I enjoy long walks on the beach...

soooo, last night I was actually being a good student. I had bought a book and printed out an article for class to read and I had my pencil and highlighter in hand ready to attack the homework. And I did so, for about 30 minutes, and then a rain storm happened. It began like any other rain storm. Lots and lots and lots of LOUD thunder. And then it started to sound violent, and I opened up my door in the hall, and the noise was almost deafening. And there is this glass covered bit of the hallway a few doors down from me, and it was leaking. I guess the glass wasn’t sealed well with the adjoining wall.

So my neighbor called the on duty RA to inform her, and I went back to my room to read and highlight. Dude, this storm was crazy. It sounded like an army was beating the building up. I’m surprised my windows didn’t break. But you know what did happen? My ceiling started to leak. Yep. It started dripping through my fire alarm. Which incidentally, I had just placed my laptop on my chair right underneath it, to get it off my bed. But luckily my laptop is fine. I sat it upside down for a bit on a towel. So I put a pot under the drip and called downstairs to the RA and she said she’d be here ‘momentarily’.

I then noticed that the ceiling light next to my fire alarm was filling up with water. It has one of those bowl like fixtures around the bulb.. and yep… after watching it fill up for about 10 minutes and moving my expensive stuff out of the way, it fell from the ceiling and shattered on my floor. Dumping out all the water it had just gathered. Awesome. So I go into the hallways and it was pure madness. (by the way, it’s about midnight at this point). And everyone is running around the halls soaking wet. All the glass covered areas are dripping, all the hall lights are leaking, everyone is having water come through their fire alarms. And I look outside into the courtyards and it looks like there is a layer of what seems to be snow. I go downstairs with some friends and people are having “iceball” fights. Because it’s not snow on the ground at all, it’s all the hail that has accumulated. So after running around in ice and taking pictures I went back up to my room and eventually around 1:00 I found the ra and she came in and wrote on her clipboard what had happened and said they will get back to me tomorrow. So now it’s 2am and I finish my reading because I am wide awake by this point.

So then I wake up at 8:00 and get dressed for class (which was going to be from 9-2 straight then a 4-6 lab) and go downstairs to reception to ask about what they are gonna do with my wet carpet and my light that I’ve yet to turn on because I don’t know how safe that’ll be since a trashcan full of water was just running through it. And I find out the whole campus has been closed. Pretty much the whole city due to all the roof damages and leaking problems and wet carpets throughout. Insane! My fullest day is cancelled! And I stayed up until almost 3 preparing for it! But then I went back to my room and slept til noon. So today was a pretty good day.
The dorm people came by to see the damage, they undid my fire alarm (but I have a second one that acts as a warning, so if that goes off then I should call the fire people since my real fire alarm now doesn’t work.. so don’t worry… I’m not gonna die in a fire) and now I just have a fan blowing on my carpet. I hope mold doesn’t grow and I die. Let alone die in the hallway, there are so many wet areas. Stupid brand new building built cheaply!!

Apparently Canberra had just experienced a freak hail storm in the summer that not only was the university not prepared for, but neither was the city. The whole city shut down….. on the news they are saying it was one of the most intense and damaging storms in the city’s history. And now they are blaming global warming.

Hahaha, the news just said classes are cancelled til Monday so I just checked:
“The storm on Tuesday night caused damage to some 70 buildings on the ANU campus. Damage ranges from relatively minor to extensive.StudentsOwing to the damage to our teaching spaces, the University will not conduct lectures, tutorials or laboratory sessions on Wednesday 28 February, Thursday 1 March or Friday 2 March.”

This is crazy and all of this going on during their biggest drought.

Anyway, moving on…

Phrases my friends say all the time and the rest of the world assumes Australians use… and they do…:
Give it a go
Can’t be bothered (sometimes, when my friend is real mad, she’ll say ‘can’t be effed’) (but she says the real word. It’s weird. That doesn’t even make sense)
When I told her how I think it’s funny that she says ‘can’t be bothered’ so much, she goes ‘well what do you say?’ and I said ‘I don’t know, like ‘I don’t want to’’ and she said that sounded childish. Then I told her that ‘can’t be effed’ sounded mature.

So, some of you prob know, cause I think the rest of the world does this.. they do write their dates different than us stupid independent Americans. They do day/month/year. Which does make sense, within the ranking of measurements of time. But it messes with my head… each time I read a date.

Well this might be boring for some... but I figured I should get around to explaining exactly what my classes are (and I don’t know much cause I’ve only had about a week of classes… but here ya go anyway):

Primate Evolutionary Biology

2 lectures and 1 discussion. It is an undergrad course, with probably 35 students in it, 5 of whom are postgrad, and maybe 10 guys in the class.

So far we’ve just had a brief introduction/overview of taxonomy/classification. Gone through some suborders, then to families, staying fairly broad for now. But just looking at the difference between like bush babies and tarsiers and lemurs. Tuesday we went over opposable toes and differences in the rhinarium. Crraaazzzy

The prof is older and cool. he’s one of those brilliant guys that knows absolutely everything. He’s actually my advisor, he’s like the only one in Australia that does biological anthropology. He loves him his monkeys. He uses power point and posts his lectures online which is really nice.

Race and Human Genetic Variations

2 lectures, 1 video, 1 post-grad discussion

about 40 people, and maybe 3 guys. I don’t know how many grad students yet cause our discussion was cancelled due to the repairs from the hail storm.

this professor is kinda harder to follow in his lectures. Cause his sentences go on forever and I can never really figure out the main point of what he’s talking about… but he does have power point but said he’s only gonna post the first few lectures online… I don’t know why not all of them. I guess to make sure we all come to class.

But this class I find fairly boring, cause it’s what introduction to anth in undergrad talked a lot about. How race is a cultural creation and not biological…. I just read over 40 pages on people using big words to say it is due to societal pressures of power and the basic instincts in humans to have a hierarchical system in place that we create ‘races’ to differentiate ourselves so we can compare ourselves and place people on their rungs on the ladder. Blar blar blar. I don’t care about people alive today, I want to talk about dead people!!

And I’ve only seen one video, which is one is a series of like 7 videos that we will begin our semester with. It was fairly cool though, about the race to find the shape of dna.

At our last lecture he wore a shirt that said ’98.7% chimp”. I want that shirt.

Human Skeletal Analysis

1 lecture, a 2 hour lab

I think this class is gonna be my favorite. It reminds me of my zooarchaeology class in undergrad which was my fave. I just like looking at bones and memorizing them. We were supposed to do the postcranial part of the body today, but due to that damn storm it got cancelled… I’m not sure how their make-up sessions are gonna be. But learning 206 bones is gonna be quite a feat, with or without hail.

The prof is younger, maybe 30’s and a thick accent. He says ‘bloke’ a lot in class. It consists of around 40 people, I don’t know the guy/girl ratio, I forget, because it’s been a week since my last lecture. The labs are cool. there are only 2 lab tables, so everyone crowds around and he brings out casts and real bones for people to look at. And the fake ones you know, go together like a puzzle, so you take then apart and inspect them individually then try to rebuild the skull or body or whatever we’ll be looking at.

Anyway, not too much work for each class. Just an essay and a final I think for all classes. 2 of them you have to give a presentation. My first one will be in like 5 weeks about ‘what is a species?’ I picked the easiest topic. Others were like ‘why did lemurs migrate here?’ or ‘why are there so many species of bushbabies? What does it mean?’ or ‘explain the shifting river barriers in central Africa and shifting sea levels in asia?’ which I’m sure won’t be that hard… but nothing can be easier than just defining what a species is.

So anyway, since I wrote the above part of my blog and now, I went downstairs to the common room to celebrate a peer’s birthday. he’s from Houston actually. Anyway, it was fun, I spent most of the night outside talking at the picnic tables and here ya go:

What you wear to the gym are called : Trackies. No other name for them here.
Gym shoes are called: Runners (in Ireland I believe they call them trainers)
I tried to explain that in the south we call them tennis shoes no matter what, but in the northeast they are called sneakers. But no on believed that we called them tennis shoes until the guy from Missouri backed me up. Thank goodness for the south.

And as I sit here, a friend from Aussie asked me to go to a bay with her and from friends. So tomorrow I’ll be putting on my ‘swimmers’ (as they call them) and checking out the beach. Then that’ll be followed by a shower, and then a hit at a bbq my dorm is putting on then a night out on the town. I’m very excited to get out of the city and see the beach. Yayaya!