Life as we know it

Life as we know it will turned upside down on June 7th and we will be living in the sky. No, we're not going to commit suicide together or build a castle in the sky. We're moving to El Salvador to work for Peace Corps as municipal developers. Fancy job title, huh?

For more details visit: The New Chronicles: In Search of Something Other

Sofia, Not the Bulgarian Capital

We have a new flatmate who moved in today named Sofia. She has red eyes, seems to bathe constantly and can jump quite high for a tiny mouse.

Final Semester: A Day in the Life

Today didn't start out as well as I had hoped, even though it's only 2pm. I woke up at 6:45am this morning because our placement officer from Peace Corps (they are in charge of having the final say of where you will get shipped off to and are all in charge of sending you an invitation) was meant to call us at 8am. 9:30am rolled around, I became very tired, both from lack of sleep and calling the placement officer but getting her voicemail each time, and Will had to leave for uni to get to work on his big thesis project. Right when he was about to head out and I was about to take a nap for "30 minutes", the phone rings and we both stare at it. Then I picked it up and the phone call resulted in setting up another arranged phone meeting later tonite around 12am.

After I awoke from my "nap" I sat down to get working on my own thesis project. I've been translating more or less steadily since 11am, that's about 3 hours worth of work. However, I've now translated enough to calculate how many words there are per page and how many pages of The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl I actually have to translate--the results have left me feeling rather unmotivated to work anymore for today. Here's why:

Each page packs about 430 words and I have to translate a total of 15,000 words. That means I have a 34-35 page allowance of stories that I can choose from. The short story I've been translating is a total of 24 pages, which eats up most of my allowance, and while it's a good story, there are ones that are considerably more packed with black humour. So I've translated a total of 1,300 words and I'm not even going to use them for my project. And to think I was going to translate ALL of the stories I found interesting first and THEN figure out how many words I needed!

So, I've decided on 3 short stories totalling 36.5 pages and approximately 15,695 words: A story called Pig, where a naive child ends up getting turned into ground meat; A story called The Man From the South, where a compulsive gambler from South America who's fond of chopping off the fingers of people who lose bets with him, and Lamb to Slaugher, about a pregnant women who kills her detective husband with a frozen lam leg and ends up feeding the evidence to the detectives who come over to her home to investigate the crime.

I quite like black humour and this is possibly the most boring blog entry I've ever written.

Back from Thailand: Birthdays and Drinking Water

The first thing I need to say is that Hat Rai Lay was disappointing. It was so disapointing I didn't take a picture of it at it's most disapointing point. The coolest things about it were the bungalow we stayed at--mosquito net for sleeping, bucket baths, basic anemities and chickens--

--and the kayaking trip we did through the mangroves with a special visit of pineapple-eating monkeys.


Everything else about the beach was uncool. The water is so shallow that when the tide goes down, it REALLY goes down. The tide happend to go down when we were kayaking and it revealed a disgustingly muddy and slimy beach. The beach is also seriously lacking in the nightlife department. I suppose an upside was that we saw a Thai boxing match against at a bar we were having drinks at. We stayed there for 2 nights and then spent 1 night in Phuket because we had to catch a flight back to Bangkok the next day. We stayed right next to the airport at Nai Yang beach, which I quite liked.

I accidently booked an expensive bed and breakfast for $46 online, but it turned out to be so worth it when we we got upgraded to a bigger room because there were only 2 guests staying at the B&B and the room was absolutley amazing compared to the places we'd been staying at for $9.

How do you accidently book expensive accomodation you ask? Well, when you book at hostelworld.com the prices are per person and not per room. It was the only place near the airport and spending $23 didn't seem that bad. However, after I booked it I was reminded that upon arrival the B&B, a total of $40 was due. Ha!

Well we're back in Melbourne and it's great being back home. Hot water showers, drinkable tap water, a kitchen to cook in and cool people to hang out with. We even got new furniture while we were away. When we first moved in, we had these horrible bright red pleather couches that must be the most uncomfortable couches ever made in the history of furniture making and now we have soft, blue fabric covered couches. Ah, life is good again.

Speaking of life being good, my favourite person named Bill (and/or Will) in the world turned 24 yesterday. We had a smashing martini, dancing-on-the-couches fueled afterparty:

Cheers to my favourite birthday boy!