- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This is what happens when one of The Square does a First Aid Course:

Yay for The Square and passing ordinary evenings watching snow videos and being stupid. So much <3!

I’m one of those people who eats things by colour. I love gummi bears, and will eat all the green ones first. I probably won’t eat the orange or yellow ones. The Boy is always amused that I do this, and for one birthday he got me a container full of gummi bears – all presorted so I didn’t have to pick through them.

My latest addiction though, is the Dinosaurs from the The Natural Confectionery Company. No green ones, but I’ll generally eat all the red ones, and the purple ones, and the white ones. I won’t eat the orange, or the yellow (but lucky for me The Boy will). So imagine my delight when I opened this pack and saw this:

Hardly any orange ones! Awesome.

(Yeah, after the last post, sometimes you just have to take delight where you can find it. :P)

I just made my first voluntary student loan payment of $800. That $800 was meant to be an ipod for The Boy, a couple trips to snowplanet, and probably spending money when I’m in Melbourne. Sigh.

See, New Zealand has this great scheme at the moment. They are quite happy to give anyone a loan if they are enrolled at a qualified tertiary education facility. They are also quite happy to give you $150 a week, if you are enrolled full time. They also have this great thing where if you stay in New Zealand, they won’t charge you interest on this loan. Great! Fantastic for getting people qualified!

So you do what I did, and you meander through your degree, and graduate. And then you start another degree, and decide half way through that you disagree with what you are being taught (because apparently common sense isn’t part of ECE anymore) and so you leave and get a real job. The minimum repayments came out of my wages every month and I never really worried about it. Or noticed it. Or cared in anyway about it.

Until I discovered that if I only paid the minimum repayments it would take me 19 years 10 months to pay off the entire loan.

Colour me gobsmacked that I’m in this much debt because when I was 18 I took that $150 a week and drank it. Like a fish. Because my social life dictated I do so.

The problem is that I don’t WANT to stay in New Zealand for the next 19 years. I wish to live elsewhere at some point. Party hard in London Town. Ride the back bowls in Switzerland. Eat waffles and fried chicken in New York! If I leave New Zealand for more than 6 months I get charged interest. And that interest is NOT pretty! A friend who came back home to visit said that for the last six months he got charged $4000+ in interest on his Student Loan. FOUR GRAND!

Then I worked out that if I voluntarily pay an extra $800 a month I could be debt free in 4 and a half years. This includes the OTHER great goverment scheme which pays an extra 10% on top of your repayments if you voluntarily pay back more than $500 a year.

Lucky for me I’m not paying rent at the moment, and can afford to live AND pay back this ginormous loan. Probably not for the entire 4 and a half years (I refuse to be living at home that whole time) but enough to make a serious dent in it.

So, advice to all those 18 year olds wanting to live it up large on the governments money. DO NOT DO IT! Don’t get sucked in. I am paying for all those years now, supporting my younger self and it is fucking painful! Yes, get qualified. But borrow only what you have to to cover the course costs. Do not borrow the money to socialise. Do not borrow the money to go on snow trips. Do not borrow the money so you can buy that sweet $300 hoodie because ‘its The Shit’.

Students are meant to be poor. People with full time jobs? Not meant to be poor. It appears I did the inverse, and handing over that $800 today? Super. Super. Super. Painful.

Being debt free though? Totally worth it.

Sometimes I forget that some quirks don’t traverse from one workplace to another. The other day I got yelled at by my boss for being slightly sarcastic in an internal email. At ICONZ internal sarcasm was used as a one of those ‘touchstone’ moments in a ‘Yes, sometimes work can suck but we are all in it together’ kind of way.

Here this is apparently not the case. It was unsettling, and even through I disagreed with the justification that was used (forwarding emails vs a single well written contextual email) if ICONZ taught me nothing else, it was when it’s appropriate to keep my mouth shut and accept what’s coming my way.

After I was HORRIBLY unsettled. I found it difficult to concentrate and trying to push through was difficult. Okay so it was a small reminder to pull my head in and I should suck it. But I was all restless and the sucking it in part wasn’t going so well. In the end I went to lunch slightly early and drove around till I ended up here:

It was cold, and grey and windy and WONDERFUL!

I’m not the kind of person who can just let shit that comes my way roll off my shoulder. I’m not unaffected by what goes on around me, so it was nice to get away and stand in the freezing wind and to relax a bit.

And it wasn’t till I was standing on the sand watching the seagulls that I realised that the yelling I got was horribly severe for a single line of sarcasm, and that perhaps my boss was having a horrible day and I had just copped the end of it.

Standing on the beach made it easier to hope that his day was going better.

So, I won’t fib. I think these two, half hour shows made for MTV are BRILLIANT. They are the opposite of serious, there is no plot (and no required thinking), just people out doing the weird and crazy (but not TOO weird and crazy) for a laugh. A bunch of guys rocking out, being stupid, for our viewing pleasure. The Boy and I have been watching them together every week. It is all kinds of awesome!

In short, Rob Dyrdek spends his time trying to make ‘fantasy’ come to life in his big old industrial factory. There’s a whole bunch cool stuff too, Flying foxes, a foam pit, an GIANT indoor blob, basketball hoops in impossible places . . . they do all sorts of cool stuff too. Swim with sharks, skate on giant skateboards, build a studio, rap with the receptionist, find their ‘inner spirit animals’. Naturally they do it all while being complete asses, but it wouldn’t be tv if they took everything seriously, right?

And, they have the cutest puppies around while they do it:

Edit: Appears MTV took the video down. Enjoy this cute photo of Beefy, then.

Originally uploaded to flickr by artsprojekt

I’m totally in love, and my next pup is going to one just like that. Rob and Big, and Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory are an easy way to spend half an hour, laughing at the shit they do. A super sweet pick-me-up in tv form. :)

As I said earlier this week, the fantastic Stevie was building me a brand spanking new powerful machine! It’s the first upgrade I’ve treated myself to since First Year (think 8+ years) so it was definitely overdue!

Now, I’m not really a ‘hardware’ person. Sure, I have a BSC in Compsci, but that doesn’t mean I’ve ever touched the inside of a computer before. It was pretty awesome to see the insides get put together, and figure out what did what to make my machine as AWESOME and POWERFUL as it is!

Not only is my new machine made up of TEH AWESOME parts (think a ridiculous amount of RAM, a quad core cpu, one of those ’serious’ graphics cards and a stupid amount of hd space) but according to the box, it’s also Rock Solid. And Heart Touching.

Which really, is what you want in a new shiny computer. Something that’s powerful, fast and solid. And heart touching.

I’ve never loved a new machine so much. :)

Sinter, the company that Liz and I have together is still going strong. Because we both work full time at ‘real’ jobs, Sinter often gets relegated to those moments usually reserved for procrastinating, or tv watching, or napping. It’s not so bad, we’ve churned out some good work in the last little while.

One of my favourite sites that we’ve done recently is for the fantastic dressmaker, Kirsty. She’s just moved to London, so we did her online portfolio. It was such a fun site to make. Very simple, very clean – the idea was to let her work shine through.

http://www.kirstymacdonaldportfolio.com

Another site which I’ve been working on here and there is the Forgotten Feline site. We had to do a quick redesign due to drama with last the designer (I hate such politics, really I do) so it was thrown together really quick and as such it’s not quite refined as it should be, but is still fairly pretty. Because Forgotten Feline’s is the charity I volunteer for, Sinter maintains this website free of charge for them. There are few sites we do that for, and I’m really glad that we do. Helping out in small ways can be really beneficial for everyone involved. :)

http://www.forgottenfelines.co.nz

At this point I’m still finding this kind of work so satisfying! Completing a small site, a nice tidy project is really brilliant. Being able to see everything come together and go live. Quite fun, actually :)

I love Sundays. They seem to be days reserved for sleeping in, and meeting friends and generally just good times!

This Sunday I spent with my super good friend Stevie. He’s really great – we used to live together till I decided I wanted to go back to uni and re-educate myself. He’s always been super encouraging, and is always willing to share his brains and help with whatever project I have on hand (case in point he’s helping me build a brand spanking new computer this week. Woo!)

Anyway, we did another one of those ’spontaneous’ meets. First we went up Mt Eden to admire the pretty, pretty view:

And then into Mt Eden Village where we visited my favourite bookstore (I came out with more books wrapped in brown paper – hurrah), and then to CircusCircus for cake and dinner (I love that Stevie indulges me so – we had dessert before our dinner!)

CircusCircus is really fantastic – the food is always phenomenal, and they have enough statues around for the place to be super whimsical :)

The other great thing about Stevie, is that he has no problem with stopping in the alley on the way back to the car to be a camwhore with me:

Sundays like that one really make the weekend :) Hope your weekend was just as grand!!

Things are ever so slowly progressing with the kits. The brave little black kit (who I think the other feeders have dubbed ‘Panther’) let me PET him while he ate!!

He’s still a little skittish, and if I tried to pet him over his head he’d back off. But if I came from the side he was alright. Okay, so he was totally only allowing such an event to happen there because of the food, but I’m impressed anyway. Allowing a person to touch him is a HUGE step towards tame! It’s important to remember that he’s still a wild wild creature, but I’m stoked that it happened.

The other kits, alas, are still quite skittish and won’t come within a metre or so of me. I’m happy that they are eating, though. They aren’t chubby housecats, but I’m glad they aren’t starving either.

I get such a kick out of being help out my community, and to visibly see the results each week, even if it is such a small little thing that I do. There is something satisfying about being able to help.

Do you help out in your community?

Again (and at the risk of repeating myself), just a Forgotten Felines shout it. If you’re in the Auckland area and you’d like to adopt a kitten, please please please check out the Forgotten Felines website (forgottenfelines.co.nz) for adoptable kittens who need homes.

The Fourth Quarter and I went driving the other day. The kind where one of us goes ‘lets get out of the city’, and we get in the car and go. We didn’t really have a destination in mind when we started (I love these kind of drives), but when maybe an hour out of Auckland we saw a ‘Mt Auckland ->’ sign, we followed it. No questions asked.

It took us up a gravel road, what I think I was actually a logging track. Good for rally driving and views :)

Alas, when we got there we realised that we were (1) ill equipped for an hour and a half tramp (meaning I was in jeans and he was in jandals), (2) we’d timed it all wrong (by the time we’d got back it would be dark, and those ridge tramps aren’t lit by handy street lights) and (3), we’d brought Quinn (and there was a big ‘fuck off dogs’ sign).

So instead we clambered around the wood left by the foresters and enjoyed the sun and more pretty views!

While the day would have been better had it featured a tramp up to Mt Auckland, I think it was still a good day. And now we have a destination for another day where I’m sure we’ll be better prepared :)