Well I’ve been to two 21st’s in the past two weeks.

First one was Alison’s – which was indeed a great party. She held it at The White Horse in Surry Hills with a Safari theme – which was apparently due to the dress that she bought and wanted to wear to the party! My nod to the theme was a dodgy pink skirt with flowers on it and a dragonfly brooch on the lapel of my jacket. I know, poor form, but you don’t want to be too dressed up when chasing a 2 year old around the house. Jen had borrow a dress from Ali, but she was all frocked up nicely =D.

There was an amazing chocolate fountain (yes, pics will be forthcoming) that we dipped strawberries and marshmallows in. Yum. It made me gain 10 kilos looking at the chocolately goodness. However, I must say that I am a purist and prefer my strawberries uncoated.

Her cake was awesome and yes, pics will be forthcoming. She had it specially made and it was uber cute! I really liked the taste of the sponge, it had jam swirls in it! But marzipan icing doesn’t really do it for me.

She had lots of friends giving speeches and there were really cute photos of Ali scrolling in the background – but no horribly embarrassing stories came out. The night did kind of end with Jen, Eva, Shamis, a random Asian (sorry I forgot his name!) and I bitching (or more correctly Jen and I were bitching) about the state of the universe and how much men suck.

Then last night I went to Beren’s 21st. It was a great party and I had a lot of fun. I met quite a few new people as Beren has random D’n'D friends and college friends and it was great chatting to them. I was slightly hyperactive that evening but I felt great. I’m usually very awkward socialising but everyone was really cool. I particularly enjoyed talking to a lovely girl Holly.

The speeches at Beren were indeed embarrassing and the speakers performed “Can You Feel The Selling Out” to the tune of “Can You Feel The Love Tonight”. There was an awesome Venn diagram cake (yes, pics are forthcoming) that him and his house mate Justin (whose birthday is the day after his) cut with Justin’s sword. Beren then proceeded to get totally smashed. And I mean totally. He couldn’t walk by the time I left the party.

My foray into Arts Revue wellbeing has been a complete success. I cooked up a storm on Friday night with Brian (and pics are forthcoming) and even though I miscalculated the time taken to fry wontons, everyone really enjoyed my food! People came back for seconds even though the food was vegetarian and the leftover rice was put in takeaway boxes that people ACTUALLY took home. OMG I’m on such a high from that.

Before Beren’s I actually had Costumes Size ‘em Up day and felt up and measured the new cast of CSE Revue. There weren’t THAT many n00bs and I recognised most of them. I watched a bit of the rehearsals afterwards and that was good fun. Funnily enough, the cast was most interested with those with the biggest bust sizes and those with the biggest head sizes because the bust sizes show off how big your boobs are and your head apparently show how intelligent you are… right…

So far the weekend has been awesome.

… quite a bit.

I’ve been working heaps to make up for the week I was gone. I worked 2 12 hour days directly after Monday flying home and I spent the entire of last week tired and in desperate need of catching up on my sleep.

On Friday, I went and bought a laptop. A black Sony VGN-FJ89GP. I just wanted on and decided to get it. I’m going to be broke for the next few months or so, but I adore it. I’ve been carrying it everywhere with me and I’ve done more organising of my file system which has been utter chaos because I just used to dump things all over my hard disk on my PC. But now, I’m slowly getting rid of things I don’t need and putting everything in organised folders. It’s great use of the 2.5 hours or so a day I spend on public transport.

I’m currently fixing up all my pics from Vietnam – I never did upload the lot of them to flickr. If only I spent enough time in my room to do the same kind of work at home… But I am in desperate need of coat hangers and magazine files… I’ve got way too many of both but loathe to part with any.

I spent the Saturday evening at the Casa playing Guitar Hero and tried again my recipes of Citrus Chicken Drumsticks and Moroccan Rice. Though the recipe asks the drumsticks to be skinless, I prefer that it did actually. I had to do a few substitutions in the Moroccan Rice recipe and it worked out well I think – but I discovered that though filling chickpeas may be, I’m not a big fan of them.

After that on Sunday was Sophia’s ‘surprise’ birthday party. I was asked to drag along the TNTT leaders along at the very last minute – her high school girl gang decided to do it and her mum asked me to make up the numbers. Ah, good old rent-a-crowd. But as always, Sophia’s mum cooked up a storm. Sophia played on the piano (she’s very talented) and I was treated to a performance of Coldplay songs. I’ve been listening to The Scientist ever since.

In the meantime, my dad has pestered me about his new Sony DSC-H5 which is an awesome camera. The pics I took at Sophia’s party are taken with it.

First day of uni on Monday. I was very happy and optimistic at uni despite being waking up late and I missed my single class for the day =S. I now can use CSE wireless for myself as opposed to leeching internet from friends to check my email! YAY!

I’ve been working since. Making up for time lost. I’ve gotten a project to do at work. A data mining one. It’s not terribly difficult once you know what to do but the database that we have the extracts from is really archaic and has a lot of unnecessary double counting of the records and I just need to be able to extract non-duplicates… but some of it is difficult because it’s hard to see which data to keep and what to remove. Plus until now, I have never used SAS before. The documentation for SAS is too verbose and they have so many modules that have similar function keywords it drives me nuts to try and find the thing I want.

But the project guarantees me work for the next few months! My probation period ends next week and Stephen my boss hasn’t shown signs of wanting to fire me.

I’m doing Arts Revue wellbeing tomorrow night which is awesome =D but it’s interesting that in a cast of 20 odd people or so that there are 2 vegetarians, 2 on gluten free, 1 who doesn’t eat red meat and 1 that doesn’t eat pork. Picky picky. I love how at TNTT nobody has any dietary prejudices. Christina use to be vegetarian but went back to omnivoredom after getting anaemic. That’ll teach those vegetarians! On tomorrow’s menu, fried rice and vegetarian won tons.

After last night’s attempt at tomato and herb rice at my kid’s place, I’m happy to make it non-fried and make it just mixed up rice. I’ve found that in catering, unless you have a barbeque or a stove that’s just one massive hotplate, it takes too long to make fried rice. I bought a new cookbook as well, but haven’t figured out what my next cooking adventure it yet…

Though I have managed to get yelled by my parents a lot recently. My father ranted and raved about how the kids in my family are so disrespectful to the parents. I’ve been thinking about how I’ve gotten to this point with my parents considering that generally I like to be nice to people.

I’ve come up with this, I don’t like living with them. I don’t like how intrusive they are on my life demanding to know answers to personal questions I don’t wish to share. In fact, the last thing I want to do when I’m tired from work or wake up is to talk to them which doesn’t leave much room for developing a relationship. I don’t share their perception of the world and it’s difficult to go along with things they want me to do.

Which is very sad. I mean considering how much I used to be hanging onto my parents when I was a child, like Sam hangs onto his parents, how did it get this way? I feel that the accumulated years of nagging has gotten me to the point where I no longer wish to share anything with them anymore.

I hope I try and avoid that with my kids.

Well before I blog about everything else that has happened since Adelaide, I want to blog about some deception going on at the UNSW campus.

On Monday, I was at uni and I was walking to my bus stop to go look after my kid and some girl gives me a flyer advertising a free lunch and dinner. There is no other information than the time of the event except for the very small print that says “Hosted by UCS, a registered student club on campus”.

I bet they were Christians. So when I called David that night and bitched about the flyer, he actually looked up on the Student Guild website and lo and behold it stands for “Uniting Christian Students”.

I mean it’s bad enough CBS (Campus Bible Study) has one soul one sausage trades but this is ridiculous! They are trying to recruit people through false pretences. A lie of omission is still a lie.

It pisses me off.

On the topic of haveawhinge, the spellcheck dictionary of this blogging software sucks major cock.

… ok.

(Yes I realise this post has been long in coming!)

I think the best thing about the whole thing was that we were in holiday mode so even though we did very prosaic things, it was amusing and fun.

We left at the obscene time of 5am on Monday the 10th. Way too early in the morning. But we caught up on our sleep in the plane. We left Huy watching the world cup final at Christina’s place and he and Bob have bet against Chris and Paul that France would win the world cup against Italy. Just before we boarded, the gate room was silent to everyone mesmerised by the game on the tiny TV that was playing it. Apparently France lost and so Huy and Bob owe Chris and Paul a steamboat meal. Chris was crowing about it for quite a while afterwards. Of course, us girls will be in on the steamboat. We are risk adverse (and intelligent enough) to not bet, but we just reap the benefits. =D

We proceeded to Glenelg where we stayed at the Buffalo Motor Inn for the first 2 nights. We had nice rooms and we rested a bit before hitting Rundle Mall. I bought a pair of jeans and various accessories. That evening we had dinner out an overpriced restaurant but they had massive amounts of food which was indeed impossible for me to finish! In fact, most people had quite a lot left over. We then decided that we should watch where we eat because we can’t afford to spend so much on food that will go to waste.

Before dinner I had Joel come over who is a friend from IRC meet me which was cool. He’s a very cool guy. Unfortunately I couldn’t take him along to dinner which was what I was hoping to do considering my TNTT friends said I couldn’t as I hadn’t cleared it with them much earlier. I noticed that one of the things that come along from these very conservative people is that they have this ‘group’ mentality. You have to be part of the ‘group’. It’s a bit harder for loners like me and Nhung, but we make do. I’ve never been a big fan of ‘group’-dom. I prefer my one or two close friends and chilling with them. But I think what’s interesting is that they are a very closed ‘group’. They don’t like outsiders visiting. Unless of course they are ex-members. It made me very sad.

That night, we hit AMF Norwood for a bowling game. It was terrific. I was in the lowest scoring team including Mary, and Christina but I was the best scorer of the team… at 58 points. Yes, I know we were all crap.

Dead tired after bowling, we woke up the next morning and I made bacon and eggs.. during which I made a pan explode. There was a glass pan and I put it on the hot plate and because the glass saucepans at home seem to work, I didn’t think it would explode. But alas, it did. It was way cool! But I eventually cooked all the breakfast and everyone was happy. No injuries were obtained during this procedure thankfully!

Then, the Barossa Valley. We did some wine tasting (though Tim, Nhung and I didn’t drink) and we got a couple of cases sent back to my house. I recommend this course of action if you are buying wine. For only $10 to ship a dozen bottles, it’s a helluva lot easier and safer then carrying it around on a plane. We visited the Cockatoo Ridge, Chateux Tanadu and Rockhampton wineries. I bought some jam, mustard and chutneys back as gifts as opposed to wine.

That night we went to the casino in Adelaide called Sky City. Star City is a much bigger casino and apart from the very nice marble inside the foyer, there was a very RSL feel to the whole place. I totally endorse the buffet there, it was delicious! I got laughed at by Liz for pronouncing Gnocchi as “Gee-nock-ki”. /me shrugs. I don’t speak foreign! We gambled and I limited myself to 5 bucks at the pokies, of which I lost it all. Tim won 20 bucks and Mary 12 bucks. Chris, the lucky guy managed to score 100 bucks somewhere! He was ecstatic. However the losers of the night where Paul, Christina and Peter at 50,75 and 100 respectively.

We headed back to the motel. I did a quick early morning run to get bacon, eggs and bread for breakfast and no pans exploded this time. No one felt like doing anything the next day so we kind of just lazed in the cars and went out to lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant. Funnily enough – they don’t have huge Vietnamese shopping areas like we have in Bankstown and Cabramatta. They were scattered along Hanson (?) Rd and we had to turn into each separate lot if we wanted to look at it.

One of my pet things to do on the trip was to make Nhung laugh. She was very quiet, we mostly speak English and since she doesn’t speak much English didn’t have much to say. She didn’t make huge amounts of effort to make friends with people during the conference. So every now and then I’d walk up to her and say “Nhuuuuuunnnnnnnnnnggggggggg” in a low freaky voice. She’d always grin and laugh at me. I’m not close to her and I don’t feel a connection, but that’s my effort to include her at times. Liz and Christina thought that me doing that was bizarre. But doing bizarre things is ok once in a while to make Nhung smile.

While I was there in the playground, I called Alex. I had incidently called him from the same spot the last time I was there. Stupid thing to do, but I was nostalgic.

We went out for dinner for Paul’s birthday at a nice Pizza/Pasta place. The food there was delicious and cheap! We then spent the night at the presbytery and the next morning, THE CONFERENCE!!!

I sat on the bus with Andrew, a guy I’ve been speaking to on the internet mostly off then on since I went to Hiep Nhat last year. Funnily enough, I’ve come closer to Hanh, his brother a guy I’ve emailed mostly off then on. They are very sweet. I couldn’t walk anywhere in the camp without running into at least one member of their large family. Khuong and En, the elder sisters are great. I chatted to En just before we left Adelaide and she’s so lovely and we discussed relationships.

The conference, I was in level 3. It’s the highest training level they offered. There were only 15 people in the group and everyone was fantastically nice. We spent a lot of time together considering our activities are based on level. I really enjoyed all the classes I took. Even though I didn’t really learn anything I didn’t already know to some extent, it was great to take a refresher. I think the really important thing that struck me was that it wasn’t what I learning – and that the message from my teachers was what my commitment and responsibility is about. I’ve been kind of lost on that score for quite a while now. It strengthened my resolve to come back home and do my duties to the fullest extent.

We had Anh Trach and Anh Tuyen as our Level 3 sheepdogs. They told us where to go and what to do. On the first night of the conference, we sat down with Anh Tuyen and had a chat about how we got into TNTT. After saying why I had come back to TNTT, I realised that I still needed to keep doing it for a little while longer. I just had to be reminded of it – which is what the conference did for me. I loved being in Level 3 because everybody there CARED about TNTT. You don’t get to that level without passion and commitment. We expressed it in different ways, but everyone there was loving and hard-working. It felt like coming home.

On the second morning we had only 15 mins to prepare for Tro Cho Lon which pissed me off. But I created a lovely cipher for the Level 2 people. It was a good one, but I misspelt a key word in the clue and got flamed for it (deservedly). The game wasn’t organised very well – which is something I’d like to do one day. Christina has always organised the games at my school which is great, but I’d like to do it once. I’d like that we had a more obscure theme one day, like the friends of Jesus, the parables or the lesser known prophets of the Old Testament.

The game was good fun though. Christina had devised an obstacle where they had to get the next cipher text in the bread which was hanging on a string and they had to bite it off after pulling it down. They couldn’t use their hands and if it feel on the ground, tough love. I was a vicious gate keeper and they had to pass me by properly greeting me – on their knees. They weren’t exactly ecstatic about putting their knees in the mud lol. One group tried to bribe me with Tiny Teddys when they couldn’t figure out how to great me. haha. But alas, I don’t take bribes and punished them with a quick lap around the area.

That night we had our bonfire plus pageant. It was too cold, wet and muddy so we lit a fire in a can outside before going inside for the pageant. It was wonderfully fun. Everyone made an effort and the skits were awesomely funny. It was a very small area so the more amusing mini games couldn’t be done, but everyone really got into it and the atmosphere was great.

Level 3 was chagrined the first morning for not receiving any ribbons for behaviour. But on the second day we got some! We were told that it was because we were bonding better as a group by the second morning. I think having to do the pageant rehearsals put us together. We spent every spare second we had rehearsing. But we didn’t get a ribbon for piety. lol

The third day was quiz day. I got up with Mary and did the quizzes. There was a moment where I had only partially derived the clear text but I could figure it out and pressed the buzzer. Anh Son KNEW that I hadn’t done the whole thing and closed the cipher text. Argh. But I guessed it and got it right! We didn’t do well in religious studies but came 4th in recreational studies =D. I lost out on 3rd by being to slow with Morse. Argh, I need to practice receiving whistle blown messages.

We also voted in the next national board. The NSW board people got it. They were really unhappy. But on the same token, there wasn’t any new blood in the place and people are so terribly conservative that they weren’t willing to vote different people in. However, I know it’s going to be really hard on them doing double the work.

We had Archbishop Phillip Wilson come and celebrate mass with us. Chi Khuong went off her head in excitement. I was very impressed with him. He was a great speaker and delivered a very charismatic sermon – something that I feel has been lacking in my own church for quite a while.

Nang Hong Idol was that night and we had a concert. I hadn’t brought any music with me but they band was amazing! Nhu, the keyboarder being only 18 or so, was fantastic and played everything by ear. I sang Material Girl and was given my jacket as soon as I got offstage to cover my chest haha. I managed to see Jon as well, he had popped in as he’s doing the security wiring of Adelaide Stadium. My brother got in the whole spirit of the thing too! There was only one guy, Joe from Wollongong and he got up and performed “As Long As You Love Me” as representative of his school. But John, Dom and Tim got up and were his backup dancers! It’s was heaps hilarious. They decided to call themselves the T-Pigeons as all their Vietnamese names start with T. (Pigeons instead of Birds because Pigeons is more Asian apparently) They tested their popularity out onto the chicks by signing girls arms. They signed mine! Tim even put “Love from your brother” as well…. awww…..

Level 3 went down for a prayer circle in the sacristy that night after dinner. It was really moving. Nearly everyone (including me) offered a prayer of thanksgiving and some personal things. It was extremely spiritual and everyone by the end of it was in tears.

The priests found us an hour or so later and we went back into the sacristy for an impromptu religious Q&A session. I found it disturbing the large number of marriage orientated questions. I thought it was slightly inappropriate at the time because of the forum we were in. We stayed in there for close to 3 hours (which I felt was slightly excessive though good at the same time) in the freezing cold and I ended up getting my sleeping bag because I was still in my dress from the concert.

The next day was the last. Christina and Liz had played a prank and hid all the leaders flags. Apparently they had left a clue which the administration hadn’t shared with us. They thought it was hilarious.
Level 3 got dumped on that morning the closing ceremony dance and we had to like prepare it in a dash and gulped down lunch really quick to squeeze and extra 20 minutes practice.

Level 3 thought since we got kicked out of the campsite so early we didn’t have to perform our slap dashed dance – but alas we did it anyway when we got back to the parish center. Thao Nguyen and Tuyen are amazing at creating dances but we had to simplify it heaps due to our time constraints which was unfortunate.

There was a lot of signing of souvenir books and stayed around for a while. I had a long chat with Cuong in the quiet aftermath and finally learned all the lyrics of the theme song “Ve Day Nang Hong”.

We hired a Tarago and went out to dinner with the crowd. Good Chinese place called T-Chow I think. Tim ate heaps at this camp which is different to his close to starvation at others which is a sign of him learning how to fend for himself as I wasn’t in the kitchen this time for him to go “‘cile, feed me.” Then we went over to Cabra’s holiday house they borrowed from a relative where I played a few amusing hands of cards with kneeling as punishment. Good thing I didn’t lose too often! Managed to talk to Thuyen for a while which is fantastic because I don’t get to chat to him often. He picked me up off the ground when I said I didn’t think he could lift me because he doesn’t train to lift people like his brother Au does (Au is in the Army Reserves).

Went back to Chi Khuongs place and had a lazy morning. I ended up having a nice chat with Hanh before breakfast. We played pool for a while and then we went last minute shopping in Rundle Mall. So last minute, we barely made it to the airport in time for the flight home!

I napped for the flight home and was glad to be home. My dad pestered me about his brand new digital camera that my sister got him from Hong Kong.

I think I ate too much in Adelaide. Always snacking and the meals I ate were enormous! It was like having dinner 4 times a day. I’m cutting back now, eating very simply now and back to my old habits of eating light breakfasts and lunches. I feel less bloated that’s for sure. =S

Well listening to Tiffany after this post I cut my own dodgy clip of the song Open My Eyes.

Luckily, I knew you were going to groan and smirked appropriately.

In more singing news, I will be Bankstown’s representative at the TNTT Idol competition during our Nang Hong XI conference! I’m singing Madonna’s Material Girl. The boys already claim that I don’t actually go to Bankstown. Christina and I are totally looking forward to the conference. Should be stacks of fun! The plan is tomorrow morning head off for touring Adelaide for Monday and Tuesday, meet up with all the other HT in Adelaide on Wednesday, camp Thursday to Sunday and then fly home Monday afternoon. I should get to catch up with a guy, Andrew that I met last year during Hiep Nhat. I won’t be online much obviously. =( It’ll be a killer to be away from a computer for a whole week!

I’ve bought 3 128mb memory sticks for the occasion. Lol, yes, I know I should of bought a 1 gig one but they were only $15 each as opposed to paying $100 for a 512mb. I can take 200 shots with the 4 128mb sticks I have. And if all else fails, I can always still Christina’s Canon Powershot and spam her flash card. =D

I spent the day with David yesterday. I hadn’t even realised I haven’t seen him in about a month. We’ve both been busy a lot I guess. It was really good to see him yesterday. We had lunch at my house and watched the first half of Pretty In Pink. I’m always surprised by how bad the movie is every time I watch it. I mainly watch it because it’s so sappy and make narky comments on what Molly Ringwald is wearing but approving of the uber pinkness.

I went to Myer’s stocktake sale on Friday and bought some new lingerie. I got a pink Valery set. The full set. Total splurge. I also got some other cheap panties and camisoles. I went to the checkout and the shop assistants reaction was “You must like pink.” Lol. What an understatement. She should check out the rest of my underwear.

Well this is it from me for a whole week! I should like pack now or something.

*muah*