Blogging Month Day 22: Holiday Gifts, Hard Work, Honest Truths and Hotties

Last late evening shift of the semester: and it’s the time of year when nobody wants anything, so lots of time for blogging!

1) One Good Thing: hubby on holidays = hubby that goes shopping and buys me gifts! (We won’t mention the new digital camera he got himself which I am afraid to ask how much it cost). I got home yesterday to find new books and The Sims 3 waiting for me, and he even got off Assassin’s Creed II long enough for me to have a go before bedtime. Booyah!

2) One Bad Thing: Having visited my Head of School a couple of weeks ago, I was gung-ho to prove to him that yes, librarians could be helpful. And yesterday an opportunity came up where his PA wanted some figures on economics publications. I said yep, sure, no problem, I could help with that. BIG MISTAKE. This was a complex query. Very complex. Compare numbers of publications in top ARC ranked journals by staff in similar discipline departments to ours at other universities for the past 4 years. It took me 2 hours just to write the search syntax. And the job just kept getting bigger and bigger. It’s done now. The PA is grateful. The presentation can go on. But it makes you wonder (well it makes me wonder anyway): what was it all for? Aside from that it’s my job, of course. This took me the best part of a whole day to do. The figures aren’t perfect, there was no way to account for the dozens of variables in the scope of this project. The PA has no appreciation of how much time and anguish it took, and I doubt the HOS will ever get to hear that it was me that found the figures. So what exactly do I get out of it that I wouldn’t get out of Business As Usual?

3) One Thing I Learned: that apparently, following yesterday’s Meme Monday, I’m not as shrouded obscurely in mystery as I thought I was! Yes, most of you guessed that I do not, in fact, write Twilight fanfic. I dabble in a bit of writing (more so when I was younger in school) but most of what I right is original. I think the rabidness (rabitidy?) of fanfic devotees frightens me off. The whole “Character X so would not do that!” thing. And I dislike Twilight and accompanying Twi-Hards very much.

Now, comments have asked for clarification on the two truths, so here you are:

1. I’ve been to every continent except South America and Antarctica.

I have indeed. When I was 14 we had lived in a rent-free house for the last 3 years (my mum was a residential director of a mental health facility and we lived there free. Yes, I grew up in a mental hospital. That should have been one of my truths!) Anyway, since she’d had no rent or mortgage bills for 3 years, Mum had a whole bunch of savings, and as she was preparing to quit that job she figured we’d blow it all on a round the world trip. So in 12 weeks we went to North America (US & Canada), Europe (UK, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Greece) and Africa (Zimbabwe). I’ve also been since to Spain and briefly to South Korea. Hubby argues that it’s in fact part of Australasia and not Asia, but I’ve also been to NZ. I haven’t ever been to South America: though my father grew up in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and I’d love to go visit with him some time and see what it’s like now. I have never met anyone who’s been to Antarctica – many of my little Scouts claim to have, but they are dirty little liars and I don’t believe them at all.

2. I have done modelling shoots for several Australian fashion magazines.

Yep, done this too. Two of them (which I’m totally going to say is several). A couple of years ago I did Weight Watchers Online, and mostly through sheer stubbornness managed to lose about 25 kgs. Once it had stayed off for 6 months, I figured there wasn’t much point keeping on giving them money, so I cancelled my account. When you do this, if you’ve been successful, they invite you to fill out a success survey and send them before and after shots, which I did. They then phoned me to say they had an opportunity for someone who’d successfully done WW Online to appear in an advertorial-style thing in Cleo Click magazine, did I want to do it? I did – flew down to Sydney for the day, did hair and makeup and dresses in this gorgeous house in Mossman, flew back in the evening and was sent the photos and a copy of the magazine a month or so later. They also called me a few months after that to do a similar story for their own WW magazine, which I also did – a bit more relaxed of a shoot than the Cleo one which was full of models, but pretty much as surreal. At least I have some photos to one day show my grandkids how hot I was. I present them below for your viewing pleasure…

4) Today’s Link: In the words of Flight of the Conchords: “Just wanna do something special / For all the ladies in the world”. Thus I present, for your viewing pleasure, Hot Guys Reading Books. You’re welcome.