Moments

In case you were wondering what I've been up to lately...

Firstly some baking fails... 

This is a tart shell that I dropped after baking.

These are supposed to be cake-pops (they tasted ok, just looked a little odd due to lack of decorating skills)!

An unpleasant surprise when collecting the mail...

Clearly we have very small mailboxes for our apartment building. Unfortunately a (potentially disgruntled??) mailman took this to mean it's fine to wedge a DVD delivery in to the point of it being broken and stuck. D'oh. The place I'd ordered the DVD from nicely replaced it however, even though it wasn't their fault!

A beautiful day at Little Bay...

This is a lovely beach not that far from where we live that I had no idea existed until last month! I know where I'll be in Summer...

Dinner for our three year anniversary...

Mini sliders at Rockpool Bar and Grill Sydney. YUM. P.S. How has it been 3 years already!!

I'm now a Dr! My graduation was on Friday November 8th.

Excuse the lopsided hat and gown situation!

Celebration dinner after my graduation...

Devonshire Tea Crème brûlée at The Devonshire. Awesome.

Things definitely have not been boring lately!

Sleep Talking Husband Strikes Again

Due to the lack of interesting things I have to say myself at the moment, I've yet again decided to resort to the sayings of my sleeping husband. This one is from a couple of days ago:

"Stop it you uncultured swine! Shush! ...................shush".

He has jokingly called me (and others) an uncultured swine when awake in the past, as it is a quote from Toy Story. However when he said it this time whilst asleep he definitely sounded serious and annoyed.

As much as I wanted to wake him up to ask about it, I decided not to. Unfortunately he had no recollection of saying this the next day, or the dream that prompted it. So this one will forever be a mystery!

[via]

What's going on?

Hello to any of you who still read this blog (if there are actually any of you besides my mum). I realise I haven't really been on here much lately. It's hard to think of things to post at the moment - I don't have any silly anecdotes, not many science-y things have been happening in my life (well I got a paper accepted which is great, but still no word from my thesis examiners), and spouse wise: things are fine, except Husband had a bad flu for quite a while. Thankfully he's mostly better now. 

As for other people's spouses, my sister is getting married in a week and half. I'm the maid of honour (technically 'matron' of honour I think, but sounds like such an unattractive word so I'll stick with maid), so it has been a busy time the last couple of weeks. Enjoyable of course though. I'm definitely looking forward to the wedding, however I'm not looking forward to the 100 reports that I'll be receiving to mark that same week. 

Because I don't really have a photo to go with this post I'm including a picture of the shoes I'll be wearing with my bridesmaid dress. Pretty, hey!

Job-wise, still nothing. I had an interview via skype about a month ago which was nerve wracking (seriously I clenched my leg muscles so much during the interview without realising that I had aching legs for a couple of days after!). It was a good experience but I didn't get the job. I've also applied for several others and unfortunately I don't think I got those either since I should have heard by now.

So that's what's been going on. 

P.S. As an afterthought, I do have a slightly silly anecdote. The other day I heard Husband coming home from work and I decided to hide behind the door in the computer room to jump out and surprise him. However I forgot that I had left my bag in plain sight so it was pretty clear I was home. He walked around calling my name and I remained silent. Next he called my phone and you could clearly hear it ringing in the bedroom. He kept walking around calling my name, but I waited until he walked into the computer room. When he finally came in and I jumped out, he was really unimpressed. He said since all my belongings were still home and the door was unlocked he thought I'd been kidnapped and he was getting extremely concerned. Oops. I guess I did let it go on for a little too long. 

P.P.S. I just realised that this blog has been going for a bit over two years now. Wow. It doesn't seem like that long.  

Husband Quotes: Sleep Talking Edition #5

I was just falling off to sleep the other night when...

Husband: "Excuse me darling, can you move out of the way for a second please?"

Me: "Okay, where am I moving to?"

H: "Oh, I wasn't talking to you. I was having a dream."

Me: "Who were you calling 'darling' then?"

H: "An old lady at the shopping centre".

I just laughed and went back to sleep. Husband was asleep for that entire conversation, as evidenced by his surprise when I told him about it the next day! Husband often talks to strangers, and if they're older ladies they usually get called something like 'darling'. So I could totally see this dream being enacted in real life. Being an introvert and fairly socially avoidant I'd prefer he didn't talk to randoms, and also the terms of endearment I find a bit weird also! It does make for some amusing situations, however.

[via]

Question for you: would you call a random old lady 'darling'??

Husband Quotes: Sleep Talking Edition #4

Yesterday was the Postgrad Conference I was involved in organising. It was a very long day and I'm glad it's over, but it went fairly well.

Anyway, I didn't get home until 11pm and went to give Husband (who was of course asleep) a hello hug. When I did, this is what he said:

"I don't want any frittata!"

Considering I made frittata the other week, and he'd never even heard of it before then, I can only assume that he didn't care for it that much if he's dreaming about avoiding eating it. He had no recollection of saying it until I (of course) teased him about it!

Oh dear, another cooking fail then I guess...

...though I thought they tasted OK! [pic via here]

Snippets v2

I tried to make blueberry muffins. I didn't nearly explode my kitchen this time, so that's a win. However the muffins were pretty awful to be honest. I think I need to admit that baking-wise I'm a one-trick pony with the banana muffins and stick to them (I think Husband agreed, but implied it in a much more diplomatic way).

After a few weeks off, I went for a run today. Hopefully I stick with it this time and run more regularly because I do actually enjoy it - once it's over.

A paper that I submitted to a journal came back with the decision "revise and resubmit". I was expecting it to be rejected so this is a pretty good outcome. The changes I have to make are a bit irritating but oh well. The editor said my paper has the potential to be quite important, which was very encouraging because I've definitely been thinking lately that my research sucks!

I'm on an organising committee for a conference in November. I was able to conveniently forget that fact for most of the year, but now that it's pretty soon I don't think that's possible anymore. 

My two-year wedding anniversary with Husband is a week away. I feel old. We haven't organised anything particularly spectacular to celebrate since we had our weekend away a couple of weeks ago as a present to each other. It's weird because it feels like two years has gone past extremely quickly, but at the same time it feels like we've been married a lot longer - in a nice, comfortable way, not in a 'this is really dragging on when will it end' kind of way!

Lastly, I've been laughing a lot at the below youtube clip. It's pretty old, but I love the guys' enthusiasm for rainbows! It has also been turned into a song, which unfortunately has been stuck in my head for a couple of weeks.

 

"What does it mean!?"

Feel free to share any snippets of your own in the comments. You know you want to. 

Quirk.

I am afraid of feet. Thankfully it's winter here so feet are covered generally and I don't have to see or think about feet much at the moment, but seriously they freak me out. Generally I think most people's feet are pretty unattractive (no offence), but that's not what bothers me. What I really can't stand is having people's bare feet touch my skin. It actually happens more than you'd probably realise (if feet don't bother you) - under the table when eating, people sitting closely on the lounge or on the floor - it's creeping me out just thinking about it!

AAARGH they're coming right for us!!!! [via]

As someone who studies psychology, obviously I've considered that perhaps I had some sort of foot-related traumatic incident in childhood that haunts me to this day. The thing is, I really have no recollection of such an event. Maybe Freud was right and repression is real, and I'm just that good at making sure this foot memory never comes to the surface... NEVER! 

I also can not endure shoe sharing. The reason I bring this up is that yesterday my sister nicely lent my mother some of her slippers to wear since it was cold, but it really freaked me out. Other people were very shocked and confused at my reaction that I would refuse to give my poor mother some slippers to borrow if she were cold. Sorry Mum but knowing our feet skin cells would be interacting makes me want to vomit. 

Baby feet: allowed.

The problem with telling people is, they then seem to think it's highly amusing to go out of their way to TOUCH ME WITH THEIR FEET. Boy feet are definitely worse, and they are the feet that have been shoved in my face. The thing is though, if someone says they are scared of spiders, do you rush out and find a spider to dangle in their face? I hope not. So what gives? Perhaps the difference is that a spider phobia is really quite reasonable, since well the spider could bite you and you could die (or at least experience some pain). The consequence of people's feet touching me is... tinea or something I guess. Yeah I realise this is a stupid thing to be afraid of.

Ahem. Anyway, sorry about that crazy rant. I will say that for some reason I can tolerate baby human feet (not sure why) and I've forced myself to become accustomed to Husband's feet - though this has definitely not generalised to other people (even his identical twin who genetically has the same feet). 

Do you have any quirks like this that people love to tease you about? Would you try to touch me with your feet if you were to see me in person?

Well here's what happened.

I didn't mean to take a 5 week break from blogging, honest. It's not that I was super busy, or super unhappy or unwell or something. I just didn't have a lot to say, and then I kept thinking I should wait until I have something super important or interesting to talk about. I still don't really. However I just thought I would write an update (that is potentially non-important, non-interesting, sorry) anyway. Like previously, I've broken it up into three categories:

[via]

Science: Some good news and some good/scary news. The good news is that my first first-author paper has been accepted for publication (old news for twitter followers)! This is a relief, as it had taken a while for it to get accepted somewhere. It will be out next month. The good/scary news is my PhD scholarship has been extended for 6 months. Good in that I will not be poor for the next 6 months, but scary because the confirmation email also included the date the scholarship stops: November 12. This then gives me a very specific date to try and finish my thesis by, and it really doesn't seem all that far away now... gulp. As for the fact that I have no idea what I'll do after that, well that's the especially scary part.

Spouses: Yep, still got one of those (although he's been slightly MIA recently since the release of computer game Diablo III). It's actually Husband's birthday tomorrow, and we're going out to play laser tag, which should be fun / slightly nerdy. We're also going out on Saturday night to a Brazilian BBQ place, which essentially involves being served larged quantities of meat.

Silliness: Well on a whim about two weeks ago I did something I've never done (or planned to do) before: I gave myself a haircut. I decided I was sick of how long my hair was, and impulsively grabbed some scissors and started hacking. After I did the first snip I regretted it immediately, but obviously had to continue. Towards the end I decided I should be sensible about it and used my hair straightener so I could make sure it was all even. It went from being half-way down my back to just above my shoulders. My (post-hoc) reasoning was that I'm contemplating getting a more drastic haircut (see picture below), but I hate going to the hairdressers (I'm sure they're very nice people but I really don't like all the pointless chit-chat). This way when I do go there's less hair to cut and dye, and therefore I'll be there for less time (??). 

[from my pinterest]

Well enough about me:

What have you been up to lately?

Have you ever done something strange/impulsive and you're not really sure why?
Is anyone else afraid of going to the hairdressers?

Thankful.

Something I've been whinging about a lot lately is the lack of sign ups by participants to my studies. I really need to make sure I get enough so I can finish my PhD. Finally in the past two weeks I've had a reasonable amount of people sign up, however...

[via]

I unexpectedly had to stay in hospital for a few days this week (don't worry, I'm almost totally ok now), and I had to get my supervisor to email all my participants to postpone the experiments they'd signed up to. I opened my email later on to find many many emails from participants wishing to reschedule (usually they can just cancel, or if not enough notice is given, take the credit anyway) and also saying they hope I felt better soon, and they were looking forward to participating in the experiment later on. At first (besides thinking it was sweet they were wishing me well) I was a bit irritated, because now I have to reschedule many different timeslots - but then I remembered, I've been praying for more participants, and even though I was sick they still all want to come! 

Two more things I'm thankful for - nurses, and family/friends. I already thought nurses had a tough job, but having to stay in hospital for a few days really showed me just how much they do. Even though visiting hours finished, one nurse let Husband stay in the room all night, because she knew I hadn't been in hospital before and was a bit scared/overwhelmed. As I mentioned, I'm also thankful for the family members and friends that came to see me and cheered me up, and especially for Husband. He got time off work so he could just sit with me for hours. 

It's times when something bad happens, that you really get the chance to see the good in people, and I'm very thankful for that reminder.

2011 - A Review

Fireworks over Sydney Harbour [via]

For some reason I always am surprised when it comes to the end of the year. It seems as though the year went by so fast, and yet it takes as long as it always does! In the past New Years Eve (NYE) has been a big deal, and unfortunately it is often a let down when it doesn't live up to the hype. This year our celebration will be a fairly quiet one (hanging out at my sister's), but should still be quite fun. 

Usually on NYE just before the countdown to midnight I quickly take stock of the past year, without much proper time to reflect. So I thought I would put a bit more effort in this time, and I'm glad I did because I remembered some cool things. 

For me, 2011 was a year of NEW...

Anniversary

Yesterday (Sunday) was my one year wedding anniversary with my husband. I can hardly believe it's been that long already! We didn't do too much, as we mostly celebrated a few weeks ago when we went to the Blue Mountains. We did however go out to dinner Saturday night - and got to see a lot of weird halloween costumes also. Unfortuantely Husband had a cold, so we kept the rest of the weekend fairly quiet, we've postponed our trip to the zoo 'til next week. As promised however I will now show you the present I gave him. It's nothing too big (as our present to each other was the trip), but he really seemed to like it anyway which is good. 

What is that? You ask. Well it's a picture frame with the speech I said to Husband at our wedding reception. It's not written in squibbly - it's actually Greek. For those of you who don't know, Husband is Greek and I spent the year leading up to our wedding secretly taking Greek lessons so I could surprise him and his family on the day.

I am usually not the sappy type, but I do think I'll share this. I forgot that just before my wedding I sent myself an email using the cool website FutureMe to be sent on our anniversary. So here it is (slightly edited):

Where have you been young lady!?

scolding old lady from here

Well firstly, thank you for calling me 'young'. Sometimes I feel quite old at 26, so it's nice to be called that (don't scoff older people). Secondly, don't be concerned, the rumours aren't true: I did not actually turn into a zombie and I haven't been roaming the streets in search of brains ever since. The fairly boring truth is that our internet at home has had a lot of issues of late (still dodgy unfortunately), and I've been trying to be studious at uni and not write blog posts when I'm supposed to be PhD-ing.

So just a little bit of a recap on what I've been up to of late, based on three areas...

Science: Well, unfortunately still nobody has been signing up for my experiments. I suspect it's due to all the strict preparation requirements to give a saliva sample to test for cortisol; you must wake up between 6am and 8am, can't have had alcohol 12 hours prior to the experiment, can't have had caffeine a few hours before either, can't have eaten in the last hour, can't be on most types of medication, can't be a smoker... etc. The waking up between 6am and 8am would be my biggest problem along with the no caffeine, so even I wouldn't participate in my experiment! I'm hoping at the beginning of next semester when all the keen beans (i.e., nerds) are excited about experiments, I will get more participants. In the mean time I've just been trying to write papers and parts of my thesis.

Spouses: I only have one of those, but things are going good! It's actually our one year wedding anniversary on Sunday - woohoo! Our main celebration was actually when we went to the Blue Mountains a few weeks ago, but we're still going to have a small celebration this weekend by going out to dinner Saturday, and some sort of outing Sunday (we're thinking the zoo). Since the first year is traditionally supposed to be paper, I have made a present which I will show you after my Husband's seen it. 

Silliness: Not too much in the way of silliness lately. At least on a large scale. You'll be happy to know I still manage to fit in a small amount of silliness into each day. Or if I can't manage it, sometimes Husband contributes which is nice - not that long ago he decided to show me he could jump backwards down the stairs (our apartment is at the top of three flights of stairs). I, more concerned than impressed, yelled out "don't" and at that exact moment he went tumbling down. Thankfully no trips to the hospital were required, just a slightly bruised ego.

Well there you have it. 

 

What have I missed/what have YOU been up to lately? 

Instead of packing...

...well here I am. I am very thankful that it is a long weekend this weekend, and as a semi-early 1st anniversary present (our actual anniversary is at the end of Oct) we are going away for the weekend to the Blue Mountains. Google maps tells me that it's less than 2 hours drive away from home, but as we suspect many people have similar plans in mind for the long weekend, traffic will be interesting to say the least. 

If you have never been to the Blue Mountains before, I highly suggest it. It looks like this:

Photo from here, because I'm pretty sure the photos I take this weekend won't be as good!

The only minor glitch is that when booking I thought "Hey, since Husband actually has Tuesday off from work too, we should stay Monday night too and come back Tuesday". So we went ahead and booked. Exactly five minutes after that I remembered: I tutor two two-hour classes on Tuesdays, and have for the whole semester. They start at 11am, so guess who's leaving early to get back in time. Oops. Anyhoo - hope you all have a good weekend :)

P.S. Well I just checked the weather forecast for tomorrow for the Blue Mountains. Top of 10°C (50°F) and rain. Hahah oh dear.

Exciting News!

Well, for me anyway. I'm not sure how exciting you'll find this information, but it's my blog and I'll say what I want to hehe. It's also not so news-y for people who also follow me on twitter since I've already mentioned it there. But oh well. By the way, before I go any further I'd like to state NO I'm not pregnant.

Since I got back from New York earlier this year, I've been thinking it would be cool to go on a longer trip to the US, as New York is the only place I've been there, and Husband hasn't been at all. However it didn't seem like it would happen any time soon. Then yesterday morning I had a dream I was organising going and talking about which places to visit. When I woke up (at 4am mind you) I was very sad to find out it wasn't real. As Husband was getting up for work at the time (poor him) I sleepily asked him if we could go next year and to my surprise he said yes! So of course this meant it was extremely difficult to get back to sleep because I started calculating in my head how much money we'd need and could save, and my list of places we could go. I finally got back to sleep a bit after 7am. When I got up again a bit later, of course I wasn't really able to get much work done. I did however make an excel spreadsheet of the order of places I wanted to go to, and how many days at each place (yes, I know how nerdy this sounds).

"I want to go to there". [map from here]

Poor Husband when he got home from work got bombarded with all my plans. When I'm really excited about something I do seem to go a bit overboard and start organising right away (if only that excitement would return about uni work!). I've very begrudgingly nicely conceded however that he is welcome to think this through for himself and change my plans accordingly, since it's his trip too!

As it stands however we'll probably be going mid September next year, for nearly two months, getting back in time for Husband's brother's wedding in November. There is one potential glitch in this plan however - which is when will I be submitting my PhD thesis? I'm hoping that having a definite deadline of when I'm leaving the country will help me to actually finish up by then. As the time gets closer, I'll have to re-evaluate how likely this is. 

For now though, I should probably stop imagining all the places we might go, and get back to uni work, or maybe I won't be finished in time! I will post later on where we plan to go once Husband agrees with me helps decide our itinerary :P

I have a confession to make...

I like to consider myself an organised person. I write many to-do lists, and get great satisfaction in ticking items off (which I usually why I add things like 'eat lunch'). However I must confess that one area in which there is zero organisation, is at home. Although we generally do have a 'shopping night' on Mondays, this is mostly because by the end of the weekend all the food is so long gone that we have to go shopping or else decide to not eat any more. The main problem is the vast chasm between how our place looks most of the time, and how it looks when guests are expected. Basically, the couple of hours before people are due to arrive, I freak out. I try to make Husband join me in the freaking out, but he doesn't seem all that concerned. He does politely humour me though, and does help out considerably. However this huge gap in 'regular clean' and 'guest clean' might explain why invitations to have people over aren't all that forthcoming right now! 

Don't worry, it's nowhere near this bad! [source]

Someone once said to me "true friends invite people over regardless of the tidiness of their house". I assume it's because supposedly true friends won't really care about how it looks, they're there for the company. I still can't bring myself to subscribe to this though. I feel that it's respectful to put in the time and effort for your friends. However, the other reason is probably that if I can fool these friends into thinking I'm this clean and organised all the time, I can still fool myself that this is the case.

Something needs to change though. Besides the fact that the pre-guest freak out isn't all that fun, I don't actually like seeing the house so cluttered and disorganised. That's as far as I've gotten in the matter however - thinking something has to change. What I can do about it though, is still a mystery to me! 

Do you have a regular schedule to keep your house organised? Any suggestions (please!)? 

The time I almost died.

Jess over at Insignficant, Yet Important is currently doing a series on near-death experiences, and she kindly invited me to talk about mine, in which I nearly drowned in the ocean. This event is the reason that 'swim at the beach' is on my 30 before 30 list. One day I hope I can get back in the water without freaking out!

The post is obviously not overly science-y, or silly, for that matter. However it is a little bit spouse-y (new word and spoiler alert), so check it out if you're interested. 

[source]

The Husband Questionnaire

Even though my blog is 'science, spouses & silliness' I think I tend to focus on the silly part the most. So today instead I have decided to talk about the spouse part. While reading through a friend of mine's blog: Lord Girl - I came across a challenge (based on this website) to work at making my husband more of a priority. Obviously I think any successful relationship is a two-way street, but it's not going to work at all if I try to change his behaviour instead of looking closely at my own. But of course I had to put my own psych spin on it and have thus come up with my own questionnaire for him to fill out: The [husband's name] Questionnaire.

Here are a sample of some of the questions:

As if I didn't already know what he'd like me to cook!

• What are your favourites out of the meals I've cooked?
• What are some meals you'd like me to try cooking for you?
• What things do I do that make you feel the most respected?
• What things can we do to make our house a haven?

Also I wrote a list of things I do in our house and relationship and have asked him to rank order them in terms of importance so I know which I should prioritise. For example, there is no point in me spending ages cooking elaborate meals for him every day, if say he'd really just prefer I use that time to spend with him!

A true psych questionnaire requires administering it to many many people to be able to do statistics on what the average person is like. However in this case I don't care about the average person - just my husband (who could be a total outlier for all I know)! Though I do think that I can check test-retest reliability by asking the same questions again in a year's time haha. However priorities do change so the reliability might be low too but that's ok!

Gosh I am just unable to escape being a nerd, hey.