Random rant on taxis and NRMA

I was going to write about something exciting, but I have suddenly forgotten it 10 seconds ago. In other news, until I remember what exciting news I had to tell, I had wanted to blab on a little about taxi drivers in Australia.

I must say, I have probably been in an Australian taxi, in a total of probably 3 times in the past 5 years, and 2 of those times being the last 7 days. Mum decided to reverse the car into someone behind her by accident, so I had to go drop it off at NRMA and then pick it up again which NRMA paid for my 2 taxi rides (else I probably would never take a taxi). Now, this isn't meant to be a bitching session, I had imagined that taxi drivers were crazy drivers, weaving in and out of traffic, over taking everyone, accelerating and stopping really suddenly. But oh how wrong I was! I must say, you taxi drivers out there are probably the most patient drivers I have been in a car with. Only in a taxi have I followed a huge truck down a 70 road driving at 50-60 without seeing any form of impatience from the driver.

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As for a totally different topic, I picked up the car today from NRMA (thank you for being so easy to deal with), and I haven't been in my car for a week or two. I'm not a big fan of cruises so I'm not particularly missing driving all that much. I do, however, miss driving over this fabulous hill (it's actually more of an imperfection in the road, a little bump on the side of a road). Tung is probably the only one who knows about my childish love for driving over this little hill/bump thing, I could be in the worst mood, but this little bump in the road can always put a smile on my face (yes, I'm smiling just thinking about it). It's like a little tiny roller coaster or something, where you accelerate when you get closer to it, then take the foot off the pedal at the peak of the little hill, and go down and just feel a little thrill.

Okay, maybe I'm the only idiot out there who finds so much thrill and fun going over a little hill in my road, but I just thought I'd blog about it because I love it so much and it deserves to be known to other people. I'm sure you all have something of your own that you get thrills out of that other people may think you're weird for doing.

I still can't figure out what exciting news I was going to share, it probably wasn't exciting anyway...
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Skiing!

Tung and I went skiing last week, it was a bit of a last minute thing. I had wanted to go skiing since before the uni break started, and no one ever wanted to go with me, so I kind of gave up on that idea. Then suddenly a week before the trip my cousin rings me up and asks if I want to go as there are a few spots left in her ASOC (actuarial society) ski trip event.

We were to leave Thursday night (19th), get there around 9:30pm and have a night's sleep, head out to hit the snow the next day, have a full day of skiing (9-4:30), then another night back at the lodge, then head back out for another day of skiing and drive straight home after skiing, and get back around 11:30pm on Saturday night. It was a pretty awesome trip. Not the best lodge, or food, but I can't complain, it was a reasonably cheap holiday away, so the food and the lodge was expected to be a little dodgey, but we had our sleep and we were fed, so it was all good. The ski resort we went to was Selwyn, not as big as Thredbo, and only a fraction of Perisher, but was sufficient enough for a bunch of beginners like me.

The first night at the lodge, we barely got 5 hours of sleep (Tung and I), I was drenched in sweat from the highest setting for our electric blankets, with 2 sleeping bags and another quilt. The second night I froze to death with only 1 quilt and a sleeping bag on top (which does absolutely nothing), and the lowest setting on my electric blanket, got about 6 hours of sleep with continuous waking up in between. But, it's a crazy holiday, and was overall great fun.

The snow was great, we had great weather, a slight wind during our visit, but was probably a good thing to cool us down from hours of skiing. We experienced some snowing on the Saturday morning - nothing fascinating, just a bunch of tiny ice particles that you cannot even see, and it just looked like fog, but clings to your face a little. The slopes were a little short, and of course, nothing beats Perisher in terms of slopes, but we did manage to find a nice little triangle to go around in so it was pretty much continuous skiing until our legs were completely bruised, and my knee dislocated (snow plough! snow plough!).

If anyone knows of great snow deal packages, let me know for next year (I already know about Ski Kaos). I think a 2 day ski package is more than enough, if 3 day or more I'd probably like some other activities other than skiing.
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Who's looking at YOUR Facebook profile?

I'm sure that everyone who reads this article knows what Facebook is. If you don't, you need to get online more often, heck it's even in the papers and everywhere else. I admit that I am a person who likes to go snooping around in other people's profiles and reading things, cause - well, that's what it's up there for, you put it there for me to see, so I'm going to look at it when I'm bored. It's all innocent on my end, although when it's being done to me, I kind of feel disturbed.

Lately I noticed a bunch of randoms looking at my profile and who knows what other private things like photos and things (even though I set those to friends only). How do I know this? I have installed a little application a long time ago called fluff friends for those who use Facebook. It's a simple little thing where you adopt a little "pet" (an image) and you can pet it or (newly added) feed it. When the developers introduced the feeding option, they introduced a thing called "munni", which you get from petting these pets (whether it be your own or someone else's), and then you can buy food to feed your pet, or backgrounds to put to make your pet look pretty.

Now, there is the option to see who the last few people who pet it are, and who fed it are. This is where I have recently found some really random randoms petting my pet. I noticed a few persons who are on my list who never talk to me, decide to pet my pet for some munni (mind you, you people are REALLY sad, go out and get a real pet dammit!) which is all fine for me, but then the last few days I noticed people I don't even know pet my pet (damn these people must be pretty desperate for munni and should get a life). I found one person, who is a friend of a friend, so that's alright, but then there's a person who I have no friends in common with at all. I decided to do a bit of investigating, since I am able to look through their profile since they decided to piss all over my Facebook. I saw that this person was in a relationship, so my first reaction was to look to see if I knew their partner, whom I did not know, however, the partner and I have a friend in common - my work friend. So this random, decided to go through her list and pet all the stupid pets, and then went to their partner's list and pet his friends' pets, and then decided to go through his friends lists and pet THEIR friends list pets. Do you have no life woman?!

I also got some COMPLETE random who went around promoting his music and tried to add me as a friend, who decided to pet my pet. In fact, I shall try to undermine who this freak is, as we have no friend's in common. What do you know, we have now two mutual friends! Will pm a friend to see who the hell this guy is.

I had originally thought about removing this fluff friends application since it's completely useless and is only for novelty reasons, but now I think I'll leave it up there to see if any more randoms come and pet my dumb pet now that I've changed all my privacy settings and set them all to friends only.
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MenoPAUSE?

I was reading the new Fitness First magazine for winter which just came out, and there was an article about menopause. Just a random thought but, (I have not done any readings on menopause, or any research since my thought) I know it's just a name, but doesn't pause suggest that it's only temporarily stopped? Does that mean that my periods will pause and stop for a while and one day it'll come back - un-paused?

Yeah, just wanted to know where the name originated from, shouldn't it be more menostop?

Cityrail Havoc MKII....and my first Bridge Walk!

As the SMH reports, Cityrail services between Wynyard and Gordon were halted today after a section of roofing from a train carriage was blown off while travelling across the Harbour Bridge. The flying debris brought down power lines, causing rail delays.

This is not the first time that rail services have been cancelled on the north shore line, preventing commuters from crossing the harbour by rail. An earlier incident occurred a few months ago, creating huge delays as people had to wait for buses to replace trains.

I was at work in North Sydney today, and rather than join the crowd/mob of people (stretching around halfway down a city block) waiting for a train, a few workmates and I decided to go for a walk across the bridge. How exciting...it was the first time I'd walk across the harbour bridge.
We bypassed North Sydney station as well as Milson's point, taking only 30mins or so to walk from my building to Wynyard. I bet those poor souls waiting for buses at North Sydney were still standing in the cold by the time I was on a train.

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