Ice Bucket Challenge

On the 19th August 2014 I did the ALS Ice Bucket challenge. It's a challenge spreading like wildfire through Facebook. A person nominates 3 people and they have to either donate $10 to the ALS charity or pour ice water over themselves and nominate 3 other people. The decision needs to be made in 24 hours. After contemplating in 'the thinker' position for a couple of hours, I decided to walk down to the nearest BP station and buy a $5 bag of ice. I'm an evil person.

The procedure only lasted 3 seconds, but felt like an eternity. My heartbeat slowed and I felt every bone in my body chill and crack. My breath got fainter and fainter and for a while I didn't think I was going to make it. In my delirious state I played this song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMqfWoFjgto) through my head a thousand times to give me the mental strength I needed to push through the ordeal.

The deed was done.

Hunter Valley

Did you know that there is a word in German for the specific type of pain you get when your left earlobe hurts? Why don't we have a word like that in English? We should have a word which describes that pain! After living with international students for a while now I've started to learn how dreadfully inefficient English is. 1) Some words sound the same but are spelled differently (like "no" and "know") 2) We have silent letters jammed into other words (like "know") 3) sentences whilst clear and easy to understand can still technically be grammatically incorrect (like "You know I no like chocolate"). Now I know I definitely haven't mastered the English language, but from what I do know, I can tell ya it's pretty limited. In my personal opinion, I think we should all abandon English and switch to sign language and grunting. Or if society won't allow me to do that, then fuck it, I'm learning French.

I just came back from the hunter valley today. It was awesome sauce. The food was awesome. The company was good and the bike riding was adventurous. About a week ago, I didn't think "Adventurous" would be the word I thought I'd use to describe what I thought would be a relaxing day of cycling between wineyards and trying different wines. But when you see the News title "Rain-magedon" the same day you drive up to the Hunter you start to change your expectations a lil' bit. It did rain quite a lot on Saturday, but not enough to close any wineries or roads. The plan was to ride a full loop around a bike trail, but one member of our group (let's call him "Tom Mayfield"), despite having weeks of warning, decided that now was the time to tell us that he couldn't ride a bike. God complimented Tom's timing by unzipping his pants and pissing down water at the exact same time. Fortunately, things did get better. Over time the rain got less severe and Toms bike riding got better with more wine. Even though we only made 1/4 of the route we were planning to ride around we still managed to enjoy a shit tonne of wine. Mission complete! In the morning the weather was much better so Jonas, Alberto and I rode the entire bike trail including a good lookout just to make the most of our bikes before we had to return them by 12. Then, after we checked out we visited a few more distilleries and wineries. Yep so it looks like everything worked out after all. Oh, except for the part where I rode my bike into a wall of barbed wire and got slashes up and down my right and left arms. EXTREME!

Oh yeah, a little bit of tension has been building up in the house recently over the mess that has slowly been piling up in the sink. I've suggested public whipping to the person that doesn't clean his/her plate. My idea was down-voted 0 - 6 (even I down-voted it). But now that I've put more thought into it, I've realized that public whipping could be a great way to bond 5/6ths of the house together and make the house cleaner. Bring back the whip!

City2Surf

I ran the City2Surf race yesterday. I'm still out of breath. I woke up at 7:10am for a 7:55 start in the red group. It may have been optimistic of me to think I'd be able to get there on time, but it was definitely stupid of me to press the snooze button when I heard my phone alarm go off. I had sprinted down to the bus stop and was waiting impatiently for the bus to get to its destination (Hyde Park) when I heard the gun go off. By the way, Red group is at the front of the 70,000 people, and it's usually filled with mostly super fit athletes and a small mix of unfit and unprepared idiots like me. I got off the bus early and sprinted down oxford st to join the Red group before it was too late. I approached a side entrance where a crowed control officer was filtering out runners from watchers. I was already so tired from sprinting from Oxford st that I could only manage to wheeze out the words "I'm.. in.. red.. group.. can I get through.. (deep breath) please..?". After sharing a glimpse of disgust and sympathy, the guy pulled the gate open and let me through. Almost all the runners had already crossed the start line at this point, so I was the last guy to cross the start line while panting furiously with the camera pointing at my face. The race itself was good though. I somehow managed to run the whole thing and got a final time of 1 hour and 15 minutes. I think this is my worst time yet, but I'm not too surprised. After all, your dignity isn't the only thing you lose when you sit down 7 hours a day in an office.

Life is a video game

Day 234234

Reinforcements have arrived. Today we got our dishwasher fixed. Finally the cutting boards, bowls and cutlery that served as the breeding grounds for the cockroaches will be swept clean. We can finally take back what was once ours - a kitchen free of infestation. Our first assault will be at 0900. My roommates are resting for the day ahead, God knows they'll need it...

In other news my hunter valley trip is getting nearer and nearer. I'm very excited. This weekend off will be the closest thing to a holiday that I've had since the start of the year. It's just my roommates and a friend of mine from Pymble driving up there for a few days of good ol wine drinking and site seeing. We're actually bringing up German food as preventative hangover cure. Most of it I'm guessing will be German sausage so I guess the weekend trip will be a sausage fest in more than one way.

Hanging out with only my roommates and a few select friends from up north all the time really gets me thinking about my deteriorating social life. I'm seriously one boring Saturday night away from Googling how to make friends. But my track record for doing research through Google for school / uni projects makes me think I'll inevitably end up watching YouTube videos of Pokemon or reading an mildly interesting Wikipedia article about Vegemite.

I know I keep hammering on about this every blog, but I really wish there were more post uni activities for people fresh out in the real world. Perhaps something simple like 'international onesie week' would be a refreshing way to meet people. I think it'll be really cool to have a African American friend who's not actually American (just black). I think I'd get so much street cred without even trying - it's like the cheat code to popularity.

So I'm sure I must have mentioned at some point in a previous post that I view life kinda like a high graphics video game that's more boring than GTA but more interesting than Tetris. I still cling to this world view by the way. It keeps me super vigilant about the possibility of a zombie breakout.  Which reminds me, why do people in Zombie films write fancy dramatic sayings like "The End Is Nigh" or "Muuuurrrdeeerrrr" across the wall in blood? Why wouldn't you communicate something more meaningful like "Food this way ---->" or something. Also, why do they write in blood? This is a zombie Apocalypse we're talking about, not some world wide shortage of pens. And if they're so rushed to write a message that they're forced to write in blood, why don't they just run? I dunno, these questions and more I think will never be solved :(

But alas this is not the only time I've been confused by the actions of a computer. I found myself typing on Microsoft word yesterday and a word I had typed up had been underlined in that squiggly red line we're all familiar too with. I was sure the word was spelled correctly so I right clicked to see if I could get rid of that red underline. Instead Microsoft word insisted I "ignore once". WTF Microsoft? What's with the ambiguous threat? What if I want to ignore it twice? Bring it on computer, game on.