Inside the looking glass...

So I participated in SoCNoC again this year and managed a pathetic 15,000 words of the 50,000 target. Procrastination is purely to blame for that; well procrastination, a week in Griffith and the purchase of Age of Empires 3 are the real reasons I only managed to write just over a fifth of the total target. Meh there is always next year...

I get my ganglion removed on Monday which is mildly exciting in an absurd medical kind of way, it has stopped aching all the time now only twinging now and then when it gets cold or i over extend my wrist but it has doubled in size and still looks just wrong so i can't wait to be rid of it.

Nothing much else has happened of late.

So lots of stuff has been happening lately and very little of it is wonderfully exciting:

I am on the waiting list to have my ganglion removed which could be anytime between three weeks ago and the next two months. I am betting on the three months after the next two months...got to love the public health system..mind you I can't complain if it si public I don't have to pay the thousand of dollars it would cost if I was getting it done privately...one of the joys of being a poor uni student I guess.

I have the next seven weeks off uni because lucky me doesn't have any exams so I get all of exam break plus the mid semester break just to bum around the house and work on some of writing and other wonderful stuff.

Tomorrow morning the boy and I will be piling ourselves into my car at 3am to begin an eight hour drive to visit my aunt in Griffith...we expect this drive to take a lot longer as there are several places we want to stop along way like the Zigzag Railway in Lithgow and Japanese Gardens/Prisoner of War Camp in Cowra. I have seen the railway before it is pretty neat for an old steam railway they have a platform 9 3/4 there which gave me a little nerdgasm last time I was there.

That's about it for now.

So I have this weird lump growing on my wrist, whilst mainly just a gross looking lump it is sometimes very painful and occasionally if I bump it the wrong way it makes my fingers go numb which is kind of a pain in the ass. I have an appointment for an x-ray tomorrow but the general consensus is that it is a ganglion; in other words a cyst full of sticky joint fluid caused by a small rupture in the joint sheath. So once my x-ray confirms that is in fact what it is then I will have to make an appointment to see a surgeon to have it removed. Fun fact number one about ganglion removal: in something like 95% of cases they only put your arm to sleep so I will get to watch all the action if I am so inclined. It is usually just non invasive surgery that and shouldn't take too long but I will have stiches where they cut the back of my wrist. which for me is morbidly cool as I haven't had external stitches before had plenty of scars from growing up on the farm which could have probably used a stitch or two; gouges from bits of wire, scrapes and slices on my knees from learning to ride my bike, a star shaped hole in my palm from falling into a shovel (glad that one was my palm because it would have been my face if I hadn’t put my hands out), a slice on my instep from stepping o a rusty star picket in the dam, a slash on my temple from falling over in the bath room and a spot above my little toe from being stepped on by my horse. I have had dissolvable stitches in my mouth when they cut my wisdom teeth out last year but never had externals. Oops I didn't mean for that to become a catalogue of my various scars, I might as well add the burn on my foot from hot fat off the BBQ and the six burns on my right leg from a motor bike accident.

So anyway back to the ganglion; when I showed it to mum she said oh that is a ganglion I think you are supposed to hit it with a book, actually I think it is supposed to be the family bible. So with the knowledge that mothers are supposed to know best I found the biggest hardcover book on my bookshelf and slammed it onto the back of my hand and then there was much swearing and gnashing of teeth but the lump was still very much there. Thanks mum! My doctor had a good chuckle when I told him about my efforts and informed me that whilst it does sometimes work most ganglions removed by this method just come back.

Other then weird lumps there has been very little going on at the moment, most of my time has been taken up with study or writing but mostly study.

But I can't be bothered right now having spent the better part of Sunday doing the research and plotting for it It will be over fairly quickly and the sooner I get it done the sooner I can get to work on the two english essays that are due by the end of next week...yuck...I don't want to do that either. I am just having one of those can't be bothered days and it seems that extends to my writing as well. For the past week I have had the writing bug but today I just wanted to sit in front of the play station and then after an hour or two even that was too much effort and the boy and I settled down to watch X-Men 3, well i settled down to watch the movie he shuffled around me tidying the lounge room and after that we decided to watch another movie before taking a short afternoon nap. It seems when you live with your grandparents you start to mimic their day to day activities...dear god I hope not.

Uni has been interesting over the last couple of weeks I have made a small group of friends in my Japanese class and they seem just as diversely nerdy as me and though we are all vastly different personality wise we share a very similar type of humour. It makes the four hour long class a breeze which is nice. One of my English classes is superb the lecturer is great the content is great and I have discovered a love for sonnets that I never had before the other class is not so great. When the lecturer decides to remember to turn up the class is well I wrote about them in my last post. We have moved on to Beowulf but they are still just kind of stagnant and repetitive in their ideas it seems like no one wants to have thoughts on the material different to anyone else in the room. My final class Caesar is great material wise, the content is fascinating, my fellow students are mildly amusing but the lecturer is as dry and brittle as the books she gets her material from. An upside to this class is that one of my friends from Japanese takes it as well.

The only big thing to happen over the past couple of weeks happened on Saturday; one of the besties got married. I was not in the bridal party but I didn't really want to be I enjoy weddings much more if I am not party of the official party. It was a lovely day though some parts of it were not what I was expecting and it was the first wedding the boy and I have attended as a couple which we both found amusing. We also found it amusing that at our table we were the only ones not married or engaged, but the comments and questions about why we weren't considering yet didn't bother us. We'll get to it one day the most important thing is being with the one you love and you don't need a ring on your finger to prove that.

So I am back at Uni, first year again seeing as this time I have changed from science to arts, because i wasn't really happy with science and i am not exactly sure why i choose to do it apart from my love of biology. So my majors are English Literature and Japanese both of which are turning out to be very interesting and both of which I already have done extensive ground work for.

Now I am not sure if I am getting older and therefore grumpier or if first year university students are getting more immature and in most respects more stupid. In one of my classes we are currently studying C14th Italian poet Petrarch, now for those who don't know who Petrarch is he wrote a sequence of sonnets addressed to a girl called Laura, a woman who was married to another man and therefore unattainable. Now by today's standards yes i will agree that Petrarch could be seen as a bit of a stalker but I will also mention that my class does not believe in love, true love, fairytale love or even just plain old love that ends sweetly. They are a bunch of cynics and for me who is even on my worst days overly romantic it is kind of a let down, they can't even discuss the idea of love as it was in Petrarch's society with out snarling jibes at how even though Petrarch had all this love for Laura she didn't love him back so he should just get over it and move on. Now to me such a comment is immature and lacks thought...well the type of thought required for and english lit class. another girl said and this is a direct quote: "he can't have had sex with her because if he had he would have seen that she was just a big B and his idealism of her would have been shattered." she didn't even say bitch, I am sure if she had been chewing gum she wouldn't have bothered to take it out of her mouth either. And on the subject of Petrarch being a stalker, whilst I can see that writing 366 poems about someone you can't have half of these after her actual death would be seen as the act of a stalker by most of today's generation in the aspect of courtly love that sort of thing was the done thing. but then again they had a strong belief in love and all its many faces back then. But I did laugh out loud at one comment by another member of the class in response to the topic of Petrarch the stalker: "well it is creepy, but not creepy in the same sense that sending her dead kittens would be creepy, when you think of it she would have certainly preferred 366 poems over a bunch of dead kittens" And the lesson went further downhill from there.

so other then that one class things have been great. The boy and I are currently living with my grandparents due to the Bratling moving back in with mum and dad. That house is way too small for six adults, four dogs and three cats.