Round Robin

Yes! It is that time of the year again - it is Christmas and what does Christmas mean? Catching up with those friends and relatives that you have forgotten for the rest of the year - its the round robin. So for all of those I have forgotten here is my round robin.

It has been an extraordinary year for all concerned, I for one had no idea what living in America would bring! But it hasn't just been an exciting year for me, Oz finally completed his undergraduate degree and met with a potential graduate school supervisor! Aunt Marjorie finally completed her patchwork on the history of clocks throughout the centuries, although she jokes that it will never really be finished! But before we get carried away let us not forget to mention the passing of Percy our Parakeet, he had been Majorie's best friend for neigh on twenty years and following his untimely demise due to an unfortunately out-of-date date she could barely bring herself to finish the patchwork.

Cousin Dermot was ordained as a man of the cloth by ordinations4u.com, we are all very proud of him and have booked him for all our christenings, weddings and funerals for the foreseeable future. If you would his services (his speciality is funerals and bar mitzvahs!) email crazyrevderm@hotmail.com.

Oz continues to astound us all, he got straight As in his quarter at UCSB and has now finished his undergraduate, we are all very proud of him. He is currently finishing writing a ground breaking manuscript that is set to change the field of avian palaeontology forever! We all wait with baited breath. Just this week he visited LA and met with the one-and-only reknowned Dr. Luis M. Chiappe, Director of the Dinosaur institute at the LA county Natural History Museum, whom he hopes to continue Postgraduate studies with, they were locked in an office in heated debate for many hours! Oz is currently travelling around California with Martyni before returning to Australia for six months to rest on his laurels.

Martyni passed her first year of her degree with a grade good enough to continue her scholarship, however she has left her home university for a year to study abroad at UCSB. She has found the experience interesting to say the least, and has so far resisted the urge to strangle certain teachers, although how long she will be able to continue resisting is uncertain. She has bravely attempted to study Arabic and to our amazement passed this quarter with a flying pass! She found it surprisingly enjoyable, stretching her brain in previously under-utilised ways. Oz is encouraging her to stretch other parts of her anatomy. She has found the experience of having a room mate interesting to say the least, and is slightly unsettled at the prospect of not having her own room until next October. After completing her studies at UCSB she intends to spend the summer with Oz in her in Melbourne, working as an assistant teacher.

With the craziness of 2008 all but over, we eagerly anticipate what the new year shall bring!

With love,

Martyni and Oz xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Moving and LA (thankfully not to LA)

I'm writing this blog sitting next to Oz on a Greyhound bus that's going from LA to San Francisco. We're in the middle of fuck-knows-where-ville driving next to what looks to be thousands of cows, and trust me =, you can smell them! After a lapse of an hour or two, we made it back to civilisation—for a moment at least—before being plunged back into the dark highway. There is a strange cackling man sitting next to us. So instead of getting freaked out by the cackling man who occasionally decides to stare at us I'll recount what has been going on in the past week or so.

As soon as my exams finished I had the joy of moving and Oz had the joy of helping me. Having none of my friends with cars around at this point we had no choice but to carry all my stuff (and I have accumulated a lot of it over the past four months!) the five or so blocks to my new apartment. But alas, if only it had been that easy. We expected to move in straight away, but my new room mate was still in residence, so we were in limbo for three days not being entirely sure where our possessions were.

On the subject of room mates I appear to have moved from an anal one into the room of a stoned, permanently hungover one. Of the three days we moved my stuff she was hungover on each of them, the mornings were spent with her make-up smeared over her face, lying in bed, with the covers pulled over her head. Its going to be an interesting two quarters.

I have vowed to move as least often as possible following this experience. We were generally ill prepared in every possible way and it was a complete nightmare that led to us setting of for our travels three hours late,

Oz has written a guide to easy moving. Here it is:

Step one: Have a friend with easy access to a car on standby at all times.
Step two: Do not acquire any personal belongings, so they do not, as a result, need to be moved in the first place.
Step Three: If you ignore both of the first two steps, make sure you do not try and move two person's belongings from different houses at the same time, mixing the items up as much as possible.
Step Three and a half: If you are trying to live in two residences at once do not move many of these items back and forth several times before they find their final resting place.
Step Four: If at all possible, do not move house.

Anyway I am now 98% in my new apartment (a few last minute items were discovered and stowed away in a cupboard to be moved when we get back. We were so disorganised that we had to get a later bus and arrived in LA in the pitch black.

The next day was our first proper day in LA and what did we do? Spend the entire morning trying to get a bus to the Natural History Museum (don't go if you don't have a car - totally not worth it!) because Oz wants to do a PhD with one of the big shots there and went to butter him up. The result being that Oz had lots of Palaeontological conversations and spent hours looking at casts of bones (not even the actual fossils!) whilst I sat in the corner of an office knitting and bored out of my mind. I'll let Oz justify himself. As is widely known, palaeontologists are teh coolest people alive. I need just two words to justify this bombastic claim: T. rex. To my great delight, I discovered that there was a largely-complete skeleton of this iconic creature in the draws of the lab we were visiting. There is also considerable merit in long, convoluted and technical conversations on extinct creatures that no one cares about, besides the select few geeks who live and breath this stuff. What more reason does one need for such a laborious trek?

Anyway, after about five hours of being cooped up in this office (or "lab") we eventually escaped, only to spend the next hour or so on the buses in the pouring rain (oh yes, it does rain in LA!) so that we couldn't actually see where we were supposed to get off. I eventually forced Oz to come food shopping with me (Oz: I wasnt forced; she persuaded me with her silver tongue) and the actually began to become enjoyable. We got our hands on some hot chocolates and some beautiful French bread (that reminded me of Sunday breakfasts with my family) and we sat in a cafe dipping the bread into our hot chocolates. Beautiful. We also were able to get some red wine and the night began to look up.

Having vowed not to step foot in any more palaeontology based attractions on this trip it was with surprise and some annoyance that I found myself outside the La Brea tar pits, where a long time ago a lot of boring animals met their untimely end and now some geeks dig up their bones and make a big deal out of something that matters very little indeed. So I ended up trawling around a museum that Oz theoretically wasn't even interested in, he prefers the Mesozoic period, these animals weren't even dinosaurs! (See, I am learning things about dinosaurs slowly, I embarrassed Oz in front of some PhD students the day before by calling something a dinosaur when it wasn't. Served him right for boring me stupid!)

After getting high off the tar fumes we finally were released and we went shopping on Melrose Avenue, I don't even particularly enjoy shopping but it was my highlight of the day so far. I got a cool t-shirt with the picture from earth beamed out to aliens with Jesus in the background, sounds strange but I like it. I wanted to get a Mary is my Homegirl t-shirt but they didn't have the right size. I also got an amazing t-shirt fro a friend of mine, but its a secret so I shan't tell you just how amazing it was.

Once Oz got scared at how dark it was getting and how much our chances of mugging has increased we went back to our hostel and has a pitifully small dinner. After complaining of not having eaten enough we put ourselves at risk of mugging by venturing outside to get some more dinner. We also attempted to see the Hollywood sign, but no buses were going the right way and after waiting for half an hour we gave up waiting and strolled to Santa Monica Boulevard. Having decided against about half a dozen restaurants we eventually ended up in an Italian and had a beautiful Bruschetta and cheese free pizza. But even more excitingly than that I got served! I had two glasses of wine in a restaurant underage! I actually felt like an adult for the first time in four months. Was fantastic.

Today we had very little time, once we'd packed up and got to the Greyhound station our time in LA was over. We've done none of the usual LA things, although we did go along Hollywood Boulevard and saw the stars names on the pavement. But this was only because the Greyhound station was on a road off of it. I didn't leave LA with a particularly good picture of it, it seemed sprawling and full of palaeontology. I'll be very glad to get to San Francisco, which I can now actually see!

Greyhound weirdoes - 1, LA muggings - 0, LA sights seen - 0 (Although insists we've seen at least 1, I dispute this entirely!), Oz: disgustingly unhealthy fast food pitstops - 1

Finals

Sorry I've been silent for ages, I have been very busy with studying, both catching up on what I missed whilst ill and revising for exams. This last week has been finals week in which each subject holds a final examination, in England I don't mind exams because we're given time off to study for them and have past questions to look at, but both have been deprived to me and I've been struggling to have the energy to study.

My exams were a really mixed bag, I seriously messed up Arabic but not because I didn't know the Arabic, but because I didn't know the language of learning languages, for example what is a conjunctive verb? There were two possibilities to decide from, so I just guessed. In the end I somehow passed the course, but I don't know what by due to being graded pass or no pass. I think I barely scraped by, but I did it, which I did not think I would at the start of the quarter. My religion in America exam went as well as could be expected, but anthropology was a nightmare, I realise halfway through the exam why I never do well in the exams, they want skills I don't possess - they want regurgitation. I can't do that, but I can make intelligent comments and good arguments, which is not what they are looking for at all. So I don't expect to to do to well.

But on the positive side I've now finished, but Oz hasn't. I'm writing this on Oz's kitchen table at three thirty in the morning helping him study by encouraging him to continue and looking interested whilst he explains his course to me. He has had other exams that have prevented him from studying for this one, so he's been reading over 190 detailed pages of lecture notes for almost the last twelve hours in a desperate attempt to pass. Coffee has been a very good friend to him over this time as he chatters away to himself. I've never pulled an all-nighter before because I reach a studying point of no return and have to go to sleep, but where my man (and no studying) is involved I can pull the cat out of the bag. I'm walking with him to the exam and waiting outside (or if a coffee shop nearby is open then in there) for him before we celebrate. With this exam he will have finished his whole degree, so a big celebration is in order.

Unfortunately we won't really have much time to celebrate because tomorrow I am moving apartment. I had one apartment lined up but unfortunately with less than two weeks before the end of term the person I was taking over from decided she wasn't moving after all, so I got quite stressed and desperately replied to lots of adverts. Unfortunately I was really tired as I was still recovering from being ill and was busy trying to catch up on work I'd missed out on, so I only got round to viewing one house, the one that I really wanted. Luckily I got the room and so am moving tomorrow into a room on DP, the main party street of IV that is adjacent to the ocean. I've still got a room mate, but the room is en suite, the living space is bigger and there is a balcony - outdoor space! I have no where to go in my current apartment and often look longingly out of the window at the good weather but am unable to enjoy it without a five - ten minute walk. So I'm really looking forward to moving in.

There are however a few moving related problems (does moving ever go smoothly?), I have no vehicle to move with, so its our arms and bikes to move me, will be interesting. It is also unfurnished and I have virtually no furniture at the moment, so have to buy a bed, desk and chair, as well as kitchen equipment that I don't have either. Today I tried unsuccessfully to buy furniture, the thrift (second hand) shop I went to had no beds and the desks were all heavy and expensive. I tried new desks, but for my budget (under $50) and requirements (BIG - I'm messy and like to spread out) I couldn't find anything. I've decided that the best thing to do would be to buy a table, but I'm yet to find a cheap, light table. But the desk isn't my main problem, that is a bed, when I actually move in (my rent in my current apartment runs out on the 31st, so I can continue living there for a while) depends entirely on when I can get a bed. I'm going to go to another thrift store tomorrow in the hope that I can buy one and get a taxi to get it home. On less than three hours sleep its going to be entertaining to say the least!