Claire's Blog...Stuff that came into me hed.
Claire is feeling 
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About me: I'm 23 years old, female, and I live in Sydney (yes, in Australia.)
You can see the rest of my page here, but there's not much at the moment.
Write to me at unwittyname@hotmail.com
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Wednesday, September 18, 2002
Postcards from Far Away....
I'm back now. I've just spent 5 days in lovely Cairns, and this awful weather is making me wish I hadn't come home!
I was going to write this up postcard style, but the size of the task is just too big, and I can't be bothered. So I will give you some highlights:
* Fruit toast on the plane on the way to Cairns. It was all heavy and yum. I like fruit toast.
* The weather. What can I say, it was 25-30 degrees the whole time we were there. It rained once, lightly, for about 30 minutes, which was not enough to get us out of the pool. .
* The place we stayed, the Cairns Colonial Club Resort. It sounds and looks pretty flash, but we were lucky enough to get a substantial discount, so it was pretty cheap for us. The place was lovely, the food was lovely, and the people were very friendly. I'm not sure if that was a North Queensland thing, or if it was a not-Sydney thing, or if they just hired very nice people, but everyone was nice to us all the time!
* Looking down on the rainforest canopy from the skyrail. I'm really scared of heights, but I think a cable car is just about enough machinery to keep me from feeling like I'm going to fall (notwithstanding that scene from Spider-Man.) Although September is a pretty dry month for Cairns, the overall rainfall is pretty high compared to Sydney, so all the foliage is very green and lush. I have visited some quasi-rainforest in NSW, but they have different trees in FNQ. I tried to put a picture of one of the trees here, but unfortunately I can't. I will try to find out some way to connect them up later (maybe after consultation with a more learned friend.) I think maybe this will work once I publish:
No joy so far. I will keep trying, though.
* Extravagant hotel breakfast. Okay, I know I predicted this, but they had a breakfast buffet. I'm not usually one for a lot of breakfast, although I do find that breakfast is necessary for me before I start doing anything in the morning. I consumed fruit with yoghurt, banana bread, little hash brown thingies, baked beans and english muffins like all the above items were going out of style. Yum yum yum. I convince myself that going swimming 1-2 times per day while away compensated for the massive calorie intake of these breakfasts, but I'm pretty sure I'm just fooling myself.
* Snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef. It was a truly awe inspiring experience. Just as we went down to the dive platform to get into the water, a whole bunch of fish swam up to say hello! The biggest fish I saw was probably about 1.3 metres long, which is pretty big by my standards. I also lots of "parrot fish", that are coloured a bit like parrots, and also flap their fins a bit like birds. And the coral was amazing.
Picture of me snorkelling (sort of):
More later.
8:54 PM
Sunday, September 08, 2002
Jamp Jamp Jamp!!!
(OK, I pinched the word Jamp from Heather. It's part of my vocabulary, now, though.)
I'm going away on Friday, for a grand total of 4 lovely days, to a delightful sunny location. I can't wait! I predict there will be swimming, sunburn, behaving like a tourist, eating large extravagant hotel breakfasts, lounging around doing nothing, buying tacky souvenirs, writing postcards that I won't get around to sending, taking photos and other alien behaviours. Bliss.
Ooh, Affirmation!
How Are You Smart?
I found a link to this quiz on Heather's blog, and I did the quiz. It was a nice affirmation seeing as I have an honours degree in Psychology which I have as yet done practically nothing with. One day, one day....
I went to a 21st yesterday, for Karen (Craig's sister), which was fun, but it took me a while to get into it because I was stuck in "helper" mode. Today, I went out driving with Craig and Karen's family. I don't understand people enjoying driving so much that they want to spend most of the day doing it. I think it comes from being part of a family that have crappy old bomb cars that cannot be relied upon to get from A to B if the distance between these points is more than 50 kms. I guess I also think of cars as a guilty luxury; they're really bad, but you put up with the earth damage because you need them to do the shopping, get around in places where there is no public transport, or get from one place to another at night without being mugged/bashed/raped. To drive from one place to another just for fun is weird to me. Oh well.
No progress on starting the Top Ten blog - I've been too busy. Sorry.
10:45 PM
Monday, September 02, 2002
Hey, long time, no rant. :-)
It's Monday, and so far the week is looking pretty average. I had a really great weekend, which always make going back to work on Monday feel like an injustice.
To start with, on Friday I went to a trivia night organised by Craig's old workplace. It was kind of cool, even though I knew very few people - mostly very friendly. Anyway, our trivia team won! I've been on winning teams a couple of times, but all the other times it was at church or school run events, and the prize for the winning teams was a packet of biscuits or whatever. In this one, though, we each got a $30 voucher from HMV! I was pretty thrilled. It was also a kick to be able to answer some questions: I knew that the colour umber was a brownish colour, that the cult involved in Waco was the Branch Davidians, and I recognised Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me" (I love that song!!) from about the first 2 bars. I like knowing things, even if they do not seem to be worth knowing.
On Saturday, Craig and I went to Burwood RSL Club for lunch: if you're a member, the club sends you coupons on your birthday so you can get two meals for the price of one at the buffet. It's surprisingly un-bad for a buffet at an RSL club... vegetarians often get a raw deal at clubs, I once had a meal at a club that consisted of soggy green beans, carrots and corn with hot chips. Not happy Jan. I also once had a club meal that was nominally an avocado salad, but wherein the avocado seemed to be made of concrete, but then I think the meals and service that night were universally bad, so I guess I can't do the righteous vegetarian rant about that one. It was not a particularly leisurely lunch, because the buffet closed at 2pm, and we didn't get there until 1.30...this was because the bus we were going to catch either ran waaaaay early, or didn't come at all. We were comfortably at the bus stop by 12.20, and the bus was not due until 12.24, but it failed to materialise. Grr.
Incidentally, if Sydney's Buses, Trains or Ferries do you wrong, you can complain about them here, or you can ring 131500 and rant to someone in person. It is my current plan to complain every time a bus runs early, doesn't come or doesn't stop, so as you may understand, I may have quite a job on my hands!
I've been thinking about setting up another blog, which I will provisionally call "The Top Ten"", even though I acknowledge this is a pathetic name. This arose out of me reading a lot of non-fiction books, for no apparent reason. I felt the urge to write a list of the Top 10 non-fiction books I have read. Also, yesterday we were talking about the 80's. I am very proud to be a 70's child, although I only snuck in by a few months, but even I acknowledge that the 80's had their charms. Heather said: "Name three!", implying that there weren't that many. I thought: "I bet I could name 10! The Top 10 80's things! Yay!"
7:57 PM
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