I complain about not having childhood friends and long term friends and all that

But fact is, I get bored.

(but then on other days I think otherwise. I’m just an extremely confused person.)

Since the research scholarship ended, I feel so restless like I have nothing to do. I had a book to read for a while, but I’ve finished that book a couple of days ago. Now when I’m at home I don’t know what to do. It’s not like I have nothing to do: my room is still in a mess from room switching with my bro. I have stuff strewn all over the floor. But I can’t get myself to clear up the mess. I feel like I’m a workaholic, but only for selective work (house cleaning being something which is not one of the selected). I get a strange sort of ‘high’ after i finish a day of work. It’s just… satisfying. Even the QEH job that I’m not getting paid for…

For the past couple of nights I had work at HJ and I found myself looking forward to work. I also don’t mind that I finished at 12am instead of 11pm like we should have. I’m happy when I’m at work, even when I’m working with people I don’t usually like working with. The past couple of nights, after work I hung out with some of my colleagues into the wee hours of the morning… Its not like we did anything very exciting. We played UNO and video games and although later on I started falling asleep, I didn’t want to go home because I enjoyed their company. It’s been a while since I hung out with a group of friends that can get along so well. It’s really quite refreshing. Last year I guess I built up quite a big network of friends, but it’s very broken… if you know what I mean. I sort of knew them all but amongst them there were people who were closer to each other, and people who had conflicts. There’s always this underlying tension going on and no matter how much fun we may be having, that underlying tension just tugs at the back of your mind. It gets tiring after a while. I also feel like there’s this need to TRY hard to make anything happen. We make plans days ahead of time and when we finally get around to doing something, we’re not completely satisfied. We say things to make ourselves feel happy and satisfied about how the day turned out to be. We say certain things just because it’s expected from us. It’s just so… forced. I guess for the past few nights out with my colleagues it’s been extremely relaxing because I say what I want, I don’t have to make any decisions, and I just go with the flow. They call me, I join them, end of story. I feel like I’m wanted there. They say things like ‘we all want you to come’ and it’s nice to know. Whereas if I’m making plans, I feel like I’m getting people to join me because I need company. Do you see the difference? That being said though, I’m NOT complaining about my old friends. I’m not always the person who makes plans, and a lot of times they make me feel wanted there as well. I’m just saying that it’s been a while, and I’m very happy to finally get to know the people I’ve been working with for a year now, and to know that they enjoy having me around them jsut as much as i enjoy being with them gives me a nice fuzzy feeling inside.

That was probably quite non-sensical at some parts, and maybe I didn’t even have a point but some things have been running through my head and I just had to get something out. I think these holidays have turned out to be more stressful than a normal uni term. I enjoy being at work, but at the same time it just the thought that scares me. For a couple of weeks, I was in the labs, at HJ and working at QEH. There’s a song that kept on playing over and over in my head and it sort of pushed me to continue with what I was doing instead of giving up something like asking for less shifts at HJ.

“Cause I am a Superwoman
Yes, I am
(Yes, she is)
Even when I’m a mess
I still put on a vest
With an S on my chest
Oh, yes
I’m a Superwoman (that’s right)” - Alicia Keys

On a side note, yesterday I spent a big chunk of my time sorting the MySA website but although the information has sort of been updated, the entire site still looks bad and rather messy. I’ve also spent lots of time worrying about UWeek and thinking about how memberships will work next year. I’m worrying because half of the committee won’t be returning to Adelaide until a day before UWeek itself. On top of that there’s some other problems going on which I feel I shouldn’t delve into right now.

I can’t wait for Saturday, when I’ll finally meet some of the committee and get things sorted out for UWeek. I can’t sleep well knowing that plans at the moment are still non-existent. (although I have rough plans in my head- no one knows about them)

WTH My apartment just VIBRATED. there was some banging noise (not very loud… like a door slam) and the entire floor SHOOK. FREAKY!

Today I had spare time

I had 2 choices- go out for a jog, or make food.

Naturally the second one sounded more tempting. I’ve been living off breakfast food, instant food, outside food, and my brother’s stew for too long.

So I looked for a reasonably easy recipe from my newly acquired recipe book called ‘101 one-pot dishes’ (I stole off mum in Spore) and I came across ‘Oven Baked Risotto’. I still had some arborio rice from the last couple of times I made risotto.

They asked to use a oven proof pan or a casserole dish. I don’t know what those are and I don’t think I have any of them anyway… So instead I just used one of those oven proof dishes i i dont know what they’re called… anyway so much for ‘one pot’ i had to use 3 different ‘pots’. One to heat up the chicken stock, one to fry stuff, and the other for the oven. Long story short (as if its not already too long) here’s the final product:

I have a feeling I’ll be doing this again sometime soon. It’s so much easier than the first couple of times I tried making risotto and ended up spending ages standing in front of the stove adding stock and stirring, stirring and stirring… just stick in the oven! How come no one told me that earlier??

And it tasted pretty good for something with no salt in it. I cracked some black pepper over the top. i like my black pepper.

Ok on to the MUFFINS.

While i was buying ingredients for dinner, I came across Blueberries on a sort-of offer. It was still ridiculously expensive (about $4 for a 125g punnet) but remembering mum’s recipe she told me about a while ago, I couldn’t stop myself from buying them.

The recipe turned out to be pretty strange (in my opinion). The batter looked more suited to be scone batter rather than muffins. It was so thick. And the recipe was meant to make 6 muffins. I filled up my 6-hole muffin tin and i Still had so much extra!

So i took out my mini cupcake cups and filled some of those up too. I ended up with 6 giant muffins, and 6 mini-muffins.

On the recipe it also said to ‘dust generously with sifted icing sugar before serving’ so I did as told.

Except I had so much extra icing sugar left in my sieve i ended up dusting ALL the other muffins as well, even though they’re going to be kept, and not served… yet.

I just hope dusting them with icing sugar too early doesn’t do anything to them :S I’m a bit worried about it making the muffin soggy or something…

Same as the past entire week (Except the chicken farm day) we analysed the incubated plates and spotted phage onto another set of 20 plates. Nothing too exciting, but by the looks of it we have found some phage that seems to lyse almost all the CJ spp. bacteria which looks good.

The trip to the farm didn’t give any good results though. It didn’t answer any questions. Which is really quite depressing. So whether we take samples from the farm or from the abattoir, we get the same result…

J got me a box of Cadbury Favourites as a gift. She was so nice, it made me feel bad because I had planned to bake cookies or something for the ladies (and the couple of men) in the lab but instead my thursday night was spent hanging out and socializing.

She even tied a pretty ribbon around it!

 Well, since I’ve got no commitments tomorrow and i can sleep in or do whatever I feel like doing, I’ll post up a few pictures here that I meant to post a while ago…

This is J!

Next is from Tuesday night. I don’t think I’ve written about Tuesday night… I went to play table tennis with some Micro Lab staff. About 8 of us went. The person who brought us there was Maurizio, our Immunology lecturer from last year.(The only reason i wrote his name was cuz I think he has a fancy name…) So here’s the place we played in. It’s in Brighton, close to Glenelg…

quite a nice little place, but hidden... and a bit far :(

Here’s some pics from the trip to the chicken farm:

It was a long drive on the highway, but when we got there, it was a sandy, pot-hole-y road to the farm

 It was so isolated. Around it was just LAND. Plain, empty, flat, land. Australia has too much land. But it looked too hot and dry to grow anything on it…

The giant sheds in which the chickens live in.

View from the other side

 So that’s really it.

If you’re wondering what it looks like inside (since It was pretty dark and I was wearing overalls I didn’t take any pictures. I don’t think i’m allowed to… I kind of sneaked these photos~)

I found some pictures online which are pretty much the same…

except without the window looking thingies on the sides...

I think I’m getting pro at doing stuff. I believe the amount of work we did today is quite similar to some other days, but we finished before lunch and i get to go home for the day! How awesome is that?

Oh and J broke a mercury thermometer today, so i finally got to see what mercury looks like

Anyway, today… we collected, centrifuged, and filtered our 26 poo samples from yesterday. While J subcultured more plates for tomorrow, I prepared bacteria broth for overlays for more plate spotting. Then we spotted the plates. 25 diff phage, 24 diff spp.  SO my point is i think I’m getting pretty good at this.

The bad news is, tomorrow is my last day.

Went to a chicken farm today. One of those far away places where they grow chickens in gigantic sheds. Glad to say it didn’t smell as bad as the abattoir. It was also a lot harder to find chicken poo there… so we ended up like… looking for chicken poo-ing then collect what comes out… they’re still warm! ok enough grossness. Oh, and I found myself talking to the chickens when I was trying to get out of the shed. I wanted to be nice and not scare them so I walked slowly and said to them “excuse me…” But i don’t think they cared much cuz they didn’t budge. So finally I got out anyway cuz fast movements scare them out of the way… SO ya. so much for trying to be nice.

The place was about 95kms from Adelaide so we spent ages going there, and coming back. We left the city at about 8:30am, and when we got back it was 1:30pm.

Put the samples to shake, and I analysed yesterday’s spotting results, while J subcultured more bacteria for tomorrow.

So now I’m done and it’s 3pm and I’ve only eaten some biscuits to curb my hunger while I type this out and i shall now go home for lunch…

This weekend was like- *whoooosh* and it was gone.

Saturday: Valentine’s day. But unlike lovey dovey coupled people, for me, it was another ordinary day. Got up pretty late after a long friday, headed to Bunnings warehouse with bro to get some stuff. Had early dinner on the way home, rushed to work at 6pm, got off work at 11:20 by the time i got back and showered and messed around a bit with god-knows-what. It was late. I slept.

Sunday: Got up at 7:15. Thought of catching the 8am bus. Got to bus stop at 7:50. Waited. Waited. Waited. NO FRIGGIN BUS. Bus came at 8:30. That’s the NEXT bus I was supposed to catch if I missed the first one. i CAN”T HAVE MISSED THE FIRST FRIGGIN BUS. I WAS 10 MINS EARLY! WTH. Complained to C and Mj who was about the only person I know unlikely to be asleep at that time due to time difference. Mj called back. Made my day Cuz work was shitty. It was boring, the pharmacist wasn’t very nice, and it was SO BUSY I ended up staying back till 5:20 (i was meant to finish at 5) cuz they had a massive stack of scripts to dispense. Also made me miss my 5:25 bus so i had to wait for the 5:55 bus to get home.

Got home, watched tv (for the first time in a long time… its shocking. for me.) and had a sandwich for dinner. Then met up with my HJ friends at D’s place and had some drinks and gossiped out on his balcony after. Gorgeous weather. Great people. Good night. Came home after 2am, slept about 3am, woke up this morning at 8:30am.

As shitty as life may be sometimes, I think I love it.

I completely skipped Day 24. Nothing too exciting anyway. I cultured about 80 species of CJ. And I can’t remember what else i did but it was a short day. Then i went for lunch, went to Clinique to get some freebies, and went to work at night. And got friggin hammered. 5.5 hours. Hardly a minute break. it was one helluva busy night.

Today:

- prepared stuff for overlays

- went to very very long meeting

- finished overlay preparation

- lunch

- plate spotting (20 CJ spp., 20 phage)

- poured lots of plates…

finished at 4:30pm

What should I do???

I can’t go for another concert… Or can i…?

Ah i need to save money!! i want to go on a holiday!

(but i also want to buy this super pretty jacket i’ve been eyeing, and I need to buy my food cuz i dont have time to cook, and I WANT TO SEE JASON MRAZ. How ar?)