Assignment ... well... at least somewhat finished
I've finished my assignment, well at least the first part of it - which should hopefully be the biggest and longest part of it. I woke up reasonably early this morning so that I could finish it off before work, I should have done it all on Wednesday but I was writing crap for a while and figured that if I kept on writing I would actually be doing more harm than good.

Lots of things are going to change next week - I'll be working quite a bit more than I am currently, while Nats starts university. I don't really know how things are going to go, it'll probably be a little bit strange at first and next week might be rather difficult, but on the other hand it is very exciting.

Work seems to be settling into a pattern at long last, although it still seems like management really don't give a crap about us and only really care about profit levels. But at least they're giving me some OK hours for next week, so maybe I will hold off on any possible move to Starbucks, or any other possible places.

Productive... OMG
Yesterday turned out to be a pretty productive day, as I managed to write about 3000 words for my research assignment. This means that I will finish writing it tomorrow, giving me enough time to hand it in to the lecturer so that he can give me some help before classes are back next week. I am pretty pleased with how it's turned out so far, although I am sure that I'll need to do a fair amount of editing so that it makes proper sense and so that I don't end up repeating myself over and over again.

It rained today, which was a pain in the ass because our Rainbow's End excursion got postponed until next week. I suppose that's a good thing, because it would have been pretty stink to go all the way out there and have the night ruined because of bad weather. Hopefully next Tuesday will be a nice and clear evening so that we can have a really good time.

I got a supply of contact lenses for the next six months today. Over the past two and a half months since I first got my lenses I probably haven't worn them as much as I should. At least now I've sorted out putting them in and taking them out, so that only sometimes I have a few problems with my left eye because my eyelash seems to get caught between the lense and my eyeball - which hurts like hell - and I have to take the lense out and put it in again, which seems to fix everything. I realised that if Nats is working early in the morning then it makes sense to take my contacts to her work then put them on there, rather than having to get up really early and putting them in when I'm half asleep. So hopefully over the next few months I'll be wearing my lenses most of the time, and just my glasses on lazy Sundays or once I've worn my contacts for the maximum 12 hours.

The Work/Sleep Dilemma
I got called into work today, it's always a dilemma when work calls and asks if you want to work today. On the one hand your mind is telling you that you really neeed the money, you have like $20 in your account and heaps of bills coming up soon. So common sense tells you that any extra hours that are available should be snapped up. But on the other hand it's 11am on a Sunday morning, you've only just woken up after staying up until 3am the night before. You're pretty tired and really feel like a nice relaxing day in bed... so what do you do? I chose to work, and it does make me feel a bit better about myself in hindsight, although it wasn't the best way to spend my day and undoubtedly it would have been nicer to spend the day at home. But I will thank myself for working when I get paid on Tuesday, and hopefully that little bit extra money will help things.

Next week is the last week before university goes back, this also means that I really need to just about finish my research project by the end of the week. After that I'll have about 2 weeks to write my report on the report, which I need to give to the Science faculty to prove that I haven't just wasted the $4000 they gave me, and I've actually done some work for it. Hopefully that shouldn't take too long, and will consist of a whole heap of copying and pasting from my main report. Unfortunately I really need to write the main report, as so far I'm about 300 words into something I suspect will be about 5,000-7,000 words long. So it's all in front of me.

Tuesday is going to be an interesting day. Nats has her orientation during the day - which will hopefully mean that she find out a bit more about her course, figures out when and where her lectures are so that we can plan things a bit more than has been possible. Then we head out to Rainbow's End - a theme park in Auckland - for the one decent thing that McDondald's does each year. Once a year Maccas feels a little bit sorry for all the people who have slaved away for the past year and decides to hire out Rainbow's End for the evening. It's always pretty cool, free entry to go on as many rides as you can in the four hours it's open for. It can be chance to catch up with people from old stores you used to work at, or just to enjoy the fact that you'd normally have to pay about $35 for entry. I'm looking forward to it, especially now as I have contact lenses and will actually be able to see what's going on when I'm on the roller coaster (previously I've had to take my glasses off which has meant the world's a bit of a blur).

Change is Coming
Had work today, it was actually pretty busy although we amazingly had enough staff to cover for it all. But it's still really frustrating because most people are complaining that they're not getting enough shifts while at the same time we don't have enough people on the floor during rush periods. So the argument that we don't have the sales to justify the extra shifts really doesn't work anymore - work is just being rather greedy at the moment and is fucking us over by not scheduling enough people.

Only a couple of weeks before Nats goes to university, and really only a couple of weeks for me to finish my research assignemnt, at lot is going to change in our lives during the next couple of weeks so I guess that's pretty exciting. It means that it's been a year since I started at my current store, strange in that it doesn't really seem that long ago. I remember being slightly intimidated that I was going to work at this really busy store, but kind of excited because if I was going to work at any store then this was a pretty cool one to work at. My first day at work was a bloody mission, when I arrived there were about 50 customers waiting to be served, and once I went into the kitchen I was told that about three people hadn't turned up and we were left with me, a McCafe person and the shift manager. It was a pretty interesting shift... over time I realised that Queen St really is like any other store, with its busy patches and its quiet times. A year later I'm completely used to working there, know most of the people and almost feel like I've been there long enough. Who knows where I will be this time next year - maybe still at Maccas desperately saving up my fees for my Masters degree, or maybe I'll be working somewhere else.

Progress At Last
At last I made some more progress on my research assignment. Talked to my lecturer for a bit today, he seemed pretty happy with what I've been up to (or he's too polite to say that I need to get my ass into gear and get it done), and we sort of figured out what the next few steps are going to be. He wants me to write up the results that I've found out - and then submit it to him and then we'll work together to find out the theoretical stuff. This should be pretty good, give me the chance to make some progress while not doing it all myself. I have the results, well at least most of them, I just need to remember how to write in a formal style - as it has been quite a few months since I last wrote an essay. Well at least I should take some heart from the fact that the last two essays I wrote got A+'s. And this one doesn't even get marked, it just doesn't get into a journal if someone figures that it's crap.

No racing in the America's Cup today, a lack of wind for the first time so far. At least it means that for one more day than planned we will be able to hold onto the cup. I'm not very optimistic about our chances now that we're 3-0 down. In the last race Alinghi did everything perfectly and we never really had a chance. At least in the first two races we could say that we 'could' have won it had various things not gone wrong. But this time we had no chance, from about 30 seconds before it started right through the race. It all means that we have to win the next race, otherwise Alinghi will only need to win once more to win the cup. 3-1 will mean that we at least have a chance, but 4-0 means that it's pretty much all over. Will be very interesting on Saturday.

Nats went back to work today, still feeling like crap, but at least she managed to get through the day without anything too bad happening. I have thought about possibly applying for a job at Starbucks, as a lot of the staff there are going back to university in the next couple of weeks and I would be able to work heaps of hours there. At the moment I'm struggling to get enough hours at McDonald's so that is one way of getting more hours - but I'm not sure if I really want to be a coffee making person. On the other hand it's slightly further up the food chain than a burger making boy, I know everyone who works there and have some idea about how they make all the coffees so I don't think that it would be too difficult to learn. I'd probably be working at different times to Nats if I did decide to work there - as she'd be going to university during the day, when I'd be most likely to work. I think I might give Maccas a bit more of a chance though, at the end of the month I'm due for a pay-rise so that might be worth sticking around for. And then there's the next performance review in April and the chance for another bonus. But who knows how things will turn out, it might be a welcome change.

A Better Day
Today was much better at work, McDonalds obviously learned from yesterday's experience and added a few more people. We were busier than yesterday so it was lucky that we had the extra people. It was a pretty long shift, from 6:30 in the morning until I finally finished at 3:45. For some reason my longer shifts at work generally seem to be a bit more enjoyable than my short ones, maybe it's because I get into work a little bit more and it's not too bad - because I'm not expecting to finish soon so my eyes aren't always on the clock telling it to hurry up.

I stuffed up a couple of things yesterday, firstly when I was filling up the mop bucket to mop up a spill in the dining area I lost the tap into the mop bucket. That was a real bitch, because the only thing I could do was either fish it out of the boiling hot water, try to turn off the tap which was going hard core spraying water all over the place, or tip the mop bucket out spilling water all over the place. I got a cloth and turned off the tap, mopped up the spill and then came back and tipped the bucket all over the floor, before eventually fishing the tap out of a mix of bubbles and coke syrup. Then later on, head office was at our store testing some new products, some sort of chicken sweet and sour burger I think. They were testing how well it would last in the production bin, by putting the burgers in a Kiwiburger box and then leaving it at the top of the production bin. But did anyone tell me this? No. So when one of my customers ordered a Kiwiburger I naturally took one of the burgers in Kiwiburger boxes at the top of the production bin, slightly wondering why we had two of them ready at a pretty quiet time. I gave them to the customer and thought nothing more of it, at least not until about two or three minutes later someone yells out not to take any of the burgers "up the top". I figure that maybe they've put some new burgers in that nobody's to take, and I'm not particularly worried. Especially as my customer hadn't come back to complain. However, when someone actually asked me if I had taken the burger in the Kiwiburger box at the top of the bin, I realised that it hadn't actually been a Kiwiburger. Still, that person never came back, so either they liked their "Kiwiburger", were too fucking stupid to realise that it wasn't what they had ordered, or were too shit scared to complain. Either way, it left us all giggling, and hoping that the big people from Head Office didn't notice.

Fucking McDonald's!
Work sucked today. For some reason during the past few days Maccas has decided to cut down on the number of people working big time. Of course the managers always think that this is a great idea, as the labour percentage goes down and they end up making more money. Problem is, it means that we get absolutely screwed, don't have enough people to serve so that the lines go on forever, don't have enough people to cook so customers are always waiting for their food, and don't have a person to make sure the dining area is clean - so it ends up an absolutely huge mess. Yeah, well hopefully today taught the managers a lesson that you can only take things so far - and that by cutting down on the number of staff you end up at a point where we can't actually work any harder. That means the customer gets a shit burger after waiting for ages, and eventually they don't want to come back. Good stuff Maccas, real smart, why don't we just try to put ourselves out of a job?

Nats is feeling a little bit better today, still not good enough to go to work tomorrow - but at least things are on the improve.

It was strange today, work felt like I was in a bit of a bad dream. Probably that has something to do with the fact that I dreamed about work last night, one of those times when everything was going wrong. I was left to cook with a couple of people who had no idea about what they were doing. So while the front counter people were screaming for their burgers I had fellow cooks putting the meat patties on the wrong grill, cooking the meat twice and all sorts of rubbish. So at work today, when everything started to go wrong, I wondered whether in fact I was actually awake - or possibly my dream was just continuing. It was rather strange.

GT3... and a sore thumb
A bit of a crappy day today, we woke up early as-per-usual, and Nats told me that she wasn't feeling very well. I guess that we both figured it was something that would pass, maybe the result of not having anything to eat or just one of those things that happens when you wake up early in the morning. But we were wrong, and after Nats had been at work for a while she was just feeling worse and worse - and eventually we came home at about 9am so that Nats could go to bed. So since then it's been a pretty quiet day - I should have been working on my university project, but at the moment I'm waiting for some information from my supervisor so it's not really going anywhere quickly.

So instead I spent the day in the incredibly constructive pastime of Grand Turismo 3, and now I have an incredibly sore left thumb from turning far too much and having a long running habit of using the arrow buttons rather than the analog stick. But it was a relaxing day, and one which hopefully gave Nats the chance to have lots of sleep, and to get rid of the bugs from her system. She's having the day off tomorrow, but hopefully will be better by Wednesd

2-0... Crap
2-0 Alinghi. Although it wasn't nearly as bad as yesterday, Team New Zealand have found themselves in a bloody horrible situation after two races. This race was so disappointing because Team NZ led most of the way, just to be pipped on the final leg, at least we know that the boats are really even, and I'm pretty sure than Team NZ will win some races soon. Whether or not they can beat Alinghi five times is quite another question.

It's back to uni and work tomorrow, after a really relaxing weekend. I think that I slept about as many hours as I was awake, which is a good thing as last week was pretty busy with work and university. Next week will be much the same, I'm going to start writing my university report which will hopefully not take too long. After that's all finished I'll be able to work fulltime, which should help the money situation.

Massive worldwide protests against the immient war in Iraq today. Very interesting to see the biggest numbers of people taking to the streets for over 30 years, or even in some places the biggest protests ever. Although I don't think that this is going to change Geogrge Bush's mentality whatsoever, it will probably make countries such as France and Germany keep to their current position of not supporting war, and looking to avoid it in any way possible. Also, I get the feeling that countries which are sitting on the fence at the moment, such as Russia, will lean more towards not supporting the war because they know that any support they show for war is going to be against the wishes of the amjority of their population. It will be interesting to see how this turns out...

Anti-Climactica
The America's Cup started today, after all the months of challenger series and the massive amount of build-up it was all go! And... for probably one of the biggest anti-climaxes ever, Team New Zealand's boat had all sorts of problems leading to them eventually having to withdraw after a couple of things broke. Talk about bloody disappointing, at least I can say that before all the problems came along they seemed to be going pretty fast and had a really good start. But it really doesn't matter if you can't finish off the race - we just have to hope that they've sorted out all of their problems by tomorrow so that we can get a proper race. The wind shouldn't be blowing quite so much tomorrow, which will take pressure off the boats a bit more and hopefully will stop things from breaking.

Went out last night for dinner, a few drinks, and to see a movie. We saw Just Married, which was OK - funny in parts but not the greatest movie that I've ever seen, although certainly not the worst either. Nats liked it, and I do have to say that I was just about rolling in aisles with laughter at times. Before then, we went to a classy restaurant in the Viaduct Harbour, with about half of Auckland. The night before the first America's Cup race, coupled with Valentine's Day, meant that everyone went to the Viaduct to have dinner. After waiting about an hour for a table, we had a really nice dinner which really filled me up.

I did remember Valentine's Day yesterday, and got Nats a nice card as well as a cute little book. I had been trying to keep it a secret, which can be a bit difficult when you get people asking you "have you got Nats anything for Valentine's Day?" I think that I did a pretty good job, as Nats was pleasantly surprised when I gave her the present.

Today seems to have disappeared really quickly, probably because I slept in until about midday, and then have spent most of the rest of the day in bed playing on the computer or watching TV. Compared to yesterday, which was a really long day, today has been pretty short. Yesterday I would have been awake at 5:45am, when the alarm went off, I then worked from 8-2. After Nats finished work at 2:30 we sorted out some bank stuff, went up to Work and Income NZ to sort out her student allowance (which looks like it's going to make things marginally possible this year), up to the gym for a spa and a shower before we came back to Nats' work to drop off our stuff (including, unintentionally my glasses which have been in the backroom at Starbucks since last night - possibly a good thing as it's made me wear my contacts for once). After we had sorted that out, we caught a free bus down to the Viaduct Basin, where I got slightly drunk on rather expensive drinks from Soul Bar. I've explained the rest earlier in this post, but by the end of the movie and after we had pissed around a bit longer waiting for a bus that never showed up, it was almost 3am by the time I got to sleep. So it was a bloody long day yesterday!

Argh Money Problems
Life marches on, as I feel buried by all the university stuff I have to do, while at the same time knowing that I really need to work more otherwise I’m going to run out of money very soon. I guess the bright side of things is that I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel when it comes to my university project. I’m just about finished the research for it, I have developed a plan of attack when it comes to the actual writing of it – now I just need to actually go out there and do it, to finish of the last little pieces of research and to sit down for a couple of days and write the whole thing. I have no idea how long it’s going to be, although I know that it has the potential to be bigger and longer than my internal migration research assignment I did in the second semester of last year. And that was over 6,000 words!

Our money problems might not get so critically bad once university starts, as it looks as though Nats will be eligible for a student allowance – which will mean that she should be able to earn roughly the same as what she does now, as she’s allowed to work up to about 14 hours a week before they stop paying her the allowance. With me hopefully getting 40 hours a week, we should be earning about the same combined as we are now, if not a little bit more. It might mean that we won’t have to stagger from pay-day to pay-day, which always seems to happen no matter how much you happened to get paid.

Work seems really different lately, I know that with the two most senior managers gone I should expect that to be the case. But it really just doesn’t feel like Queen St. anymore – maybe this stage will pass and once I get some more hours and the place gets busier as it should once university starts it might feel more like it should. All the memories of when I first started work are of this amazement at how busy the place got over lunch, and now it seems so incredibly tame. I know that this is somewhat because I have simply got used to working at a busy store and it’s not such a novelty, but I even know that by the numbers the place is not nearly as busy so far this year as it was last year. I think that’s because university hasn’t started yet, and a lot of McDonald’s business does come from the students, but if things don’t start to pick up then there’s a real problem.

I seem to be afraid of time going by too quickly, last year disappeared really quickly, but now it seems like ages and ages since I had my last exam for university. Lately I’ve been thinking about what’s been going on over the last few months a bit more than I had previously – realising that over these ‘holidays’ quite a lot has changed, and it has been a considerable length of time. I think that’s because it’s a quite sustained period which isn’t broken up by going to university or having short holidays etc. Maybe that makes time seem to go slower, as I’m not looking at dates all the time wishing that I had more time before my exams or my essays. I write a lot about my perception of time… maybe it’s because I’m fascinated why some lengths of time seem to take longer than others, and how our brain perceives time even over a short period. I often comment to people at work that your half hour break always seems to disappear much faster than the last half-hour of your shift. Sucks how that happens.

Yahoo Chat
In the last couple of days Nats and I have re-entered Yahoo Chat for the first time in ages - mainly because we now have a webcam and it's funny watching people who are watching you, especially when you get up to about 50 people viewing your webcam and realise that you'd probably feel quite shy in front of 50 people in real life, but somehow it just doesn't seem like that when you're all sitting in front of computers, and you know that they're complete strangers on the other side of the world. It's also meant that our internet usage has soared - a bloody good thing actually since I pay for 250 hours of internet every month and we've only averaged about 60 hours in the past.

Going back to chat, you realise that some things never change. You always get the horny guys looking for chicks to cyber with (sorry... if you had taken 5 seconds to look you would have realised that I'm male), and the millions of Indian chatters who think that you're their 'special person in life'. Or the ones that take every word you say completely serious - an example from the other night:

dumbisschatter(can't remember their actual ID): Hi there
Josh: Hi
dumbisschatter: how are you
Josh: i am dead
dumbisschatter: are you joking?
Josh: no.... i am completely serious, my hands are searching for my head
dumbisschatter: that's not good
Josh: *no fucking shit sherlock!*

As well as confusing chatters from around the world, I had work yesterday. At the moment everyone seems as though they're on their toes at work, the shift managers are trying to impress the new senior managers who are trying to 'make a difference' and not end up with their head next on the chopping block. It seems as though the whole 'family atmosphere' the store had is gone, people are now suspicious of one another. The managers don't trust crew to take the correct length breaks, there's even less trust than ever before, and it all just seems a little bit sad. It might not help that at the moment I'm working a day on, day off schedule - which means that I never really get into the flow of work by seeing what's going on day in day out, while at the same time I don't really get the chance to have a decent length break from it all. At least I suppose I am scheduled to have this coming weekend off - although I need the money so badly that I will need to ask for any available shifts.

BBQ
A nice quiet day today, we had a BBQ dinner which was nice, it might be the last one for the summer which is a bit of a pity. But BBQs are always nice, the food always tastes a little bit different - and the smell is always gooooooooooood..... Hopefully we'll be going out tonight, except the bank balance indicates that might not be the smartest idea ever.

It's funny when you read back into the archives of my page, you get these funny feelings that link with your memories. I think it's a mixture of smells, sounds, and feelings which all combine to become your memories. I know that at work when I first started I could really smell the meat, it had a really distinctive smell when just cooked (not actually that bad you know!) Eventually, over time, I didn't really notice the smell most of the time - but sometimes it came back. Whenever get a whiff of that smell it reminds me of when I first started work at McDonald's.

I know that when I think of 2001 I remember a mixture of being on the computer downstairs chatting in cheetachat, doing billions of essays for university, going into town on Saturday nights with Nats, and learning how to use stylish computer programs. 2001 really seems like a long time ago now, almost a lifetime ago if you think about how much my life has changed since then - although funnily enough only a few months ago I was thinking about how fast 2002 had gone by. Now the start of 2002 really does seem like quite a while ago, following the pattern in my life when the holiday at the end of the year seems to go on forever while the year between seems to go by really quickly. Maybe that means that the rest of this year is going to disappear really quickly - I don't know if that's a good thing or not.

Friday woohoo
Thank God it's Friday! Although admittedly you could say that it's been one really short week as yesterday was a public holiday that both Nats and I had off work, it's always a really nice feeling to finish work on Friday and know that you don't have work the next day. A slight pity that I'm working on Sunday, but at least I can go to sleep at some ungodly hour tonight and not worry about having to wake up early tomorrow morning. So tonight's the chance to go out and have some fun, although Nats' and my financial situation at the moment probably means that a quiet night at home would be the prudent thing to do. To be prudent or not to be? That is the question...

Work is slightly frustrating at the moment, as you probably know, the past couple of weeks have been a time of drastic change. I've met the new restaurant manager and he seems like a pretty cool guy, we've also got a new first assistant who used to work at Queen St a couple of years ago - he seems alright I suppose. At the moment everyone seems a bit jumpy (not really that surprising I guess with people getting fired left, right and centre), and it's meaning that the managers are stressed out and are snapping quicker than normal. Do I really want all the extra stress of management? I guess that for a while I'm not going to have too much responsibility, while I learn how to run shifts and all that - and by the time I have to worry about it I will know what to do and it won't be all scary and new.

The cricket world cup is starting in the next few days. Although I have to accept that Australia are probably the favourites to win, South Africa might give them a good run for their money. As for New Zealand, well although we beat India comfortably in the last series, that seemed to be only because India was playing utter crap rather than us playing any good whatsoever. So I'm going to be the pessimist and say that New Zealand is going to do surprisingly badly - I damn well hope that they prove me wrong, but the batting looks incredibly fragile at the moment, even if Nathan Astle is back.

I used to play cricket quite a lot, in fact for nine years I spent my Saturdays during summer running around fields chasing cricket balls, or in the middle having someone bowl a hard piece of leather at me. I actually got quite good eventually, and managed to make the Eastern Districts B team who played in an Auckland wide tournament. These tournaments were pretty fun, with some of the best players from around the city all converging in the one place, and certainly gave me a much more challening environment to play in. It was a lot of fun, that was until some massive guy from Howick/Pakuranga who was probably about twice the size of me and could hit the ball a mile decided in one match that he was going to have a bit of a hit. I think he wacked about 120 in no more than 20 overs, and we went from doing really well to conceding about 260 in 50 overs. I did eventually get him out, but my last two overs went for about 27, including some giant swipes onto the golf course next to the cricket field. You always feel slightly helpless and a little embarrassed when some giant decides to dispatch your carefully flighted and well positioned spinner about 100m away onto a golf course.

Personalised Plates
You see some interesting personalised license (number) plates around. Generally on rather expensive cars (you'd have to be pretty rich to bother spending a few hundred dollars on a piece of metal), you see a mixture of people's names, funny little phrases or advertisements for the company car. It seems as though the idea is to stand out and be different from all the other cars on the road. Which was why I was rather surprised and intrigued the other day when I saw a personalised plate which went something along the lines of CVW168. Now call me weird or not, but I have 'followed' number plates for quite some years - starting back in about 1994 when all number plates had the format of 2 letters then 4 numbers. I think back then we were up to SR****, with one of my good friends at intermediate school Jason Foster, we followed the plates through to the end of the year seeing who could see the first SS, ST, SU and so on. Now I left intermediate at the end of 1994 and never really followed the plates quite so closely again. But about once a year we'd get to the end of a letter at the start of the plate and it would always turn into a race among my family as to who could see the first plate starting with a T, U, W (they missed out V because it looked too much like U I suspect) and so on. Now as you can probably guess after a few years we were getting towards the end of the alphabet, which caused a bit of a problem for whoever issues number plates. But a solution was found, with a huge amount of imagination they decided to change the 2 letter, 4 number format to a 3 letter, 3 number format starting again at A. Now this time it was really interesting who could see the first three letter number plate - and I think that I saw the first, a AAA178 or something like that one day back in about May 2001. Since then we've progressed up to about BDA although I haven't actually seen a BD quite yet. I've got Nats hooked on keeping an eye on car number plates while we're waiting for the bus or getting driven to work in the morning. But anyway, the CVW168 number plate I saw the other day could have been someone wanting to get a bit of a jump start on everyone else (I also saw ZZ0001 the other day which must have been personalised because it would have normally been just ZZ1), or maybe that particular combination of letters and numbers really meant something to the people who owned that car. It's amazing the things that you notice...

It was bloody awesome sleeping in this morning! Instead of the alarm going off at 5:40am I dozed on and off until about 11:30, and haven't really left the bed ever since (apart from to get some food etc.) That's one of the really good things about having a laptop, you don't even need to sit in a computer chair you just lie in bed with the computer on your knee typing away. The only problem is that in summer it's rathr warm, and having a laptop on your knee is very similar to having a hot water bottle on your lap - although I guess that's definately going to be a positive once winter arrives.

I added a heap of new links to my site last night - most of them sourced from a really useful place called dmoz.org, which I think is attached to the google search engine. Some sort of massive directory which contains something like 2600 weblogs as well as a million other things you could ever look for. It's all open source so don't worry about being flooded by advertisements (the bane of the internet), and you even have the chance to become an editor yourself. You don't get paid (obviously), but you do gain a little bit of recognition among your chosen field. I thought about doing something like that, but I already seem to have enough on my platter at the moment without ending up doing something which is probably a lot more work than I thought it would be. But anyway, the site's worth checking out and I might add quite a few more links from there in the future to my page.

I've been reading a few more blogs around the net lately, expanding from my usual bunch of about 5 or 6 regular reads. Interestingly enough, I am pretty sure that it was blogjam.com, one of my more regular reads, which got me back into the mood of reading blogs. You can only laugh continuously for so long before realising that there's something brilliant about the way some people write about their lives. I am left with a mixture of emotions, a sense of jealousy that I wish I could write that well, to describe my life in such an entertaining and fantastic way, but also a sense of purpose. A desire to improve my writing style, to open up more and write more interesting stuff than just "this is what I did today". Even though I consider the main purpose of this page is to create a time vault, so that in the future I can know what was going on in my life back in February 03, I am sure that I can improve the way that I write about my life.

I have plans to update the layout of this site, as it's basically been the same since the end of 2001, but with all my archives and links, any such change is going to be an absolutely huge job. It probably doesn't help that this page is different to most blogs, in that I don't use blogger or movable type, just a shit load of HTML to create the effect that I want - it also means that nothing automatically updates, I have to do it all manually. But to tell you the truth, I'm getting a tad bored of seeing the same white and black page showing up all the time and I'm also afraid that I might forget some of the HTML tricks that I learned ages ago when I first created this page (since then it's been lots and lots of copying and pasting!) So maybe there'll be change in the future - I've done some experimentation in Microsoft Frontpage but nothing seems to work so maybe a more radical design shift is necessary. Hmmmmm.....

Pay Day - Thank God
Wow I finally got paid! After my bank account slowly but surely disappeared down to about $3.23, it's finally up again to a manageable level. It's such a feeling of frustration and helplessness when you have no money whatsoever - you begin to wonder whether you've scraped together enough change to catch the bus home, and you just have to get through to the next pay-day. Fortunately it seems as though McDonald's remembered to pay me properly this week (as opposed to last week, when they forgot about one shift altogether as well as paying me an hour less for my other work than they should have.) I met the new restaurant manager this morning, he seems like a pretty nice guy and hopefully he'll get things organised so that the store can run properly, Queen St. McDonald's is a very different store to most, as it goes from being pretty much dead one minute to being probably the busiest store in Auckland the next - it's also physically one of the biggest stores around and it seems to take a lot of looking after, especially as it's probably the most visible Maccas in Auckland.

Nats had the worst migraine ever last night, well actually from yesterday afternoon it seemed as though she had her head in a vice which someone was continually tightening (yeah, doesn't sound too great does it?) I always feel so bloody helpless in situations like that, either when people are in lots of pain or if they are sick. I'm not sure whether I should give them lots of hugs, but then sometimes if you're sick or feeling like shit you just need some space and hugs are the last thing you want, or whether I should be rushing around organising painkillers and wet flannels - which actually means that I'm not where I'm really needed. You can't really do anything, but you can't really go back to what you may have been doing otherwise because you feel like an asshole for leaving them like this. So I end up sitting there like an idiot - going 'can I get you anything?' repeatedly. Hmmm..... surely there's a manual on what to do when your girlfriend gets sick or is in pain, so I can be constructive and actually make a difference rather than giving out the impression that I don't care or getting too cuddly and ending up with a punch in the face.

Nobody's using my comments option! Either that means it's not working, I'm writing such utter crap that it's not even worth the effort of commenting on, or that the people who come to this site (surprisingly many) are so disgusted by what they see that they depart the scene as quickly as possible. Maybe telling everyone the fact that my wallpapers are actually located here might give them some reason to read this page in the future. But come on people, surely you all have interesting stuff to say...

Tomorrow is Waitangi Day, the day that we all celebrate New Zealand becoming the place that it is today. Now I'm no hardcore Maori activist, but it seems as though all Waitangi Day is really celebrating is the un-independence of New Zealand. Before February 6th 1840 New Zealand was Aotearoa (a much nicer name I think personally) and it was completely independent. The Maori people signed the Treaty of Waitangi becoming a member of the British empire (basically losing independence) in return for various rights that would be guaranteed. Of course, the British being the British, manipulated the translation so that the two versions were actually quite different and then proceeded to break every single right which was 'guaranteed' under the Treaty. So we were stuck with the British monarch as head of state, and now 163 years later we're still stuck with the Queen and Coronation Street. So happy un-independence day tomorrow! Oh well, at least it's a paid day off, and gives me a chance to have a sleep in tomorrow morning - so go the manipulative British translation! Maybe I need to go to London in order to really appreciate what Waitaingi Day is, to get away from the politics of it all and just enjoy what it feels like to be a New Zealander.

I wouldn't say that I'm a particularly patriotic person, I most definately wouldn't give my life up for my country (I'm more of the peaceful kind) and I don't really like the national anthem or all that bullshit about patriotism. But I'm bloody proud about being a New Zealander and it's always going to be home. I know that last time I returned to NZ after spending three weeks in Australia I had a really strange feeling when I saw the rolling hills of the Waitakeres - I was so happy to be home and I knew that this was my patch and no matter where I end up living in the future (probably will be here in NZ) I'll always be a Kiwi. I think that you don't even realise that you're really from a country until you leave it - whenever I was in Australia I was keen for people to know that I was a New Zealander and I've acquired quite a few T shirts over the past few years saying New Zealand stuff all over them which I plan to wear continuously next time I go overseas (whenever the hell that may be).

On a realted note, I remember that everywhere in Australia they sold T shirts with Australia scrawled all over them. Now, why would you buy a T shirt like that? If you think about it, if you buy it and wear it in Australia you look like a tourist, and if you wear it back in New Zealand you look like and Australian. Now personally, if I'm in Australia I don't really want to look like a tourist - and if I'm in New Zealand I really don't want to look like an Australian!

Sim City 4
The last few days have been a mixture of university, a depressing lack of money and Sim City 4 - which I am finally becoming good at. Compared to all the other Sim City games, this one is most definately the most difficult as you have to worry about ongoing costs for absolutely everything. Luckily, as you build more and more cities it becomes easier and easier because they can feed off other cities and grow much quicker. The problem is that I'm getting a bit addicted to it, at a time when I really should be spending as much time on my university scholarship as possible. I guess I have made quite a lot of progress so far - but I just want to get it done ASAP so that it's one less thing that I have to worry about and I can get stuck into my life for the rest of the year.

It looks like there is going to be heaps of changes at work over the next few weeks - heaps of new people are currently being hired (hopefully that doesn't mean my job is in danger!) And the fact that January was not a good month for the restaurant means that quite a few things look ready to change - personally I actually thought that for the first time people were beginning to follow procedures better. Now that the two top managers have gone there's no doubt the restaurant won't be the same, and although I do understand that there must have been bloody good reasons for firing the top two managers, it still seems like an awfully drastic move. There's a possibility that I might do some management training over the next weeks, as I have mentioned to the person who's currently in charge of the restaurant that I would like to move up once I become fulltime in March (or as soon as I finish my university scholarship.) So maybe my Maccas future is looking a little mroe interesting - and maybe I'll actually get a bit of a pay rise which would be bloody useful at the moment.

I'm also going to really need the extra money once Nats goes to university in March. At the moment with her working fulltime we are struggling with our finances, I don't want to know how it's going to be once she can't work the hours she's doing at the moment. I guess we'll have to find some way of managing it - hopefully a better pay rate for myself can be the first step. It's just rather worrying that if things are a struggle now how are they going to be soon. But then again, I thought the same thing this time last year (although I was admittedly trying to save $2000 for my fees), and I did manage to find some hours that worked in with my schedule at university, and I did manage to get through the year working part-time. So it is possible, just difficult I think.

One Medium Managers Shake Please
The complete and utter lack of money has become rather depressing, I am getting pretty good hours at work but the money seems to be disappearing just as quickly as I am acquiring it. Even going out and getting (slightly) drunk in town can set a bunch of friends back almost $300. We saw 8 Mile, which was an OK movie but nothing really that special. It was a good story, but I felt that they finished it too quickly and missed out bits that would have been interesting. I don't know whether Eminem really makes the greatest of actors as he didn't really have that much character - although that might have just been because of the part he was playing.

Work has been interesting during the past few days, there has been a huge shake-up and the top 2 managers at Queen St. both got fired meaning that we really don't know what they hell's going on at the moment. There has been plenty of speculation and conflicting stories about why they were fired, but it came as a huge surprise to me as they both seemed to work incredibly hard for the store and appeared to be doing an OK job. We are having a crew meeting tomorrow to (supposedly) discuss a pay increase, and maybe we'll get a few more answers then. Just as long as I do get a pay increase, then I might be earning more than $10 an hour which isn't too bad.

More Interesting Research
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...

The Quay Street Graveyard
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.