So, I am officially done with the academic aspect of this experience. Thank god. I wish I could say it was a smooth finish. My politics classes finished up ok, my econ and law felt good (just wrote the exam Monday morning), macro unfortunately kicked my ass.
But focusing on the good! Now that exams are over I can start focusing on the data work that my prof wants done. Hopefully that will entertain me until July 24th when I fly to Australia!! I cannot wait. I fly into Melbourne (Tom if you are reading this...suggestions on places to go??) and the bus up through Canberra to Sydney where I meet mom and dad and will travel with them along the coast towards Brisbane, Fraser Island, and whatever good hiking we can find up north.
Just based on the day and a half I have had free from school, I think the trip to Australia will be good for me! Who knew boredom could set in so quickly. I guess I have never been in a position where I literally have NOTHING to do. I always have friends to visit or ponies to ride or lacrosse to play, etc. Clearly I have friends but I spend so much time with them that we have actually have run out of things to talk about. One of us will start to say something and everyone else goes 'you already told us'.
That being said, it was a lot harder than I expected to say good bye to Shannon today as she flew home to Pittsburg. We all know I'm heartless/emotionless/heart of stone and all that, but I was genuinely sad to say bye. Were there tears? Come on now guys...I haven't gotten THAT mushy. Charlotte leaves to go home to Nelson tomorrow, but she'll be back for second semester. Justin leaves friday, Mary on the 2nd, and Cynthia around that time too. Thank god Kallan is here until November.
Other than boredom and leaving friends life is good. I have scheduled a riding lesson or Friday with a local trainer who has an ex-competition horse for me to train with. I thought I could make it until I got home to find something to ride...but I cracked. When I started looking at horses for sale instead of studying for Econ and Law and had dreams about riding every night and talked INCESSANTLY about horses, I decided it was time to suck up the costs and start looking for barns.
Jason has been kind enough to let me use his car during the week while he is at work (I think he's just hoping it'll make me shut up, he is quite sick of all the horse language and the constant answer of "pony shopping" whenever he asks what I want to do). So from 9-5 Monday to Friday I am free to go riding! Two weekends ago I managed to convince Jason to go out to take a look at a barn to decide if I wanted to take lessons, but it was too much of a 'school' for my taste, so I decided to keep looking. After quite a long time of searching (apparently NZ is new to internet listings *eye roll*) I found an Event and Dressage rider who is only 20 minutes north of Wellington that has a horse. So I'll decide on Friday if I want to pursue lessons with her and her horse and if so then I'll have something to fill part of my time besides boring data entry. Luckily with the exchange rate and overall inexpensive lesson rates (Mass is so freagin expensive I've realized!) my lessons are not going to be too painful for the bank account.
I've also spent time putting together a schedule for next year's courses, I'm optimistic about most of them, although as usual some are going to be a bit of a pain to suffer through.
Lacrosse organizing is going well. We have our schedule finalized and other than Thurs AM practices we got everything we wanted. We also are hoping to have the funding to go to the early bird tournament the weekend after try-outs, which is nice since we couldn't afford it last year. Recruits are looking great, we have had a lot of experienced players contacting us about the team and I'm optimistic for the season. Lisa and I have decided to run quite a competitive team...so all you laxers reading this better get running!! And on that note, I really need to start running again. Whooops for getting lazy.
Hmmmm....any other updates. Nalumon if you're reading this I'm now climbing at about the US equivalent of a 5.9. I'm stuck there. I complain everytime we go and I can easily finish the 17s and get stuck on the...what's the word..tricky part, can't remember the climber's term for it... on the 18s. Jason then reminds me I climb once every two weeks if that...so I guess he has a point there. But I'm determined to get up to at least a 19/20 here which would be about a 5.10 b/c. I'll let you know how it goes. I've convinced him to let me borrow some of the Vic Uni club's climbing equipment to save costs on going to the climbing gym, so once I have those I'm hoping to climb at least once a week, possibly twice!
I think that's about all for me. I'm home Aug 17th, up to K-town shortly after (well, my cottage, but frequent trips into Kingston).
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