Forgetful

I'm all sorts of muddle headed today. I'm sitting on the bus, on my way into uni right now. Dad dropped me off on his way in this morning but I forgot my phone so I went home again to get it. Truthfully, I didn't have a clue where my phone was. It was low on batteries last night, I forgot to charge it and it wasn't in my handbag when I went into uni. After I got home, I couldn't find it anywhere. I called it and luckily that last bar allowed me to track it down to my gym/netball back from last night. Good grief Dana. Good Grief. Last night, I couldn't find my DS. It was wedged between my bed and wall. This morning I couldn't find my necklace. After searching the usual places, I returned to my jewelery tree, where it had been sitting all along. The jewelery tree is where I usually put my stuff but I was sure it wasn't there the first time I looked. :S. Today, when I was catching the bus back home, I missed my bus stop. I looked out the window and saw my bus stop and I was still sitting down. I nearly fell as I got to the front of the bus. I'm going crazy. I'm misplacing things, forgetting things, loosing track of things.

It's funny how I can't read or play DS on the bus (unless it's Harry Potter, nothing stops me from Harry Potter) because I start to feel sick after a while but I can write on my laptop. I guess I'm not really reading what I'm writing. I'm just typing and hoping that the words are correct. I guess I'll find out when I get into my office. That spell check is going all kinds of red.

So this past week has gone really quickly again and once again I feel as though I haven't accomplished anything research wise. My mum got home last night (woohoo!) and we had a talk. I said I feel like I have to force myself to do research. Right now, I'm just constantly thinking of excuses to get out of doing any work. I told her I would prefer to be in something managerial, organising stuff. I am a bossy person in general. She said I shouldn't do things that makes me unhappy/force myself to do things that I don't want. So I guess she encourages me to apply for something different after my PhD. Different as in industry based as opposed to pure research. But then again, that's how I'm feeling now, I might feel very different next year, or even next week! haha.

One of the things that I've done this week to procrastinate is run around for Project Runway Australia. The show starts tonight and I have no idea what it's about. For advertising, I've seen posters on billboards and stuff and the twitter for the show added me the other day. I was like... who? spam? oh dear. But before I block spammers, I clicked their twitter homepage to see what they were spamming and saw that they were giving away stuff in Sydney and Melbourne in the lead up to the start of the show. I wasn't entirely convinced and wasn't too interested until I clicked to see what they were giving away. It wasn't so much what they were giving away that swayed me, but one of the girls holding a price. The girl who had won one of the items was an Anita Borg finalist I met in Sydney in 2006. A girl called Andrea, who I knew, had won! This was for realz man!

This all happened at the end of last week. On Friday, I saw that they were giving something away at Melbourne Central. It looked like it could have been good but I wasn't sure about it. Karl encouraged me so I skipped work early and tried to find the man with the Blue Box, giving away dresses. I went but I was too late. That was a bit sad for me. I was disheartened on Monday, and decided I was too far away (they were at that Ferris wheel in Docklands - I did not want to walk/go that far) but yesterday, they were at Spencer Street DFO. DFO is almost as far as docklands but they were giving away Hussy Dresses and Karl and I decided they looked okay. Once again Karl encouraged me and said he would text me location updates while I was out. Once I left uni, I have no access to twitter because my useless retard phone cannot access internet. But having trust in Karl, I went off in search of the holy grail dress. Unfortunately, as I was on a tram along Burke Street towards Spencer Street, Karl texted me to say I was once again beaten to the dress. Their live twitter feed informs said they had been found in DFO. Sad.

Disheartened once more, I went back into the city to buy Karl and myself a couple of Boost juices and a pair of Voodoo 120 Denier Opaque stockings (they're the thickest stocking tights around and very opaque. I'm wearing them today, they're good :D /end unpaid advertisement). Just as I was paying for the tights, I felt Karl's second sms go off in my bag. I missed his first message; lucky he wrote another one. The message said they were doing another give away (last for that day) and they are in Crown. So off I went again, catching myself a 96 Tram towards the Casino. Karl worked out they were in the Atrium in Crown and told me to go to the stairs near the stairs with the pools of water. This happens to be very close to the Burberry store (where I went to gawk and cry at the expensive) so I knew where it was. He also mentioned Rock Pool restaurant which was very close to where I had dinner for my 25th Birthday. Point of long story, I found them because of Karl's awesome clue working out/deductive skills. When I got to RockPool and the water feature, I couldn't see anyone. But after walking around, I found the box sitting next to the stairs (Hoorah!) and then looked next to the box to see a man and a woman sitting next to it. The first thought was oh noes (in less refined words), I've been beaten again! There's a girl there. But turns out, the girl was just there to keep him company. They were all like "How did you find us? The clues were so hard!" Karl is obviously the solution to all. They took some photos, I was flustered then they took my details. As I was filling forms and giving away my identity with my new dress, another girl runs up and goes, "Did I win?". I giggled. The following Hussy Trojan Warrior Dress in Tangerine now belongs to me. Minus the belt. (Wish I had the best). Looks 20x less awesome on me. But hey, I got it for free and it's RRP $198. Best part, it fits me. Size 10! What are the odds? Pretty good actually, considering it's the most popular dress size.

Chapter 1

This week I'm starting Chapter 1 of my thesis. In my meeting with my supervisors on Tuesday, they said Chapter 1 and 2 were going to be the most challenging, because I haven't written them. Well something along those lines. Chapters 4 and 5 are my 4 papers. Chapter 3 is my prelimiaries, data generation, theoretical representation, ra ra and Chapter 6 is my conclusion. It all sounds rather difficult to me. But I guess I just have to slowly start chipping away.

After my meeting on Tuesday, I went to see Transformers. It was alright. There have been terrible reviews but at the beginning I thought it was quite decent. Towards the end... it started getting a bit too far fetched/crazy. Still good, I suppose. My favourite part out of both movies is still the bit there the Sam Witwicky tries to show off his muscles by pointing at random objects in his car. Before the movie we had dinner at Oriental Spoon, a Korean BBQ place. My burnt the roof of my mouth so severely that it is still red and sore today. I hope the pain goes away tomorrow. Stupid takoyaki, if only you weren't so delicious (and hot). After the movie, it was 12:20am and there were no more trains. That will be the last time I watch such a late movie without driving in. I spent more than double the price of the movie ticket for a taxi home. Hmph.

Usually Tuesday nights are filled with training. But because I agreed to go to the movie, I requested training be moved to Thursday because we have a bye this week. That worked out well because last night, we were able to train with Premier League instead of C grade. It was the first time that I got more of a work out in GK than in GD. But it was fantastic. Playing with them just felt so different! They were good and we were pwnd but their shooters weren't retarded and tried to push into me with their butts. I hate it when they do that because it looks like I'm pushing them to the umpires and I get called for contact. I also played a game of mixed netball this week. Last time I played mixed was back when I was still at Google. Mixed netball is a whole different game altogether. I often forget how quick boys can be. There was this one boy that I was meant to be defending, I didn't think it was physically possible to move around so quickly, or jump so high. There was lot of WTF??? moments. Cam, another PhD student sponsored by the same company as me is in a mixed netball team on Mondays. They were running low on players and gave me a call. Cam was fantastic at netball, very impressive. But we lost something 3-1000000. Good game, good game.

Friday's Here!

Hoorah. I'm all tired and my eyes are starting to hurt. I didn't get too much done today but I'm very ready to go home. Yesterday I finished/worked out the template of my thesis. I'm very happy with it. Looking at it just makes me happy. I found some templates from the internet and just merged them/modified them to something that I wanted. Apparently Karl can just used the template his supervisor gave him. Students of his research area pretty much all use the same one. Lucky him. But I'm happy with mine, gives me the flexibility of modifying it if I want :).

Anyway, next I have to work out what goes in which chapter and start putting in bibliography references. It shouldn't be too bad, but given my lack of productivity this week, I might come in on Sunday and do some work. Also go for a swim at the pool. I went to Ivanhoe last week but I think I like the university one better. There's less old people and little children. Children are gross. Even though Ivanhoe has a spa and a sauna, I'm not really there to steam up or experience bubbles. Just a couple of laps to do something that's not sitting still. Netball training was cancelled again on Tuesday so I'm feeling a bit blah.

The netball game on Thursday was good. We beat the opposition by 15. The final score was 39-24. Vast improvement to the two consecutive loses we had the weeks prior; 14-21 and 13-28. For those games, we only had one shooter. Last game, we had both our shooters and they only had one shooter. Hehe. Last time we played them we tied 28 all. So it was nice to make the comeback, even though they were one shooter down, and shooters, as we discovered, are v.important.

Wednesday night was Mathew's birthay; we had Korean BBQ in Glen Waverly. There were these cool looking mint things that if you poor tea (or any sort of liquid) on them, they turn into towels. Karl stole some as we were leaving. Some of the boys went to see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen afterwards. Karl and I are saving that for Tuesday night. Collete's organised a movie outing.

Officially started

Well I have a title page. Today I started my thesis. All my past plans/outlines and things like that, haven't really helped. My conversion report was a good starting point, though. I had two papers written when I did the conversion report. Now I have two more papers. Hopefully by the time I finish my paper, I'll have one or two more journal papers and my thesis will be complete. Sigh, sounds lovely. I'm going to extend the first paper I had accepted into a journal and I'm working on a paper with a Brisbane collaborator. I'm not the first author on the paper with my Brisbane CSIRO collaborator so it can't really go in my thesis, but publications are always nice. Work work work. My 3 minute supervisor meeting was basically to say I should produce an detailed outline of what I should write in each chapter and which section of each paper which thesis chapters should reference. So yeah, that's what I'll be working on this week as well as my Brisbane collaboration. I wanted to work on my journal paper as well but I don't think I'll have time for that :(.

So yeah... what else have I done? Erm... not much last weekend. I had dinner with Karl's Dad on Saturday night and Karl's mum on Sunday night. Karl's step sister, Maryanne was there on Saturday too. She's having a black tie event for her 21st in March next year, so that's exciting. (I don't get black tie events often so this is exciting for me). This coming weekend Karl and I are having dinner with my Dad. My mum's in Hong Kong so I have to cook and Karl's offered to help out with the cooking as well. So that's nice. Tomorrow I'm having lunch at Blufish with Loki and tomorrow night is Mat's birthday dinner. Mat's also going to see Transformers. I'm really looking forward to seeing the movie but I'm waiting until Tuesday to see it with Karl's friends. Thursday is our final netball game of the season. We lost our last two games because we only had one shooter for each of those games. Lack of shooting makes it very challenging. So we lost. We're still third on the ladder. If we loose this week, we might slip to 4th but either way, we've made it to semi-finals. Training was canceled today so I'm feeling a little frumpy. There was also no training last week but I went for a swim instead. I recently bought a full piece swim suit on sale from Seafolly. I also went once over the weekend but I think I'm going to need a swimcap because my hair felt funny afterwards. I bought another pair of goggles from my local aquatic centre because my goggles broke as I was putting them on in the change room. 20% off togs and goggles so I got a pair of TYR Femme T-72 Petite for $14. Good enough. Anyway, I'm going to go play some DS. Time to pull some weeds from animal crossing and finish off Chapter 1 of Pheonix Wright - Justice for all.

Well that was rough

I finally got my paper submitted yesterday at 4pm. My supervisor was in my room at about 3:30 giving me comments. We didn't finish until 4:30pm so I didn't get my final final draft in. I submitted one at 3:57pm but according to my primary supervisor, the graph wasn't very good. It failed show the most important contribution of the paper. We fixed the graph but by then it was already 4:30pm. I emailed the co-chair of the track that I submitted to, but she said no. It would be unfair to all the other people who submitted on time. Sad. But that's two papers in two weeks. It was a bit exhausting. I wish I did more work on them, I would have done more experimentation, more proof reading, just more I suppose. But... I'm just running out of steam and I eventually ran out of time.

But my week wasn't all work. Over the weekend, I went out to dinner and drink's for Katie's birthday. She's a girlie from netball and we all went to The Retreat in Brunswick. We went there last year for Katie's birthday as well; she lives by so it's a good place to stumble home from for her. I can't remember if we went there for dinner last year but this year we ate there. The food was theoretically quite good. Other people's meals looked good, the Kangaroo I ordered was not so great. The meat was tender but there was too much weird tasting gravy.

On Sunday night, I had dinner with Karl, his mother and his brother at The Press Club. We were celebrating Adam (Karl's bro) and his recent graduation certificate. He didn't have a graduation ceremony and just had the certificate mailed to him. I think both his parents were a little disappointed (they wanted a ceremony) but Adam just didn't want it and I guess his word goes. It's okay, Karl will have two graduations so I guess his parents will have to take comfort in that. The food at the Press Club was nice, but pretty much exactly the same as last time. We had the sampling/degustation again. You'd think they'd change their menu after a year, especially since it's a sampling of whatever the Chef is in the mood for. Clear lies. It's a set menu. They should advertise it as that. I think if I ever go again, I'll just order what I want, instead of the 5-6 course sampling. Last time I went was last year for my 2 year anniversary with Karl.

And today, I bought a Guess watch for 50% off from the Guess store and some wrist support. My wrist randomly started to hurt and I couldn't work out why. The I realised a couple of weekends ago I started Super Mario Galaxy again on my Wii. There was one star that took me like 2 hours to get. 2 hours play of being stressed and tense about a stupid star... Hello wrist pain. Last time I felt the twinge in my wrist was when I was playing rock band with Loki. I love rock band. Why do I only like playing games that cause me RSI?