oh look, here I am!

Pas d’excuse. Sorry.


Well, no, scratch that. Insane workload does count as a reason for not updating this. A recent post was all about how during my holidays I would do all the tasks I’d been too busy to do in first semester. Hah! Well, I had one day off after my last exam and then worked full-time right up until second semester. I did read another Tintin in French, Tintin au Tibet, but I did not hem my pants, adjust my skirt or go op-shop hunting with Nikki. I did my tax and sewed a lap-top cover for a friend, do those things count? I also house-sat for the girls in the Blue Mountains and downloaded all the anatomy-related apps possible. Yip, geeky just got geekier.  (May I recommend Speed Anatomy?  Lots of fun to be had.)

This is week 4 out of 12 of second semester. Exciting things about this semester (and here’s a sentence I never thought I’d say!) include wound dressings and INJECTIONS. Eek. I’m actually less freaked out about these things than I thought I would be. I think house-sitting and looking after Zac the diabetic cat with his twice daily insulin shots helped. I also unabashedly love studying nursing so the ‘yuck’ factor of some things has been overridden by the ‘wow, that’s so interesting, human bodies are amazing’ factor. I even took part in sheep dissection last week. I had even gotten permission to abstain from taking part but in the end it was so interesting and relevant to our studies that I picked up a scalpel and had a bit of a poke around (in a respectful way.)

Right, funny anecdote for you now. As much as we all deny that we do this, we do judge people. This applies especially to ‘mismatched’ couples. You know what I mean: much older guy and younger girl and vice versa. You see a couple like this and you're quietly trying to figure out if they're father/daughter or something more else.  I recently had the opportunity to be on the receiving end of such judgement, and it certainly made me think a lot about how quick we are to jump to conclusions.

So you know that I’ve been studying French with the same group of people since last January. We’re a pretty close bunch. Steve is in my French class, and we are music buddies. We’ve been to see Laura Marling, Bon Iver, the Jezabels and a few others together. Steve used to be on the board for the Brandenburg so he got free tickets to see them a few weeks ago and was kind enough to offer me a ticket.
So off to the orchestra I go, oh look there’s free champagne and everyone is dressed up really nicely. Steve is in a proper suit. I’m in what passes for dressy in studentville. Being all ‘important’, Steve knows heaps of similarly important people and so there is lots of meeting, greeting, hand-shaking and introducing. Did I mention that Steve is in his late forties/early fifties and I am a young 29? I could almost see these well-dressed older women eyeing me up and down and trying to figure out what our relationship was. Most amusing. Fooled you all! We are just friends!

I'm off to Kangaroo Valley this weekend with Emma from French and her lovely French hubbie Jerome, and another couple as well.  It's Emma's birthday and we're going hiking.  This will be my last weekend that resembles a weekend until mid-December, so I'm studying like mad to make up for the study time I will lose this weekend.  2 couples and me.  I really hope it's not an obvious fifth wheel situation.   Don't you just love being single and twenty-nine and everyone around you is married and having babies?