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24.99726 years

Tomorrow I turn 25. As of tomorrow I am most certainly in my mid 20s. 25 it sounds so much more formal than 24.

For everything that the last 364 days have brought me, from the good, the bad, the ugly, the forgettable, the unforgettable, the amazing, the challenging, the one thing that I think will always be a hallmark of my 24th year is of course Pabbi dying. My 25th year starts to unfold tomorrow and as the year passes it will be interesting to see what it brings. I’ve got a number of things I want to complete/accomplish next year but mostly I’m here to live and to make the most whilst doing just that; living life.

and to move away from birthdays but onto happenings of the last week.

For the past week I’ve been literally overdosing on strawberries.
Strawberries ....

I am very pleased to announce that I got 80% for my accounting exam last week, it put me in the top 9% of the class, I aim to improve on that as the semester continues. The exam was Saturday morning and Saturday evening was Riverfire which we watched from a hill in Wooloowin. Oh sigh, we had 3, yes 3 dump and burns this year from the one plane. Oh the F-111 is one special plane.

Dump and Burn

Tonight after work N and I had “dinner” at the 40 Days and 40 Nights of Chocolate Buffet at the Bistro Allure. Oh I’m just recovering from chocolate and sugar overdose. I’ll go again in a couple of weeks with some of the girls from work and I’ve got a game plan worked out. The plan from which I shall not deviate is to get one piece at a time, eat that piece and then go back for more. mmmm chocolate ….

One of the many cases of goodies
Chocolate Buffet at Bistro Allure

N’s plate
Chocolate Buffet at Bistro Allure

My plate
Chocolate Buffet at Bistro Allure

This is one of the adorable presents I got from one of the girls at work today. A mini tea set. The perfect desk accessory for a tea fanatic like myself. I had received the little sugar pot at Easter and was told that I would get the rest of the present for my birthday. Total gold. The best thing is that the tea pot actually pours 🙂

A mini tea set for my birthday

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Riverfire tonight

It’s Riverfire tonight and it is quite windy… We’ll have to see how it pans out but fireworks and the amount of wind we’ve got at the moment tends not to make a good show.

This is the last year for the F-111, well so they say since last year was meant to be the last as well, frankly I’ll believe it when it doesn’t do a flyover next year …. There are no Roulettes this year which is quite a 🙁 for me. I love seeing them doing all their formations etc instead there’ll be some Black Hawks flying about …

Riverfire from the Beach at Captain Burke Park

I made pizza muffins earlier – basically this recipe but with more veggies in. They’ll be snack food tonight along with some Lebanese pastries I picked up on the way home from uni this morning.

I had my first uni exam this morning, 9am on a Saturday … I was fairly confident going in, going out well, I’m still confident I’ll get a decent mark but not as confident as I was going in.

Some collected links from the last little while which I’ve been meaning to share.

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Iceland at work

Iceland at work

This is what my desk looks like at work, at knock off time when all the files have been locked up. I’ve always had 4×6 photos or postcards running along the top of the mini-wall. A few days after I came home from Iceland I made 9 A4 collages of a whole bunch of photos from the trip to put up at work. It has been a great improvement over a bunch of 4x6s and I think it looks a whole lot better than the digital photo frames that are typically used. Co-workers pause and look at them, I get to smile at all those faces and places I miss and it just brightens up my drab desk so much!

Week 2 of uni is now over and I’ve got a lot of respect for all those who work full time and study part time…. It’s a hard slog, I’m slowly getting into the swing of things and I’m sure in a few weeks it will be like I’ve always been doing this.

Here is a photoshop comp of the 9 A4 pages together. Click on the photo to see it full size.
The photos on my desk mini-wall

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back in the swing

Well I’ve been home from Iceland for 10 days or so now and things are slowly settling back into some sort of resemblance to how they were before Pabbi died. My mind stays more focused and doesn’t jump about quite as much as it was. I’m getting back into the work routine but man I’m probably shouldn’t have had so many sleep-ins whilst in Iceland. Getting up by 0630 is just a wee bit harder at the moment than it was before going to Iceland.

I miss Iceland (probably the family/people more than the actual physical place, though I miss that too) terribly but oh when I walked into my own bedroom at 2am last Thursday morning, I felt things for my room that I don’t think I’ve felt before. If I could have hugged my room I probably would have, instead I opened the door and just sighed. My bed, my stuff, my own tea collection, my everythings. I picked up a few things in my travels to add to my room and in the below picture is one. I could have spent a lot more money and time in the Cath Kidston shop… My new cup for when I want a biggish cup of tea (I might have 4 cups that I drink tea out of at home depending on the type of tea, the mood I’m in etc).

Home

Not just my house but also the farm, collecting macadamias, playing with my camera in the afternoon sun.

Oh Hello Sun

I see red

Anchor Point

This past week was also my first week back at Uni for the first time in a good 3.5 years. It’s good to be giving the brain some more stimulus. It’s going to take a while to get used to class from 1800-2100 on Tuesday and Thursday nights but I’ll get there. A bonus to the late finish is that I get an off-peak train fare home 🙂 and since I’m at uni on Thursday nights I can’t be tempted by late night shopping. It does mean that I miss ballet this term though which is a bummer.

Back to Uni

Now a picture or two from Iceland

mmm Irises. There were so many in the botanical gardens.

Reykjavik Botanical Gardens

Bro, where’s my fish?
Bro, where's my fish?

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This is where I am

296/365.
swoon a new deck table, 296/365

On the deck, sitting at the new to our house table. With my laptop (obviously), a pot of of florally sencha and some grapes. This table is the perfect height. I found the old table a bit too high to type/sit comfortably at. This table will also be great for cutting fabric on as well 🙂 yay.

I can hear a faint din of traffic on Corro drive, the whistles and cheers from the basketball stadium and the sounds of feet fall as people walk through the park.

Today is day 299 for my 365 project. It seems like I’ve been doing this for ages now. Today also marks 292 days till I go to Japan next year with one of the girls. I’m so excited about that trip. We will be away from March 1 to March 15 and will be flying in and out of Osaka. I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am. Oh all the places to explore and visit as well as crafty and cute things to peruse.

Lunch on Lawson's, 299/365

We got a free lunch today from Lawson’s who are running a Lunch on Lawson’s promo across the country this month. We will also be having a free lunch tomorrow and on Friday as well. Today our sandwich came from e’cco and was just amazing. Somehow I’ve a feeling that our sandwiches tomorrow and Friday will also be amazing. Registrations for tomorrow in Brisbane have closed but are still open for Friday. My entire department will be having sandwiches on Friday as they were all quite taken with our lunch today. If you are in Brisbane and would like a yummy free lunch on Friday, register now! If you are in Sydney or Melbourne, Lawson’s is coming to your town later this month.

And on a different note to finish off with. I’m going back to Uni!! I’ve been thinking about it for the last 18mths or so and bit the bullet a few months ago and put my application in for the Semester 2 intake.

I was very excited when I came home last week to this email.

Dear Helen Palsson,
You have been made an offer in the latest QTAC offer round.

When I logged in to to QTAC I saw this.

In the 6 May offer round you have been offered:
413021 Bachelor of Business – full-time or part-time – Queensland University of Technology, Gardens Point Campus
Start Month: July 2010
You have firmly accepted this offer and you will not be considered in any further offer rounds.

and tonight I saw this

Dear HELEN
Congratulations on receiving your offer to study at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). I hope that you are excited about starting your study at QUT, as becoming part of the university for the real world couldn’t be easier.

Here is to brain stimulation and increased career prospects long-term.

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The Final Countdown

The day that will have the biggest impact on my life so far is almost here. In three days time I will be at the board presenting myself as best I can. The last couple of days I have been busily going over my notes, talking to people, writing new notes, reading reports and more. My desk seriously looks worse now then it ever did when I was at uni.

We picked Mum up from the airport this arvo. It will be a bit of a change having her home again after three weeks away. We have fallen into a system since she has been away and as of tonight that will all be out the window and it will be back to how it was before she went away. In saying that though it very nice to have her home again and to hear all her stories about the sights she has seen out west.

There was an excellent piece of news tucked away in the Higher Education supplement of The Australian yesterday about Asian Studies or more precisely titled the return to Asian Studies not only in universities across Australia but in the school systems as well if Labor wins the upcoming election. I let out a little cheer in the tearoom at work where I was reading the paper and then proceeded to send messages out to various friends either current or former Asian Studies students telling them of the story. In particular it made me think of one of my dear friends Sam who I met in my first year Indonesian class and in a couple of weeks will complete her degree to be a secondary Indonesian teacher and the fact that if Labor wins (as they very well should) her future looks much brighter if a greater focus is made on putting Asian languages and in particular Indonesian into more schools across the country. Kevin Rudd is an Asian Studies man, he did his degree though at ANU and had first class honours to go with it. The electorate that he represents though is Griffith, the very electorate that holds the university that I went to, Griffith University and when Griffith Uni was opened in 1975, one of the four subject areas it offered was Asian Studies. It all seems quite linked together when you look at it. Here though is to the future of Asian Studies not only in Australian universities but Australian schools.