One down

One exam done, three to go. Times being spent between the library and the apartment, and thats it.

Ohh man...

I'm already sick of studying. I've been in the library for the morning after going to the city library and picking up some new DVDs, most of which I've seen but will give me something to watch, and some new CDs to put onto the computer. I've definitely fallen in love with the library on this trip. So as crappy as sitting here listening to an audio file of a class I missed at the beginning of the year, all I want to do is go outside. its good atleast that I'm in the basement of the uni library and therefore can't see the outside. The bad weather has broken mostly, and yesterday and today the sun has been out shinning full force. This morning was gorgeous, around 17 degrees is what the weather told me last night, I got a decent mist going on my way down to uni and I was only wearing khakis and a t-shirt. I especially wanted to blow off the morning to walk around downtown Adelaide and snap some photos, but this morning I had a little bit of a delay looking for my wallet. I headed out the door and remembered I didn't put it in my bookbag before I left, so I turned around and started looking everywhere. Took almost half an hour doing that, retraced my steps outside, even went through the bag that I dropped off in the garbage bin. Worst part about it, I had checked the jacket (duck-bill - Green North Face, best jacket ever) that I wore yesterday to pick up some food but only gave it a once over. Well, low and behold, after frantic searches and memory scans, I figured there was no way it wasn't in the jacket, went back and looked in the only two pockets that the jacket has and of course it was in there the whole time. Just goes to show, its not always in the last place you look, sometimes its in the first and you just want to freak out a little bit before actually finding it. So needless to say the morning starting significantly later then I'd have liked, I think in the end that escapade took nearly the better part of an hour and I still had to make it to the library to drop off some DVDs I rented earlier last week - Beerfest and M*A*S*H*. I never knew that mash was originally a movie, and that Donald Sutherland was the original Captain Benjamin Franklin 'Hawkeye' Pierce. Gotta say, although the movie was really good in its own right, the show was much better. And I'm just too used to Alan Alda as that lovable character to not be a little put off by the Canucks performance.

1970 Capt. Hawkeye 1972-1983

Anyways, I went for a good run yesterday, 16k, but it was a pretty strong struggle at the beginning for the first half because I only got in two runs last week. Unfortunately, I had to spring for new bike tubes for this old girl's race bike I've borrowed from a friend and as these aforementioned flat tyres (I thought it was just the one but this morning when I went to good look at it I was pleasantly surprised with two flats...) so I haven't made it swimming in about a week either, so my overall fitness was just struck down a knotch, but I'm back on track now. Right when I have much better things to do, ie study, I'm ready to swim for about the next 10 days straight. After this the pool membership is done with and I'm not keen on paying 4.60$ per session. Well, that was sufficient procrastination for the time being, back to the wonderful world of pollinators.

No idea who this guy is, but I feel his pain.

Surprised about where this trip has gone

So the allure of Adelaide hasn't really worn off, but Australia has been letting me down lately. I may have mentioned this before but the weather here has turned exactly into the weather you would experience back at home, minus the fact that at home, when it rains a lot and its around ten degrees, we as Canadians know its only going to get warmer (I find, correct me if I'm wrong, that often the autumn doesn't rain all that much). I don't know how much we've gotten lately, but it just seems consist. Every day there's not too much sun to be had. I got an extremely eery feeling today coming out of the movie theatre. We had gone to see an early show for Trine's birthday and whenever you see an early show, its always a little weird coming out of the cinema and it still being light outside. But particularly today, it was a little extra weird for me. I'm looking up in the sky, and there's not a single variation in the colour. Like how fog is all that one colour of light gray, the entire sky was like that. And it was a hue and of a brightness that it actually hurt your eyes to look at, well hurt is an exaggeration but definitely some squinting had to be done. You'd be less hard pressed looking into a bright blue, beautiful clear sky that wouldn't need this kinda squinting. This really is just a terrible description as to what happened, but for reference sake if I ever look back on the post of 14 June 2009, I'll know exactly what I was talking about.

So as for the title of the post, this past week has been just extremely uneventful. After a semesters worth of not really having much work to do at all (for the entire semester, I've had to hand in two assignments total), I was just faced with three days and 44 pages of scientific papers to write. That obviously took up a lot of my week. On Monday, though, I went to a wine and sea festival with some friends and we had a great day tasting some reds, some whites, some ports, and some decent pizza. I still stand by the fact that the best pizza served in the entire world (granted I've never been to Italy so this is a bold statement) is found in Amqui, Quebec. No idea what the place is called, but the seafood pizza there is by in large one of the single best meals I've ever eaten. This has just occurred to me: In retrospect, this was the first meal I'd eaten after running the half-marathon in Rimouski, a likely cause to me enjoying just about anything at that time. But, as proof that it wasn't all hallucinations, Ellen also said that the pizzeria is legendary.

So Monday was the wine festival.
Tuesday was the Australian Gehyra geckos phylogeny/evolution write up.
Wednesday was the Hakea francisiana plants as a mammalian pollinator food source write up.
Thursday was the Acacia papyrocarpa canopy's shade providing a piosphere write up.
Friday was the handing in of all said write ups, the final day of classes and some relaxing movies rented from blockbuster.
Saturday was some reading enjoying a few early hours of sun on a cool day until the rain came and witnessing Pittsburgh win the Stanley cup, followed my watching the movie Bloodsport with Jean-Claude Van Damme (even if you remember every part of this movie, I guarantee you don't remember how hilarious it was)
And Sunday was Trine's birthday and watching the Hangover. I was originally supposed to see this with my buddy Sam and his housemates, but I couldn't refuse the birthday girl. You only turn 1/4 of a century once.

As for training, I'd prefer not to discuss it. A tyre flatted on the bike that I'm riding so I haven't been able to make it up to the pool, and the weather hasn't been making me want to jump outside for a run. 10deg is a tricky one to dress for because you don't know whether to go with the pants and a tshirt, the long sleeve and shorts, or what. But tomorrow I've got 16k scheduled, rain or shine. And start revising for upcoming exams, and get that tyre fixed so I can get to the pool for the last days of my membership. I can see the finish line coming soon and then I'll be in new areas of Australia with new photos to post. I'm actually waiting for a really nice last day in Adelaide to go around and take some pictures to remember the place by, but that hasn't quite come yet. I've also been missing my bike like crazy and can't wait to get home and enjoy some of those north of Oakville rollers.

Apologise for the lack of posts, but as you can see there isn't too much to write home about.

What I learnt this week

The conventional list of what I learnt this first week of June, 2009 -

1. I should've been born in a different era, this is easily explainable. I love Elvis, he's just the man. I've admired Elvis since my dad and I went to Memphis and got thrown into the extravagance that is Graceland culture down there. And it just happens that today on tv they're showing one of the King's movies, Girl Happy. I haven't been able to catch it all, I had to go grocery shopping, but the parts that I've seen are great. There's just other things as well that make me want to have been born in the early 1900s and to avoid this mess of ever increasing technology and capitalism that never ceases. Things just seemed to be simpler in the past, and much more attractive to me. I would've loved to build my own house, have to walk everywhere. Sure, I wouldn't have liked the 20 kg bikes you'd have to ride around town, and the general lack of advancement in sports training science and the inability to travel around the world, but I also would've liked having fun for the sake of having fun, and not always needing to increase the odds. Go out to bars and find more novel ways to waste money, why I'd be better suited just sitting down around the kitchen table hanging out with friends and listening to the radio. But, this is obviously all talk as I'd have no idea what it really was like without being there, but its nice to think about.

2. Its really easy being lazy, but its actually even easier to just get off your butt and do something. I've had the laundry sitting there in the corner of my room for some time, running down to the last pairs of socks and underwear, and re-wearing t-shirts as much as I could, and it only took a few hours before the stocks were refreshed, all done while watching a movie and working on an essay. This applies to many things, grocery shopping for instance. I've been reluctant out of laziness to make my way to the supermarket this week, so I've been eating very little and what I was eating wasn't all that great. Well, these things take time to amalgamate in the body, but Saturday and this morning I had too of the weirdest workouts I've had all year.

3. Nutrition is actually important. Its not all just talk, its actually true. As I was saying, this week I haven't eaten much. I had a great meal on Friday, but followed it up with two pieces of cake and many many doughnuts. Well, that wasn't a good idea. I made my way to the pool in the morning, nothing to eat before hand, and I just had no energy at all. Swimming's been going great lately, and I'm really starting to know my pacing well enough to know that the effort I was putting in wasn't translating to the times it should have, and on top of that I couldn't find the energy to push myself any harder then I already was going, regardless if it wasn't that hard in the first place. Its kind of hard to explain, but in the end, I couldn't put forth a effort to make my times decent at all. Then there was this morning, after learning what I'd learnt, I had some breakfast and waited for it to settle before making my way for a long Sunday run. I took a new route and didn't really know the distance I was going, so I did it all time based, and figured after my main (new) route followed by a known 2.25k route, I figured I had hit my 14 or 15k mark that I wanted to put in this morning. Well, I came back home pumped about what I thought was a relatively good time and good effort, and it turns out it was awful, not by all standards but most. I got a good run in, but the pace was slow, and the distance wasn't close to 14. It was 12.74k when last week I got in 13.68k, this won't ever do. The worst was, because I had ran at a slower pace, I had plenty left in the tank to cheap going. But, although I had fuel, after I was doing my post-run lounging, my stomach was absolutely wrecked. This all translates to an awful nutrition regime this past week, something I shaltn't repeat this week.

I'm sure I learnt more, but some lessons are best kept to yourself.
School's officially over except for 2 hrs of class on Friday, 4 essays to hand in, and 4 exams to write. Then I'll really get to relax (sarcasm - its all I've been doing these past 4 months).