The Beginning of a Very Long Day

Gosh I just glanced at my 5 previous blogs and they were all about work. How boring of me!

But that's life.

I work 5-7 days a week and tonight, once again, I'm on overnight duty at the clinic. Another night of staying up and no sleeping. Although I would have liked to say that I got plenty of rest last night to prepare for it, I didn't.

I didn't because I came home at 11pm after my Salsa lesson and I had to drink the soup my Mum left for me, I had to pack tomorrow's lunch and dinner and then I had to have a quick shower before I got into bed.

By the time my head touched the pillow, it was almost 11:45pm. And I was soooo tired :(

It's now 5:30am and I've already had a shower and washed my hair. I need to pack stuff for my overnight stay, get dressed, make breakfast, go to Coles and stock up on snacks to keep me awake tonight before I head off to work.

So I'm signing off now...

The First Long Night

So I did my 8pm, 12am and 4am checks with no problems. The 2 girls came back to help me out and really, between the 3 of us, the 13 patients we had took us 15 minutes to do. It really was quite easy. None of them were in critical condition and they just needed to be checked on to make sure they're okay.

I didn't sleep between the 8pm to 12am or the 12am to 4am checks. I had my wonderful Keeping Faith to read and I finished it just as we had to do the 4am checks. It was a great book and if I have time tomorrow, I'm going to return it and borrow another Jodi Picoult novel. (Hmm, although I did promise Dru I will start reading Angels & Demons next...)

I know I've been mentioning Jodi Picoult a bit lately, but I really think she's a fantastic writer and I urge you to have a read of her books. They may not be everyone's cup of tea as the topics she writes on can sometimes be quite controversial (Keeping Faith is about a 7 y.o. girl who 'sees' a female God), but I find them really inspiring and they stimulate me to think deeply about things that I normally don't think much about. I love those types of novels!

After my 4am check, I tried out this new SMH puzzle but it was quite boring as the clues were about the news that occurred that day (sheesh, I don't read EVERY single article in the paper!) so I decided to perhaps try to sleep in the Cat ICU room.

My round chair had wheels that tried to roll away underneath me as I bent down to rest my upper body onto the bench which was really annoying! Then when I finally worked out a position which didn't cause the chair to roll, my arms started getting pins and needles cos I was sleeping on them (so that I didn't have to lie my face onto the bench... ewww goodness knows what's been on that bench!).

Now I had the choice of getting my sleeping bag from the car and hauling it upstairs to the room in which the other 2 girls had gone to sleep, but I really didn't want to go outside (it's really dark and scary!), I didn't have the keys to get back into the building (I thought about blocking the door so it wouldn't fully close but then I thought what happens if someone gets into the building while I was at the car?!), it was bloody cold, and I didn't particularly feel like catching a cold so I can sleep for 4 hours. It's not really worth it. In the end I just went into another room with more comfy chairs, kicked off my shoes and bent down onto the table again. This time I was successful in falling asleep, but it could be just that I was dead tired and I needed the rest so I can drive back home safely in the morning. I woke up 3 times during my short sleep and was finally woken up by the garbage guy who came in in the mornings to take out the stinky rubbish.

I was then forced to make polite conversation with this guy for 15 minutes. And this is when I could hardly understand him as his English isn't that great and he has a heavy accent to go with it. I just wanted to go back to my table and nap for a few more minutes.

Well, at least I drove back safely.

I will be doing this again on Tuesday night. This time, it will be worse because I'd have worked the whole Tuesday from 8am to 6pm and then do the overnight shift from 6pm to 8am.

ARGH!

I'm not looking forward to it... -_-

At Work and B-O-R-E-D

At the uni clinic right now and I'm about to do my 8pm checks. It's been quite boring here and not much is happening. I just need to do 8pm, 12am and 4am checks. And I've got 2 other 4th year girls helping me out. Although... one's gone out for dinner with her friend and the other, I don't know where she is. She came back from dinner and I let her in, then after that, I don't know where she's gone. Maybe she's gone upstairs to rest or something, or maybe she's gone downstairs in the kennels to play with this really cute puppy that's got a neurological disease.

I've just had dinner and was reading my novel. I'm afraid I will finish the novel before the end of the night, then I will be forced to read material relevant to my course and do some study!


I'm just waiting for the 2 girls to come back so we can start our checks. Or perhaps I can start them by myself? Yeh maybe I'll just check 'Marlon' first cos he's pretty easy. But he's sleeping and I don't want to wake him up.

Working All Night

Ahhh... first week of uni clinic almost finished. It wasn't too bad either! Mon, Tues and Wed were really busy but Thurs and Fri was really quiet and boring. Only 2 cases on Thurs and 1 case on Fri. Yesterday was a bit of a time waster really, cos of the aforementioned 1 case which only needed 2 interns to look after it, and we have 7 altogether. The rest of us just went to the library, 'self studied' and looked up journal articles for the Jounal Club relating to anaesthesia under the big topic of Exotic Animals (i.e. not cats and dogs).

I found 2 interesting articles. One on Siberian tiger anaesthesia and one on sea lion anaesthesia. I know that I'm not going to exactly see these animals routinely, but I'm interested in them and that's all that matters. We'll need to present our articles some time next week when we're not so busy.

Apart from the library, I went to Darling Harbour and had lunch with Dru and 3 of his workmates, two (all three maybe??) of which were going to be leaving Sydney very shortly to do projects elsewhere in the world. We went to this chinese place in Harbourside for their lunchtime yumcha special, which costs $15pp for 3 yumcha dishes and a soft drink/tea. The food was so yuk! YUK is the only word to describe it. I would use another more fitting word, but I promised Dru to stop swearing so much. (Yes, I really have been quite foul-mouthed recently.)

So tonight, I'm actually going to have to work, from 4:30pm to 8am the next morning. No sleep is allowed I was told, so it's going to be a long night with the animals in ICU (Intensive Care Unit). I'm bringing the book I'm reading, Keeping Faith by Jodi Picoult (I finished My Sister's Keeper, it was so good and I cried for the last 1/4 of the book) and also some good music to listen to.

I have to leave soon to start heading over to uni, and grab some lunch on the way over. Hope you have a better night than I do! (It's Saturday night, go out and par-tay!)

-_- *zZzZzZz*

I'm so tired :(

I tried sleeping early last night... but I don't think it really helped me much. So I'm just going to go sleep now. I'll update with some interesting cases or events later when I can actually keep my eyes open and my mind concentrated long enough to write a good entry :P

Goodnight.

Back To Work Again

What a busy 2 days it has been! Just started working at the Uni clinic and it's already so busy for everyone. Luckily for me, I've been finishing around 4-5pm but for a lot of other interns, they're finishing 7pm.

At least I have the time to study a bit. I think I really have been a bit slack on keeping up on my knowledge and it really showed today... I think the anaesthetist thought I was a total idiot who didn't know anything about anaesthesia drugs! :( So tonight, after this blog I am hitting the books hard and brushing up on all I need to know about anaethesia drugs.

Today I had 2 nasty animals to anaesthetise. A grumpy, cranky, bitey and scratchy old cat that bit me, and a big rottweiler x that looked friendly but he almost bit my hand off. Thank heavens he was muzzled properly!

However, I'm really tired right now so I'll most likely not be hitting the books for very long. At the very least I will have to look up info on the case that I'm presenting tomorrow. This dog had a myelogram and I'm supposed to talk about all these complications that the dog could've had, but fortunately he didn't have any complications which was really great.

Dru left his mobile phone in a taxi yesterday so when I rang it at 5pm to see where he was, the cab driver picked up instead and told me he'll leave it at their cab base in Surry Hills ready to be picked up today after 12pm. Dru didn't ring me til ~6pm and for a moment I thought that he forgot what my mobile number is. I picked him and his work mate up and we went for cheapo $5 steaks in Broadway.

We then went to our salsa lesson where we had to learn to do this move which had double spins in it and I proceeded to get totally nauseous from all the spinning. By the end of the lesson I was ready to throw up. I tried my best to keep it down and took a nap on the way home which did make me feel better but I was still feeling a little nauseous. When I got home I realised that Dru had left his wallet in my bag, so now he was without a phone OR a wallet for work tomorrow morning. Great isn't it? -_-

I was really anxious to get his wallet back to him at least but there really wasn't much I could do. I finished work early today, so I went to Surry Hills and picked up his phone for him and then I also picked him up from his work so I gave both items back to their rightful owner. And bonus, I get to see him :P

Anyway, I'm off to study!

The Last Saturday...

Last night was the last Saturday of my 1-month holiday. *sad* At least I had a really great day (and night) to show for it!

I went over to Dru's in the morning and we made our way to the city. We were supposed to go see the Greek Treasures Exhibition at the Powerhouse Museum, but it was $10 per person, we were broke, and I also wasn't too interested to see it.

So instead, we went walkabouts at the city and went in to Kelly's Bookshop (a really cheap place where I love to buy books), Kinokuniya (another book shop), the Apple Centre in Broadway and also Broadway shopping centre. Ok by now you must think we're very boring people, but really, the 2 bookshops were entirely my idea cos I was really hankering to buy a new book to read (even though I borrowed Angels and Demons off a friend, which I am currently reading). The cheap book shop I mentioned is a place that I discovered about four years back when I started to buy my own novels to read instead of borrowing them from the library.

At Kinokuniya, I found a series of well-written novels by an author called Jodi Picoult. She writes novels about family, relationships and love. (For more please go to www.jodipicoult.com) The synopses I read on her novels were really interesting and I would really love to read all the books she's written. I bought a copy of My Sister's Keeper which I've already started to read. The story talks about a girl who was specifically conceived to be a perfect allogenic match for her older sister who has leukaemia. I think it's going to be quite a moving, deep and emotional story. It's from multiple points of view so I'm sure it's going to be really good reading.

At Broadway shopping centre, I paid a visit to my friend Janice, who works at an optometrist in the complex. The poor girl, she was working there til 6pm that day :(

We were going to go to look around at the Ikea in Rhodes shopping centre, but we decided against it. I wanted to get him some new furniture for his room, but he reckons he doesn't need it.

So instead we just went back to his house and his niece went to rent DVDs and convinced Dru to get a DVD too. We watched one of them, although we haven't finished it and I... really don't what the title of the movie is... It was alright though.

Dru had promised his friends that we will play poker with them but we were supposed to be over at his friend's house by 6:30pm... By 8:25pm, we had just finished watching the DVD and were 2 hours late. We felt really, really bad. So we headed over and instead of telling everyone the truth, we decided to lie and say that we were having dinner with my parents up near my area, and that's why we were so late. We're bad, we know... but we really couldn't tell them the truth - that we made them wait 2 hours for us because of a DVD.

And the thing is... they really did wait 2 hours for us to start poker. We felt extremely bad!!

Oh well, we got over the initial shameful fact that we were so late... and proceeded to have a fantastic time playing poker, blackjack (yes, a little mini casino going on here!), and this other game that I don't know the name of, and would take too long to explain here.

It was a $20 entry fee for the poker and the money from all 8 people were pooled together for the prizes. First prize $95, second prize $40 and third prize $20. There was also a consolation prize for the first loser - $5. Well... I have to say that I didn't win any of those prizes, and I also had to fork out another $5 (well I didn't fork out but I'll explain later) to play in the game of Blackjack, which composed of the first 4 losers from the poker game. I was the second loser :( That's ok though 'cos I actually had no idea how to play poker and that was the first time I ever played.

Dru won first prize, but because we were late and also broke, we were playing on credit so it was lucky that Dru won first prize so that we didn't have to fork out any money and he still got the extra $55. He gave me the $5 to play blackjack too. *hehehe* We then went out for a beer run (this is at about 11:30pm, and we had to go to 3 places before we found one open) where he got a case of beer for the boys and a 4 pack of cruisers for the girls with his prize money. Isn't he so sweet?

We came back to reheated pizzas, the newly bought alcohol, and a new game of cards - one which had us screaming with laughter, yelling, pointing fingers, touching noses, snatching at each other's cards and some of these actions were done simultaneously. All I can say is that it was the funnest (is that a real work?) part of the night. There were penalty drinks of beers when u lose or did something wrong. Dru offered to drink for my penalties and mistakes as I still had to drive people home. He drank a lot more than he would've needed to because of me :P

By the time I got home, it was 2am - way, way past my bedtime as I had work today :(

I'm so tired!!!!

Hair...

I went shopping yesterday and while I was just browsing around in the pharmacy, I saw a special deal that gives you a free Ľoréal Pure Zone with any purchase of Ľoréal Colour Pulse or Féria Colour 3D.

At first I thought, 'Aw yeh, I can get a freebie if I bought stuff to dye my hair with.' So I looked at the two types of hair dye (one's permanent and one's temporary) and looked at which colour would suit me best. My hair was a funny colour, because I had dyed it brown before and it had grown out... so half was dark brown/black and the other half was brown - not exactly a great look!

Now, I've dyed my hair several times before. I've put streaks in it, i've dyed it brown and I've dyed it purple black. Dru has a thing for girls with blue hair (when I say blue... I mean blue, like manga girls blue hair). I'm not really quite sure why, because I'm pretty sure not many people have dyed their hair to that bright blue colour, or maybe he's seen someone with a blue wig? I don't know. Anyway, I LOVE the colour blue (as you may have already figured out?), and I've always wanted to dye my hair blue. Well I'm sure I don't want it bright blue, but there is a colour which is blue black and it's quite nice. Perhaps it makes you a little goth-looking, but I think it's a very sexy hair colour.

And as my luck would have it, they had that exact colour in their Féria Colour 3D range! It's called 'Starry Night', which makes it even more perfect because one of my more-used nicknames is Star :) There was only one packet left of this blue black dye so I quickly bought it and decided to use it today.

I woke up this morning and my mum told me she wanted for us to go visit and have lunch with an aunty that had undergone a tumour-removing operation recently. I still wanted to dye my hair today so I had to move quickly! I dyed it but it took ages! My mum told the aunty we'd be over at 11:30am (she lives near Burwood) but by 11:30, I still wasn't ready to leave... it was a bad decision on my behalf :(

However, my hair turned out alright and now it's a nice blue black! ^-^ It's supposedly permanent so it won't wash out. I don't have photos of it at the moment but even if I did take photos, you probably won't be able to see the colour anyway... it'll just look black :P

I love my hair colour right now! If only it was also straight..... it would be perfect!

Blogging Woes

Gosh today's been quite annoying because I found out from a friend that my photos weren't being viewed by other people because they weren't hosted on the web. So I had to go and host my photos somewhere (or work out how Hello works...) and it was a big mess. Luckily it seems to be working so far. I don't know, it might die on me again soon. If you have troubles viewing my photos, please leave a comment and let me know?

Thanks! :)

Queensland Trip

My four day trip to Queensland was good but because I only went with my Mum, many pictures we took only have me in it. People who want to just look at photos can click here :)

On Wednesday, we hopped on a plane to Gold Coast in the morning then as soon as we checked in at the hotel, we took a transfer bus to Seaworld. I was tired cos I stayed up late packing so I look really tired in photos that day :(

It was a cloudy day but lucky for us it didn't rain. However it did make it a bad day for photo taking.

We went and saw all the sharks, dolphins, dugongs, sea lions, seals, penguins, fish, polar bears, tigers, crocodiles, sheep, kangaroos, koalas,... hmm what else? Can't remember at the moment. We didn't go on any rides, however we saw 3 shows, the Dolphin Cove Show, the Quest for the Golden Seal and Planet SOS in 4-D. The shows were pretty exciting.


The Quest for the Golden Seal!!!


The seal arrives!


That lady on the right looks a bit too happy, doesn't she?


They look around for the Temple...

... and then after that all I took were short videos so I can't post them up on here :P


The Dolphin Cove Show!!




Flips!


I love their smiley facial expressions!

Same as before, I mostly took videos... Sorry bout that!

The next day we went to Dreamworld. Unfortunately it rained :(

I took sooooo many photos and videos of the tigers in Tiger Island...... that my flash memory card had no memory left in it :( I had to go back and erase some of my photos and videos to free up memory! I missed out photos of the tiger climbing a tree!


See that braid thingy in my hair? I got it done just earlier on in the day.


There it is there near the white arrow. Hmm, and that tiger in the background looks like it's about to do a poo or something.... but he's probably just about to sit down.


Oh what I'd give to be that handler... to be able to have close contact with these magnificent creatures!


White tiger! My absolute FAVOURITE animal in the world. (And yes, I know that white tigers aren't a breed, they're just a colour type of Bengal Tigers!)


Whenever I see this photo, it makes me laugh because the tiger just looks sooo cute in it! He's got his eyes focused on the milk the handler's holding!


That must be hard on the handler's shoulder! That tiger weighs 200 something kgs!


That just looks amazing! But supposedly that's how tigers stand up to sniff leaves in trees or something like that.


He let me pat him then ran away from the other guy who wanted to get close to him *heee heee*

This was taken especially for someone, you know who you are!

That night we went to Jupiters Casino to see a show called Midnight Magic...


That was the only photo I was allowed to take in Jupiter Theatre :(

The show was pretty amazing though. There was magic, dancing, singing and a lot of perky butts hanging out of g-strings. I'm sure the guys would love it! And unlike the name of the show would have you believe, it started at 8pm and ended at 9:30pm.

We took a bus up to Brisbane on the Friday and stayed with my Mum's friend for the remainder of the trip.


It's some lookout place that looks over Brisbane...


This is in Brisbane's Bicentennial Park??

On Saturday, we just went to Brisbane city and shopped around. Well. I shopped around :P We went to Southbank too, to see that man-made beach and to walk the markets. I bought a top, 2 headbands and some stuff that makes my hands all soft and moisturised.


It was a pretty hot day but I'm sure the water would still be quite cold!


This is taken in the man-made beach in Southbank.




Just me trying to be cool....



And that was pretty much the end of my trip. I bought 2 new tops on top of all the stuff I bought at the markets and so I spent a bit of money that day. I think it was a total of $110. That's like a weeks' worth of work for me! (I only work Sundays...)

Anyway, I'm tired and need some sleep. I'm off!

Tired...

I just got back from Brisbane and I'm sooo tired.... Plus I need to get up early to help with the vet checks at the 'A Million Paws Walk' (held in Centennial Park) tomorrow. So I'm off to bed and I'll update everyone with my trip to Queensland and the walk tomorrow night.

Good night!!!

Queensland!

Well, I'm off to the Gold Coast for the next 4 days. I still haven't packed yet! Our plane's leaving tomorrow morning at 7:05am so I also got to sleep early tonight.

We're going to Sea World tomorrow, Dreamworld on Thursday, then up to Brisbane for Friday and Saturday. Then I'm coming back on Saturday night. I'm gonna take heaps of photos (hopefully!)

Anyway, got to go pack!

What a Life!

Look at my two cats. Sleeping on MY bed like they own it. Sometimes I envy their carefree existence in this world.

Revised Friday Night

I ended up having just a very ordinary and relaxing night with my boyfriend, Dru.

I picked him up from work and drove back to his place. In the car, we made plans to catch a movie at the cinemas after dinner but when we had a peek at 'What's Showing' at Hoyts, the lack of good movies became painfully obvious, so that idea was scrapped. (White Noise was unfortunately on too late.)

We had dinner while watching TV and, thankfully, Dru's love of channel surfing came to our rescue. We also discovered that Friday night TV was absolutely boring. No wonder everyone wants to go out on Friday nights! Anyway, the ad for Unbreakable to be shown on channel 7 at 8:30pm came on and since there wasn't anything else good to watch (another channel was showing Clueless which is a movie I love, but I was pretty sure that Dru would be against watching that!), we decided to watch it.

Actually, I lied. I remember now that the footy was also on but I don't like watching violent sports like that. However, with Dru's control of the remote and his power of channel surfing, we watched bits of it during the Unbreakable ad breaks.

Near the end of the movie, my eyelids started getting heavy so I retreated to Dru's room for a nice, comfy nap. I've told him many times before, I LOVE his bed. I don't know why, I just find that when I lie in it, I can very easily just fall asleep. Recently in the past couple of months, I've had trouble sleeping at night. I still don't know the reason why, but I suspect it may have something to do with the stress of working, assignment deadlines and my moving back home. I'd been living away from home for about a year and I enjoyed and cherished my freedom. Moving back home means I now have to ask for permission whenever I wanted to go out with my friends, or if I go anywhere for that matter. My mother is quite strict and, although I'm almost 23, still tries to restrict me from going out late at night. *sigh* Luckily I'm quite the persuader and so I usually get my way, but I wish she'd just be ok with it.

Cancelled Dinner

Originally, three of my friends, my boyfriend and I were supposed to go out for dinner tonight but unfortunately, two of my friends can't make it. One's going to go see The Lion King and the other has assignments due. :( My remaining friend didn't want to be the third wheel at dinner so it's been cancelled. Now hopefully my boyfriend and I will still go out tonight, although it's not certain yet at the moment. I'm still waiting for him to call me to let me know.

I don't mind if we don't go out to the city. It's so far! I wonder if there's any good movies on right now? Hmm... there's one called White Noise... I love horror/thriller movies! But I always get scared after I watch them. :P Can't live with them, can't live without them... Life's always funny like that.

I've Got Bad Eyes

Yay! I finally got more episodes of '大長今' to watch! :D *runs off to the tv*

It's lunch time already and I've done nothing but watching VCDs! My eyes are going to get so much worse if I continue at this rate~ I really don't want to get thicker glasses! I'm blind enough as it is... I've been wearing glasses since I was 4!

My First Entry!

Well, this is my first blog entry EVER and because of that I'm excited but also a little bit nervous. I was originally a little bored and hence the reason for starting this, but when I thought deeper, I realised that having a place where I can record my everyday's thoughts and feelings is really sorta fun. Like having a diary except it's not exactly private...

However I'm a person who likes starting things, and then sometimes I don't end up finishing them. But you know, I MEAN to finish them, I WANT to finish them, although my excuse is that 'I don't have the time!'......

Yes, yes, I'm a very busy person! (Or so I'd like to think) However, at this moment in time I'm on my 1 month holiday. It's only been 1 week and a half and I'm already bored out of my mind. On the very first day, I totally cleaned out and tidied up my bedroom from top to bottom! At least I now have a clean, tidy bedroom to lounge around in during the day. I love reading and I've been doing it pretty much non-stop since the beginning of my break - I've already finished 'The Da Vinci Code', halfway into 'The Gene of Isis' and waiting on 'Angels & Demons'. I'm also watching a Korean series called '大長今', currently up to episode 20 but I think there's a total of about 70 episodes. I wish that more people were on holidays so I can go out with them, or that they went to uni or worked in places closer to me so I can have lunch with them without making a big trek out to the city! I guess maybe I do have to make the trek at least once during this holiday,... I can go shopping!

Gosh speaking of shopping, I really need to buy some new clothes. Winter is coming and my old winter wardrobe is looking a bit... well,... old. Some nice knee-length skirts wouldn't go astray either... and a few more pairs of jeans... and a few light jackets... and... *slips into daydream*