Well I have finally moved on from adding numbers with numbers and working out percentages for my project. Now I am finally getting into the real nitty gritty stuff which is what I am more used to when it comes to research. In other words, trawling through university search engines for ages and ages trying to find something that is of relevance to my project, then go looking for the book/article/whatever the hell it is... realise that half of them aren't where they should be, and most of the other half have actually turned out to be completely and utterly irrelevant to what I really am looking for. Such is the joy of research. Maybe I am being a little bit pessimistic, as I have found a few useful books which explain changes in immigration policy in New Zealand over the past 20 years - a critical starting point when explaining ethnic change as if it wasn't for immigration then nobody would be living in little ol' New Zealand.

I took a few photos today, some of Albert Park (a really cool park next to the university) and others of a couple of buildings in the university which actually look nice. For some reason the architecture at this university looks like it was thought up by an angry 5 year old. Everywhere you get grey 1960s blocks, devoid of any character or interest - it seems as though the aim of the time was to create an environment looking so dreary that everyone would have to concentrate on their studies. Maybe I should take a couple of photos to illustrate my point - the engineering department and the Maths & Physics building are probably the two worst examples. On the other hand, a couple of nice buildings remain from the 19th century (I think), as well as a rather historic wall - oh the joys of being a student at the University of Auckland. I suppose soem day I should take a photo of the view as you cross the harbour bridge, for anyone who hasn't been to Auckland it's pretty spectacular - even if you have seen it a couple of million times!

Life seems to be on the up at the moment, maybe it's the fact that things aren't going too wrong for the time being. However I have all these nagging thoughts at the back of my mind which mean that I really can't that I'm feeling very peaceful. Our money problems aren't really getting any better, as I'm not working very much, my project for university is developing but not as quickly as I would hope and these little problems which I can't seem to ignore stop me from really enjoying the now. It's a bit shitty, because the one thing that I really don't miss from when I was studying for my degree was that nagging feeling that I really should be studying for the essay that was due in a week, or the exam that was coming up. I'm really glad to leave that behind (if only for a year), but now this project obviously has me worrying about whether I'm doing enough work on it. Now I really really don't regret getting myself into the whole summer scholarship scheme, I wouldn't have my laptop otherwise, but I am looking forward to getting it all finished so that I don't have anything nagging away at the back of my mind anymore - and so that I can up my hours and sort out the money problems.

I took about 40 photos today, of all sorts of things, I'll upload them all soon and maybe tell a funny story about a day in my life and all the things that make me go "that's interesting". I think that I got quite a few funny looks from people today as I was taking photos of relatively unintersting things - maybe they thought that I was a wacko tourist willing to take a photo of anything. But it all has a point, I tell you all about my life in words here most days, I think that I need a few photos to illustrate it. Maybe that will give a bit more of an insight into my life...

Saturday night’s graveyard shift at Quay St. wasn’t actually too bad. For a start the store was completely dead, which meant that it was an incredibly easy 8 hour shift and probably about the easiest money I’ve ever earned by working at McDonald’s. Furthermore, I didn’t actually really get tired until 5am and by then I only had another hour to go in my shift so I could get through it pretty well. After I finished I went up to the gym and had a nice shower and spa before coming home and immediately going to bed. I managed to sleep for about six hours, which made me feel much better and means that I really have overcome my inability to sleep during the day. After that I felt more awake but still sleepy enough to go to bed normally on Sunday night and wake up now on Monday morning feeling none-the-worse as the result of my enormous time-shifts over the weekend. I think the fact that I slept for a reasonable amount of time both on Sunday and Sunday night contributed to this, as well as the fact that for the first time in ages I’m really sleeping soundly and not waking up again and again twitching and moving throughout the night. I’m even remembering my dreams a little better – maybe something to do with the fact that I haven’t been rudely awoken by the alarm at 5:40am for a few days.

I’ve thought about taking a few more photographs to put up on my webpage, and actually figured that the most interesting photos to take will be ones of things you would never normally consider taking photos of. I know when I look back at photo albums some of the most interesting photos are simply ones of my bedroom when I was little or ones of the house, school or wherever. Normal, everyday aspects of life you just consider taken for granted are sometimes those which are most worth capturing as you have a part of your life stored forever. I regret not taking any photos of my old workplace at St. Luke’s because that store has now been demolished because they reconstructed the mall and built a new store. So I have decided that I’m going to take a couple of photos of where I live, work and places which I go past everyday and figure would be worth having a record of. I’m obviously not going to live in the same house for the rest of my life, I’m obviously not going to work in the same place for the rest of my life (bloody well better not) so it might be really worth capturing some things which can really explain how my life is at the moment. Nats doesn’t want me taking any photos of her, which she has her reasons for and I respect those reasons – but there are plenty of other things which I feel would be interesting to have on my webpage to show the rest of the world how my life really is. I have a nifty little digital camera to do this with so I might as well have some fun.

I really do have some weird dreams, one which often reoccurs is me going back to school for another year of bursary. This one happened again last night where I was talking to Nats discussing what subjects I should take, whether I should bother doing bursary geography again and asking myself why I wasn’t going to English classes. Strangely enough during this dream I came to the realisation that school starts in about three days, and that I really really didn’t want to be going to school and that there wasn’t really any point as I’ve finished a degree in the meantime. Maybe this will give me closure on this dream, as it’s never happened before that I’ve actually realised I don’t need to go to school and really don’t want to. Or maybe soon I’ll be thinking about going to another year of university and that will continue for much longer because there’s not necessarily any end to university study.

On the subject of university, it’s now about a month until Nats starts university. She’s excited about it, although really scared in some ways because it’ll be something really different from before and that can be real scary starting out on something totally new that you really aren’t sure how it’s going to turn out. I think that the first couple of weeks will be interesting and really different, and it might take a lot of getting used to, but I know that Nats has the ability to not only pass university but to do pretty damn well: she has a memory that seems to remember the finest little details of everything and store them for perpetuity. Also, she learns things quickly and understands things in her own particular way. Having both a great memory and being able to pick up on things quickly are incredibly useful skills when it comes to university, so even though there are a few things she needs to catch up on like formal writing and grammar use, these are easy things to teach. You can’t teach someone how to have a good memory and you can’t teach someone to pick up on things quickly, so Nats should do pretty well once she gets used to university, which is quite an important step and took me quite a while.

I've been playing Sim City 4 quite a lot today, getting a hang of it, and developing some idea of what strategies are needed for a successful city. It's bloody hard! You really can't feel bad about funding your hospitals and schools at pathetically low levels or you'll never get anywhere. It's very very different to Sim City 3000, with vastly superior graphics and quite a different style of gameplay. Within a region you have up to about 90 cities which all interlink with each other to potentially create an absolutely huge megalopolis. The only unfortunate thing is that the actual city sizes aren't huge, quite a lot smaller than in 3000, probably a concession made by the developers because you can just link the cities together. But some are really small, and as each individual needs to be able to fund itself you don't really have enough tax payers to fund decent facilities. Oh well, I am sure that I'll figure out how to fine tune everything so that it gets easier and easier to create good cities. Except the larger the cities get the slower they run on my computer - which can get really really boring when you have to wait 30 seconds for it to zoom in or out.

Ella arrives back in New Zealand today, after spending the last 10 weeks travelling around Europe, and then staying on with a French family. It's been an incredible experience for her, or so I have gathered from various e-mails. So it'll be back to the airport for like the fourth time in the past couple of months, but it'll be great to see my little sister for the first time in ages.

After that, tomorrow night I have a graveyard shift at the Quay Street McDonald's to look forward to. I have only ever done one graveyard shift before, and it was a bit of a challenge. Maybe this one will be OK, as it's at a different store to where I normally work which might make things slightly more interesting and new. Graveyard shifts are not great for your sleep patterns, which are already taking a bit of a battering lately with the mixture of early wake-ups, late nights and sometimes quite interrupted sleep.

At least I didn't experience what Nats had last night, my poor baby woke up with a really really nasty migraine at about 2 in the morning, which was strong enough to make her feel as though she was going to be sick. I've had some nasty heachaches over the years, but migraines are in a whole different league so I really felt sorry for her. Luckily she did manage to go back to sleep eventually, and it wasn't too bad at work today.

In the last couple of days I've managed to get quite a lot done on my summer scholarship assignment - which is good because I have just realised how much work I really need to do, and have just been reminded by the Science Faculty of what they expect me to do. Lots of the work I have done in the past couple of days has been really boring, copying and pasting figures from one Microsoft Excel file to another, working out percentages and so on. But I can sense that I'm nearly finished this stage, and I know that once I get into reading about ethnic change as well as other information which will be good, my project should begin to come together into something that really makes sense. I have all these figures, and a reasonable understanding of what has happened, I just need to explain why it's happened. Always the more difficult of the two challeneges, but obviously the more interesting as you can argue a particular point and actually use your head rather than just mundanely copy and paste figures.

Nats bought Sim City 4 a couple of days ago, which is really really cool, an incredible step up from Sim City 3000 in graphics, while it fixes many of the more annoying things in Sim City 3000 (such as bloody bridges!) I haven't really had the chance to play it for ages and ages yet, but from what I know it's quite a challenge - you need to watch your money bloody carefully - although it does get a little bit easier as your city grows. Only problem is that it's so graphically intensive that my computer thrwos a spazz when you zoom in or out, probably because I need a bit more than my current 256MB of RAM. But I can be patient, and it might work better on Nats' computer because she has a better video card, more RAM and a faster Hard Drive , even if her processor is slower.

Work is frustrating me again, it seems as though half the people there are always trying to do as little work as possible - taking extra long breaks, trying to finish early or just going and sitting down somewhere when you really need them. This is especially frustrating when it's a manager and you can't particularly say anything. I always seem to manage to get along with other crew people even if I don't particularly like them, but it's always a problem when you continually have differences of opinion with the shift manager. I know at Pt. Chev there were a couple of managers I really didn't get along with, and I was pretty happy to get away from them when I moved along. Interestingly, I was frustrated by those managers because they were so picky on procedures and made you feel stupid telling you things that you really did know again and again. But at Queen St the managers who annoy me are those who don't seem to give a shit about how the shift goes, or what the quality of our product is. At least they don't care until the word gets out that someone from Head Office is coming in soon, then they start contradicting what they say and do 90% of the time by telling us off for not following procedures.

I think half the problem is the whole McDonald's system, which reminds me of an army with it's clear-cut heirarchy. It seems as though everyone needs to kiss the ass of the person above them, and quality check are made by those at the top who always seem to announce their visit in advance. So the shift manager who normally changes timers on product (a big no-no as it means that product is being sold after it has been held for too long, and probably tastes like crap after a while), all of a sudden has the chance to do things properly for a couple of minutes while the big head office people are around. Obviously I feel sorry for shift managers in some ways, as they always seem to get put in the position where there's not quite enough people, or the people who are working are not good enough and something needs to give, which unfortunately is quite often the quality of our food. If Head Office hired someone anonymous to go and sit in the lobby (we recognise most people who work at H.O. now, because they come in all the time to test new products) for a couple of hours, especially on the graveyard shift, they would really see what's going on and we might actually see some changes for the better. No wonder McDonald's is going down the tubes when all people care about is impressing the person above them.

I worked 12 hours today, from 7am-7pm which didn't really leave that much time to do anything else. It didn't really seem like that long until I finished. Then my feet began to hurt like hell, and I felt like going straight to sleep - I haven't worked that long in quite a few month although the money problems that we're having at the moment probably will mean that I'll have to do quite a few more 12 hour shifts.

Getting home was good, I had a bath with Nats for the first time in years for the both of us, which was really soothing on the sore feet and rather relaxing too. Having a bath brought back million of memories of when I was little, as I used to have baths like every night - making bubble castles with my sister Ella nad playing with the little plastic toys we had positioned around the bath. Then we'd splash water all over the floor, try to mop it up only to make things worse, and then end up getting in trouble for turning the bathroom into a swimming pool!

Work is slightly frustrating at the moment, it seems as though I'm not really getting anywhere - I'm getting decent hours which is good, but it seems as though the entire store simply doesn't give a damn about improving itself. There's no training programme in place, basically us crew trainers have no idea who we need to focus our training on, or at what level. So either we do random training on people who half the time don't really need it, or (as is the case with most crew trainers), hardly do any training whatsoever, which means that you still end up working with people who don't know what they're doing and continually stuff up simple procedures. All the senior managers seem so busy, that they just simply don't have enough time to get a training programme together - although it seemed to be working just fine last year. Maybe I should have a good talk to the restaurant manager, to figure out what my future at Maccas is going to be over the next year, and to hopefully get some sort of training system in place that's going to make a real difference.

As you may have noticed, I have comments on my site finally. At the moment there are some rather shocking teething problems - as the number of comments isn't adjusting while also the comments made for one day seems to pop up for every day. Oh well.... I will get there.

I haven't updated for a while which is pretty shocking, but then again I've managed to find quite a few hours of work which has meant that I've been rather busy. Work is gooooooooooooood at the moment, as my debts are mounting and I really need to start earining some serious money. Work has actually been better than normal lately, mainly because I have been having regular shifts, which means that I can 'get into it' and really get a feel for working at the place. That may sound really strange, as you would think that working irregularly and for a short number of hours would make things best as you wouldn't get sick of it, but it seems that the opposite is true for me. When I work regularly I can get a feel for how the store works, and actually feel as though I'm a real part of things as opposed to being someone who comes in once in a while to work. I've got quite a few shifts this week, including a graveyard shift on Saturday night at a different store to the one I normally work at. I don't know if I'm dreading that shift or looking forward to it - I know one thing for sure: it'll be different. Working at a place like Maccas, anything that's different is generally a good thing.

There has been a shocking lack of sleep in my life lately. On Friday night I got hardly any, as I went out with Nats to see Swimfan (pretty good movie), and then had to get up at 5:30am the next morning to work. I then slept on Saturday afternoon, which is incredibly unusual for me (I'm one of those people who never falls asleep in cars, planes etc., only in a comfy bed at night-time). So Saturday seemed to be like two days, because when I woke up it felt like the morning. Then last night me and Nats were playing around with MSN messenger and Remote Assistance, taking over each other's computers as well as our friends' ones. It was pretty fun, although really weird watching someone else shifting the mouse on your screen, typing words into your messenger and changing the songs on your computer. We have our computers networked so it wasn't unusual to be able to access each other's computers - just not take them over. But anyway, we lost track of time and before you know it was almost 1am, before another early start this morning. Oh well, we've promised each other that it's going to be an early night tonight - no computers after 8:30!

The Big Day Out was on Friday, as it's customary for me to comment on the event (even though I didn't go - again) I'll let you all know that the people who I have spoken to who went have all said that it was great. Apart from the New Zealand bands, there wasn't really that many bands which I like so it definately wasn't worth the ticket price for me to go. Instead I was stuck working at Maccas, realising that about half of Auckland wanted to stop off in the city for a Bacon & Egg McMuffin Combo before they went to the B.D.O. So we had one of the busiest breakfasts in a long time, followed by an absolutely dead lunch rush (everyone was already there by then). I'm sure that one year the bands coming to the B.D.O. will be worth the ticket price, and I'll go with Nats. Unfortunately over the past couple of years the bands seem to be getting a bit worse (with the possible exception of last year), so maybe that won't happen.

With all my work at McDonald's, my research project has taken a bit of a break over the past week. I have lots of ideas running around in my head for what I can do. There's also a crap load of copying, pasting, working out percentages and stuff like that to do - as I have come across better data than that which I spent a couple of weeks working on. Midly frustrating. But I'll get there.... eventually.

Ugh, money problems are getting even worse. I feel bad because I owe money to people who really need it at the moment (Nats for example), but I have no money to give and basically no means of acquiring a reasonable amount of money in the near future because I'm hardly working. And it's all stressing me out which isn't good, Maccas just doesn't have any spare shifts for once no matter how many times I seem to ask.

Sometimes I feel as though I'm stuck in a haze and I really can't see beyond a day or two ahead nor behind me. What's happening now seems to be the only thing that goes on inside my head - I seem to be forgetting the past way sooner than normal and I don't seem to be looking forward to the future very much. I mean things aren't that bad (apart from the money problems), but my whole life seems to be very narrowly focused. It's really difficult to explain, but it seems as though huge chunks of my life have found their way into the darkest depths of my subconscious. I know that my dreams at the moment are really interesting and stimulating but as soon as I wake up they just disappear. I am sure that I used to remember my dreams much better, but now as soon as I open my eyes the whole experience which I have been immersed in during the past few hours completely disappears from my mind. I have this whole bunch of memories which were there a few seconds earlier, but are now gone.

It's back to the 5:45am wake-up calls this week as Nats has started working fulltime at Starbucks again. This is really good in some ways, as I get into town nice and early and really have a full day to work on my research assignments, but as we haven't really adjusted our bedtimes yet (the bad habits of holidays when you can stay up until 3am), it's been a rather sleepy last couple of days. I am sure that I'll get used to the pattern again soon, just as I eventually did during the second half of last year, it'll just take some time.

Told you my memory was bad! This newspage/weblog/thing of mine has now been in operation for two years (as of three days ago). Some day I'll have a spare hour or two, and take myself back to January 2001 and read through my entire page and realise that an absolute shit load has happened throughout the past two years. As it really has been a time of great change, I'm particularly glad that I have a pretty good record of my life. I just can't bloody believe that 2001 was the year before last! Does anyone else have that feeling that last year went awfully quickly?

2003 is really beginning to get going now, I'm back at university getting stuck into my summer scholarship - Nats is back working, and our ever-present money problems are back. It seems like the whole world has been on holiday and they're all coming back. My website has been rather ignored by everyone in the past three weeks, but they're slowly beginning to come back as people search for wallpapers, find that my backgrounds page has been disabled for bandwidth problems, and then end up here. Also, everyone else on the net is starting to update their blogs - which means that there's some interesting reading around.

My job at the moment is really pissing me off because they're not giving me enough hours. Just at a time when I owe everyone a shit load of money I end up having no hours whatsoever, maybe the only solution will be to work graveyard shifts which is really going to destroy my sleeping patterns, but it might be necessary soon.

I took a couple of photos with my new digital camera while I was at the cricket on Saturday, they don't look that fantastic because of the sun, but it gives some idea about what Eden Park was like on Saturday.

I'm working on my research project, which seems to turn up unforseen obstacles at every opportunity, very frustrating because just when you think that you've passed a point and can move onto the next part of the project you realise that you've missed out something really important that needs to be addressed, and then I have problems with the data and things take even longer.

Effectively what I am doing is describing and explaining ethnic change on the North Shore of Auckland over the past 20 years. This means using a lot of census data, and playing around in Microsoft Excel for hours upon end constructing percentages and comparing them with other percentages. Maybe I'm being a little bit harsh on the project, some of the results I have found out so far are rather interesting and unexpected - and I certainly have a pretty soon idea of the ethnic composition of the North Shore. Things have changed a lot in the past 20 years on the Shore, and apparentely nobody has really studied it in depth before so I'm doing some groundbreaking research. Maybe it'll even get published in a journal and I'll become famous like June, who's writing a book.

Went the cricket yesterday, with Nats, her cousin Ben, my Dad and Mana - a friend of the family. It was an interesting match, unfortunately New Zealand lost (but only just in the end), and a pretty cool day out. I got rather sunburnt which isn't the best thing, but hopefully that will go away rather quickly. Nats got a little bored at times, as can happen in a cricket match when things are slow - but eventually India stuffed up to go from a position where they were cruising to victory, to one where they very nearly lost.

I took some photos with my new digital/web camera, and I'll upload them to the net as soon as we fix our network which mysteriously died yesterday. It's always good to go to a cricket match once in a while, even if the view you get isn't as good as what you get on TV. There's something about being there, probably the fact that you don't really get that many chances to go to a match, which makes being there special. I can watch a match on TV if it's in Australia, England, South Africa or wherever, but I only get the chance to go to a match when there's one here in Auckland.

I'm a real statistics buff, especially when it comes to movies and how well they do at the box office. Then again, I suppose that I follow the music charts pretty closely too. Anyway, I have been frequenting The Numbers ever since May, when I was curious about how the new Stars Wars movie was doing at the box office. This site offers an incredible array of statistics relating to US box office data - ever curious what the highest grossing films never to make it to number one are? However, I recently found out that this site is merely the tip of the ice-berg, as sites such as Box Office Mojo offers the same information for a number of countries around the world. I have been able to track the performance of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers closely, and predictions are that it might become the second highest grossing movie ever, after Titanic. Not bad for a film directed by a New Zealander, shot almost entirely in New Zealand, and whose cast and crew comprised of many New Zealanders. Now I'm definately looking forward to the third movie, which comes out at the end of the year, and has its world premiere here in New Zealand.

Me and Nats might be going to the cricket tomorrow, as New Zealand is playing India in Auckland. I say might because it has been raining quite steadily here for the last two or three days, and the weather forecast shows that this weather is going to continue tomorrow as well. That would be a real shame, as it's going to be the first cricket match Nats has been to, and my first one for a couple of years. So hopefully the weather will clear up, and we'll get to see a good match.

Speaking of the Indian cricket team, two players (Yuvraj Singh and Harbhajan Singh) came into my work today during our lunch rush. I didn't immediately recognise them, but someone else pointed out who they were - and it became fairly obvious as they were signing autographs for other customers. I managed to get an autograph from them both, which is pretty cool. I was hoping that some other players might come into our store, especially Sachin Tendulkar, but nobody else showed up. Maybe they all went to Burger King?

Back to work today, as life seemed to shift into another phase. Nats was back at work for the first time in about three weeks, and we went to the gym for the first time in ages. Work was OK today, much better than Sunday simply because of the people I was working with. We were also much busier over lunch than we have been for quite some time. The rest of the day was pretty quiet, but lunch seemed busier than it has been since November.

Waking up this morning at 5:45am wasn't that pleasant, as we hadn't had very much sleep. Fortunately I woke up reasonably quickly, and had an hour to kill before I started work which gave me the chance to get myself ready, and have some breakfast. I guess this might be the pattern for my life throughout the next couple of weeks - either going to university to work on my project, or working to try to pay back my ever-surmounting bills.

The best part of going to the gym, funnily enough, is not working out or seeing that I can run 2km much easier than I could when I first started (although that does give me some sense of satisfaction), but the spa. After a day's work on my feet at Maccas, there's nothing better for my poor feet than to rest for a while in nice hot water. We haven't been going to the gym enough to get our money's worth for a while, which has a lot to do with the fact that our personal trainer has screwed us over by not completing our forms so we really have little idea what we're meant to do - apart from the few things I remember when we had our one-on-one session. But hopefully that's going to sort itself out, otherwise I'm going to tell the gym what I think of the way they have stuffed us around. Eventually we should have some idea of what we're meant to be doing, so that we know we're doing the right things. Then, and if we go frequently enough, I should start to see some real results - I might actually put on some weight and improve my stamina levels. At the moment I'm pretty stuffed after 2km. so I don't think that I'm ready to take the step to 3km. yet. Maybe if I go every day for a week and have a run everytime I will be able to slowly increase the distance that I run.

Natalie's Uncle Peter went back to the US today, after spending a month with us here in NZ. It was sad to see him go, as he was a really cool addition to the household. I know that Zen the dog will really miss him as Peter took Zen for walks almost every single day. So we all went out to the airport to see him go, the third time that I've been out to the airport in the last couple of months.

Airports are funny places, there's so much happiness and sadness around you, so many extremes of emotion that it becomes a place really unlike any other. I know that I find sitting in the viewing area watching the planes land and take off incredibly peaceful, watching these huge pieces of machinery defy gravity still fills me with a sense of wonder. Knowing how much raw power there is in front of you is mindboggling, while at the same time being shielded from it all by what must be the strongest soundproof glass in the world. Auckland airport is not a busy airport by international standards, as there is only one main runway at the moment, but there is a steady stream of planes landing and taking off which makes for interesting viewing. Peter's plane was an hour late taking off, due to some ignorant people not knowing what time their flight was. So we all stood watching giant, medium and tiny planes appear and disappear before our eyes. Then Peter's plane finally took off, just as the sun was setting into one of the most spectacular sunsets that I have seen for a long time.

My contact lenses seem to be behaving much better these days. We changed the solution that I rinse and store them in, and this new stuff seems to sting a hell of a lot less than what my optometrist originally gave me. I'm also overcoming the idea of sticking my finger in my eye, while my eyes are subconsciously learning not to freak out all the time and instinctively shut. It's really difficult overcoming these sorts of instincts, which you have never really worked on before. Even holding your eyelid open at times can be incredibly challenging, especially if your hands aren't totally dry. Most of the time my lenses come out fairly easily, I just need to make sure that I'm aiming my fingers at the middle of the eye so that when I squeeze my thumb and finger together I'm going to pull my contact off rather than scrape my finger over my eyeball which can be rather painful. But I'm getting better at it, so I guess that soon I'll be an absolute expert and be able to get them on and off first time every time.

Back to work today for the first time in two weeks, and my shift seemed to take forever, even though it was only five hours long. That's the funny thing about short shifts, they always seem to take longer than your full 8 hour days, because you expect them to be even shorter. Either that, or the fact that you get more breaks in longer shifts, means that my short shifts seem to drag on and on. I also think that when it comes to working at McDonald's, the people you are working with determine how your shift is going to go to a great extent. If you're working with people you like, and talk to a lot, then the time seems to fly by and work seems to much easier and more pleasant. But on the other hand, when you don't really have much in common with the people you're working with, or don't really get along with them that well, time seems to slow down and you have to concentrate on what you're doing a bit more (or daydream), which probably doesn't help things.

I'm really glad that I have this page, because my memory seems to be a bit worse than what it used to be. Or maybe I just don't think about the past as much as I used to, so my short term memories expire and I'm left with huge blanks of space when I'm not quite sure what happened. It's funny how the memory works, if someone asked me to list a few things that happened in May last year, I'd probably struggle. I know I wrote quite a few essays, had 81 people visit my site in a week and going to Nats' work party, but any more detail and I would be having problems remembering. But if I was to go back to my May page the memories would come flooding back, and I would be able to extend upon so much of what I had written. I'm not sure if things were always like this, did I used to have a really good knowledge of what had been going on in my life month by month and it has just disappeared? Maybe it's just because last year went by so damn quickly that in my memory it just seems like a blur. This time last year I was working at Pt Chev McDonald's and trying to save for my university fees, I think my computer had just died, making us reinstall windows about three times before it worked. It all seems like a couple of months ago, hardly a whole year in the past. How quickly is this year going to go by?

It's quite exciting, but slightly scary when I look ahead to what's in store for me and Nats in the upcoming year. For me it's going to be a very different year from the past, as I won't be going to school or university but instead giving myself a break for a year before I start my Masters in 2004. It's exciting, because I might be able to find a really cool job this year (although rather unlikely), and I'll hopefully have a bit more money than I have over the past three years because I'll be working fulltime. I know that from past experience working fulltime at Maccas can actually be a bit more fulfilling than part-time, because you begin to see how the place works and to understand it in much more depth. You notice the day-to-day patterns more, everything becomes a bit more easy and you get to know people a hell of a lot more than you do working once or twice a week (if that) with them. So in some ways this year looks exciting for me, but on the other hand the most likely scenario is going to be that I'll be working at Maccas fulltime, while that might be OK in some respects, it's a lot of work ahead of me which might end up boring me to no ends, as it's not really as intellectually challenging as a year at university. But then again, I should become a manager some time this year, which will challenge me a bit more and give me lots more things to learn - hopefully a chance to make the job more interesting.

The upcoming year also has some drastic changes ahead for Nats, who's going to university for the first time. After cleaning and babysitting in 2001, then being a barista at Starbucks in 2002, a year of university is going to be a big change for her. I know that she's looking forward to it in some ways, as it's the first step in her longterm goal of becoming a psychologist, but it's also scary for her as she's not sure whether she will be up to it. I know that she has the intellect, and I should be able to help her in some areas such as Maths and Geography. I think the main thing she needs is a bit of confidence, and I can't really give her that - hopefully some good marks early on will show her that she is up to standard and that university's not really that scary afer all.

So as you can all see, 2003 is going to be an interesting year - one of great change, but also one where our eyes are clearly focused on the future. In some ways it's a year of transition, where the next step of Nats and my lives will really begin in 2004 when she starts her Bachelors in Psychology and I start my Masters in Geography. So stay tuned (I sound like a radio commercial now), because in the next year hopefully I'll have some interesting stuff to write about!

It's been a long day today, I haven't left the property now for two days, which may or may not be a good thing. On the one hand it means that I've had a pretty relaxing couple of days, at least yesterday was as I played on Natalie's cousin Ben's Playstation 2 which he got for Christmas. However, today was rather more stressful and annoying as it seems as though my rather new laptop managed to either get hacked, or got nailed by a virus. Nats first noticed that things weren't working quite as they should be last night when she was on the net, and then this morning Windows Task Manager began to crash while a few other things weren't working. And then whenever we tried to run a program Windows said that I had incorrect privileges, which was completely wrong as there's only one user account on my compuer and it has Administrator privileges. But we called Nats' step-father Mark, who's Mr Fix-it when it comes to computer problems.

About seven hours and a million installs later (it seems that the only operating system that wanted to work on my computer was the Dell recovery CD that came with it), my laptop was finally working, now complete with a partition and running much better than it was before. So I guess things turned out OK in the end, it was just rather stressful when nothing was working, and I was wondering whether the virus had killed my Hard Drive.

Back to work on Sunday, and the end of my two week holiday. In some ways I don't want to go back, as it's been really nice to have some time when I am not work or university and can just relax and do nothing for the day. But on the other hand I'm running out of money desperately, and I know that I need to start getting stuck into my research project or I'm going to owe the university $4000. I guess that now I've got my own computer I'll be able to work on my project easier, be able to spend the day at home instead of having to go into uni, or be able to transfer large files around a hell of a lot easier than worrying about floppy disks or having to e-mail attachments.

Life has been strange in the past couple of weeks, without all the stresses of work and university I've had the chance to holiday for the first time in ages and ages. Apart from my trips to Australia in the past three years, I haven't really had a decent break from either work or university, so these weeks have been something that I haven't really experienced for at least three years. I presume that's why I've been feeling strange and different lately, life just doesn't seem normal without either work or university. For some reason I seem to be craving normality in my life over the past few months, maybe that's because so much has changed that I need some pattern to give me any idea about where I am.

Norton Anti-Virus sucks! The two times that I have needed it, it's crashed and been about as useful as a submarine with wind-down windows. Get your shit together Symantec!

Happy New Year! It's been a week since I last updated, but that's because Nats and I have been on holiday, and were unable to access the net for an entire week (well, five days). For the first time in ages I actually had a holiday, as the last time I worked was a week and a half ago. We went up to my parents' holiday house at Mangawhai Heads which was a nice getaway from the city - a chance to relax and do nothing for a few days. I spent a lot of the time playing games on my laptop, or watching DVDs with Nats (I think we got through about 10 of them over the 5 days). I also went down to the beach a few times, played some beach cricket with my Dad, while managing to get sunburnt on the last day we were there. Talking about sun, it seems as though summer has finally arrived and is making up for the time it took to get here. For the past three days it's been perfectly sunny and incredibly hot! Quite nice when you're at the beach, and can just go for a paddle in the water when you overheat, but not so great on long car trips back to the city, or when you're walking home from the bus stop carrying heavy bags.

I went to a BBQ party last night, and saw a few of my old friends from school for the first time in ages. Some of them are still as annoying as always, some are still pretty cool and others seem incredibly different to how they were at school (not always in a good way). I guess it has been three years since I finished school (doesn't really seem like that long), and people have very different lives to those they had during school. I can imagine that I would have changed more than anyone there, especially some of the people who seemed like they're permanentely stuck with the maturity of a 14 year old (or maybe I'm being harsh on 14 year olds here). But anyway, it was good to see a few of the people there and see what they're up to these days. Midnight almost passed without us noticing it, and it still seems strange that it's now 2003.

I guess the fact that it's now 2003 gives me a chance to put last year in perspective, and it was a rather important year in my life. One where I moved out of home (although that process had started at the end of last year), finished my degree and managed to stay in a relationship for an entire year. Obviously the year had its ups and downs, although fortunately it seems as though things have been picking up in the last few months. Who knows where this upcoming year will take me, it's going to be very different from past years - as I'll be a fulltime worker and not at school or university for the first time in 16 years. Nats will be at university, which means that we're swapping places from how things were this year. Hopefully I can keep up this page as well as I did last year, although it was ignored at times I think the fact that I now have my own computer means that I will be able to update whenever I like. I doubt this means that I'll be able to update every single day, but I've never been able to do that, so long as there are no really long gaps between entries and that they're interesting entries (more of how I'm feeling, things that I notice and interest me, not only what I've been up to).

There's a cricket and a rugby world cup to look forward to, and hopefully not too many wars (although Bush might have other ideas) in the coming year. I'm not one to make New Year's resolutions, but the new year does give one the chance to put the past in the past if you choose, and the chance to look forward to a really great 2003. I'm being positive, let's hope you all have a great year!