Helen Chick
This little exercise is being done mainly for archival purposes; you can ignore this page with impunity. The updates are in reverse chronological order, and generally should be read with “Helen …” at the beginning of each post (and, as a result of this Facebook style, many of the updates are in the third person).
Helen
December
– Found a very special mathematical ticking “cache” today. Thanks, May; that’s legendary.
November
– Awesome day at Bushranger’s Bay and Cape Schanck.
October
– The wheels are falling off. Well, one wheel. Off the Scout trailer. Fortunately only the jockey wheel. Still a nuisance though.
September
– Muddy boots, muddy jeans, a bruise or two, lots of breaths of Yarra Valley air, and 8 smilies.
– 4.1 upgrade + iPhone = Brick 🙁
– Just saw Hubble 3D. Molto awesomeness … but I now feel very small.
August
– Hmmmmmmmmm
– reviewed a paper before getting up … which sounds very virtuous except for the fact that “getting up” didn’t happen until 9:45.
– would like another two days before Monday. Please, pretty please?
– thinks there’s nothing like camping, a hike to a fascinating spot, campfires, wide games, 1001 questions ranging from “where’s the sauce?” to “have you got $20 million I could borrow?”, a bunch of great kids, and watching Matthew get wet to highlight that life is pretty good.
– just came across a cool new word: “axiological”. I like it.
– can’t quite decide whether or not 11pm is a sensible time to be packing for camp.
– Sorry, facebook, but that’s NOT how I entered it. My version was much more evocative of my frustration.
– ‘ s c o m p u t e r i s h a v i n g a s e r i o u s a t t a c k o f t h e g o – s l o w s . D y s f u n c t i o n a l
July
– After several “aaaagh” moments today, at least one story is probably heading towards a happy ending.
– Go home and work, or stay in the office and work? There’s something fundamentally wrong with these options at 6pm on a Friday!
– woke up, looked at clock, and discovered it was 9:30am. Ooops.
– is glad that the suitcase she last saw in Slovenia rolled off the belt in Melbourne in the wee sma’s this morning.
– ‘s iPhone spat the dummy. She is now doing the same.
– has discovered an important linguistic fact: multilingual communication is not advanced when an Austrian’s words of English exactly correspond with your words of German.
– scored a few goals in the 7-7 draw in the football/soccer match between the combined Singapore-Australia mixed team vs the other combined Singapore-Australia mixed team after the conference sessions today. May not be able to walk tomorrow.
– Have just partied with a bunch of wild maths educators: Nutbush City Limits in glorious en masse synchronisation.
– puts down the red pen, packs up, jumps on the bike and heads home.
– feels like spring, thanks to a great James Morrison and The Idea of North concert. They’re awesome.
June
– is hanging out to go see The Idea of North and James Morrison tomorrow night (or tonight, depending on when you read this); hopefully they’ll chase away the Great Office Upgrade blues.
– MS Office upgrade rant #1: How can something that is filled with “no fill” be OPAQUE until you set the transparency to 100%?
– is undecided as to whether not being able to use Word, Entourage, and Excel (i.e., Office in general) AT ALL is a Serious and Unpleasant Consequence (TM) or not.
– should have known that deciding to upgrade Office was going to have Serious and Unpleasant Consequences (TM, patents pending, all rights reserved)
– is stuck in the office with piles of marking. I suppose it’s better than being stuck in the office with piles.
– Nice new comfy home office chair assembled in 25 minutes. May not mean I get more work done, however.
– Pedes ambitus minutum orbis.
– spent 2.5 hours in Pakistan this afternoon and was still in time to take her 5:15 class in Melbourne. Heh heh.
– Yay the Matildas.
May
– thinks that Word and MathType should be taken out the back and hung, drawn, and quartered! And whipped! And boiled…until…until…until they’ve had enough. And then she will do it again! And when she’s finished she will take all the little bits, and JUMP on them! And she will carry on jumping on them until she gets blisters, or she can think of anything even more unpleasant to do
– is not happy that Word thought the computer disk was full and wasn’t saving stuff for an hour. I do not have another hour to do that work. VERY grumpy. 🙁
– is planning to work at home today. Half of this plan has already been achieved.
– notes that tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of geocaching in Australia, and laments the fact that she is not likely to be able to get out and use million dollar satellites to pursue the scent of plastic boxes in the great outdoors. Sigh.
– has had a festery day … and is annoyed with herself.
– had a great time with the leaders and kids at the Moonee Valley District Walter Murphy Hide hike (just don’t mention “navigation” to our patrol!)
April
– Brilliant idea: I add “Cross one thing off my To Do list” to my To Do list. Then, when I do one of the other tasks on my list, I get to cross off TWO things! Double the satisfaction!
– Grrrr. Dear facebook: punctuation matters. There is a big difference between running those two sentences together, and treating them as the two separate, point-emphasising paragraphs that I intended.
– Gotta love a 12 hour work day. Okay, that wasn’t entirely true.
– thought she had given all the leaches the flick. She was wrong.
– likes it when X rings HER, so that she can cross “Ring X” off her To Do list.
– 6km in the dark, 13km in daylight, idyllic lagoon and beach and campsite, no one else within 20km, glorious sunrise, 19km return plod, sore feet, muscles that almost certainly won’t work tomorrow, 311 photos to edit. 🙂
– just had a quick fb chat with her favouritest oldest niece. 🙂
– thinks “If only I had already been asleep when my English coauthor sent me an email about a problem with our joint paper. Now it’s nearly time to get up again.”
– is having an attack of indecisive lethargy, which should be perfectly acceptable behaviour for 10:30pm on a Saturday evening … so why am I feeling guilty?!
– has another paper to finish by today. I see a need for pecan tart again (or some other suitably sweet reward-structure mechanism).
– is going to ignore To Do Lists … a bit … for not long enough …
March
– could use an extra 120 hours between today and tomorrow. Oh, bother, it’s only half an hour until tomorrow anyway. Sigh.
– thinks she used to be organised and efficient … but a very long time ago.
– notes that there was a certain inevitability to the fact that she is coming down with a cold.
– was going to experiment with the concept of going to sleep on the sensible side of midnight, but blew her chance. (And if facebook makes me look stupid by finding and displaying the original version of this post as well, I shall be annoyed.)
– Full stop. The end. Finished. And they all lived happily ever after (I hope). Time to go home Time to go home Tra la la la la la Time to go home.
– loves it when it looks like the final words will make the paper expand JUST enough to hit the 8 page limit (if it had been shorter it might have given the illusion of lacking substance!), and that there’ll be no tight-editing required (like getting 12 pages down to 8 )
– has hit the 8-page mark, and has only easy bits to do (that’s the sort of statement that invariably turns false just for spite)
– snuck out of the house just after midnight and was FTF on a cache at 12:30am. The withdrawal symptoms had become too much.
– confesses that the pecan tart is long gone, but the paper isn’t. She is moderately optimistic of finishing today, however. (Would it help if she got another pecan tart?!)
– notes that the ratio of eaten to uneaten parts of that (small) pecan tart is 1:3. She felt entitled, since she has written 1/4 of that paper (plus she was hungry and in need of cheering up). She needs to write 3 times as much as she has already written (can you tell that the paper is about ratio and fractions?!)
– has a (small) Brunetti’s pecan tart sitting on her desk, and is vowing that it may only be eaten once a goodly portion of this paper is written (… but I think I need to define “goodly portion” lest the tart be consumed before I really deserve it!)
– has an 8-page paper due on Monday that is currently 0 pages long, and knows this is a problem.
– is about to leave the building. Gotta love teaching evening classes.
– Go the “Control Patrol”! Great effort to bring home the Fitzy Cup. In fact both patrols did well … on a VERY wet weekend
– doesn’t know which she is annoyed about more: that she can’t cope without her favourite breakfast cereal or that they’ve stopped making her favourite breakfast cereal.
February
– confesses that UK colleague was right to wonder whether she (Helen) would make sense talking over the phone about some joint work at 10:30pm Australian time.
– is losimg the plot.
– is finally prepared to confess that she is too old-fogey-ish* to figure out the temporal randomness that seems to affect fb’s News Feed and Status Updates. (And as for what time zone it’s in …) *She is also too uncool to know** the current vernacular synonyms for uncool and old fogey. **But she is proud of the fact that she knows what a shibboleth is, so put THAT in your contemporary linguistic culture.
– is meetinged out.
– has just had the first night of the year for Scouts. Great to see the kids again; some I haven’t seen for six months … and some newbies I hadn’t met at all. Hoping for a good year: lots of great experiences … and no stress.
– missed out on a first-to-find by 5 minutes. Bother that it took me so long to get my bike back into its preferred state.
January
– has just done an evening caching run with M and J, as a reward for getting rid of the old socks (and some other tedious tasks) and as a need-to-get-out-of-the-house thing after a fortnight of not having much energy for doing anything.
– has been spring cleaning and threw out an embarrassingly large number of old socks. (Thank you, facebook, for allowing me to share that with you all!)
– has been coughing all week and finally can have a sick day … on Saturday. Sigh.
– knew that going to work was going to be problematic, and is now wondering where to find some chocolate.
– and a bus load of Scouts slept like logs on the way back from Jamboree … but we are all in desperate need of more sleep … after a long, hot, relaxing, cleansing, refreshing soak in the bath (so why is she wasting time on facebook?!)
– has had her programmed rest day at Jamboree (went caching and sightseeing in Sydney) and is about to return to the fray (hoping that no one has become too frayed in her absence, despite the heat and chaos!).
– should not have checked on work emails at Jamboree!
– is thinking “It’s too late now”. Coming (going?), ready or not.
– has just written the fifth number on some items that are going to Jamboree.
– is still failing to find motivation to pack (or work), but has at least confirmed that the stretcher will fit in the little tent.
– Happy new year everyone. (I can’t believe I just did that! Feel free to mock!)
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