Chocolate Frogs && Pumpkin Juice

I would actually pay money to see Avatar in 3D again. It's not that the storyline was all that amazing, but holycrap was it entertaining. I don't think I've managed to find an escape like that since the last Lord of the Rings movie came out.

brb need to go find a banshee to fly.

Never thought anyone would try to pick me up at Spotlight. Quite hilarious now, but was extremely embarrassing at the time; I tried, unsuccessfully to hide in the aisles.

Nothing brightens up a moody day like art. Drawn for me by the lovely Carrie over at Gaia Online. Just about the most beautiful piece of art anyone has ever given me.

The much awaited Singapore shopping spam post, which is a good indicator of how busy I am these holidays.



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We're changing.
We're not the same people we were three years ago.

Since a picture speaks a 1000 words..

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Hurrah, I'm back!

As is with most of my holidays, I've come home to the large mess that is my room. Not surprisingly, I haven't had time to take photos of all, or any, of the clothes I picked up in Singapore. To be honest, I probably won't even bother trying to catolgue all of it on this blog because there's just so much junk I've managed to accumulate.

My 10 days in Singapore were fairly interesting, though I could have done without the cold that I managed to catch a few days before I left. This left me quite grouchy on the first couple of days, which wasn't quite the first impression that I was hoping to leave on the people at Arup. Since one week wasn't long enough for me to do any substantial work, my entire experience consisted mostly of sitting in meetings, taking minutes and trying to understand design and floor plans. Everyone in the Environmental Sustainable Design team were architects and mechanical engineers, so the first couple of days was spent just trying to get my head around all of the lingo and acronyms for building standards.

It just so happened to be my luck that I was asked to give my presentation on the day that my cold hit me the worse. To overcome the desire to lie crippled across the table, and to prevent any sort of coughing fit, I stocked up on Strepsils and was able to make it through in one piece. In actuality, the presentation went a lot better than I had thought it would, with or without a cold. Although I have an inkling that I ate so many Strepsils that I zoned out, stopped giving a shit about my entire situation and babbled on like a crazy woman. I somehow managed to miss the warning label on the Strepsil box that advices you not to exceed the recommended dosage: one lozenge every three hours.

To be completely honest, I found the experience to be quite boring. From the looks of it, if I chose to specialise in green buildings, I'd be sitting in front of a computer all day. Compared to all the fun times I had driving utes in the outback, mining is currently stacking up to be the more interesting of career paths. That said, I'm not sure if I can compare one week of work in green buildings with three months of work in mining. I find it so odd that the two things I'm interested in are so different; civilisation or the middle of no-where. Eh, I think too much about the future.

On a lighter note, Akira (the laptop) is also back! His motherboard was fried during a power surge, however the good people at Acer in Singapore fixed him for free. Motherboards are quite expensive, so the reason for all the good-will is quite mysterious. Apparently since Akira is a Travelmate, one of the more expensive models, the fact that he's been in twice for repair isn't very good publicity. My dad and I were told that we would only be charged the labour fees if 'we didn't tell anyone about this.' Very mysterious.