So, project is over and done. Thank goodness.

I'm not feeling particularly brilliant, because I've gotten very little sleep the last few nights (no sleep at all on thursday night, short to average sleep on friday night and very short last night), so I think I might have to have a bit of a nap today if I actually want to make it to this evening without falling asleep (though I'll probably be fine even without one)... but I'm feeling infinitely better than I was on Thursday night. :)

Only thing left due now is Studio, which is still huge, but two weeks away, so I have time. And after that it's holidays for four months! Yey!

Five hours until Josh Groban concert!

*dies from excitement*

I could kill whoever thought up having assignments that were worth 80% of a class's mark. 

Seriously. I've been working almost continuously since Tuesday morning (save sleeping and eating), and I'm still less than 3/4 of the way done. I feel positively queasy about having to do the rest of the work.

So damn sick of drawing.

Die. Die. Die.

Also, my cat is an annoying, clingy little thing. Good god, cat. Please do something other than follow me around and lay on the work I'm trying to do!

And my eyes are dead. Seriously. I struggled to read the McDonalds menu tonight. All this close-up Uni work... I feel like I'm slowly but surely destroying my eyes' ability to focus on anything further away than a computer screen or piece of paper.

My internet, for some strange reason, seems to be operating at dial-up speed. At least I think so. It may possibly be slower. How do people live with it being sooo sloooooooow!?

In any case, I'm in the habit of bringing up Freecell whenever I have to wait for anything, so I played about ten games of it (of which I have lost about one). So I moved on to Spider Solitaire, which I played enough times to win the difficult version. Currently my 'win rate' is about 7%, though I suspect at least half of that percent was artifically pushed up by re-doing the same winning game three or four times. ^^

But yesh, I finally won it! With a score of 1036 and 264 moves. :)

And, having finally got LJ to open, I've run out of things to do. Half the games I normally play probably won't work 'cause of the internet, and of the other ones... I've mostly finished Neverwinter Nights (all I have to do is finish the Kingmaker module, which I'm sure I've done before and am currently doing with a not-so-great cleric. I'd probably have to start again with something more substantial if I am to actually finish it). So nah.

I can't do any studio, because I've done pretty much all I can do on trace and I'm starting on AutoCAD, which I don't have on this computer. Though I plan to fix that soon. As long as dad is willing to pay for the bloody thing. Expensive programs should die. At least there's a student version which is less than 10% of the standard price. But it still manages to be expensive.

Hmmm. It's strange, but I feel fairly motivated as far as Studio goes. I'm not sure whether it's that I feel like I have a decent scheme that is actually worth putting some effort into, or purely because I am procrastinating like hell on this 1000-word review I have due on Friday. I have all the material (I hope) that I require, so all I need to do it sit down and thrash out three or four pages.

But I really cannot bring myself to do it. I tried, the other day, and spent two hours re-arranging the pictures to create a lovely design-y strip down the side. No actual content.

Tomorrow I'll do it. I have three or so hours in the afternoon before work, so I can get a bit done then, and finish it up after work. Easy.

I hope.

On another topic, this keyboard is starting to die. It's doing it sneakily, but I'm noticing. One day, for no apparent reason, the space button stopped working properly (I'd hit it and it wouldn't type out anything, so I'd hit it a bit harder and it would give me about six spaces in a row for a single tap). I was going to go in and get it replaced (it's still under warranty, because my last keyboard of the same make did a similar thing with the 'a' button, I think it was. Must be a glitch in this particular make.), but apart from that one day, it's been working just fine. So, I don't know.

But just the other day, I noticed something odd with the backspace button. It works fine, until you go into Word. And then it starts behaving oddly. Regular backspacing is fine, but then when you try and highlight something and delete the whole block, it just unselects it. :/ Although, come to think of it, it may not be the backspace button. I notice the same thing when I've got something highlighted and I try and type over it (and delete it) or paste something. The only thing that works is to highlight and 'delete' it. Maybe some setting was changed. Anyone have any suggestions?

So yeah. That's that. Otherwise it works fine. :)

Um.

I'm going to continue to procrastinate by doing this Meme that I'm inventing from that featured musicshuffle group.

Take your iTunes/iPod/MP3 Player/Whatever and put it on shuffle. Make a comment about the first ten. No cheating!


1. 'Rock Your Body Rock' - Ferry Corsten
Hmm. Not too bad a track, largely just beat and about two lines of lyrics. This'd be one of the ones left over from my sister's massive playlist, which I stole and adapted.

2. 'King of the Golden Hall' - from LOTR: TTT
Ooh. Since I've been lazy and haven't actually uploaded my Lord of the Rings CDs onto iTunes, this is just about the only track I actually have on here. The Lord of the Rings music is always nice to listen to, and the Rohan theme was always a favourite. :)

3.  'Unforgettable' - Nat King Cole + Natalie Cole
This is that track where they used the old recording of his voice and got her to sing it and put the two together, so it sounds like a duet. Sweet. :)

4. 'All the Love in the World' - The Corrs
I love the Corrs. They're so pretty. And singalongable. ^^

5. 'Voice Inside My Head' - Dixie Chicks
I'm quite used to country music, considering dad plays it a lot, but there isn't a whole lot of it I'd actually go ahead and listen to myself. Dixie Chicks are an exception, though. Their lyrics are thoughtful, and the sound is perhaps slightly 'poppier' than other country, so perhaps that explains it. This is a nice one from their newest CD.

6. 'She's Out of My Life' - Josh Groban
Hahaha. I knew a Josh Groban one had to turn up sooner or later. :P I have enough of them. This one's from the special edition of his second CD, and isn't one of my favourites, but it's not bad. Fairly simple, in comparison to the more dramatic songs he does. :)

7. 'Graduation' - Vitamin C
Ehh, I remember this one. Used waay too much when it was popular, but I suppose it has a nice message and I don't really mind listening to it.

8. 'Working Class Hero' - John Lennon
Hm. I like some of John Lennon's stuff, but I don't really like this one. Just slow.

9. 'Home' - Micheal Buble
Another yay. :) I've really started to listen to him lately, and I adore lots of songs on the new CD. His voice is just so smoooth. I'm even starting to like the old classics that I wouldn't normally ever listen to. :) This one in particular I liked instantly, then got tired of because of excessive radio overplayage, and now that I haven't heard it in a while, I'm starting to like it once again. Sweet.

10. 'Us' - Rockstar INXS
Agh! Sister's influence again. She's got all of the songs that any of the Rockstar contestants ever sang, (both seasons) and while I didn't mind them at first, my iTunes has a perverse preference for these songs, so it seems like I'm hearing them every second song. (Clearly not, but the fact that one showed up here, out of 2000 other possible choices.....) Might start deleting them soon.

And that's all!

Hm, I was hoping for a Keane one. Or RENT. Oh well, you can't have everything. ^^ I might have to re-do this sometime. :)

And since that successfully took up an hour of my time, I think I shall go to sleep so I can get up bright and early tomorrow! (Joy.)

So, driving today was rather traumatic.

I didn't hit anyone, thank goodness, though if I'd had to drive much longer it may have been a distinct possibility, considering the way it was going.

So, since I was heading to Uni by 9, I took the 'long route' (which avoids the freeway/rush hour thus is faster), and they've been doing a bit of fixing one of the roads up - putting new kerbs and median islands in, etc. But I guess they're not completely done, because as I was driving down there today, I noticed a big hole in the side of the road. I avoided the first one, but didn't think it was that bad, because I wasn't paying as much attention when the second one showed up, so I drove right over it, and it went CLUNK! If the car hadn't kept going I would have been sure I'd just lost a wheel or something....and it just about gave me a heart attack. Honestly, all they would have to do is put a witches hat or something at the end of the pothole. Ehhh. In any case, I have a phobia of potholes now. (Or at least for the next few days!) I scared myself about three times on the way back home. ><

That was incident enough in the morning, but when I left, and went back home via the same way, I encountered even more trouble! Firstly, it was about 3:30, so the tradies are just getting off work, and on this street I drive along, it's a single lane that splits into two lanes at each of the two or three traffic lights along the road. Both those lanes have the option of turning or heading straight, so after each light, the two lanes merge back into a single lane.

Now, I was at the front of the right lane, both having a few cars lined up. When the light turns green, I start a little slowly, and let the car beside me go first. I'm all the way at the point where the road merges back together when all of a sudden I hear this roar of an engine to my left, and this guy in a ute speeds past me.

I'm a fairly passive driver, so I just pass him off as a wierdo and let him go. Whatever. I also choose to stay some distance behind him, because on the flat back of his ute was a big pile of sand, and a wobbly cement mixer 'tied down' by ropes that were flapping generously in the wind. So purely because I didn't want to have something land on my car, I was a ways back.

He was going the same way I was, and about five minutes later, I see him (currently tailgating a car), decide to change lanes. Unfortunately, there happens to be a pair of black 4WDs beside him. But oh, no matter! He changes lanes so rapidly that the back car has to veer up onto the kerb and brake pretty severely in order to avoid getting hit. Thankfully there was nobody directly behind him.

I just sort of gaped. And then watched as this guy zigzagged between two lanes of traffic five or six times in order to get perhaps 50m ahead.

What a moron. I half expected to encounter an accident a little later down the road.

Anyway. A little later on, in stop and go traffic, I'm looking at the cars to my right, and a pair of them seem rather close together. As I drive past, I swear, the bullbar on the 4WD was about ten centimeters away from the back of the car in front. O.o 

I really don't know. Just glad I didn't nearly hit anyone.

Oh, and there was this white car with a pink 'Blonde' licenceplate, put on upside-down. :P Although the kid in the front seat had a little fluffy white dog in his arms which had its head stuck out of the window, so I hope has the sense not to jump out after something.

Gehhh.

Not driving any more today, I think.

Although I have to pick up little brother at about 8. :/ 



 

I had a wierdly sort of positive day today.

Firstly, I had an overwhelmingly positive crit today in Studio.

Now, you can't actually understand what that's like until you've done this course. Most of the time you stand up there, display your work and listen while they suggest 294375636274 ways to fix it. Naturally, it usually leaves you sort of dejected and without much desire to work on it. But you do, and you do as many improvements as you can, and then show it to them three days later to have them go, hmm, nah, go back to where you were last time and approach it from a different angle.

Frustrating, to say the least.

But this week, and to a lesser extent this studio in general... is just such a relief. I don't know, but our studio lady is pretty nice (both of them are), but beyond that, she's clear, understandable and helpful. Normally, they do something like tell you to 'interrogate the formal aesthetics of the site and the interaction with the public and use that to inform your idea and resolve your concept', and you just go 'huh?'. I actually understand that phrase, now, but after nearly two years of this I still would have very little clue as to how to actually /do/ that. Which is what it all comes down to, really.

And so I'm used to studios being, for the most part, frustrating and confusing. And I'm not a greatly motivated person, so more than once I've wondered why I was doing this to myself - usually answering because semester fees are too exorbitant to just change willy-nilly and then I'd have to answer to dad if I did.

Anyway, the point being, studio lady is helpful and informative, and though she has a tendancy to ramble on for half an hour on a complete tangent, they're /interesting/ tangents. But this morning, when I brought my project in, both of them were seriously glowing about it. So. Wierd. Naturally, things to do, but only minor tweakages, which is slightly absurd, six weeks into the 13-week semester. Yeah, I don't know. They both seemed really impressed with the leap I'd made (I swear, it was mostly the tutor's idea and I just followed through, but apparently 'I made crucial decisions that've really added a strength to this project'). Given, my initial idea was crap, and stuck in a box, but regardless.

Oh well.

In summary, good, but wierd.

And then, later on, I found something that made me laugh waaay too much:



I had work in the evening, and that was normal... Oh, and Steph, I'm sure you know already, but the new Micheal Hoeye book is out, as well as the new Holly Black.

Go Hermux Tantamoq, watchmaker!

And then again, after work, wierdly positive, or rather wierdly amusing, this guy at Maccas was trying rather too hard to impress. Struck up a conversation about UWA (noticed my student card) and when I told him I was doing architecture, he was all like, oh, do you come down to the Ref much at all?

I didn't ask him what he did, because I didn't really care, but also because I doubted some guy working at Maccas (domain of 16-year-old employees) in Joondalup (about an hour away) was a UWA student. He probably knew about the Ref from his big brother. Or the UWA Expo a few weekends ago.

In any case, I was sort of amused.

And now I'm home. :)

And time to go play this game which is quite rapidly strangling my computer (it crashes at least three or four times every time I play the game), and yet... it's fun. So I'll play it for a little while longer, anyway. :)

I am so deprived.

I /still/ haven't got a copy of the new Harry Potter, and it doesn't look like I can get hold of a copy for another 6 and a half hours. Purely because nothing's open at 3am in the morning. But STILL!

Aagh.

Must. Resist. Spoilers.

(Bad, bad firebyrd. Your entry is eyeing me.)

 Anyway, I have no intention of sleeping until that point (and certainly not for a while after), so I shall fill my time with explaining how I'm in this terrible predicament to begin with.

Anyway, I'll wrap it up here because I'm cold and had better go have a shower, but I know I've learned a lesson here!

Be careful what you wish for, or the Weather and Airport gods may just conspire with the Harry Potter powers that be and prevent you from getting the book for at least 27 hours!

Also, I am very very glad that, if nowhere else, the city is open on Sundays. Otherwise I would have to wait until Monday. And I don't think I could resist the spoilers that long. ^^

Also also, I've missed my iTunes. Must procure myself new mp3 player with much haste! 

So, it's almost 9pm, the night before we leave for Europe.

I haven't begun to pack.

And what am I doing about it? Posting on my livejournal.

Yep.