I’m super sorry about nearly coughing up a lung. Blame it on the reject in the study room who gave me my cold.

Good luck to those poor individuals who have auditing with me tomorrow. I will bring cough lozenges, but they do bugger all.

Isn’t it crazy how life is constantly like a roller coaster? Mine certainly has constant ups and downs and no week is ever the same. I’m sure everyone’s lives are the same. I just feel I’ve had my share of drama this last month.

I’ve had the positives; my camera prize, my weight loss is going really well, moving house, my recent weekend away to Dargaville with friends, and all the plans we have coming up for this summer and New Years.

And then there’s the negatives; exams and my joblessness (yes this is the latest. I thought I had a job lined up for summer and then part time next year - but turns out I haven’t actually been officially hired, they haven’t even looked at CVs yet. So I’m officially unemployed. Shit. I’ve applied for lots of temp jobs, so hopefully something comes through).

I guess I have more positives than negatives, but unfortunately the negatives are BIGGER issues.

Last night I planned that I would bus to University to study, I searched the times and pick up and drop off spots and costs. I found that it was going to take 45 minutes to get to Uni and then a 45 minute trip home. And the cost? $9 for the day!! That’s crap! I decided I was better off putting $10 petrol in my car, which would get me three days worth of trips to and from Uni. So much for my money saving plan.

While writing this post I’ve had an email back from a company offering part time office admin role - perfect! Keep your fingers crossed for me. I’d prefer and office admin job over a retail one any day!

I stumbled across a blog post about classic books and thought it quite interesting as to how few I’ve actually read (24/100). I thought I’d read lots more!

So the idea is to bold all the ones you have read. There’s a few that don’t interest me and I may never read. The ones with * next to them are on my list of “to reads”. Many of them I know the story anyway, even without having read them.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte *
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell *
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (only read a few)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald *
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell *
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen *
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens *
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez *
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck *
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo *

So that’s me, how many have you read?

Yes, exams are definitely looming. My first two (yes, two on the same day - bastards!!) are in 8 days. Shite! Luckily I am well planned this semester and have already been studying for two weeks. So hopefully I’m prepared by time they roll round. I will be all finished by November 1st, oh god I can’t wait!!

We’ve moved into our new house. We’re still living among boxes as we want to renovate, so really no point in unpacking everything. We’re just coping with the basics. I would have uploaded some ‘before’ renovation photos of the house but we’re still internet-free at home. I have taken some though, so as soon as our ISP can get their asses into gear I will upload them.

So apart from exam study and living in a partially boxed house, not a lot is happening. Oh I am into my sports now though. Playing netball on a Monday night with a group of friends and now tennis has started up on Wednesday nights. So it’s basically exams and exercise at the moment. Can’t be bad for the body and mind!! Especially before celebration season kicks in over the summer….

Today I had some more fantastic news about my winning photo. At midday I started receiving text messages from family and friends telling me that my name and competition photo had been printed in the NZ Herald (New Zealand’s nationwide newspaper). So of course I had to stop my studying I was doing, I’m such a good girl I know, and run up to the Uni cafe and buy a copy of the paper to see if it was true. It was! Woohoo! Lots of people have seen it, it’s so very exciting!

What’s even more exciting, I am able to cross number 53 off my 100 things list, as I now have had a photo published in a newspaper. I just realised number 56 is to own a Nikon camera - lol. Yay! When it arrives I shall cross it off!

In other news, we visited our new home this afternoon. Oh god. You know how houses always look terrible when they’re empty and don’t have your personal touch and furniture? Yes. Looks terrible. We move in on Thursday. Will be wonderful once we’ve renovated it and got it sorted to how we want it looking.

A quick question; is anyone having issues accessing my site? I’ve had emails from some people saying it never loads. I have no idea why. Works fine for me no matter what computer/internet I use. Please let me know if you’re having issues and I’ll see if I can sort it. But I probably can’t because I don’t know that much. lol. But I’m sure my lovely host will help me.

1 birthday party
4 hours of dancing with friends
55 minutes of driving each way to the airport to pick up my Dad & Laurel
1 bottle of wine, snuck into a bar
2 quick fucks (the drink!)
12 boxes packed for moving day (Thursday)
1,700 the value of my new camera
3 slices of italiano pizza
800 lost in poker chips
360 minutes spent laughing with friends
2 pairs of jeans thrown out, no longer fit
1 car vacuumed, I finally cleaned it!
5 liquors in my Long Island Iced Tea last night
500g lost from all the dancing on Friday night
2am, the time I went to sleep Saturday & Sunday morning
9 times I listened and sang my heart out to The Man Who Can’t Be Moved

Thanks Miss Em, have borrowed again.

About four to six weeks ago a friend of mine sent me an event invitation on facebook for a photography competition run by Habitat for Humanity. The competition was “A place to be”, so I submitted my rain drop that looks like it has the world reflecting. One of my all time favourites. I think I added a small snippet in one of my posts for everyone to please keep their fingers and toes crossed for me.

my submission

Well today I check my facebook profile and there’s a message from my friend saying why didn’t I tell him I won?! W.T.F?! I had no idea I had won! Then I was worried he was tricking me. So checked it out on the website… and sure enough, I won first prize! WOOHOO!

I never thought I’d actually win!! But the best bit…. my prize…. a

Oh yes.. I am thrilled!!! The morale of the story… enter EVERYTHING. You’ve got to be in to win.

We had an absolutely fabulous time in Dargaville! It’s a small town with not much to do. But we had a brilliant time! Our time was spent walking, drinking, eating, relaxing, drinking some more, eating some more and so on… I feel like I need a serious diet and detox week of ; soup, salad and water only.

On departure day, Friday, after our last lecture of the day we all decided to meet up for a celebratory drink at the bar across the road from Uni. It was to celebrate the end of our crazy week of assignments and the excitement of our trip.

We started the journey at 5.30pm, the drive down was fun. We all piled into the 7-seater car and first made a stop at Toni’s gorgeous farm in Warkworth where we’ll be spending New Years, to pick her up.

So while we waited for her to get ready we had our second (or third for some) drink of the day. Once all piled in we were off. Just one stop on the way for dinner (McDs), my first burger in months!

We arrived at the bach at about 10.30pm and decided we deserved another drink. The shisha came out and the first round of drinking games were played. We must have had a hell of a lot to drink because we all got a bit free spirited and excitable and thought we’d go for a nudie run. Yes you read right. I can’t believe I did it. Well all six of us did it. Sorry the camera was banned .

The morning view from the bach.

The next day we went back into Dargaville-town to meet two other friends driving up. While waiting for them we stopped at a local hotel/pub that was opened in 1876 for yet another drink.

After that we did some grocery shopping, cooked a BBQ, napped, drank some more, laughed our asses off, played some more drinking/card games, played on some swings, took lots of photos, took a beach walk, had another nap. It really was a relax weekend. It was wonderful!

A beach walk

Saturday night was filled with more BBQing, drinking games, laughs, and super relaxation. Another night walk on the beach, this time fully clothed. One of the guys decided he’d swim - crazy! It was freezing, we had to huddle to keep warm.
We paused the drinking games to get some group photos before the sun set. Amazingly beautiful!

The drive home was a more quiet event. Myself and another girl, Dale, fell asleep in the back with a pillow between us, while the guys kept each other awake.
I didn’t feel very tired yesterday afternoon. But it hit me today. Uni dragged out so long.

All I can say is bring on the next bach weekend! It was fabulous!