broadcast me a joyful noise

Outside the Maples building is an old wooden bench with a plaque on it, donated by one of the college alumna, and I've never stopped to actually look at it before this morning. The name on the plaque is, in fact:

Jane WENTWORTH ELLIOT.

Me: sjhdisaudsbdsdb??

Awesome, y/n? I wish my surname was half as lit-geeky.

Anyway, once again my grand plans for the day have been swept out the window by the prospect of coffee + Glebe markets + Thai lunch + fun shopping with some of the other postgrads. Oops. Tonight I am going to chain myself to a library table (oh yeah. you wish you had Saturday night prospects as exciting as mine.) and STUDY.

(I have not forgotten about the top fives meme, it's just...taking a while.)

the good

Developmental paediatrics assignment, part one -- done and done! Babies are fun <3 And taking a history from a mother who's a GP is the easiest thing in the world.

the bad

I can pick up my laptop tomorrow. The day I leave. So much for all those shows I wanted to catch up on :(

the ugly

I DO NOT WANT to spend this afternoon sitting in an ice rink judging a technical comp and trying to convince the judge administrator that I can't be the technical specialist for the ISA divisions because I haven't been trained above Aussie Skate, sjdadkhdsanmcslk >:(

the...mitigating

I've gotten a lot of reading done over the past week, after not having finished a single book since med school started. I've reread the first two Thursday Next books and The End of Mr Y, and last night I began One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, which I am LOVING.

the scary

*looks balefully at oh_shit_santa*

MYRA YOU CUNNING ENABLER.

Whoa. Waaaaay too much chocolate was consumed today. Or rather, way too much chocolate considering that it was hotter than it's been for a month, thank you, Sydney, way to spring summer on our asses now that it's officially autumn.

Tomorrow I am actually going to study. (She says, with a straight face.)

My feelings about my current fic can best be summed up by the following equation:

NINJAS X APOCALYPSE = AWESOMENESS SQUARED

(Y/N?)

"How's everything going?" asks Tenten.

"Fine," says Neji, who feels as though someone is pouring molten wax across his eyelids. "Everything's fine."

4800 words and I've finally worked out that the secret to writing Neji is that he is a self-centred little drama queen who nonetheless possesses a martyr complex the size of a mountain.

Things still to happen today:

4pm: History of Medicine lecture at my hospital (\o/)
5:30pm: dinner
6pm: College AGM
post-AGM: helping put together charity birthing kits to be sent to Vietnam

Things to be done before lecture/post-evening events:

1) Go shopping for laundry powder & other assorted groceries.

2) Read a few chapters of my Clinical Examination textbook.

3) Do histology lab assignment from dodgy lecture slides & less dodgy textbook.

Things I want to do:

1) Reread Ji's contributions to eyaiverse -- have I even recced these yet? omg. maybe not. -- so that I can sort out Wolf and Dieter's voices/worldbuilding details/etc. and start scribbling my new eyai stories.

[Okay, you should definitely read ascending analogy and l'Homme machine and then tell her how large your crush on Oliver Wolf is on a scale of one to ENORMOUS.]

2) Watch period dramas. Er. I'm not sure why. But I have two unwatched episodes of Tipping the Velvet and also the burning need to rewatch the new Jane Eyre and Sense & Sensibility.

You know what there is not nearly enough of in my life? IMPROMPTU WACKY FUN.

Context: ryokophoenix is up in Sydney for a few days (*CLINGS TO HER*) and we, through a friend of queencattabby's on the production team, managed to score free tickets to the opening night of Rocky Horror Picture Show at Star City. This was a seriously awesome professional show, with pyrotechnics and stunning costumes and an incredibly talented cast.

Of course, the condition attached to the 'free tickets' was that we were audience plants who had to get up and dance like maniacs during the Time Warp -- though nobody else danced, but I don't blame them, the stuff going on onstage was far more interesting anyway -- but I figure that getting a free seat at a show worth something like $90 was well worth a little public humiliation.

And then there's the little things like the fact that the four of us were all dressed up Rocky Horror-esque and looking smashing, so we got our pictures taken for a newspaper article, and we were sitting in the same row as the Veronicas, and after the show a nice guy offered to take a picture of us all with Mel's camera and it turns out he was an actor from Home and Away. Apparently opening nights in Sydney are SRS BZNS and attract ACTUAL CELEBRITIES. Whoodathunk?

So yeah, that was my night, and considering I dropped everything at 5pm in response to a phone call which ran along the lines of 'hey! want to come to a show? you have to dance, but it's free!' ... I think it was a pretty damn good one.

Time I eventually fell asleep: 2:40am

Time I was awakened by my sister's (loud) trumpet practice: 7am.

There may be some variant on a 'priceless' joke to be gained herein, but -- as should surprise no one -- I am far too tired for my brain to piece it together. All current brain functions are being devoted to making sure I don't leave any important things behind.

The plan is that I bus to Sydney today and stay in _leareth's apartment, and then register at the medical school tomorrow, and then my parents will drive up on Saturday with the greater part of my worldly belongings and we'll move me into college. And six days from now, MEDICAL SCHOOL BEGINS.

~

Also: goodness, Naruto fandom is friendly <3

It is so, so unbelievably hot. I am gulping lime cordial & tonic water in an effort to avert the very real prospect of MELTING INTO GOOP. And it's only 34 today -- summers here can get up to 40, but clearly I've become sensitised to the heat.

Today I finally found the perfect bag to lug all my stuff around campus next year! It's a black Fossil messenger bag with contrast stitching on the leather straps and coloured stripes inside, and it's roomy and beautiful and it was reduced from $260 to $180, so I'm pretty happy.

And now: to guzzle more fluids and watch more Naruto and never move again.

Er, just to clarify for anyone who was confused by the recent 'I'm off to Sydney!' post -- I was just in Sydney for the weekend! I bought cheap fabric at Cabramatta and swanked my way through an evening at an Oxford Street restaurant, fell in love with _leareth's neighbourhood in Chatswood, dressed up for a picnic and drove through the upper-upper crust eastern coast suburbs to get there, and watched all five hours of the BBC Pride & Prejudice miniseries. IT WAS FUN. But now I'm back in Canberra for the rest of the month, and I expect to spend most of my time either sewing or packing, because I have to produce this (no, not the goat. hilarious as that would be.) and convince myself that applying a fake tan will not signal the end of the world (MY BRITISH SENSIBILITIES. THEY HURT.) etc. etc.

My paid account runs out in three days; to distract myself from the loss of all those things I never use, like phoneposts, I have been tidying up my LJ tags! The 'writing' tag is now handily subdivided into 'fanfic', 'origific', 'drabbles', and so on, so that if I'm looking for an actual fic I don't have to trawl through all those entries in which I am merely moaning about how stuck I am. Now all I need is a tags page that doesn't look like it's been put through a garbage compressor, or a layout that actually lets me display all tags instead of a handful. Sigh.

I am also acquiring TV at the speed of light, so that I have things saved up to watch in Sydney. I watched the pilot of How I Met Your Mother today to see if I should download the rest, which was a mistake, because now I want to download it all and watch it IMMEDIATELY. I'd forgotten how much I have an enormous crush on admire Alyson Hannigan.

Well, the polls have closed in the east; WA, SA, NT & Qld are still pre-6pm. Everyone VOTE SAXON cross your fingers that Maxine McKew gets the Bennelong seat and that Labor kicks the ass of the Coalition. Even if you've got no idea what that means. TRUST ME, IT'S FOR THE BEST.

And I'm off to tammaiya's 21st, looking kind of smashing even if I do say so myself, and fully prepared to periodically race towards the nearest television or radio to get a count update.

Ahem. In addition to 'Brown Derby Jump', I am also seeking copies of:

1) Pink's 'U + Ur Hand'.

2) Fergie's 'Big Girls Don't Cry'. I KNOW. I KNOW. BUT THE RADIO KEEPS PLAYING IT AND IT GETS STUCK IN MY HEAD EVEN THOUGH I KIND OF DETEST IT ON PRINCIPLE.

My siblings are on holidays. In my brother's case this means that he spends even more time in his room with his enormous amounts of HSC study papers, although occasionally he emerges to grunt at people, consume food, watch my NCIS DVDs, or set up little colonial settlements of study papers on the floors of other rooms. One day I will awaken to a house entirely papered in essays about WWII and musicology and postmodernism.

In my SISTER'S case, this means we are either going to see Ratatouille tomorrow, or we're going to the National Zoo & Aquarium. I need to take advantage of a thirteen-year-old sister as an excuse to do these things while I still can!

hpmugglestudies has had a few fics posted to it (hurrah!) and I am going to have a nice long reading session this weekend once the psych ball & my parasitology assignments are all over. Mine is here -

Healer - Harry Potter - Padma/George, 4506 words

Padma feels crowded with the words that are already scrawled on every inch of her, the power that she alone possesses, and she wonders if this new graffiti of education is overwriting that which already exists.