Sunny days

Photos from Coogee Beach today yesterday, since Blogger wouldn't upload any photos for me last night.

I haven't edited or touched these up in any way. My new SLR camera (a Canon 450D) is just that good! And the water really is that turquoise.

And cold, according to Chelsea.
















But, apart from the water, it was a beautiful sun-filled day.

Perfect for walking barefoot along the beach.

By the way, this is also my 100th post! Yay!

Travelin', Travelin', Travelin', Travelin', Travelin' Through

Gah! I have so much to do before this coming weekend!

(and if you don't know why I repeat the word "Travelin'" so much in the title of this post, then you must not be very familiar with Dolly Parton. and while I am no huge fan of hers- compared to say, The Dixie Chicks; I do like that particular song.)


On Friday I'm going on a mission trip with some people from my church to Molong, which is kind of near Orange, past Bathurst. (My friend Keisha was very excited when she found out that we'll get to go 'over the other side of the mountain'! Seeing as we live on this side of the Blue Mountains, none of us have ever been over the other side. It's like a whole new world.)

We leave on Friday and stay until Sunday. We're basically going to help out the Molong Baptist Church, and I'm expecting it to be kind of a church in the middle of nowhere, but we're told the town has a population of over 1000, so I guess it could be like a rural version of Penrith. Truth be told, I'm really not sure what to expect. I'm hoping it's like Farmer Wants a Wife (a reality show we have here in Oz) since we were told a lot of the townspeople own cattle farms.

Anyway, it should take about 3 hours to drive there ("over the mountain and far away...") and Keisha, Claryse & I are doing a road trip, picking up Polly on the way over the mountain (she lives in Blaxland, which is like halfway up the mountain I guess) and we plan to have lots of dodgy 90's music playing so we can make it a really memorable girly road trip.

(On another note, I just remember something Fabian, the Swiss exchange student who is staying with my friend Elise's family, once said when he saw the Blue Mountains for the first time- "Those are not mountains!" I guess we can't really rival the Swiss Alps when it comes to mountains. So if you're reading this thinking I live in a little chalet on the foot of the mountains- ha! Although Penrith prides itself on being "the foot of the mountains", it's more or less suburbia with the Blue Mountains in the background.)


And then, the following Tuesday, we are going "home" to New Zealand for Neil's nephew's wedding. So I'm going to be leaving this wonderful sunny weather behind in exchange for the freezing, Antarctic climate of Christchurch, Queenstown and Dunedin.

I'm already stocking up on my woolen scarves, beanies and boots.

Goosebumps

In one of my subjects this semester, we have to design a behaviour modification task to implement on ourselves. It can be anything, so long as it can be conducted via a four week program.

I decided to design my program around my two loves - violin and going on the computer!

The idea of it is this: if I practise my violin for half an hour, then I can go on the internet for half an hour. In the third week of the program, I will decrease the reinforcement (internet use) to 15 minutes and see if I still continue to practise for half an hour, and in the fourth (and final) week, I will have no reinforcement (no internet use) and see if I still continue to practise.

I figure this is a good way to get my practise to increase, as I've been a bit slack on that front lately!


But whenever I need inspiration, I always listen to this. The strings section towards the end never fails to give me goosebumps! This is why I want to learn the violin!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJk-pWGbKaA&feature=related


(I tried to add the actual video to this post, rather than just the web address, but for some reason it wouldn't work.)

Feelin' on top of the world

I am feeling much better thankyouverymuch.

My appetite is almost back to normal, and I am back at uni, work, PAC, dancing, church, violin, babysitting... everything is full steam ahead, really. Business as usual.

Except I lost a bit of weight thanks to le gastro and really, I'm feeling pretty fabulous about it. i don't think I've had such a flat stomach in well, ever.

Anyway. All I'm saying is that there are there are upsides to emptying the contents of your (empty) stomach for a few days and then not eating anything at all for a few days after that. Apparently fitting into your skinny jeans is one of them.



But I digress.

Besides feeling better, what else have I been up to?
I've been doing a lot of reading (did you notice my new "What I've Been Reading" sidebar on the right?) and there are a few books that are rocking my world. I'm really loving the whole "reading for pleasure" thing, because after a while, uni sucks the desire to read anything right out of you with it's incessant demands that you read pages ii-xvii of such and such a textbook that adds no meaning to your life.

But I have gotten back into reading things that I want to read, and I'm chowing through books like nobody's business. At the moment, I go through about a book a week. I'm thinking I will need to reaquaint myself with the good ol' Penrith City Library, because at at least $25 a pop, reading has apparently become an expensive hobby.


Aaaand, I've been catching up with friends. A few weeks ago, I discovered The Coffee Club right opposite Nepean River, and in it's go-for-a-walk-then-come-put-all-that-hard-earned-weight-loss-right-back-on-again-with-a-slice-of-cake charm, I was hooked. And then I discovered that apparently I was the last person in Penrith to "discover" The Coffee Club Nepean River, and that it's been open since May. Well I never. Let's just say I made up for my lack of patronage from months May-July by spending a lot of time, both quality and quantity (but emphasis on the quantity) seated in one of the many comfy couches it offers during the month of August.

So, I've been a social butterfly. Hanging out with my girlfriends. Catching up. Doing a bit of shopping, a bit of eating and a lot of talking.


Just today I was talking with my friend Keisha about how good it feels to be in our twenties. Your twenties is such a decade of change; you can go from being single and a student at 20 to being married with children and a career and a house and a mortgage at 29. And at 21 now, we are right at the beginning. We both feel like this is the age of opportunity, really. There's so much to look forward to; so much on the horizon. Every day is a step towards our futures, and it's all exciting! I have such an urge to do things. I want to accomplish so much. I want to travel, and I want to see the world, and I want to learn, and I want to meet people and have stories to tell, and I want to do. I don't want to miss out on anything. Because that's what your twenties are about. And right now, it's so much fun! I love being 21! In all it's socialising and meeting people and reading and studying and learning about new things goodness, I am soaking it up.

Frequent flyers

I think I should be eligible for some frequent flyers at Nepean Hospital by now (you know, if they had such a program.)

Or maybe like a "come 10 times, get a procedure FREE" promotion.

Something like that.

Because I ended up there again last week, after spending the wee hours of Friday morning throwing my guts up and having horrific stomach pain. (Why do these things always appear in the very dead of night? Why can't they show up at a more respectable time?)

Anyway, I toughed it out at home for about 3 hours, but by 4am I was so exhausted, and couldn't keep any painkillers or anti-nausea drugs down so we headed into the hospital.


Let me tell you, if you want to get admitted into a hospital quickly, all you need to do is get your heart racing. Literally. The past 2 times I have been to the ER I have gotten admitted straight away because I have had a really high heart rate (tachycardia).

On Friday (although it felt like Thursday night to me) my heart rate was 170 and when one of the nurses said to another "She's quite "tachy" ", the other nurse looked at her and went "Oh, you think?"


So that's my secret. Oh, and breathing really fast and looking in pain helps too.



Anyway, so I got admitted straight away and as soon as I was in a bed a nurse came to try to put an IV in my arm. Fun. I HATE needles. And I hate them even more when they don't go in on the first go. I have 3 puncture marks in both arms from attempts at getting an IV in. Eventually the nurses had to call a senior doctor to come and get one in, and she was pretty good.

I was so nauseous at this point that the pain of the needle didn't really bother me, as long as it meant I could get something to make me stop throwing up! And then we'd deal with the pain. And then they could take some blood.


So I got some good drugs (including my old friend Morphine, which unusually this time, sent me straight to Dreamland where I could hardly keep my eyes open and kept forgetting what day it was) , got rehydrated with not one, but three bags of saline, and then they started doing all sorts of tests on me - blood tests, urine tests, x-rays.

The possible diagnosis changed with the results of every test. At first they thought it was gastro, but then my blood tests were normal, so then they thought kidney stones, but my urine tests were normal.


And then - the big one - my abdomen x-ray showed some abnormalities, which led them to think I had a twist in my bowel, which would mean surgery. Again. Less than a month after the surgery on my pilonidal abscess.



I remember praying so hard for "just" gastro. I was happy with that diagnosis. I did not want another surgery.


Anyway, skip forward a few more hours (I won't tell you about how I got stabbed in the leg with an injection of anti-nausea drugs that didn't work, or the amount of times I threw up before, during and after) and the doctors (who were very nice) agreed that it was gastro.

I had a surgical follow-up just in case, where I was so worried he would say "Let's just do the surgery so we can take a look inside and see what's going on" so I really pushed the fact that I worked with kids a lot and had been in contact with kids that had similar symptoms, and thankfully he agreed that it probably was just a really severe case of gastroenteritis.



(Let me add that this entire time, I am nil by mouth in case I need surgery. My mouth is so dry that I would've killed someone to get a drink of water. It'd been at least 6 hours since I'd had a drink, and add to that all the vomiting, and man was I parched. And all I got was ice cubes, which let me tell you, do not do the job.)


Then , I get the glorious news that I can start eating and drinking again, and better news I have never in my life received. But, darn it, my stomach has like shrunk or something and all I can manage are a few pieces of mandarin washed down with some lemonade and water. Pathetic.

Oh, and as we're waiting in the car park after I got discharged, I threw everything back up. And I mean everything.


On the plus side, it's a great way to fit back into some old jeans.

Back to the real world...

Uni officially started back last week, but in Psychology courses, there are no tutorials until Week 2, so I only had a few lectures to go to last week.

This week is the wake-up call.

It's like they suck you in with Week 1, and I was one of those thinking "Oh, this isn't so bad, i don't know why I always get so stressed about uni...." Ha. I've only had one class so far today (two more to come later in the afternoon) and already I'm worried about the workload!

This semester (my final semester of my Arts degree! Yay! Have you noticed my countdown on the right hand side?) I am doing 4 subjects as usual.

Three of them are Psych subjects (2 core subjects and 1 elective) and then there is my "real" elective, an education subject.


Even the names of the subjects sound intense, I think:
- History & Philosophy of Psychology (this is supposed to be the hard one)
- Human Learning & Cognition
- Psychology of Learning Environments
- Early Mathematical Thinking


On the plus side, at least I'll finally, finally be learning about teaching (in a round a bout way since I'm learning about learning)!