YAY! Australia Day Long Weekend!

It Sunday night, and I'm just relaxing under the aircon after an awesome long weekend. It's been quite a busy one but I took every opportunity to sleep in since I've been having a really tough time at work lately (more on that later...). So here's what I got up to!

Friday 26th Jan - Australia Day!

This year we thought we'd give the drunken foreshore crowds a miss, and so Gabby decided to have everyone over for Aussie day drinks and a barbecue. Unfortunately she set up the table outside, so we were absolutely cooked by the end of the day, and the fact that the barbecue was being made right next to us didn't help! I wore the coolest (and smallest!) dress I own, and by the end of the day I'd melted the equivalent of about 2 cups of ice all over myself in an attempt to stay cool, with no success.

We had the Triple J Hottest 100 on, but only a few of us were interested (the rest of the crowd kept asking what number it was up to so "we could turn this shit off already and put 94.5 on"). Despite the heat, and the complaints about the music, it was a nice relaxing drunk-14-year-old -free afternoon.





Saturday 27th Jan - Emma's Birthday

Saturday night we went to Emma Doyle's house for her 21st. She really went all out! When we first got there we were greeted by a friendly security guard (who looked like he could snap me in half with his little finger) who crossed our names off the guest list and directed us to the extravagantly decorated backyard. There was a bar and tables set up all around, and a projector screen set up with a photo slide show of Emma's childhood playing on it.

It was really strange to see people from high school that I'd lost touch with, since I had a different group of friends to Em. It was also strange to be in her house again, which is where me and Matt met! We met at Emma's when I was over doing an English assignment, and Matt, who was Emma's bro's best friend was over too. Love at first sight!

I ended up spending the majority of the night catching up with Vanessa who will be going on the same Contiki trip we did last year. We gave her all the important tips that we wish we'd known about before we left, for example, skip the sex show in Amsterdam - waste of money, watch out for ear-bugs in Rome, and be wary of anyone that may have a mental break down and need to be committed to a mental hospital!

Sunday 28th Jan - Fire!

Where there's 40 degree heat and lots of bush land - there's (probably going to be) fire. We were walking around in my backyard today when all of a sudden we hear helicopters flying really close by. There was a fire yesterday near my area (around Waneroo Reid Highway area), so we figured it must've sparked up again. My grandma told me that yesterday the helicopters were getting water from the lake near our house, so me and Matt decided to walk down and take a look.

There were two helicopters flying between the fire and Emu Lake. They would hover really low over the lake, and pull up water through a long hose. It was crazy to watch! I was actually really excited about the whole thing - despite the devastation caused by the fire of course.

There were heaps of people around the lake watching the drama, and more were arriving as we left. We stopped hearing the helicopters after a while so hopefully the fire got under control. I've never seen anything like it before, and I didn't even realise that they got water for fires that way. We managed to get some really good photos that were definitely worth getting wet with dirty lake water from the spray caused by the propellers.



Back To Work Tomorrow...

I'm working in Freo at the moment as a vacation student for a company called L3-Nautronix as a software engineer. The company does all sorts of underwater telemetry work, and I'm working on one of the projects thats coming close to it's release date.

I'm actually having a really tough time trying to finish my task, and my mentor has just left for a holiday to make things even more interesting for me. I'm meant to be moving on to something new this week, but I'm still not finished integrating what I've done. Everyone's been really busy with the ever approaching deadlines, and so I'm sorta feeling the stress of having to work stuff out on my own.

Although, the work I'm doing is really interesting and challenging - by far the hardest work I've ever done - ever. I'm actually feeling a bit scared that I'm writing software for a Station that will be sitting on the ocean floor, part of a system that controls the automatic shut down of an oil rig in the case of an emergency - not pressure at all!

Oh One More Thing...

You know those skill testers that are a variation of Tetris where you have to build up a tower to the top of the screen? We'll I just won my second iPod shuffle on one! Matt's already written up about our first exciting shuffle win.

The first time we won was on a machine in Malaga, and I've just discovered that Timezone in Freo also has a couple of machines there. There's a cheap machine which has the shuffle as one of the prizes, and an expensive one, which has a Nano in it. The machines are rigged so that you can only win if there's enough money in it so that it's made a profit even if it looses a major prize. I've figured out how to tell if the machine will let you win by playing only one or two games, so I've pretty much got it sorted out. Now all I need to do is play the waiting game :)