Showing posts with label My life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label My life. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

ZXCVB!

On Sunday night - the wee hours of Monday morning in fact (12:09:25am, 12/04/2010) -  I received the following text from Vodafone:

zxcvb

After typing that, I just realised the significance - it's the first five keys of the bottom row of a "qwerty" keyboard. But anyway.

I was quite puzzled by that text. I got it immediately after sending a text to a friend who it was costing me money to text, and, with a low prepaid balance and fearing that this was an alternative to Vodafone's traditional "Sorry, you do not have enough credit to send this message" response, I checked my balance. But I still had enough money to send texts. So I showed the text to my friends and we laughed about it, trying to pronounce the word in an urgent manner. Zxcvb! ZXCVB!

But then just after lunchtime on Monday (12:54:36pm, 12/04/2010), I got another text from Vodafone:

Due to a system error you were sent a VF TXT on 12April10 that said 'ZXCVB'. Please ignore this message. Our apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Well Vodafone, I refuse to ignore that message. It amuses me too much to do so. But rest assured that no inconvenience was caused at all - in fact, it was a source of much entertainment.

I found out later that one of my other friends also received this puzzling sequence of messages from Vodafone. What a mystery.

Friday, March 19, 2010

The Hitchhiker's Guide to Critical Thinking

My Philosophy 105 Coursebook has the words DON'T PANIC in large, friendly letters on the cover.


Also, as a bonus for the extra-geeky among you who will pick up on the reference, here's the workbook:

Monday, February 15, 2010

Donut Love

Yesterday (Sunday the 14th of February), Mum was moving frozen donuts from the baking trays on which they had been freezing, into plastic bags to be returned to the freezer and restore the usefulness of the baking trays for their intended purpose - that is, baking.

She asked me if I wanted her to leave out a donut for me, to which I responded enthusiastically and affirmatively. I pointed to one, and she returned to the laundry to put the other donuts back in the freezer, leaving my chosen donut on the baking tray. While she was out of the room, I noticed something about the donut...

"Hey Mum?"

"Yeah?"

"Did you do this?"

"Do what?"

*point*

"No. Did you?"

"No. Didn't you?"

"No."

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Guy on the bus, part two

It just occurred to me, loyal readers, that I should update you concerning the guy on the bus - the only update being that I saw him again, at a different busstop. This was aaaages ago - back before I graduated. Friday the 20th of November, to be exact (so basically, a month).

My Spanish class had just finished our Spanish exam. Afterwards, we were heading to an eatery in Newmarket - Mexicali Fresh - for a celebration dinner (I recommend the place highly). People went their various ways, but the way I went was on foot, with three or four others from my class.


And there he was.


Sitting on a bench waiting for the bus, somewhere on Ranfurly Road. I immediately hid behind the others, to their confusion.

"That's him!"

"Who?"

"The guy from the bus, the cute one I blogged about!"

"You wrote about him in your blog? You stalker!"

"Why do you think I'm hiding?"

We then reached the conclusion that he would not have read my blog and therefore wouldn't have known that I was stalking him, and, having passed him by now, I seized the chance for another ogle.

And until now, I entirely forgot to update the blogizzle about this momentous event. How thoughtless of me.




On a different note, might I highly recommend Ramblings of the Bearded One? Kim Ayres is a bearded Scotsman who blogs about all sorts of things. I find his philosophical posts, and the ones about depression/mental illness, particularly interesting.

Another blog with some pretty philosophical content is Soul Survivor, by someone I've actually met - Naveen! Naveen lives in Christchurch. I met Naveen on the NZIBO training/selection camp (the camp in which the New Zealand team for the International Biology Olympiad was selected). He has interesting thoughts.

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Mrrrrrr

I feel sick.

:(

You know when you think "I feel sick, I should lie down for a while"?

It doesn't help.

You still feel sick.

So I'm lying here knowing that for the next half an hour at least I'll be lying here, with my sore stomach and my roommate's godforsakenly noisy laptop and the funny pains that keep shooting up my left shin.

In case you were wondering, the title's onomatopoeic.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

The end of an era

Coming to you from Esquires in downtown Auckland, it's Caitlin!
Blogging on the move, woop woop!

Exams are done and finished. I have three days left of school, and then... that's it. No more. That'll be high school over.

Scary? Damn right it's scary.

Thirteen years of education. Seventeen and a half years of being a child. What will that make me now? My illustrious educational institute of the last four years would like to think that that makes me a mature, confident, well-balanced young woman (they don't specify well-balanced, but it is strongly hinted). And yet they don't call us young women anymore. They call us "the newest Old Girls". I object to women with children my age calling me "old". But, no matter. Soon I'll be free. Freeeeee!

Or so I'm supposed to feel. You know, elated at the prospect of leaving school and heading out into the big wide world. And in a way I am. But quietly. One day is much like the next, if you know what I mean. Whether I'm a secondary school student or not, I still have to do the dishes at home and tidy my room. Something I'm quite looking forward to is being able to wear whatever piercings I like. I've been thinking for some time that I'd like to get my earlobes double pierced. I'm not sure if I'm brave enough for a piercing that goes through cartilage.

Without the obstacle that boarding school presents to my employment prospects, I'll be able to get a job. I'll have money! Money that I can spend on useful things, like shoes! And socks, and bus fares!

Being an adult. That's not going to happen for a while. But still, I'm more than I was before. A kid? A teenager? A young woman?



Who cares. I'm me.


Back to blogging!

Now, I'm determined not to become this guy (click to embiggen):



Welll, I'm sort of like that guy. I love to tell people about my dreams, but they tend not to mind, because I have cool dreams. People at school ask me about my dreams - "Hey Caitlin, been chased by anymore tigers recently?" I have terrifying dreams about tigers. I'll tell you them sometime.

But I've managed to post more than four times on my blog. And I can't speak French, but I'm pretty sure I can speak Spanish. And I'm about to leave high school, so if I can speak it beyond my high school years I'll have beaten him. I'd like to beat him. If I were uninteresting, it would be silly of me to write a blog called "Something Interesting To Read", wouldn't it? I like to think I'm interesting.

Anyway!

So here's back to blogging. No apologies. Just new and exciting posts. Well, maybe not exciting. But interesting, hopefully. There you go!

Monday, November 9, 2009

"Guy on the bus", or "Learning to drink coffee - Day 3"

Went to the orthodontist today. After missing the train and having to walk there, I arrived exactly on time, had my teeth looked at, and was free ten minutes later (I don't have braces, but might in the future, depending on how my teeth behave over the next few years). I still had lots of time until I was meant to be back in school, but needed to get some lunch, so I headed to Columbus to grab a sammie and a coffee (three days in a row - pretty good for someone who doesn't like it. Not sure if I've noticed any caffeine side-effects yet).

I bought a "ham roll" (which despite having avocado and being made of some tasty bread, was rather smaller and less satisfying than expected), and a "mocha latte" - advertised as being a "chocolate flavoured latte with chocolate foam". Well, it barely tasted like chocolate at all. It was definitely stronger than boarding house coffee, but was nicely warming on the way down, so I kept drinking it.

After catching the bus back to Ranfurly, I bought a Whittaker's Sante bar (dark chocolate) for it, to try and add some chocolateyness to the drink. The Whittaker's bar usually make very nice hot chocolates - simply dissolve one in hot milk. However, by the time I got to the Ranfurly dairy, bought the chocolate and put it in, my coffee had cooled down significantly. The chocolate melted in sludge without dissolving, and then solidified once more as the coffee reached lukewarmness. I was going to microwave it in the common room once I got to school, but was intercepted by Sinead, who told me in no uncertain terms that it is a sin to microwave coffee. So I drank it cold and sat in the library scraping the solid chocolate out from the bottom of the cup with my fingers.

But! That is not the point of the story! (despite being the third instalment of the coffee saga)

The most interesting thing that happened between the orthodontist's and school was that there was a very cute fellow at the bus stop. Tallish, but sort of small and slim at the same time, without looking especially young - his face looked... not old, but worldly. He could have been anywhere between seventeen and thirty-five. Stripey shirt. Sort of smiley. Scruffyish dark brown stubble, little sideburns and fluffy light brown hair. The sort you want to ruffle.

Anyway, when I came up to the bus stop (well, patch of pavement outside Bivouac), he looked up just as I was checking him out and made eye contact. I looked away. Might have blushed. Pretended not to look at him until the bus came - or buses, seeing as two arrived at once. I got into line for the first one, and he walked over to the second one. I looked in the window of my bus, and saw that there weren't many seats free (I'm one of those people that really prefers not to sit next to strangers on the bus or train), and decided to hop on the second bus. Because, you know, there were more seats free. Not to ogle him or anything (*nonchalant whistle*). I sat a few seats back from the front, on the left, and he sat in the first seat on the right.

...

So maybe I did ogle him a little. Well, his hair at least, seeing as that was all I could really see. As I ogled I thought, the way I am wont to do when I see interesting strangers out and about. It's quite fun to look at people you see around in the city and try to imagine what their life is like, where they are going and what they are doing. Although he had two seats to himself, he was sitting in the aisle seat, unlike most people (myself included) who would sit in the window seat so that they can stare out the window and pretend to ignore their fellow passengers. I wondered if he was in a hurry to go somewhere, and wanted to leap out of his seat and out the door as soon as the bus came to his stop.I never did find out whether this was his intention, as I got off the bus before he did. Ah well. He fulfilled my eye candy quota for the week.

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Learning to drink coffee - Day 2

So today at dinner, I walked up to the table beside the coffee machine to get a mug. The mugs are stacked on trays, and for reasons of structural integrity you should take your mug from the top tray. There were two mugs on the top tray - one was the same as all the other mugs, and the other was also identical, with the exception that it was shorter than the others - more like a teacup. With Paul's advice in mind, I decided to make my own mochaccino. I put milk into the short mug, cappuccino into one normal mug and hot chocolate in another, and took them to my table, having added half a tablespoon of sugar to the cappuccino.

This time I was able to have a few sips of the cappuccino without flinching, but I still played chemist with the three mugs until I had a drink that smelt like coffee and tasted like chocolate. It was good. We had ice cream and this juicy berry stuff for dessert, so I add ice cream and berry juice at some point. And that was good. Sort of drowned out the coffee though.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Learning to drink coffee - Day 1

At dinner, I went to get a hot chocolate from the drink machine, and then thought "Wait a minute, I'm meant to be learning to drink coffee!" Why am I meant to be learning to drink coffee? Because I want to see if I can learn - I love the smell of coffee but not the taste, and people have told me that it can be an acquired taste. So I'm seeing if I can acquire it.

My friend Paul had said "Start with mochaccinos", but the machine only had hot chocolate, hot water, black coffee and cappuccino. So I pressed the button for a cappuccino.

It didn't fill the mug entirely, but I'm used to that - it does it with hot chocolate too, and I usually top it up with milk. So I topped the cappuccino up with milk and took it back to my table. I took a sip, and it taste fine until I got through the froth onto and into the actual coffee.

"Blegh!"

I put it down and pulled faces at it. Iris leaned over the table and said "Did you add sugar?"

"Nope."

"The machine doesn't add sugar. You have to put it in yourself."

"Oh, right. That might be why it tastes so bitter, mightn't it?" I carried it back to the table next to the coffee machine where the mugs and sugar are kept, and dumped two tablespoons of sugar on top of the foam, where it slowly dissolved through it and into the coffee. I stirred it with one of the little wooden popsicle sticks that they give us instead of teaspoons to stir our drinks with and tried again, back at the dinner table.

"Blegh!"

I put the mug down again. "That is way too sweet." Note to self - spoonfuls of sugar are usually measured in teaspoons, not tablespoons. Duh. I had thought that that sugar spoon looked a little big. I kept drinking, slowly, and alternating the coffee with orange juice and the chicken curryish dinner glop. At one point I said to Tap, sitting on my right: "Maybe it's like drinking whiskey. You don't grow to like it, you just get used to it." Whiskey's not so bad, but the first time I tried it I told Dad it tasted like turps. He was horrified by my lack of appreciation for fine booze!

People can grow to like all sorts of things, just because they're used to them. Like city traffic noise, or loud music, or going to hospital. Personally I don't mind hospital (getting to lie in bed sleeping and reading and drinking ginger beer!), but I dislike the circumstances that put me there (painful things like peritonitis and broken bones). Although I have to say I prefer coffee to city traffic noise.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Something Interesting About 2Degrees, or somethinginterestingaboutmobilenetworkscontinued

So this new mobile network, 2 Degrees. One of their highly-advertised perks is "free stuff when you top up". Today I decided to test this theory, as I need to top up my "texting Jack and Paul" fund. So I bought a $20 voucher, after walking past a sign telling me that I would get 100 free texts if I did. Well! Not only did I get 100 free texts, but also calling to NZ landlines and 2 degrees mobiles for 22c a minute, for the next 30 days. Hurrah! So I'm going to ring lots of people in the next thirty days.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Something Interesting About Mobile Networks, or Adventures in Foodtown Continued

If you're not from New Zealand, or live under a rock, you should know before reading this that we have three cellphone networks here - Vodafone and Telecom, the two ancient rivals, and 2 Degrees, a relative newcomer.

I've been meaning for a while to get a 2 Degrees sim card, because you can pick them up for $2 at the supermarket, they fit into a Vodafone phone (which mine is), you can call people in New Zealand and 21 other countries for 44c a minute, and you can text people for 9c a text instead of Vodafone's 20c. I'm on Vodafone's txt2000 plan thingy, which means 2000 texts to other Vodafones each month for $10 a month, but I have some friends on Telecom, especially two lovely boys I know who don't live in Auckland.

I don't know why, but something about being female and living in Auckland means you just automatically have a Vodafone. No exceptions. I think it's because of the txt2000 thing - it works best if everyone's on the same network. I know one or two in-Auckland-males with Telecom phones, and one or two out-of-Auckland-females with Telecom phones, but in general it's the out-of-Auckland-males that are the worst offenders. Shout-out to Jack and Paul!

Anyhow, it turns out that 2 Degrees sim cards are actually free! Free, I tell you! Sure, one pays $2 for the actual sim card, but it comes with $2 credit on it, so it's... free. So I grabbed one at the supermarket yesterday, while on a quest with Sinead and Conall to find cannelloni (that's where the photo of me looking all crazy in the supermarket on yesterday's post came from). So now I had a new free sim card! I sent some celebratory 9c texts to Jack and Paul, but then stopped so that I didn't chew through my hard-earned $2 too quickly. And then I got bored, so I put my Vodafone sim card back in and texted Sinead.

This wasn't really all that interesting, come to think of it. I'm just excited that I got a free sim card. FREE SIM CARD! Take that, Rhys Darby!

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

"Lifestyle" Drinks, or Adventures In Foodtown

I just moved some photos off my phone and thought it'd be worth sharing some of them. These were all taken in the Foodtown near my school, but on different occasions. Foodtown: it's where all the cool kids take photos on their phones. Here's the first, and the cause of the post title:


Lifestyle drinks. I don't know why "lifestyle" is a euphemism for sex, but people always talk about "lifestyle shops" and "lifestyle expos" and "alternative lifestyles" - I find that last one particularly irritating. Being gay or into BDSM or anything like that isn't an alternative lifestyle, it's an alternative sex life. An alternative lifestyle would be living in a treehouse. Which would be really cool. But anyway, lifestyle drinks. For the person who has everything; sex drinks now available in the beverage aisle of Foodtown! Unfortunately not. They just turned out to be "alternative" (read: cranberry/tomato) juices and sports-type drinks. Alas. Way to get our hopes up, Foodtown.

Of course, Foodtown is concerned for the wellbeing of peanut allergy sufferers:



No, really? Foodtown, you're not actually suggesting that chocolate peanuts contain PEANUTS, are you? Shop here if you have a peanut allergy and can't read small writing. They'll be sure to make it obvious.

Last of all, me. Posing quite spectacularly. That mark on my right shoulder is the scar from collarbone surgery mentioned in a previous post.

I love that whole split-personality thing my face is doing. Sinead said that this photo was scary. Can't imagine why.

That's all folks!