It's been awhile...
I suppose it's been too long since I've updated you all on my life. I don't have anything in particular to focus on, so I guess I'll do another bullet-point-posting... those seem to be the most reader-friendly anyway. I've really settled into life here, and I've truly been having an incredible time! I don't feel like any minute has gone by that hasn't been spent exactly the way it was meant to be spent. The problem is... most of my minutes apparently weren't meant to be spent on schoolwork. Well, let me rephrase that: The "problem" is most of my minutes weren't meant to be spent on schoolwork.
Anyway, yeah. Here's a summary of what my minutes were meant to be spent on:
- sitting in the sun or in the grass under leafy trees on campus, listening to great music on my headphones or chatting/ playing cards/ generally relaxing with friends that wander by; a lot of my minutes were meant to be spent doing exactly this... and it never gets old!
- group dinners on Sundays; for the past 3 Sundays, my roommates and I have gotten group dinners together, usually around 10-12 people. So far, we've had a sushi dinner night, a breakfast-for-dinner night (pancakes, eggs, and bacon all done outside on our flat-top BBQ!), and finger-food night. It's always good fun.
- playing beach volleyball on Friday nights with my 4's team, the Flogging Mollies (my roommate/teammate Scott was wearing a Flogging Mollies shirt when we had to submit our team name); we're really starting to come together as a team, and it's a lot of fun - I look forward to it all week.
- playing ultimate frisbee; my Monday-night team, Second Skin, is also really coming together to play well together (when we had to choose team colors, we chose 'skins,' which ended up working out really nicely, 'cause even at night, it's still really hot here). I still don't really know the rules, but I run and I throw and I catch, and it seems to working out alright. I'm still getting used to it being a non-contact sport, though. Apparently you're not supposed to body-check your defender in this game.
- brewing beer. Scott and I got fed up with high prices for bad beer, so we started making our own. Our first batch won't be ready for another 2 weeks, but I'm excited to be able to have quality beer around again! Well, we'll see how quality the beer-by-beginners actually is. Dave! Neil! What am I going to do without your expertise??
- laughing at silly things like the fact that the word "expertise" looks like something you do to be expertly in shape.
- laying out in my hammock on the back patio, enjoying the minutes that were definitely not meant to be spent doing schoolwork.
- drinking all the PG Tips tea that Mom and Dad sent me. At the rate I'm going, I'm actually going to drink all of that tea in the time I'm here, easy! (they sent me 2 boxes of 80 bags) Many of my minutes are actually spent brushing my teeth, too, for fear of the stains resulting from so much black tea intake.
- going on cool field trips for my Indigenous Australians class. A local Aboriginal elder named Rusty took us out for a day all around the area, sharing with us some of the incredible vast sea of knowledge they have about the land. It was really cool to learn about the uses/dangers of any plant around us, to learn how to read animal tracks (type of animal, gender, age, purpose of their movement... so much to be interpreted from such a seemingly simple thing!), to hear stories of tradition, myth, origin, culture, to visit a burial ground where I could feel the presence of generations and generations of Aboriginal culture, to see cave paintings right in front of my eyes that were painted there by a hand that moved across the rock thousands of years ago... yeah. There were some pretty cool minutes spent doing this stuff.
- watching Australia's "Biggest Loser" with all the roommates. This is the time that we all take a break from whatever we're doing (or not doing, in my case), and come together in the living room to watch people lose weight while we scarf down pizza or ice cream or cookies.
- ...then there's a couple minutes here and there where I throw an assignment together. Those minutes usually come immediately before the minutes that were meant to be spent handing in said assignment.
All in all, it's a glorious life. A girl can get used to this.
Me with Rusty, a local Aboriginal elder. I would love to have 5% of the knowledge that he has about the land!
Posted by Whitney 04/23/2008, revised 04/23/2008 by Whitney