Well this will not do...

It's seems that I am quite far away from my target for this month BMFA, this being so I shall try and catch up over the next few days. I think I have to post about another 12 or so more to beat last April's blog count.

This weekend was hectic. Friday, not so much but Saturday and Sunday definitely. On Friday all I did was be bored at home, do some study and then I went to collect the CD of a single that my friend's band Screaming Life released recently. This retrieval took awhile because I had to go to my friend's house to get it and even though I knew where it was I have never gotten myself there before, I had to take the train because I STILL haven't got my license yet (only 4 more hours!). As I was walking to his I took a complete wrong turn and went the long way round but I finally got there which was good.

On Saturday I was woken up by a call from work asking me to come and work until two. Which I did. It was a bit stressful because I wasn't expecting to go into work and I wanted to study which I didn't end up doing at all. On Sunday I worked from 8.00-4.30 and once I was done all my muscles in my body ached. I haven't done a shift that long in ages.

Now it's Monday morning and I'm supposed to have a Politics tutorial at 10 which I won't get to because I'll be studying for the German test I have today because I didn't get a chance to on Saturday.

Must blog...

Blog More Frequently in April went on a short hiatus but now it's back! Excited? Perhaps not.

Anyway, I'm back at uni for the latter half of the semester which is um, fun, I guess? One thing I've found since transferring from Curtin last semester is that I find it easier to procrastinate doing study while I'm at uni. This is because of one very simple reason and that is because I know many more people who attend UWA and it's so easy to just go hang out and do nothing with them all day instead going to the library to study (which I do do occasionally just not as often as I plan to).

The thing is my group of friends is quite large, in that it extends across many small circles of friends who went to the same high school or do the same uni course who all conglomerate in their breaks from class in one particular spot. This means that if you go there at any time during the day it is likely you'll will find someone you know there to sit with and talk about nothing in particular. This is not conducive to studying. When I was at Curtin I had no such group of friends so any time I had free time I would just go to the library and read or do assignments.

Yesterday was a perfect example, I arrived a couple of hours early to uni for the purpose of going to library to find and photocopy some readings that I needed for my politics unit. Before doing this I decided to drop into Hackett (the place where my friend conglomerate) for a bit. Bad idea. In those two hours before my lecture approximately no photocopying or reading got done.

So yes, having friends is detrimental to your study habits. One other thing that I'd like to mention, Reid Library (the main library at UWA) scares me a little compared to Curtin's Library it's so much more quiet and claustrophobic. I like Curtin's library a lot better, I guess cos it's more modern with more space and also easier to navigate.

That's it for today. I have to go into uni soon. The weathers awful. Bah.

Review!!!

As promised this is my book review (or at least an attempt at) of You Shall Know our Velocity by Dave Eggers.

You Shall Know Our Velocity - Dave Eggers

The novel is essentially about two friends, Hand and Will, who are left $38,000 after their friend Jack dies when he is (in the most literal sense possible) run over by a truck whilst in his car. Hand and Will set out to travel to as many places in the world as possible in seven days on a mission to give out this money to the needy. This leads to a variety of hilarious and awkward senarios as the characters try and give out the money to people they know nothing about. Within this journey there is a bunch of literary metaphors all about loss and finding oneself, everything that you would probably expect from a literary novel from an author as reknowned as Dave Eggers.

Before I talk about what I thought of the book, I must confess that when I decided to write this review I soon realised that I actually wasn't sure exactly what I thought of it. The reason I had bought and read it in the first place was that I had read numerous short stories by Dave Eggers and found them to be nothing short of brilliant, all slightly off-centre stories yet edging into post-modern territory containing brilliantly clear and insightful (for want of a better word) ideas about the world. You Shall Know Our Velocity not so much. Afer I had finished reading it I thought it (or perhaps I) was missing something, so before I wrote this review I google searched some other reviews on the book and found this review which managed to articulate what I had been previously wondering. Eggers book is very good, but it doesn't seem to be up to his normal standard. The clarity and ounce of brilliance just doesn't seem to be there. Now I guess I COULD be missing something, it is a possibility but I couldn't help but be slightly disappointed with this novel after readng Eggers short stories.

That being said, I still recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading literary-type books or road-trip themed books or books about silly American males. After all I did finish the whole book. Something that doesn't occur often for me as I'm a picky reader, if I'm not interested, I won't finish it. I also highly reccomend Eggers short stories the most famous of which can be found in How We are Hungry, a collection of his short stories published by Penguin.

I hope that makes some sense but I have to stop here as I have to be at work in half an hour.

Down in the Dale

I think I enjoy this whole blogging in the morning thing, it gives me a chance to sit down and concerntrate on one thing and not get distracted. Most of you wouldn't know that my attention span is fairly lacking and I often get distracted and find it hard to concerntrate a lot of the time. This is one of the reasons why I am terrible at and don't do well in exams. It's also one of the reasons I started blogging. I needed a medium where I would have to sit down and write something coherent so it could be published. It's sort of worked. I think.

But enough of that. My original plan for this blog post is to talk about my trip down south (douth) last weekend. Let's start off with a pretty picture:

This is the view from the house that we stayed in plus some chairs we put out on the large verandah. Arty huh? The property was a generous 200 acres, it belongs to one of my friend's family who built the house just recently. It's a pretty awesome place. The thing I love most about going to the country is being able to see all the stars at night. I live so close to the city that you can't see that many of them and I always forget how many stars they're actually are and how pretty they are.

I went down with my sister and four of our friends. I've never really been on a roadtrip with only people my own age before, it was definitely more fun than any of the family roadtrips I've been on in the past years (as you would expect). When we arrived there we didn't do a hell of a lot really, just consumed some (and by some I mean a lot) intoxicating beverages, went on bush walks, played numerous games of cards with some scrabble and PS 3 thrown in, we even managed to have a weird, late night experience with SBS.

I'm really glad I ended up going on this trip. I haven't had a proper holiday away from home in almost a year, so it was definitely a nice break.

Anyway, I think I'll stop there before I start rambling. Next blog post I'm going to (hopefully) post my semi-review on You Shall Know Our Velocity.

See you guys then!

Zwei

This is fairly good, two blogs for two days. Some people would say I'm on a roll, some would just say "that's not particularly impressive, Catherine". And they may be right, but when you consider my previous blog count of recent days I think it's worth the accolades.

But enough of that indulgence, I figure I'll start off BMFA with a little summary/update on what is going on in my life. Mid-semester break has just started so we now have a "study-break" for a week in which we try and cram as much fun-stuff as possible while trying to catch-up on all the work we're behind on from the first 6-ish weeks of uni. I know there's a lot off stuff I have to catch up on especially in German, which I was kinda neglecting a bit because I had so many other assignments. The bad news about neglecting a subject that has weekly tests is that the neglect shows up fairly quickly, luckily the tests are only worth 4% and they ignore your worst one when averaging your semester mark, sooo I have a little breathing space to make it better.

In other uni news I am now only doing 3 units this semester because I withdrew from my Calculus unit because it just didn't really fit in with all my other units. I wasn't really prepared to do enough work on it to even justify doing the unit. It just means I'll have to enrol in a fourth unit next semester instead of doing just 3. I already have credit for one unit from my study last year and I could probably get more credit, but I don't really want to because it'll limit the type of 2nd year units I can do next year.

In non-uni news before Easter I went down south with a few friends for three days. It was awesome. It was just so nice to get away and not worry about uni-work, normal-work and not seeing a computer screen for three days was also fantastic. I'll write more about this trip in a later blog (and possibly include pictures!).

I also finally finished reading a book that I have been trying to finish for ages (thanks again to the trip for that too). I think I'll write another blog about that book too, it was really awesome it many ways I really like the author's style of writing. He comes up with some amazing observations and ideas. The book's called You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers. Dave Eggers is a fairly well-reknowned author especially famous for his short stories which are nothing short of amazing, if I do say so myself.

I think that's enough for today.
See you all soon! (well not really)

Blog More Frequently in April

It's April and instead of doing Blog Everyday in April I will attempt to blog "more frequently" meaning that I hopefully will blog more this April than in last April where I attempted BEDA and quite clearly failed with only 17 blog posts. This monlth I shall at least aim to get 18 blogs out, however crappy in content they may be.

Today's blog post is going to be particularly short mainly because it's Easter Sunday and we're going to have family come over for dinner soon. So basically all I have to say today is

HAPPY EASTER!!!

Lots of chocolate and bunnies to you all
xx

Hail!

Last Monday Perth experienced the worst storm since 1994 (or in a century...I dunno, the date changes depending on what new program you watch). Needless to say, it was a pretty intense storm, we had heaps of rain and hail stones the size of tennis balls. There was pretty widespread property damage around the city including a mini-mud slide on Mt Eliza which caused a couple of apartments to fill up with sand. At uni the glass in heaps of windows were broken, with lots of damage to trees (there are leaves EVERYWHERE) and parts of the ceiling collasped in a couple of buildings. Plus the 80-year-old glass in Winthrop Hall, one of the university's heritage listed buildings, looks like someone has gone and thrown rocks throw the windows. Although the architecture and education library takes the cake, it filled up with a couple of feet of mud and storm water when the windows smashed from the force of all the strom water flooding in from the road (the library is built a bit below ground). Finally it's estimated that 25, 000 cars were signifcantly damaged in the hail storm.

Luckily, my area didn't seem to get any hail and the only damage we really had was some minor flooding and a possibly broken gutter, we were lucky we didn't loose power some people were still waiting to have their power reconnected yesterday. It was quite bizarre really, it was warm and sunny for most of the day then in about 2 hours it became black and the storm hit and was over.

That was fairly exciting, I found it amusing that on news reports they decided to mention the massive amount of storm related groups/fan pages etc. on social networking sites. Clearly people are still getting used to the internet age and still find it fascinating, even though in a lot of ways we rely on it to function most days.

Other than that life is ok at the moment, handing in first uni assignments with break coming up soon. Work has been annoying, getting in the way of stuff like social interaction but whatever. I guess that's what happens.

I could gripe about a couple of other things that are happening but I know they'd read stupidly when typed up. So that's enough for now. Bye!