my birthday

i rushed home from work yesterday 'cause i knew askea had a present waiting for me, and we were ringing home as well, so needless to say i was quite excited leaving work.
but i wasn't prepared for balloons and our fun fairy lights in the dark. askea'd got me a cake too (well, it was a choc swiss roll) and she put candles on it. it was really nice. all very simple, but touching :) she got me 2 really cute little kitty teddybears.
bad res. phone pic follows:

arn't they just the cutest!

so that was fun. we're going to see the bourne ultimatum on saturday as well. i can't wait. the review on rotten tomatoes was really good, and anyone who went to see it said it was really good.

i don't really know what else to say. i went to the library today and got out two books called vellum, and ink. i just got them 'cause the titles are so cool. i hope they are good - they seem different and i've been on a big quest for "different" fantasy reading material. The Lies of Locke Lamora was really good - something like nothing i'd ever read before. There are not enough books out there with thieves as the main character. I really love the legend of nightfall too - that was about an assassin. I really have to get to writing so that i can get my assassin character out there. heh, yea.

anyway, i'm going to go now - only 50 minutes left in work.

i've not posted in ages

so time passed, yet i don't have much to write about.
really what i want to say is that lunar eclipses are freaky. i'd never seen one before and there was one last night at 10:30 - a perfect opportunity, really, or so i would have thought. good weather, clear, warm-ish. but no, the one night i wanted it to be clear it was cloudy. and freezing. but anyway, enough of complaining. i did manage to see the moon close to totality and that was enough to freak me out. it looks so unnatural seeing a dark red moon hanging in the sky, too dim to illuminate anything. the wind clacked through winter-bare branches and whistled through the wires around our house. with the dark, cold and wind, the broken red moon was enough to scare me back inside quite quickly.
but i'm glad i saw it. i've never managed to witness one before, so it was an experience. i'm thinking the next one that comes around on a warm summer's night i'll watch in full - lie outside for 4hours and freak out as the moon shrivels and then feel relief as it fills back to normal again.

i'm at work now; it's quiet. what am i doing, you ask? working as a "reservations consultant" at a timeshare exchange company. confused? i was too when i took the job. it took a couple of hours to grasp just exactly what i'd be doing, but the basics are that i search for hotels around the world for people to stay in. it's good enough work, not too stressful and there's a good bunch of people working here.

i work from 12pm to 8pm, so i have mornings for writing. all good - i've finally got around to writing the end of "the fall" (aka my zachery story i was writing last year). i had to actually figure out how the ending was going to go first, but i got that done and started on the actual writing yesterday - i have about 800 words so far. i'd like to get about 6,000 or 10,000 for the end, though. but i'm not sure that that will happen. i also have the problem that the 1st and 2nd books are blending into eachother too much. i don't know where to just cut and stop writing. because i could go all the way up until zachery sees zan, but that really has no place in book1.
oh well - i'll figure that out when i get there. yes.

life in NZ is going well. we travel to places around christchurch on the weekends, well places that the buses go to anyway.

yea, i've not much else to say. i'm going to go clean my screen now - it's really dirty.

stuffs

i have 4 minutes and in those 4 i'm just going to say that i'm still alive, i hate waking early in the morning and i really really want a job in the IT side of admin. i really don't want to be a receptionist.

apart from jobs, stuff is going well - we're having fun on the weekends and reading tonnes (due to no tv) going to the cinema a fair bit - film festival - woo. go see tales of earthsea if you like studio gibli stuff.

thank god for libraries and the beach and cheap buses and i wish i had a pc, but not too badly.

anyway,
write later.

wheee, stuff. woo woo. i mean, snowboarding, a job and other miscellaney

so... we got chairs. :) that, however, happens to be the least of what has happened over the last week or 2 or however long it's been.

we went snowboarding. it rocked! i am now obsessed, it's the most fun i've had since archery. so in one year i've found 2 sports i like. go me. i can't wait to go snowboarding again, but since i have a dwindling bank account, that's not going to happen any time soon.

good news looms, though. coverstaff rang and they have a job for me and askea. askea (being the poxy one that she is) may have a job for a few weeks / months (the company is recruiting and it will depend on how long it takes for them to find someone). humble me gets a job for 3 days and then to sit at home wondering about money for snowboarding some more. not that i've not been trying. i've applied to 4 different places. none have getten back to me yet, though. ah well - 'tis early yet. (as i was writing this otago university library got back to me saying it was a permanent position, blah).

also, the christchurch film festival starts in 2 weeks and they have a mad animation program. i want to go to 5 things, one being the first venture of Gorou Miyazaki (yup, son of legend Hayao Miyazaki). That is one i absolutely don't want to miss. It's called Tales of Earthsea, based on LeGuin's works. So hmmm. Askea also wants to go see Snow Patrol - tickets are 79 / 89 dollars. That's kind of a lot. But Iain Archer is supporting them and i quite like him.

what else is new... the figure skating from my last post never happened. we went to see harry potter - i liked it, but prisoner of azkaban is still my fav. me, askea, simone and brian went playing crazy golf yesterday. that was a whole tonne of fun. the course was indoors and each area was themed. it was fun. and hard. i lost terribly, with a sore 46 over par. simone won at 10 over. ah well - it's the fun that matters, right? right...? well, i'm smiling anyway.

i think that's about everything. i think my stomach dosn't know what to do with the sudden shock of winter. i'm hungry all the time and recently my stomach has been a bit wierd. i think we had some gone-off yoghurt and i ate a bit of that without knowing. anyway. i have to consciously limit the amount of food i eat, cause at the moment, i have dinner and an hour later i'm back in the kitchen looking for something filling. i'm definitely getting enough, cause i'm not all shakey and food-deprived all the time.

anyway.
i'm going to go now. i'll add more if i think of anything i've forgotten later. (i still have 1hr 17 mins on here)

settling down while down under

does new zealand fall into the "down under" category of countries, or is that just australia?
anyway. we now live in christchurch and will be here until the start of october. we have a nice little flat just outside the city, with 2 rooms, a large kitchen and a sitting room. no furniture, but we got beds for $10 and a small bedside table (serving as a dining table) for $9. however, no place here has central heating and it gets very cold at night, especially now, when the weather is bad (it was -6 the other night).

so we have a house sorted, now we need jobs. letting a recruitment agency do the searching for you seems to be the way to go, but i'm afraid they will take all our pay in commission. hopefully we'll make enough to live a bit well. i'd hate not to be able to see the country because i couldn't afford it. and everything here is expensive. except the bus. with a bus card it's 1.90 for 2 hours travel or 3.80 for a whole day on as many busses as you like. tuesday is cheap cinema day (9.50 - usually 15), and there are cheap places to do grocery shopping. chairs are very expensive - we have none and have been eating dinner kneeling on the ground. i can't wait to get chairs!

we met some great people at the hostel we stayed in for the first week and have plans to go skating and snowboarding with them. there are figure skating lessons on tuesday evenings. knowing how to figure skate would be so cool. knowing how to skate at all would be cool.

we went out with simone and brian on friday night to sample the nightly festivities hereabouts. it's funny going into irish pubs in a forign country. they seem just like normal pubs - like any ol' place you'd stroll into in ireland. it's wierd. we tried out a karaoke bar too - much fun being on stage and blaring queen's "i want to break free" into a mic while people dance and sing beyond the stage. the sunday after, we had a lovely picnic in the park, sitting on a sheet beside the river, teasing the ducks with morsles of food, and playing bachi ball after lunch. much fun. the day rounded off with a stroll through the sunday arts market and back to our chairless home for hot chocolate and many games of zigity and cards. very much fun.

yes indeed. it's so hard to chronicle everything when internet access is so sporadic. mostly we spend our days looking for cheap furniture and remembering stuff we need to buy for our house. it's all very drab and normal and not really as much fun as you think it will be when you are 10 and have daydreams of moving to your own house (which will be bright and full of colour and warm). it is rather disillusioning to find out that you have so many bland walls in your house and arn't allowed to spice them up with posters or anything. "no blu tak" the contract says. yea, way to make a place utterly depressing. no furniture and no fun things on the walls. but we found fairy lights in cash converters for $15 and stuck them over the doorframes, where noone will ever need to know there was blu tak (it's not even blue - it's white). and there was a sale on kids' bedspreads in one of the shops here, so we both have bright duvet covers.

ok, i've definitley written enough now. i'm going to go.

tokyo, oh tokyo

ahh, tokyo. well, it certainly was an eye-opener and that's for sure. japan, while retaining all it's charm and uniqueness has fallen a notch in my list of places to absolutely return to. the main reason was the language barrier. i wouldn't have thought it would be such a problem, but it was. we tried to go shopping one day and got utterly depressed because we couldn't find any shops - the city just wasn't accessable like KL or singapore. and the people have this aloofness that shuns any attempt to communicate.

but apart from that, the place is cool and it was brilliant to see places that i've seen be decimated in animes (tokyo tower and the diet building for instance). tokyo tower was a little let-down; the diet building wasn't.
and the coolest thing about the whole place: tokyo disneyland! yes. it was so brilliant. we spent a whole day there - 13 hours going on rides and wandering around looking at all the mad disney stuff. i still have all the songs in my head - so good.

the hostel we stayed in was a nice place to stay for a few days. we had a room (more of a partition in a room) to ourselves, which worked out very well, we had enough space and privacy - compared to the people in the "dorm" (aka, outside of our partition). they all were just on bunks squashed in together into a space smaller than an irish bedroom. it had character, though + was quite japanese (that is to say small and cramped - all the towns were like that: as many houses squashed in together as possible; and no green to be seen anywhere - that was quite depressing after the amazing trees of south-east asia).
but we were close to the train lines and the trip into tokyo centre took only 20minutes. a note to any girl planning a trip to tokyo and wanting to buy cheap clothes: head to the subnade shopping centre under shinjuku station.

now it's on to winter. i've not had enough of summer. south-east asian weather is not like summer, it's just like hot. japanese summer was like summer and i feel i will dearly miss it - cool breezes, bright blue skys, warm sun, hanging out in a dark green canopy-ed park, watching the sun flicker through the trees. damn, i:m seriously going to miss that. at least it'll be past the shortest day; i have lenghtening evenings to count away 'til happy weather again. buhh. anyway - i'll have snow - i guess that's a consolation, right?

i must say: i'm really tired now. i feel like i could sleep for a month + my feet pain me all the time. i go to bed with them hurting and the moment i step down on them the next morning they hurt again. i need a holiday!!! heh he! no.

ever onwards

i'm in singapore now - the airport actually, just about to board a plane to tokyo. i am one happy bunny right now.

gotta go - time's up here.

crusing the beaches of malaysia

i must apologise to people who read my journal and who i also email. but it's just too much effort to write about the same events twice.

malaysia's going well. the perhentian islands were quite stunning, but not as good as railay beach in thailand. the best thing was the crystal clear water. we went snorkeling (snorkel - who invented this word? it is hilarious) and saw so many colourful tropical fish - big and small - the major highlight was seeing "nemo fish" (clownfish) peeping out from their anenemies (well, nemo can't spell it ethier). anyway - it was good. we're on the move again - heading south down the coast to another beach - this one reads really well. "situated on the south china sea"... "wind sculpted sand dunes" (rock on - dunes: i've been dying for some dunes to play in) ... "crashing surf" - it sounds amazing.

yea - i'm just after a huge dinner of indian thali (lots of samples of different dishes) and am very full and satisfied and not having racing brain waves. i ate shark for dinner last night. we decided to treat ourselves to a beach barbecue, and the choice was king fish, shark or barracuda. shark is nice enough, as fish goes. i'm not a huge fish person and it tasted a bit like soul. the sauce they had with it was wonderful, though.

so yea - that's my major news. getting buses around malaysia is trying. no one is very helpful (taxi drivers are like flies) and finding the local bus is hard. they have "express buses" which are like luxury coaches and cost a bomb. well - it's still only 8 euros or whatever, but the local buses are like 2, or something. and since we are budget backpackers, the difference means a nice dinner or food grabbed off a stall on the side of a street. that food gets really dull really fast. you can only eat rice and chicken so many nights in a row before you get bored of it.

yes - i guess i filled out this post well.
i really need a travel icon.

onwards to malaysia

ug, wierd o key here, so some wrds won't cme out.

we've reached malaysia, all safe and sound. the weather here is really hot - it feels as hot as india. thankfully it's not as humid as thailand. the heat i can bear, but the humidity - not at all.

we spent the last 3 days lounging about on the most perfect beach i have ever seen. fine golden sand, green turquise sea, mangroves and palms grwing up beyond the sand. the water was beautifully warm - i wanted to stay in it all the time. and of course, i built the obligatry sand castle. it was more of a fort, really. o_O

anyway. the trip has been going wonderfully. we have more lounging about on tropical beaches ahead, and some fun romps in natinal parks and KL and singapore to see. it should be fun.

bye.

babmoo rafting? yes please

ahh, thailand of the technology - look, i actually get to write more than once a week, amazing.

sooo... what's been happening? we headed north on a 17 hour train ride to chiang mai. sleeper trains are the way to travel. you wake up in your destination refreshed and ready for sightseeing. yea - we've been doing a lot of that. walking everywhere, my feet don't know what's hit them. i crash every night at about 10pm. not that that means much when askea drags me out of bed at 6 or 7. well... it's not that bad.
anyway, enough ranting.

chaing mai is a small city, nicely contained with most of the sights within an easy distance of eachother. so we spent the first day taking in 3 wats (temples) and i must say: if you've seen one wat, you've seen them all. they are beautiful, and interesting, but ultimately it's like visiting every parish church in ireland. anyway.
the other day in chaing mai was an adventure of small proportion. we booked a trip elephant riding, trekking and bamboo rafting. elephants are cute and lazy, trekking is gross and sweaty in this weather, but bamboo rafting - now that is something to write home about. it's just about the most fun i've had on our trip so far. i laughed the whole way down the river. excellent.
you sit onto this long narrow raft, held together by some rope and stuff and hold on as the river sweeps you downstream; around rocks, along bushes, into swells - brilliant stuff. we almost capsized at one point - the raft tilted dangerously over on its side, but the rafter dude straightened us and all was well again. we went just after a night's rainfall too - so the river was swollen, adding to the adventure value. brilliant. the only problem was that it didn't last long enough. ah well.

we're off to "the bridge over the river kwai" tomorrow, after going to see the grand palace. then onwards to the famed beaches of thailand. i can't really wait to get to the sea. i miss salty air. i actually bought a bikini too. me owning a bikini - there must be something wrong! anyway - it's a nice one, i feel somewhat comfortable in it.

right so.

thailand rocks!!

hello again,

first - i have to mention that i'm on a somewhat wierd keyboard. so sorry for any typos.

thank god we are out of india is all i can say. i totally couldn't wait to leave. it is such a horrible country. well - beutiful country, bbut way too much stress. we spent our first day in thailand wandering all over bangkok and looking at it's huge mall - mbk (8 floor chock full of stuff - there's a whole floor just for mobile phones).
we walked down kao san (the insane backpackers street) and got a bus to saim square. walked to the train station and got a boat home. yes, that did take the whole day. it's been fad.
thailand is a huge mix of everything from smells to people to experiences. it dosn't have the chaos of india and is way easier to settle into.

we're going to go see spiderman tomorrow afternoon. i can't wait :) we looked at the cinema lobby and it looks amazing.

i totally can't think of anything else to say. i've been up for 48 hours and it shows a bit. i'll try and get online for a bit in chaing mai.
i need sleep.

india: the short and dirty

it's really wierd, checking my journal on a computer in a forign country. emailing people wasn't so bad, but this is such a normal thing - i just checked my messages and was like "i only ever do this at home". odd. it's strange to think that i won't have a home for a year. not a real one.
it's funny the places you find to feel "safe" while away from familiar territory. airports and while in a car / plane are the only places i feel are familiar to me these days. it's a bit stressful, really, not having anywhere to ground yourself - i find my eyes welling up and my throat constricting at random intervals, but it passes quickly and everything is good again. i was just saying to penelope_stone how the good bits are amazing and how the bad bits are annoying, but quickly forgotten when things are going well.
i'd hate to have something really bad happen. i don't really think i could handle it.

so yea - this is a copy of the email i sent to everyone.


we're in Dharmshala now, with the monks and the Tibetans. one annoying thing about India is the Indians. everyone else is quite nice, but the Indians are such a pain.

we had a bit of an adventure when we arrived here (in India i mean). our hostel had no booking for us and so we were homeless in Delhi, in a cab that didn't know where the Tibetan enclave was. he brought us to a travel agents instead, which told us that every hostel in Delhi was booked out because of Indian holidays.
anyway - we ended up spending e1000 on an all inclusive tour, which has been working out very well, but wasn't really what we wanted. although, i would hate to have to deal with Indians at every stop, because this way we just get in a car, go to our next destination and check into our hotel when we get there.

so, apart from the people, India is a beautiful place. the Himalayas are amazingly beautiful. Delhi, while hot, has it's charm. there are tonnes of trees everywhere, a pleasant change from the fields and ditches of Ireland. i don't have pics, cause they are all on Askea's camera.

yep - so much has happened, and i have a wonderful journal that i'm writing in every day, but i'm just too lazy to take it out of my bag and type up.

the start of the travels

so this is my last night in my own bed for a year. not that this thought saddens me, i've never had a very comfortable mattress.

my hair is 7mm long.



yea.

it's really wierd. when the wind blows through it, it feels like ants are crawling on my head. it is really gross and icky. i see penelope_stone and i get a minor shock to see her hair so short. i suppose it must be the same for her.

i can't find the lid to a luchbox, the lunchbox i have my electronic things in. i can't think of much to say. we went to freakscene last night. mr. fadd played terrible music. as liam commented, it was like listening to daytime radio. i'm a bit tired now, though.

i had my last night of archery. my last arrow was an 8 pointer, heh. not bad. i'll miss it, i think. i'll have to find a club in new zealand.

i'm going on an airplane tomorrow! woooooo! i love airplanes, they are so cool. weeee.

goodbye so. my next post will be from asia. waaaa - how cool is that?! :) :) eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

almost gone

i think my luck for this month has been really bad. usually, i'm such a lucky person, everything works out perfectly, but recently things have been going a bit squewy. my application for a credit card got refused, my stomach has been paining me, and today, top of the bill, i failed my driving test. i just hope everything sorts itself out before friday. i'd hate to think my bags will get stolen, the hostel will have no record of our booking and we'll be kidnapped and ransomed in delhi, all because my natural luck has run out.
not that i think it has - it just likes to stay balanced. usually everything is good but when it turns, everything crashes. ah well.

i'm trying to pack - it's dull. i still have to finish my novel. i don't think that is going to happen at this stage. i could do it tomorrow, i guess. maybe.

only 2 days left at home. god, that's a little scary. then out into the big world, with no anchor back to what i know as real; everything different and new and scary. really scary. but fun. an adventure. wooo! something to really write about at last. no more inane blather about work, or college, or random page-filler that no one really wants to know about. fluf that is forgotten as soon as read. no. this will be decent. :roll eyes: yea right!

anyway. it's a little dark in here, so i will go.

i feel occasional pangs of remorse

yes - i'm aware how long it has been since i posted last. nothing has really happened since then. well, it has really.

we are getting organized for our trip. we did a practice pack last weekend - i'm seriously considering bringing only one pair of pants and only a few different tops.

our indian visas came through yesterday and arrived today. i have my first stamp on my passport. wheee!!

i'm having serious trouble with my driving test. it got re-scheduled to the 8th of may and i need it within 6 days. i really don't think that is going to happen. it will have been such a waste of time and money (and emotion) if i don't get my test before i leave, cause i can't see myself doing it after i return.

in one week i'll be on the road to dublin. wooo! i booked our hostel in delhi - i hope it's nice. it's 6km from the city centre. i don't mind - it's in the tibeten enclave, away from the worst of the touts and beggars and stuff.

why do people not accept that as a writer i can't spell some words? like responce and availible. is it not ok to master grammar if you have a few (hundred) words that you can't spell? oh well. i still have 2000 words (about) to write to finish my novel. it's the very last scene and i don't quite know (still) how to work it out. another battle is fine and all, but that will be three in a row. is it a bit much to end the book in a flair of magic and swords and stuff? meh.

i'm up to ep9 of heroes. the "wow" factor has waned but it is still very good. hiro is my favourite character. and peter. and isacc. he looks better as a junkie - clean hair dosn't suit him.

mmm, what else. i got the 3d houses finished. i should put them up on dA. if i think about it when i go home. they are ok. they have some problems, but it took waaay too long to render them for me to go back and fix them. the biggest one took 11 hours to render. the quality is really good.

right so. i guess i'll go now. i've filled up enough of people's friends' pages.

things about work and travel

today in work i sat and waited for the phone to ring or an email to come in while listening to japanese talk radio. it was cool. i actually understood 4 or 5 of the words. there were 2 girls on the program, though and they just laughed fakely all the time. it was awful, bit still - i got to brush up on my nihongo.
work's a bit wierd. i walked down to douglas at lunch today and i was feeling totally depressed. I think it's the house or something - it just dosn't have a good vibe to it. or maybe it's the doctor's energy contaminating the rest of the place. after lunch i wasn't feeling so bad - i was on my own and listening to the radio and messing with a spreadsheet eva asked me to do. hopefully tomorrow will be better.

i got more injections, so now i have hepatitis a and b, tetanus and rabies floating around inside me. wonderful! oh well - now i can ogle the monkeys of india without being paranoid of them biting me.

i'm so tired and i have to go work on the 3d houses. i just want to go to bed. blah. i'm going to go now.

100,032

wahhhhh! see that? 100,032. wow! it's taken long enough. it only took one month to get to 50,000 and three to get to 100,000. god. it has been a total struggle. Scene 1 and 2 of chapter 14 are both about 600 words. oh well. there's always the re-write.
now i'm onto the great fun of the devils' council.

yeay

so that went well. i'm now going on to scene 4 of chapter 13. most of ch 13 is wonderfully exciting. actually, all the rest of the book is wonderfully exciting. i have a feeling there will be some difficult dialogue scenes ahead, but irshemesh is about to enter stage front + i can't wait to have fun writing him. this morning i was thinking about him and it struck me that he is a little like zakath from david eddings' books. i always loved zakath. he was so infinitely cool. him and his cat. only irshemesh dosn't have the angst. yeay.

so yea. things are good. i totally can't wait for shivering isles to come out. i'll only have a month to play it when it does. and it's been said that the main quest is quite long, so i have worries that i won't get it finished. though it only took me about a month to do the oblivion main quest (and that was with a whole heap of side-tracking to go collecting flowers and kill people and steal things). so yea. i'll be buying that the day it comes out :)

more on writing - yes it is my life

do you want to know something funny? page 111 of my novel is home to scene 1 of chapter 11, i just thought that was a bit mad! and yes - i have divided my novel into scenes, just to make the writing less of a struggle, cause i can aim for 2 scenes a day as opposed to a certain number of words or pages or whatever.

i really havn't much else to say. i have a craving to play oblivion, cause i think i've found a fix to my game (my main save is a bit broken - one of the essential characters is missing).

i'm also quite looking forward to a game (an mmorpg - shock horror) called aion. it looks really beautiful and is about angels and demons. though i'll probably not buy it, because i really can't afford monthly subscription fees. oh, yes. and the fact that i will probably be in new zealand when it comes out. there are so many good games due out this year and i'm going to miss them all - waaaaaaa.

writing news

buh - writing is going badly today. i've gotten to this bit where Zachery's "mother" (she's not his real mother) is having a crisis of conscience and i don't know how to get this across, especially when writing from Zachery's point of view. so yea. i may just sum up the action and move on. i really have to move on. i have this tight schedule that, if i manage to stick to it, has me finishing the novel by the middle of february. i really don't want to be stuck at it for much longer than that.

as an aside - i am on 74,542 words (of an estimated 124,000) and 106 pages. go me! buh - i'm never going to be finished by the middle of feb.