of me, to learn and grow and make the most of this experience; that it will all be worth it in the end. 

288 days until thesis submission, 309 days until it's all over. 

a blog entry that starts with "once upon a time"

Once upon a time there was a girl who couldn't concentrate and so wrote a blog post.

There were many reasons she couldn't concentrate... 

The foundation for this lack of concentration is because her normal sleeping patterns were thrown out the window because she stayed up late the night before trying to finish the latest book-club book whilst waiting for her friend to wake up so they could skype.  

Then her traditional morning routine was thrown out the window as she had to drop her car off for a service, getting lost along the way and taking 25 minutes to drive 10 minutes down the road. From there she then had to make her way to work on public transport from somewhere she had never been before in Perth. 

Whilst messaging a friend on the train the lack of relationship status and frustration at certain people was discussed, and unfortunately for the girl once those trains of thought begin they don't generally stop. Besides, she is happy, right?

Finally, once arriving at work and sitting down at her desk and turning on her computer, the mountain of work that was before her added to the lack of concentration causing a necessary trip to the tea room for extremely necessary coffee...

Once coffee was obtained, the daily task was decided upon - statistical analysis. During the reading over her previous work, she realised that there was a major component of data missing from her cleaned dataset and so now has to go back through the whole database and find the locality information to add to the dataset before being able to start the analysis of the data, meaning that the previous two whole days work is now rendered somewhat useless. This knowledge added to the girls growing desire to go home, crawl into bed, put the covers over her head and have a hissy fit. 

The girl then stopped, knowing that the said hissy fit would be stupid and won't fix anything - the work needs to get done at some stage, it's her own fault for having friends all over the world, she was the one who booked her car in to get serviced, and a whole myriad of arguments about her lack of relationship status (let's not start talking about that!)

So the girl finished writing her blog post, thinking that this was a rather hilarious exercise but feels better for having a rant.