Well Finally
I've finally embarked upon the McDonald's management programme, which looks like it's going to be fairly interesting, although I can expect a lot of "hey.... I already knew that.... been doing that for the past year", but hopefully there will be quite a few new things to learn. I'll eventually get better pay and a slightly different job, so that's something to look forward to.

We've also bought a car, and we were very very careful about spending such a large amount of money in my opinion. We got the car AA checked, which meant that we ended up getting a couple of tyres replaced and a wheel alignment all for the price of the check. So soon we'll have a car to use, although at first it's simply going to be something for both Nats and myself to learn to drive in. But Nats seems to be picking up driving really quickly, and I know most of the theory of it all I just need to get used to doing quite a few things at once and not panicking if everything doesn't got perfectly first time.

21... Yikes!
Happy Birthday to me! 21 today, although as always it doens't feel any different to yesterday. But I suppose that I'm really an adult now no matter what way you think about it so maybe that's quite important. I had a pretty good day today, lunch at a really nice restaurant and then seeing my Nana for the first time in a while was really nice.

It's nice feeling special for at least one day of the year. I suppose being my 21st birthday it made everyone reflect a little bit about what's gone on in my life so far - talking about what was happening this time 21 years ago. This last year has been an interesting one for me, although possibly there wasn't quite as much change as there was for me between the ages of 19 and 20, it was still quite an important year in my life. I guess that I can just look forward to my years to come, and thank everyone for who I am today, from my family and Nats to all those people who have drifted in and out of my life over the past 21 years. It has been an interesting journey, that's for sure!

Dreams
I had the weirdest dream last night, and I actually remember quite a bit of it for a change, normally they completely disappear the instant I wake up - but towards the end of my dream I must have realised that it was only a dream and that it would be good to remember so that I could tell Nats in the morning. But anyway, in my dream some computer hacker had put some virus in all the world's banking systems which meant that when you made an EFTPOS transaction the actual amount of money coming out of your account was way more than what you were actually paying. All over the news people were saying don't use your cards and hang onto your receipts, but I had just spent $100 on a refundable deposit with the people selling our car to us (actually did happen yesterday), and when I checked my account about $600 had come out of it in that transaction. There were also other transactions of over $125 when I hadn't actually spent anything. I remember feeling totally helpless and really sad - when you earn money at about $8 an hour after tax you don't want it disappearning on you. And then I couldn't find any of my reciepts so I had no way of proving that I hadn't actually spent that much once everything got sorted out. After a while my dream went a little hazy, I think that I came across the person who was reponsible for everything, and argued with him. Then I remember something about lifts in the university library (not the actual library lifts, but what the university is in my dreams) and thumping this guy over the head with something.

It was a pretty odd dream, details about my dreams are always a little scratcy and the things that I remember are usually how I was feeling, rather than any words which were spoken or details of things that I noticed. I know that I was really upest about what was going on in this dream, but perhaps slightly comforted that it wasn't only me who was getting screwed over. Oh.... and I also dreamed (later on I think), that Nats was driving over the Auckland Harbour Bridge and trying not to drive off the edges which for some reason were missing half the normal fences which stop people from driving off the bridge into the water. It's nice to be able to remember my dreams for once.

Time Flies When You're.... Um... Doing Nothing
The last three days seem to have just completely disappeared - last Monday really feels like yesterday and this whole (short) week seems to have just vanished. Work has been alright I suppose, we have someone who is training up to become a big manager at head office but needs to learn how everything works at the coal face so I've been traning for most of the week which has been quite interesting, although a lot of talking and quite a bit of hard work. But I guess having to only work three days this week means that it's been pretty cruisy.

It looks as though Nats and I are buying a car, which will be rather useful as we won't have to be spending half our lives waiting for buses which are either late or don't go to where they should be going. I guess that there's only so much you can take with Auckland's crap public transport system, and having a car will give us a lot more freedom. I just need to learn how to drive now! Pity cars are so bloody expensive, although as we don't want to buy a crap car that needs replacing we have to make a pretty decent investment.

I'm not really quite sure why I haven't updated for the past few days, as I said the time seems to have vanished as I though that I was doing pretty well keeping my page up to date. But nothing too interesting has happend apart from the car business, my 21st birthday is coming up this Sunday which is kind of exciting but apart from that my life seems to just be moving along slowly but surely.

Flash
I've been playing around in Flash 5 quite a lot today, figuring out how it works and trying to create a little bit more than a ball which rolls around the screen. Sure, it might look cute, but in terms of creating something which might actually be useful I'm sure that Flash can be put to much better use. I just need to figure out how to do interactive stuff, so that if someone does something they get feedback, more than just watching a movie. I generally learn how to use a new piece of software by just playing around with it a little, finding out what does what and making millions of mistakes, although I downloaded heaps of Flash tutorials this afternoon which proved quite useful when I occasionally (OK.... frequently) got stuck. Maybe if I persevere with it then there might be a couple of exciting additions to this site - although at the moment I'm highly aware that the page takes long enough to open, and adding anything more is probably not too wise at all.

It's back to work tomorrow morning, after almost a four day weekend. I suppose as I worked Saturday night I only really had one day off, then two days off - but as that shift went by so bloody easily it really does seem like I've had quite a long time away from work. But tomorrow it should be back to busy again - with all the businesses back after the long weekend and the schools still on holiday.

Sarah's gone back home, which leaves the house feeling a little bit empty. We might be able to look after her in the next holidays Nats has, which will be at the end of June once her exams are finished - but as we're sort of on the lookout for both a new place to live and a car at the moment who knows what's going to be happening in the next couple of months. As far as my life goes, the past couple of months have been pretty stable, with not much really changing - in itself seemingly a change from normality. But I can tell the next couple of months are going to be pretty hectice, with Nats having exams not too far away and me learning how to be a shift manager (bloody well better be!)

Is Time Getting Faster?
As I seem to continuously be stating, this year seems to be disappearing awfully quickly. As winter is knocking on our door in the past couple of days (banging with a bloody huge sledge hammer to be a little more precise), it makes me realise that we're just about halfway through 2003 already - and even saying that we're in 2003 still seems a little odd. Maybe its simply because as the years pass by, each individual year is a smaller percentage of our lives, that makes time seem to go faster every year - or maybe it's some weird cosmic thing that I heard the other day, where our solar system is passing through a certain part of the Milky Way glaxy which has some strange stuff in it that makes time seem to go faster. Either way, New Years and Christmas certainly don't seem that long ago, although on the other hand it does seem like I've had my laptop for a while, and that only got delivered on Christmas Eve.

We've had another quiet day today, I felt incredibly sleepy this morning, after working last night and not going to sleep until 2:30am meant that I was pretty tired when awoken at 8am this morning. We've been looking after Nats' neice Sarah for the past week and a half, and while it's been cool in many ways she does have a habit of waking up pretty early in the morning. But I managed to sort of go back to sleep for a while, so I'm not too wasted now.

I was talking to one of the senior managers at work last night, and he said that my managers uniform had been ordered along with about three other people who were 'moving up', to become area or shift managers in the next couple of weeks. So it seem that finally I'm going to make that step up. In some ways for the first time ever, I really feel like I'm ready for it - although in the past I have done pretty well looking after parts of the shift while the manager has been on a break, or stuff like that. But now, I feel pretty confident that with a little training and help I could run a pretty good shift at work. There are quite a few things that I need to learn, including how to use the computer to print off certain sheets which are needed, as well as learning how to organise the cash at the end of my shift - but apart from those technical things I think that I'm ready. Also, feedback from other crew people and managers has been quite good, as they have generally said stuff like "I can understand you.... but the others??" Hopefully it's going to be a bit more of an interesting job, and a little bit more of a challenge.

4 Day Weekends
Four day weekends are GOOD! Especially when you've been working 35 to 40 hours weeks for the past month and a half (yeah I know some of you will be saying "I've been doing that for years"). Yesterday we spent something like 13 hours on the internet, which was a little bit excessive perhaps, but isn't that what holidays are for? I am feeling very much like a fulltime worker lately, looking forward to Fridays because that's the end of the week, and then enjoying having long weekends because of public holidays. In the past, I've normally worked a bit here and there, sometimes on the weekend and sometimes during the week - and working pretty much between 7 and 5 Monday to Friday is rather new to me, although I had probably better get used to it!

It was Natalie's sister Grace's 5th birthday today, which is always an important milestone in anyone's life, as in New Zealand you start school once you've turned 5. I don't actually remember my 5th birthday, whereas I have snippets of memories from both my 3rd and 4th birthdays. But anyway, it was a pretty big party with lots of pressies, especially when combined with all the Easter Eggs which were given out. I got called by work to come in about halfway through, which was slightly frustrating, but as I need the money I went to work from 4-11 and it was actually a really easy and cruisy shift that just flew by.

You know those days when it absolutely pours down with rain? Well lucky me got stuck in a massive storm coming home from work tonight. Even on the bus I figured that it was raining a little bit heavier than normal, as the bus ploughed through puddle after puddle it seemed pretty cool at first - the cars next to us were spraying huge amounts of water to the side and it all looked pretty cool. Unfortunately I then remembered that on Saturday's the bus I have to catch ends up about 10 minutes walk from home, and not a 2 minutes walk like the other days of the week. Once I got off the bus, it wasn't really raining that heavily, so I though that I might get lucky and if I ran home quickly I might not get too wet - but boy was I wrong. 10 minutes later I resembled a drowned rat as I walked in the door, very thankful that I had grabbed my jacket in case it was cold when I finished work but still soaked nonetheless.

Storms have always interested me, I remember being at school when I must have been about six watching one of the biggest storms to ever hit New Zealand (cyclone Bola) outside. My parents must have told me that this storm was a little different, because I sitll remember how I noticed that it was so windy and so rainy. A couple of years later I remember watching a huge thunderstorm from the safety of the classroom, as my classmates played around on some prehistoric computer chess game (back in the days of green on black screens). Even these days it's always exciting to see cars splash through big puddles, or to watch how the little puddle in the back yard grows and grows into a giant lake. Maybe next time though, it would be better to see it all from the peace of a window, or maybe even from inside a car, then I wouldn't get quite so wet!

Public Holidays... YAY!
As it's Good Friday tomorrow, today was the last day of the week for me and the start of a four day weekend. Yay! Cleverly I've managed to screw over the McDonald's public holiday policies (which really really suck), and I'll be getting paid for both Good Friday and Easter Monday even though I'll be at home sleeping. Unfortunately, not working tomorrow means that I'll get nothing for not working on ANZAC day next Friday - which is a bit of a bitch but oh well. At least for once I'll be getting the money I desever for public holidays rather than getting roped in to work and getting nothing extra for it, as has happened in previous years far too many times.

The down-side of it being the end of the week is that my body seems to realise that it doesn't have to walk around for eight hours a day for a little while, so decides it's the perfect time to hibernate. Hence, I end up really sleepy when I probably should be wanting to go out and enjoy myself. Oh well, I guess a good night's sleep will do me the world of good.

My birthday's in just over a week now - and I've kinda figured out what I'm going to do, with a few drinks on Saturday night and then going out for lunch with family and Nats on Sunday. It'll be nice, not quite the huge party that James had - but I'm not really the party person so that's maybe not a bad thing. It's only another year really, but I suppose that it's pretty cool having one birthday in particular which is a little more special than the others, going from being a 'child' to an 'adult'. Now how can I avoid having to drink copious amounts of beer???

Blogshares
I seem to have lost a little interest in writing here, although I may be spending more time on the net than I have for ages and ages. Blogshares accepted my blog, and it's slowly increasing in value, although the couple of people who did hold a rather large number of shares in my site recently sold, which brought down the share price a little. Apparentely the whole game is going to reset on May 1st, when it 'goes live' - any shares you own will no longer be worth anything and you'll only keep what money you have. Maybe with all the selling that's going to happen, it might be best to get out early before all the share prices crash. Damn I'm sounding like a real economist now.

Work today was busy, school holidays making the place much much busier than normal. A lot of the people at work complain when it's really busy, because of the extra work and having to rush all the time. But I actually prefer it when things are busy, as long as we have enough people on, as time goes faster and it just seems the way that things are meant to be. The store I work at can get incredibly busy - during special occassions such as the Santa Parade once a year, and that's the way it just ought to be in some ways. When things are quiet, it can get pretty boring and all, so if we have enough staff on it's normally a good thing when we have a real busy lunch rush.

I've got four days off in a row over Easter which is pretty cool, especially as I'm going to get paid for both Good Friday and Easter Monday. So hopefully the next week and a half is going to be quite relaxing, a chance for both Nats and I to have a little bit of a holiday.

Must.... Sleep...
Friday was indeed a long night, as I didn't get to sleep basically until about 3:30 on Saturday afternoon. My long shift actually went really well, and flew by really quickly even though it was quite quiet. Everyone waited until about quarter to six (we start cooking breakfast at six) before they came in, and we got pretty hammered in the last little while of the shift which was a bit of a pain. But overall it went pretty well, and was a pretty easy 11 hours of pay.

On Saturday night we went to James' 21st birthday, which was pretty good, as I got to catch up with a few old school friends who I hadn't seen for a long time. However by then I was getting pretty tired again (having had only 3 hours sleep in the past couple of days), and the small amount of alcohol that I did have only served to make me even sleepier. Sunday was relaxing day, and I basically didn't do anything all day, which I suppose was OK. Played The Sims on my sister's computer for the first time in ages. Still amazing how controlling the lives of little simulated people can prove to be so damn addictive. I got addicted to it about 2 years ago now, and spent many, many hours for a couple of months creating interesting lives for those little Sim people.

Nats has two weeks of holidays now, which is hopefully going to provide a good opportunity to catch up on sleep, as well as any university stuff which needs doing. Unfortunately I, on the other hand, still have fulltime work. As it's the school holidays, Maccas was really really busy today - probably about the busiest day since the start of the year. Luckily the managers were onto it for once, and had scheduled quite a few extra people on so we weren't really struggling too badly at any stage - I just hope they realise that it's going to be pretty busy the whole of the next two weeks, and may even get busier than today as Monday is usually one of the quieter days of the week.

A Busy Week
It has been a busy past few days, with Nats just finishing her last week of university before the holidays and me working quite a bit. University always has the habit of making heaps of essays due in the last week before holidays, so it has been pretty stressful lately getting them all done. At least now we can look forward to two reasonably relaxing weeks (although I'm still going to have work), leading up until my 21st on the 27th of April.

About a week after Nats goes back to university, I've got my graduation which is going to be pretty cool. I have to wear weird as gowns and stuff, but at least it'll be one day when you can look really silly and people won't laugh. And then I'll actually be given my degree, so officially I will be Joshua Arbury BA. After three years of hard work, it will be nice to finally get the qualification that I sought all that time.

It's going to be a pretty long night tonight, as I've agreed to do a pretty crazy 7pm-6am shift at work. Originally I wasn't meant to be working today, which was annoying as I wouldn't be eligible for my day-off-in-lieu for next Friday (Good Friday). However, late last week a shift became availabe, from 7pm-3am on Friday night. Now in the past I've looked at people doing this shift, and thought that it must be the worst one in the world to do - as you start off in the evening but don't finish until the middle of the bloody night. As I don't have a car, it's damn near impossible to get home at 3am so initially I passed it up, cursing the fact that it wasn't a different shift. But then I figured that if I could stay on until 6am and finish just before the first bus leaves the city it could be a possibility and I would be able to get extra pay for next Friday. At the moment, I'm not sure if I'm really going to regret this decision as I woke up at about 10am this morning and haven't slept since. I guess at about 4am you can ask me if it was a mistake. But it should be a pretty busy night tonight, as school and university finished for the term today and heaps of people will probably want to go out partying until all hours of the night, which means that time will hopefully go by pretty quickly.

The Annoyance of it all
I wondered today whether I was getting sick and tired of McDonald's. Lately everyone has become incredibly tetchy, probably as the result of staffing cutbacks, and what seems like a witchhunt to find out those responsible for stock losses (probably someone just counted wrong, as how can you lose 200 buns in a day?) Either way, work just isn't the same place that it was last year, all the camaraderie seems to have disappeared and everyone's just trying to do as little work as possible while still getting paid. While I guess this is everyone's fault to some extent, myself included, surely it is the job of senior management to ensure that everyone's working as a team to generate maximum productivity. But instead everyone's just snapping at everyone else over the tiniest details and it's not really much fun to work in an environment like that anymore.

It's amazing how many blogs have appeared from complete obscurity as the result of the war in Iraq, now I'm sure that not many people had heard of Salam Pax before the last few weeks, but all of a sudden his blog has become one of the most visited on the net. A few reporters are also updating their blogs while in Iraq, although sadly the way we've often heard of them is because they were injured or had to stop writing because of work commitments. Fortunately (I suppose), the war seems as though it's going to be over soon. But I, being the pessimist that I am, really think that deposing Saddam isn't going to be the end of things by a long shot. Surely this war has only enraged a number of potential terrorists, and it could clearly be argued that it may have had a negative effect upon US security. I'd hate to predict further terrorist activities against the US, but it does seem inevitable in the not-so-distant future. I guess we all just have to wait with baited breath and see what happens.

Nats is on holiday next week, and we're going to be looking after her neice Sarah for about a week. This should be pretty cool, although I am probably going to be rather busy with work next week as it will be the school holidays.

A Few Changes
My site has undergone a few changes in the past day, as you would have probably noticed. I started off only changing the links to a few folders, but then that didn't looks right by itself so I added the bit at the top of the page. Things might take a little longer to load up, but I don't really think that there's much I can do about it - but anyway if it doesn't take too long on my internet connection then it should be great for everyone else, as I can only normally connect at either 31.2 or 28.8 kbps. Any feedback would be great, just use the comments facility at the bottom of the post.

I finally got accepted by Blogshares, so soon you'll be able to bu shares in my site. The Blogshares phenomenon seems to have taken the internet by storm, as a hell of a lot of the 'big' blogs have got involved, so it is a pretty interesting idea. In my frustration at not being able to get listed, I created a Blogger blog, which basically mirrors what is said here, but hopefully takes advantage of Blogger's recently updated list, and any people who manage to come across it. Who knows, in the future I might make the two quite distinct, but at the moment I have enough trouble thinking about enough to say in this page, let alone worrying about two.

Nats and I changed the room around today, which is always an absolute mission. Fortunately this time it was only shifting the bed and a couple of dressers around, and not the computer desk which is stacked up to the roof with 'stuff'. Even then it probably took us the best part of 3-4 hours, including tidying the room in the first place so that we could actually get at everything. I remember when we last changed the room around, in about November last year, it took the whole day, and we were extremely exhausted by the end of the day. When you've got two people living in a bedroom, which also includes two computers, a TV, video, DVD player, scanner, stereo and god knows what else, there's always a problem or where to put everything. But I think this time we managed to somehow 'create space' by more efficiently using what we've already got. The room feels a bit bigger now, which is GOOD.

Blogrolling
I've gone a bit insane in the last week or two, adding millions and millions of blogs to my blogroll. Well, actually at the time I write this there's almost 100 so maybe I was slightly exaggerating. Some of the blogs listed are ones which I try to read every day and keep up to date with absolutely everything they say, others are occassional reads, while some I probably looked at once or twice, and just don't give a damn about anymore. I guess it's nice to have them all there, and it does give some of the people listed a chance to gather a few more hits. Unfortunately everyone on the net isn't as generous as I am when it comes to handing out links, but I think that the more we link to each other, the better this part of the net will become. So if you want me to link to you, just leave a comment with your website and I'll add you to my links list - just be nice and reciprocate. Please.

I think that there are about four main types of blogs on the net. Obviously many transcend the rather general categorizing that I'll give you, but these types of themes certainly can be applied to most blogs. Firstly there's the internet whizz blog, an example probably being Chris Pirillo's site. These types of blogs generally talk about advances in some sorts of programming languages, or how their jobs are related to blogging etc. etc. Sometimes I find these interesting, but as I'm not really 'up with the play', a bit of the technical talk goes above my head (I'm still trying to figure out exactly what CSS does). Secondly, there's the news blogger. Instapundit is probably the most famous of these blogs, which are updated many, many times a day and contain comments on certain newspaper articles relating to what's going on in the world at the moment. I'm not really a great fan of this type of blog, as they are usually trying to push some opinion or update so damn frequently it's just impossible to keep up with the site as a whole without checking it every 30 minutes (which is probably the whole point, to keep you coming back). According to many, this is the real blog, commenting on news and real life events, and offering an alternative type of journalism. Thirdly, there's the journal blog, which might be where my site fits in. I don't really comment on news or computer stuff that frequently, but just tell tales about my life so that you all know (and I can recall) what I was up to during a certain stage of my life. Often these sites aren't particularly interesting to read, unless you know the person in real life and can gain further insight into how they think or how they're feeling than you would be able to by just talking to them. In some ways, this isn't really a true blog because it might not be talking about events, or offering opinions. However, as everyone lives in the real world (hopefully), their lives are always affected by what's going on around them, and you'll find that if something big happens,(like September 11th) everyone writes about it. In this way, even this type of blogger is commenting on the world, and offering their own opinion - which I think is one of the most important parts of blogging. The fourth blog-type is probably a mixture of the above, normally with some humour thrown in - with links to stuff that they thought was cool/funny. A site such as Blogjam seems to fit into this last category, because as well as linking to funny stuff, Fraser tells us tales about his life and comments on the news. I think that this type of blog is probably my favourite, as it offers variety from day-to-day, serves up some hilarious stories, and keeps you coming back for more.

It's incredible how time can just disappear when you're on the internet, and before you know it three hours have passed. Surely there is no other activity which consumes time so effortlessly, today I've done absolutely shit all: played around with my site, tried unsuccessfully) to get Blogshares working on my site and checked a few other things. And before I know it, we'd spent about 10 hours on the net! Maybe that's a good thing, it gives me a chance to give my feet a rest from the constant torture they endure during the week, and it gives me a chance to completely catch up on all the internet reading that I do. That's the only problem when you spend quite a lot of time on the net, you get yourself involved in so many things that to keep up with them all literally takes hours. I hope that everyone likes the few changes that I've made to the design of this page, there are probably some more to come but Frontpage is badly misbehaving and I'm starting to despise HTML tables. Very frustrating.

Getting Old
My 21st birthday is in less than a month. It's funny to think how old I'm getting, kinda scary in some ways but comforting in others. I remember when I was a little kid, going to the 21st birthdays of a couple of my cousins, having these massive parties with the whole extended family, then watching them get pissed off their faces and not really understanding the whole thing. All I really knew was that this was the 'big one'. If there was one birthday which was 'bigger' than all the others, your 21st was it. I guess this stems from the fact that a while ago it was the transitin from childhood to adulthood, which has now been legally changed to 18, but for some reason once you hit 21 you're 'really' an adult now. Maybe it's all just one big excuse to throw a big party and get totally pissed.

As for me, I'm not really the party type. My idea of a nice 21st is spending some time with Nats and my family, having a nice dinner and then going out to a few bars in the city and having a good time while getting 'mildly' drunk. I don't really understand the whole idea of getting 'shit faced drunk', as I accidently (honest, I didn't know it would have that much of an effect) did once. It wasn't an enjoyable experience, spewing my guts out in a rather public location and not being able to control myself enough to even lift my head properly. And yet some people willingly do this as often as possible, maybe it's a sad sign that their lives are so miserable that they need to escape, or maybe they just never deliberately get so absolutely plastered it just happens.

Something is happening around the net lately. Lots of people who used to update their blogs all the time just don't seem to be bothered to do so anymore. Maybe the whole world is just so busy at this time of the year, or maybe there's just shit all worth writing about. But it seems a little odd that so many people aren't writing. Did I say something bad?

I'm trying out some weird Blogshares thing, which is like the sharemarket, only you're trading in blogs and the value is determined by the number of incoming links. Hmmm..... weird.

Keep Hope Alive
There's a little hope that maybe my job is going somewhere after all. I've been working at McDonald's for over three years, mainly part-time with fulltime stints during holidays, and most recently in the last month. However, after all that time I'm still a measely Crew Trainer. But there's hope of me slowly moving up the food-chain, as today the store consultant wondered why I wasn't a shift manager yet, and said that he'd try to get me there ASAP. So maybe change is going to happen quite soon.

Wearing contact lenses has a few advantages over glasses, and obviously a few more annoyances. The main annoynce, obviously, is putting the bloody things in and taking them out. When I first got my lenses this was a total mission, as I poked and prodded my eyes for about 20 minutes before they would finally go in - taking them out proved a little easier once I got past the squeamishness of it all. Nowadays, putting them in is pretty easy, although from time to time I think I trap an eyelash between the lense and my eye which bloody hurts! I guess some of the advantages are pretty obvious - I'm no longer "the guy with glasses", and it makes me look a little less nerdy. But some of the other advantages, which I like the most, are ones you wouldn't really think of. Contact lenses never get dirt on them, so you can see perfectly all the time without streaks right across your vision; they also don't fog up when I come out of the freezer at work, unlike my glasses. Furthermore, for activities which I would normally have to take my glasses off, such as roller-coaster rides or taking a spa at the gym, having contacts means that I can actually see. So I guess they're pretty cool little things, even if they bugged the hell out of me originally.

Stuffed
It's been a long last three days, and even though I'm only halfway through the week I feel rather stuffed. This probably has something to do with the fact that work is quite a bit busier this week than it has been for quite some time. It seems that things are finally beginning to pick up, since it has been much quieter than it was this time last year. I guess that's a good thing in some ways, as more customers means that more staff are on (supposedly), and things just seem to work better. It also means that getting good hours become pretty much guaranteed, although I can't really complain as my hours have been quite good lately.

The war in Iraq seems to be paused at the moment, so the world is just watching and waiting while US supply lines catch up to their troops just outside Baghdad. It will be very interesting to see what happens once they get to Baghdad, because I seriously don't think that it's going to be a quick victory for the US. You only need to have seen Black Hawk Down to know that street fighting does not lead to a quickly concluded war. Even if the US does break through the defences, various plans of Saddam's bunker show that it's going to be incredibly difficult to actually get to this guy. So who knows what's going to happen in the upcoming days, just I think that it'll take longer than people think.

The Dialectizer
Just when you think that you've seen it all, the internet surprises you yet again by throwing up something completely different. "The Dialectizer gets you to type in a web-address, choose the dialect you want to view the site in, and then makes the appropriate changes to the website. For example, when this site is viewed in 'Jive' it makes very interesting reading. I vaguely recall something similar in a chat client I used to use, but it must be a pretty stylish piece of software that can make such changes. It certainly had both Nats and myself crying with laughter after a bit of a read.

It seems as though the internet community has come out with a very anti-war opinion in the past few days. As it begins to appear that everything is not going 'quite to plan', the realisation that the US shouldn't have even got this far has begun to set in. About a week ago I sitll had the opinion that the US was doing the right thing, just in the wrong way. But now it seems as though the Iraqis, even if they hate Saddam, hate the idea of being told what to do even worse. There haven't been any 'weapons of mass destruction' found, or anything that links Saddam to al-Qaeda. As a result, many of the reasons given to justify the war are not even bothered with anymore - and it's become blatantly obvious the only reason the US are in Iraq is to secure the oilfields there, as well as to possibly cause a series of 'regime changes' throughout the Middle East to further secure their position.

Picture the Iraqi airforce bombing the hell out of Washington DC, in the aim of liberating the US from their evil leader George W. Bush..... funny isn't it? But is it really that different from what's happening in Baghdad?

TGIF
Yay it's Friday - another week seems to disappear off the face of the earth. I'm not really sure if it's a good thing that time is going so quickly. On the one hand, each week means another pay-day and as my financial position is slowly shifting from critical to stable, each pay-day is dearly welcomed. On the other hand, for Nats it means that her deadlines get closer and closer, although she has made some pretty decent dents in her workload, writing her first essay. It's scary to think that she's on holiday in a couple of weeks, which means that she's halfway through the first semester. Reminds me of my first year at uni, when I just couldn't believe how quickly time was going - it seemed that we were only really just getting started when in fact I was halway through the semester.

It poured down in Auckland all of today, which made work pretty quiet for most of the time. I don't really know if this was a good thing, it probably was as I have been pretty tired this week and it was nice not to be rushed off my feet for once. Work is tolerable at the moment, there seem to be a few more staff on for once which is a good thing, although the fact that we haven't got wasted this week means that they'll probably cut back on the staff numbers for next week because the labour was too high. You can never win with McDonald's. It should be the school holidays pretty soon, which means that the store is going to be much busier than normal, as all the kiddies come into the city for various reasons, and want Maccas for lunch.

My life feels pretty good at the moment, I am trying to keep things as stress-free as possible, and although it's depressing that I'm still working at Maccas, getting treated like shit and paid shit all, at least it's a relatively stress-free job. I look forward to the weekends, and dread Mondays. But at least once I walk out of the doors from work I can just forget about it all until the next day - something that is just never possible at university as there's always an essay that needs working on, or an exam to study for. I don't miss that bit of university, although sometimes I do miss the intellectual stimulation. But helping Nats with her university homework is challenging I suppose, and is keeping my academic side occupied.

Net Addict
Work again today... 7-3 for the past three days in fact. At the end of today I was really tired. After not getting enough sleep last night, and having a really full-on week with Nats' university everything seemed to get just a little bit too much, and I needed to have a break. I feel a bit better now, not quite so 'half-asleep'. At least tomorrow is Friday, which means that the weekend' not too far away. In some respects it has been a short week, as I didn't have work on Monday so Tuesday felt like a Monday and today sort of feels like a Wednesday.

I've been using the net quite a lot lately, finding all sorts of weird stuff along with my usual diet of blogs, cricket information and updates on music charts and box office takings. Yesterday, for example, I was bored so started to find all sort of weird information about the busiest McDonald's restaurants in the world. Apparentely the McDonald's in Moscow, which opened in 1990, is still the busiest store in the world serving approximately 30,000 customers every day! This figure is quite incredible, as the store I work at, (which is one of the busier stores in Auckland) probably serves about 2000-3000 people in a day. Trying to imagine what it would be like if the place was ten times as busy boggles the mind. I found a photo of the inside of this store, which has 27 cash registers and about a thousand employees.

All this stuff that I'm looking at is really different to what I use to check out when I spent zillions of hours on the net back in 2000 and 2001. I guess that was mainly because I was normally in chat, or creating avatars for cheetachat. I guess that things have changed, as have I. I also never used the favourites function of my browser, whereas now I use it religiously and feel lost whnever I'm on another computer which obviously doesn't have my list. Strange how things change....