Once again we BlogJune.
Blogjune 2015!
Welcome back fellow Bloggers, Librarians and Twitterers.
Today is the first of June and that means it's time to BlogJune, my annual retreat into the written word that pushes my fingers to the point of pain because typing isn't easy.
Every year I've been doing this I tend to use the same basic format. Every weekday I write an editorial about something to do with libraries, then I write about my day and I follow that up with a YouTube video I found interesting or funny. On Saturdays instead of an editorial I try to write part of this insanely procrastinated short story called The Very Quiet Young Girls Guide to Multiple Personalities, which I've been delaying for three years now(it's serialised! and I'm lazy) and then on Sundays I write a short story instead of an editorial. Sometimes I have a theme week where I'll write about some specific topic every day, last year I wrote a long travelogue about walking the El Camino De Santiago and the libraries I found along the way for a week. This month I don't have any planned out or anything but that could change.
I found myself in Centrelink sometime in November last year for some reason and I had a long time before I was going to be looked after by the helpful staff so I wrote out a long-ish list of ideas for things I could write about this year, so if nothing else I have a list I can use and rely on to find a new topic every day. I usually write down what I'm going to be writing about on Mondays, less to let people know what I'm going to write and more to make sure I actually have a topic so I'm not scrambling around every night of the week.
So my plan for this week should be:
So the theme for this week is mostly: Travels and visiting with a library twist.
My Year.
I had an interesting year. The highlight of it was my visit to America where I went to both DragonCon in Atlanta and visited the setting of Portlandia in Portland Oregon in August-September. It was a great time and I'm going to talk about it in more detail tomorrow night, suffice to say I still really like visiting America a lot, the place is just a giant playground of stuff to do and things to see for me. Also the people there seemed to love my accent.
After that the year was mostly quiet, I ignored most of the G20 except for the security drill they conducted at the State Library when I was on a shift(I was running late so I had a built in excuse for once for why I was still outside when I was meant to be inside). I was cycling the day that the hailstorm destroyed most of the windshields in the city, so that was a world of excitment I wasn't really prepared for.
I didn't end up serving on a Jury after all the build up and excitement, the trial was called off at the last minute and they never called my group back so I dodged it and still got a nice little cheque in the mail for my service.
My team didn't win any of our competition soccer games all season but we still stuck it out to the end. When I landed home from the USA I actually ended up playing a game that morning and then that afternoon played a second game with another team. Once our season was over I switched to the other team for about seven-eight games, cycled to every match, played the full thing and then cycled home. Was a great work out except for the week my bicycle broke.
Summer was a filthy hot mess of a time for me, I was trying to get out on the bike and nearly dehydrated myself a few times because of the oppressive Brisbane heat, ended up giving up for a few weeks at a time and then when I went back to riding I was horribly out of shape.
I honestly tried to do NaNoWriMo this year in November, I even tried to cycle to the Brisbane NaNoWriMo midnight writing kick-off party at the Pancake Mannor but was late and kind of wanted to go home more than I wanted to try and force someone to give me a seat at the big table they had set up. I'd just left a different kind of a party and was pretty sweaty from the bike ride at full pelt trying to get there before midnight. I went home and wrote the first few thousand words.
I think I spent New Years Eve this year being respectible and looking after my brother for most of the night, ducking out to visit a bar at 11:45 to ring in the new years with other people but only found a pokie room open, still it was something and a vast improvement on the previous year where I don't remember much of what I did.
I had the personal joy of getting surgery on my guts in when doctors decided I needed to have my gallbladder removed in March which created a whole new kind of pain and discomfort afterwards, also they wouldn't let me keep the stones which I found annoying. I somehow managed to go see a production of Legally Blonde a friend of mine was in the day after surgery(I'd forgotten that I'd promised to go when I schduled my surgery) but I was in some serious pain for the next week or so until everything kind of settled down. I couldn't take my painkillers either because I kept having to drive places and I wasn't going to risk them interfering with my driving. So I suffered a bit.
A mate of mine had a surprise wedding in late April this year, I was expecting an engagement party and suddenly found myself in the middle of a wedding which was a great surprise but also a little annoying because I didn't have a tie or leather shoes because I wasn't expecting a wedding. A great night overall. Another friend of mine had his first kid, a little girl who is adorable as hell.
My birthday was okay this year, I got some Doctor Who slippers from my brother and his wife, a new bike pump from my mum and some movie vouchers from my dad. I also found an old road bike on the side of the road during the council curbside dumping so I now have four bicycles, one of which I actually paid for and three I've salvaged.
I'm going to see if I can't put some pictures in here later, right now I'm going to just go to bed and hope my computer doesn't automatically upgrade to Windows 10 without double checking with me first.
My To-Do List.
Last year I wrote a to-do list for the upcoming year. I didn't get many done this year sadly compared to last year. But that gives me some more goals for the next twelve months at least.
DONE.
NOT DONE.
My Day.
Spent most of today sleeping because I was completely wiped out from Sunday, I didn't wake up until about midday and after that I spent most of the day checking the website for the Story Bridge Market day tickets because I wanted to make sure I got some as the last time they were on sale they were sold out in 25 minutes or so. At around 3pm I finally phoned up the council and asked them when the tickets would go on sale(they were free but they are forcing people to get tickets to limit the crowd size for logistical reasons) and they said they were going to put them up only after the announcement was made on Channel Nine News that night. So I found the site on my phone and bookmarked it.
The reason I was so exhausted and wiped out from yesterday is twofold, firstly I was exhausted because in the morning under a pretty unforgiving sun my team had to play a game of soccer with only ten players in the first half, two of which were ringers we'd pulled in from our various circles of friends. I personally called up five people and managed to get one guy to come out, he'd not played soccer in about twelve years but was keen to give it a shot. He was pretty shattered at the end of the game. I've been going light myself in recent games because I hurt my knee a few weeks back and didn't want to aggrivate it so playing a full ninety minutes was a struggle. In the second half we had an eleventh player show up and we came together a bit better, we still lost sadly 4-0 but we played out fully until the end so despite the loss I'm pretty proud of our efforts. The other reason I was so exhausted was that yesterday, after the game(and a quick shower at home), I went to the legacy tunnel and walked through it which was a great experience but also a stupid way to rest off after my game. When I finally got to sit down at home I basically fell asleep sitting upright in my chair.
So as a result today was pretty light.
I left my dad's house at about quarter to four and went to my brothers house to look after him for the night, tonight is Monday night so we went and got steaks at the Corinda tavern which is a now six year long tradition going strong. So we(he has a second carer on Monday nights who works with me) got him into the bath, cleaned him up after his day and got him dressed for going out. We got to the bar at about six pm and as soon as I sat down I started hitting refresh on my phone for tickets to the markets. I looked like the rudest hipster in history ignoring literally everything and everyone around me while waiting for tickets to become available. Where I sit I can't see the TV with the news on it so the other carer had to keep a vague look-out for me on the TV to tell me if the Story Bridge showed up.
Eventually my refreshing finally worked and I managed to snag myself four tickets. I have a few friends who might be interested in coming along so I'll ask around, guarantee I'll find someone eventually to take them if I can't push them off.
Dinner was nice and afterwards we did the shopping for the week, the meal plan for this week for my brother is Mongolian Lamb stirfry tommorrow, Pumpkin soup with a ham-hock in it for Wednesday night and Slow-Cooked Chicken Curry for Thursday night, so that should be nice, a good variety of tastes and flavours.
After that I wrote this entry up and I'm hoping to get some sleep sooner rather than later.
YouTube Clip of the day.
This is how you train a goalkeeper to keep the goal.
Welcome back fellow Bloggers, Librarians and Twitterers.
Today is the first of June and that means it's time to BlogJune, my annual retreat into the written word that pushes my fingers to the point of pain because typing isn't easy.
Every year I've been doing this I tend to use the same basic format. Every weekday I write an editorial about something to do with libraries, then I write about my day and I follow that up with a YouTube video I found interesting or funny. On Saturdays instead of an editorial I try to write part of this insanely procrastinated short story called The Very Quiet Young Girls Guide to Multiple Personalities, which I've been delaying for three years now(it's serialised! and I'm lazy) and then on Sundays I write a short story instead of an editorial. Sometimes I have a theme week where I'll write about some specific topic every day, last year I wrote a long travelogue about walking the El Camino De Santiago and the libraries I found along the way for a week. This month I don't have any planned out or anything but that could change.
I found myself in Centrelink sometime in November last year for some reason and I had a long time before I was going to be looked after by the helpful staff so I wrote out a long-ish list of ideas for things I could write about this year, so if nothing else I have a list I can use and rely on to find a new topic every day. I usually write down what I'm going to be writing about on Mondays, less to let people know what I'm going to write and more to make sure I actually have a topic so I'm not scrambling around every night of the week.
So my plan for this week should be:
- Monday(Today): Year in Review. Basically what I did since last I bloggged.
- Tuesday: DragonCon, Portland and Swordfights in a forest. My holiday to the USA.
- Wednesday: Cooking on the road. How to make food when your kitchen is basically a pan and a blunt knife and no-one uses Metric.
- Thursday: Visiting Libraries on the Road as a Librarian. Meeting my peers in strange places.
- Friday: Visitors to the library. The many types of wonderful international guests I've encountered at the State Library.
- Saturday: The Very Quiet Young Ladies Guide to Dealing with Multiple Personalities.
- Sunday: Short Story Sunday.
So the theme for this week is mostly: Travels and visiting with a library twist.
My Year.
I had an interesting year. The highlight of it was my visit to America where I went to both DragonCon in Atlanta and visited the setting of Portlandia in Portland Oregon in August-September. It was a great time and I'm going to talk about it in more detail tomorrow night, suffice to say I still really like visiting America a lot, the place is just a giant playground of stuff to do and things to see for me. Also the people there seemed to love my accent.
After that the year was mostly quiet, I ignored most of the G20 except for the security drill they conducted at the State Library when I was on a shift(I was running late so I had a built in excuse for once for why I was still outside when I was meant to be inside). I was cycling the day that the hailstorm destroyed most of the windshields in the city, so that was a world of excitment I wasn't really prepared for.
I didn't end up serving on a Jury after all the build up and excitement, the trial was called off at the last minute and they never called my group back so I dodged it and still got a nice little cheque in the mail for my service.
My team didn't win any of our competition soccer games all season but we still stuck it out to the end. When I landed home from the USA I actually ended up playing a game that morning and then that afternoon played a second game with another team. Once our season was over I switched to the other team for about seven-eight games, cycled to every match, played the full thing and then cycled home. Was a great work out except for the week my bicycle broke.
Summer was a filthy hot mess of a time for me, I was trying to get out on the bike and nearly dehydrated myself a few times because of the oppressive Brisbane heat, ended up giving up for a few weeks at a time and then when I went back to riding I was horribly out of shape.
I honestly tried to do NaNoWriMo this year in November, I even tried to cycle to the Brisbane NaNoWriMo midnight writing kick-off party at the Pancake Mannor but was late and kind of wanted to go home more than I wanted to try and force someone to give me a seat at the big table they had set up. I'd just left a different kind of a party and was pretty sweaty from the bike ride at full pelt trying to get there before midnight. I went home and wrote the first few thousand words.
I think I spent New Years Eve this year being respectible and looking after my brother for most of the night, ducking out to visit a bar at 11:45 to ring in the new years with other people but only found a pokie room open, still it was something and a vast improvement on the previous year where I don't remember much of what I did.
I had the personal joy of getting surgery on my guts in when doctors decided I needed to have my gallbladder removed in March which created a whole new kind of pain and discomfort afterwards, also they wouldn't let me keep the stones which I found annoying. I somehow managed to go see a production of Legally Blonde a friend of mine was in the day after surgery(I'd forgotten that I'd promised to go when I schduled my surgery) but I was in some serious pain for the next week or so until everything kind of settled down. I couldn't take my painkillers either because I kept having to drive places and I wasn't going to risk them interfering with my driving. So I suffered a bit.
A mate of mine had a surprise wedding in late April this year, I was expecting an engagement party and suddenly found myself in the middle of a wedding which was a great surprise but also a little annoying because I didn't have a tie or leather shoes because I wasn't expecting a wedding. A great night overall. Another friend of mine had his first kid, a little girl who is adorable as hell.
My birthday was okay this year, I got some Doctor Who slippers from my brother and his wife, a new bike pump from my mum and some movie vouchers from my dad. I also found an old road bike on the side of the road during the council curbside dumping so I now have four bicycles, one of which I actually paid for and three I've salvaged.
I'm going to see if I can't put some pictures in here later, right now I'm going to just go to bed and hope my computer doesn't automatically upgrade to Windows 10 without double checking with me first.
My To-Do List.
Last year I wrote a to-do list for the upcoming year. I didn't get many done this year sadly compared to last year. But that gives me some more goals for the next twelve months at least.
DONE.
- Go to DragonCon and have a great time.
- Follow that up with a great week in Portland Oregon.
- Participate in NaNoWriMo. I did the first week but then couldn't go on because I missed a few days because of stuff and then dropped out. I managed to write 13,407 words before I gave up and have been tinkering with it on and off since November.
- Cycle more than 200kms in a week. Strava recorded the week at 196kms but I did some off-Strava riding.
- Start saving for my next trip overseas. I have $15,000 right now and am ready to start planning.
NOT DONE.
- Get a Job and keep it for a while. I had a good couple of interviews but nothing came of them sadly.
- Sit on a jury. The trial I was meant to be called up on settled the morning I showed up for jury selection.
- Buy a new Laptop. I probably should have, I have money to do it but my old one is still somehow kicking.
- Start to pay off my HECS debt. Can I lie and say I refuse to give any money to the government until they legalise same-sex marriage or remove compulsory daytime helmet laws for cyclists?
- Get a girlfriend, because it really is boring going to weddings and parties alone. Yeah, I did not achieve this.
My Day.
Spent most of today sleeping because I was completely wiped out from Sunday, I didn't wake up until about midday and after that I spent most of the day checking the website for the Story Bridge Market day tickets because I wanted to make sure I got some as the last time they were on sale they were sold out in 25 minutes or so. At around 3pm I finally phoned up the council and asked them when the tickets would go on sale(they were free but they are forcing people to get tickets to limit the crowd size for logistical reasons) and they said they were going to put them up only after the announcement was made on Channel Nine News that night. So I found the site on my phone and bookmarked it.
The reason I was so exhausted and wiped out from yesterday is twofold, firstly I was exhausted because in the morning under a pretty unforgiving sun my team had to play a game of soccer with only ten players in the first half, two of which were ringers we'd pulled in from our various circles of friends. I personally called up five people and managed to get one guy to come out, he'd not played soccer in about twelve years but was keen to give it a shot. He was pretty shattered at the end of the game. I've been going light myself in recent games because I hurt my knee a few weeks back and didn't want to aggrivate it so playing a full ninety minutes was a struggle. In the second half we had an eleventh player show up and we came together a bit better, we still lost sadly 4-0 but we played out fully until the end so despite the loss I'm pretty proud of our efforts. The other reason I was so exhausted was that yesterday, after the game(and a quick shower at home), I went to the legacy tunnel and walked through it which was a great experience but also a stupid way to rest off after my game. When I finally got to sit down at home I basically fell asleep sitting upright in my chair.
So as a result today was pretty light.
I left my dad's house at about quarter to four and went to my brothers house to look after him for the night, tonight is Monday night so we went and got steaks at the Corinda tavern which is a now six year long tradition going strong. So we(he has a second carer on Monday nights who works with me) got him into the bath, cleaned him up after his day and got him dressed for going out. We got to the bar at about six pm and as soon as I sat down I started hitting refresh on my phone for tickets to the markets. I looked like the rudest hipster in history ignoring literally everything and everyone around me while waiting for tickets to become available. Where I sit I can't see the TV with the news on it so the other carer had to keep a vague look-out for me on the TV to tell me if the Story Bridge showed up.
Eventually my refreshing finally worked and I managed to snag myself four tickets. I have a few friends who might be interested in coming along so I'll ask around, guarantee I'll find someone eventually to take them if I can't push them off.
Dinner was nice and afterwards we did the shopping for the week, the meal plan for this week for my brother is Mongolian Lamb stirfry tommorrow, Pumpkin soup with a ham-hock in it for Wednesday night and Slow-Cooked Chicken Curry for Thursday night, so that should be nice, a good variety of tastes and flavours.
After that I wrote this entry up and I'm hoping to get some sleep sooner rather than later.
YouTube Clip of the day.
This is how you train a goalkeeper to keep the goal.
Click to view