the continuing saga of free comedy festival tickets

yesterday after my meeting i went and shopped a bit and then had lunch wth the boys at consultel.

this meant that when i finally got home around 3pm i had heaps of work to catch up on.

in the middle of that i get 2 emails.

1. you have won tickets to "Rebecca de Unamuno" at 8.30pm TONIGHT

2. you have won tickets to "Sister She" at 9.45pm TONIGHT

well thats cool and all but i am sure that comedy festival shows normally go for over 1 hour and are often located at lots of different places around melbourne.

i called up the festival to find out. Yep, the first one was at teh town hall and went for 70 mins, and the other one was at the Swiss Club, 89 flinders lane. Not so close, and only 5 mins between the shows

So while i am trying to catch up on my work, i am also trying to figure out who to gve these tickets too cause i cant do both and which one i want to go see with who.

Finally i sorted it out that I would go to the first show with Megumi, and Matt would go to the second show with a mate of his. We sorted out whose names would need to be left at which venue and we thought that was final.

But no, these things are never that easy.

I get a call from Kate about 10 mins after i had settled everything

I won tickets too, i am going to the Sister She show. You better come too!

So now everything is back to front. And i cant get in touch with megumi again to change the time.

Then, i get another email saying

You have one tickets to Gavin Baskerville at 7pm TONIGHT

Urgh. thats only 1 hour away and i am still trying to catch up on my work.

I madly call everyone i can think of that lives closer to the city than i do who might be able to use the tickets.

But alas, everyone is eitehr too busy or too boring. Rowan's excuse was that he was wacthing porn. (But he tells me today that it was his flat mates who were doing that and he was cooking dinner. sure)

So those tickets are wasted. I hate to waste free stuff...

But finally i get back in touch with megu and we organise to meet at 8pm anyway so she can tell me about her trip to sydney, and i drive matt and his mate warrick in to collect their tickets for the 8.30 show which were under my name and the tickets for me for teh 9.45 show which were under his name. complicated?

All in all it works out and it turns out that kate went to both the 8.30 show and the 9.45 show and still made it in time. So i could have done both. but then i couldnt have caught up with megu.

I finally crawled into bed around midnight. and i am going to do it all again tonight. I won tickets to a show called Geisha Lala, and kate had given me some tickets to a show by Michelle from NOVA cause she couldnt go, but i am going to give them to my parents and go to the Geisha one with James.

Gosh life is complicated when you are a uni student and win free stuff. I really feel that noone else enters these competitions for me to keep winning them. i dont usually have that much luck. I enetered all of the comps for the comedy festival (about 12 of them) so i might still have some free tickets to win yet. SO far i have one 5 double passes and counting.

the curse of daylight savings and the melbourne comedy festival

On the weekend i was the only person home to change the clocks because everyone else was up at Bonnie Doon camping.

so i changed the one on the microwave, the one in the kitchen, my alarm clock, my mobile phone

did i forget anything? i didnt think so

fast forward to tuesday night. i had dinner with julian at a new thai restaurant in croydon, reminising the 5 months we lived in bangkok together.

earlier in the afternoon i had gotten an email from Tabula Rasa, the uni magazine, telling me i had won some tickets to a comedy festival show. problem was that this show started at 11.15pm!

i phones around trying to find someone to join me cause i wasnt going to stay out that late by myself.

julian had plans aften dinner. james said he had to be alseep by 11pm or he got sad in the morning. kate was the only one who took up the offer, cause if it started at 11.15pm, she still had enough time to watch all of All Saints before having to drive into the city.

After dinner, I looked at my watch and estimated it would take me 45 mins to get into the city, and cause i was meeting kate at 11pm to pick up the tickets i would need to leave by 10.15pm.

somehow i got this all very wrong.

i was sitting out the front of the big tent next to fed square where the show was to be, and there was a guy calling out to remnd people that the 9.45pm show was just about to start.

9.45? i looked at my clock and it said 11pm. what was going on?

i looked again and then realised the stupid mistake i had made. when i chanegd all the clocks i wasnt wearing my watch because i was just about to go to the gym. and then on monday i didnt wear my watch because i went for a bike ride up the mountain.

i am very sily. i dont know if i should blame the blonde hair or if that is just a cop out.

anyways, i filled in the 1 hour i had to kill till kate turned up by sitting in starbucks reading a newspaper.

the show itself was great. it was called Laughapalooza, and had lots of different comedians, all singing and dancing. People like GUD (Paul mcDermot), Scared weird little guys, Eddie Perect, Josh Earl, Tim Minchin etc.

Most of them were very funny. I loved Josh Earl's song about why you shouldnt watch the movie "memento" with your girlfriend.

But some of the songs went a bit far and crosses the line. Eddie Perfect sang about things such as Gay Marriage, Torture in Iragi prisons and also the Tsunami. He might be a good singer, but it wasnt very funny the way he portrayed it.

But nontheless, it was a very good night and i didnt get home till 2.30am, and had to wake up for a meeting at work at 9.30am in the city. needless to say i missed my train and got there late...

but where free comedy festival tickets are involved, its the price you have to pay. even if you do make a fool of yourself for forgetting to change your clocks back after daylight savings ended.

what personality type am i?

Kate has been doing some serious procrastinating today. she came up with this website which defines the personality types of us all

I decided to make it a poll (call it my new experiement cause the other one didnt work so well) and see what my loyal readers think of me. Its very hard to make this decision about oneself, you get a bit biased to what you want yourself to be, as opposed to what you really are.

Please click on the links to check out each type and find out whcich ones suits me best.

Thanks

What personality type am i?
	ISTJ
	ISTP
	ISFJ
	ISFP
	INFJ
	INFP
	INTJ
	INTP
	ESTP
	ESTJ
	ESFP
	ESFJ
	ENFP
	ENFJ
	ENTP
	ENTJ
Free polls from Pollhost.com

dont you love easter

i just ate a whole elegant bunny in one sitting!

i feel a bit sick now...

"wanna race?" and near misses

i went for a ride this morning up the mountain. on the way through the basin, a bike track follows the side of the road.

as i was climbing the small hill to the poast office (offical start of teh climb up the mountain) a few little kids were riding along the bike track section beside me

they were probably around 10 years old, and one yells out to me "i'll race you to the top"

there was only about 300 metres to the post office so i thought for a moment, do they mean the top of the mountain? thats another 7km climb!

but then i thought, they are only 10, i dont think they planned to go much further than the shops to buy lollies. so i slowed back a bit to let them get in front. and i got stuck at the round about anyway so they ended up beating me.

i had a little rest and then contiued my climb. once i got to about the 1km to go mark a couple of guys came racing up behind me. one yells out to "make sure the guy behind doesnt catch up!". i am not sure how he planned for me to do this. but he didnt look like he was going to beat him anyway so i didnt dwell on it

after getting to sassafrass, i decided to do something new. i took the road that goes down to ferntree gully instead of the olinda one i normally do.

wow, that is a steep hill. lucky i was going down it. i was worried my brakes might give way, like the story peter was telling me about on the weekend when he was going down a hill up there and his brake pads just fell off. he ended up down a gully and his bike crumpled up and had to dink on the back of someone else's bike all the way back to glen waverly. it could have been the same hill...

the rest of the ride was uneventful until some stupid lady almost pulled out on me from a petrol station, she looked went to go, looked again and crept out and then you finally saw me when i was in line with her bumper

and then 1 second later a huge toorak tractor tries to pul in front of me acorss from the middle of the divided road. (memories of my spill on mt dandenong rd come flowing back), lucky he pull on the brakes about 2 meters away from me and i still had to swerve heaps to miss him. He ended up in the middle lane of the road so i wasnt imagining this.

People just dont look. i make sure i wear very bright colours when i ride. you cant miss me in my fluro pink "t-mobile" top. some riders are asking for it when they wear all black.. especially up the mountain where it is shady and dark.

But I hope now that these two people had near misses with me today they will pay more attention in the future. but i might be dreaming here.....

at least all of you, my loyal reader must be getting the point here. look before you pull out!

what to do when you are home alone

the easter long weekend. there has been a long tradition in my family to go up and spend the whole weekend at bonnie doon. seeing i had only just been tehre last week, and i had heaps of work and homework to do i opted to stay home and mind the house.

but after only about 8 hours of work and homework, i was bored. and with no plans eventuating for the friday evening, i chose to drive the 150kms up to join the rest of the family in time for dinner

perfect timing, the steak had just been put on the bbq and the chicken was almost done. you can see that we are a religious family :) with the no meat on friday thing....

all i can say was that it was very tasty steak.

the rest of the night was spent getting smokey arpund the campfire, looking for koalas (we found one in the morning) and drinking wine and port.

this weekend i got the loft all to myself. nothing like the 5 people that were up there last weekend. and it was nice and toasty warm. the rest of the "kids" we out in tents behind the house.

i only planned to stay for a little while and i made my way home again at around 4pm and here i am now. back to a lonely house. but this means that i should be able to get lots of homework done tomorrow before the troops come home again.

before i left today we headed down to the mansfield easter market in search of a new egg flipper. mansfield is only about 30mins away from our shack but i have hardley ever been there. only time i think i have been there is whn i go up to buller, never when we are camping.

then it was back to make pancakes with the new flipper, and i think i am the bbq pancake queen now.

later on dad had this grand plan to go gold hunting. our property had once been a major gold mining area back in the days. so he went to the bottom of the largest mine and came back with some buckets full of dirt.

and this was were i left them this arvo. arms deep in muddy clay and trying to use the gold pans to wash away all the dirt to find that elusive gold... i wonder if they will find some...

now i have to figure out what i will make for dinner. the plan yesterday was to cook up a mean green thai curry, but that might be what i have to make tonight.

pre easter drinks

went down to the glenferrie last night for a few drinks with the girls.

As Murphy's law predicts, as soon as i got of the train and was walking towards the pub to find the others, it started to pour down.

There were some charcters on the train. It must have been a special day or soemthing cause i have never seen so many people carrying slabs of beer with them when they travelled.

The pub itself was very full. For some reason i think the gender split was about 70% guys! Drinks were cheap. only $3 a glass of champagne or $4 for spirits. i am cheap so i went the champagne option.

Us girls managed to get a pool table and took control for quite a few games. my pool skills lead a lot to be desired, but i managed to get a few in. didnt make us win though. It was so hard to play wit so many people all around the table. The tables are right up nea the bar so everytime you go for a shot, you have to ask about 10 people to move out of the way.

But what the the funniest was this guy who kep coming up to our table and trying to tell us what to do. I thought he had reserved the table next and was trying to hurry us up, there was a $2 coin on the edge, but apparently it didnt belong to him. So he was just a bit of a wanker. looked a bit like tony abbot, not that he is a wanker, i actually feel a bit sorry for the man

anyways, i decided i had better catch the last train home again so kate and erin walked me to the station on the way back to the car. ran into a guy from the japanese class of the year below us, but i cant remember his name.

But now i had better get back to work... working on good friday! yuk! but someone's got to do it.

thats "Miss highest mark in HBI231" thank you very much

i dont like to blow my own trumpet or anything, but apparently i got the highest mark for "foundations of international business" last semester. I got a certificate in the mail today saying so!

But isnt it scary that the highest mark for this subject was only 87/100?

we went to bonnie doon

Departing from my house at around 12.30 in a four car convoy, we made it as far as the shops and didn't leave there for another hour cause "it takes time to prepare for only a night away in the sticks".

after getting all the lollies and pancake mix we needed and a bit of lunch it was off in the convoy again for a 1.5 hour drive to the township of bonnie doon to pick up some ice

this was not as easy as it sounds. First we lost one of our convoy cars only 100 meters from departing safeway and then when we were getting ice every bag we took had a hole in it and there was ice everywhere!!

next stop was the shack. About 15kms out of the town down a dusty dirt rd and into the bush. Luckily for me I was in the subaru and not kat'es '82 lazer. I am amazed it made it actually

first job on the list was to crack out the beer and drinks. The boys did that very well, actually that was about all they did. While us girls went arpund cleaning up the house and campsite looking for dry wood to make the fire

we made a great fire actually. And we cooked a great dinner on it. jacket potatoes, snags, kebabs, hamburgers, veggie burgers etc.

The other group of people who came up separately arrived just as we had started cooking. They had planned to arrive earlier, but had take a few disastrous detours down a very dusty and corrugated dirt road. They were not happy with my directions apparently. But they made it, albeit 1.5 hours late

we went for a few walks. One to the bee post, which was quite an adventure. Sadly there is no bee post anymore. But we did find half a car.

after dinner it was time for a few games. Everyone had put in for my birthday pressie and among items such as some new pj's, cocktail recipe's and laneway bar cards, I got this new game called "sexdrive". the rules were a bit hard to understand after that many drinks, so we made up some of our own. It involved asking people sex related questions and if they got it wrong they had to perform a charades like task. Very funny, but I think you had to be there..

more drinks and marshmallows were in order after that. and lots of chit chat around the fire. and some goss which is most likely being discussed on kate's blog. highly commended awards go to various people who know who they are.

in the morning things were a bit odd though. It turns out some people didn't get any beds to sleep on and they slept in their cars. I told them they should sort out bedding before they got drunk, but did they listen?? Of course not.

that group left at around 8.30am for some reason without giving me the money for food, and also leaving behind one person who had come up with them while he was asleep, so I was a but peeved. But the rest of us kicked on till lunchtime and ate pancakes and bacon and egg muffins till we almost exploded

the trip home was very sleepy, and I don't remember much of it, but I had to do heaps of homework when I got home. yuk. I got a bit done between sleeping and eating and showering off the bonnie doon grime.

I had fun and I hope everyone else wasn't too scared of the idea of roughing it in the country to not want to come back again. But I think the next trip definitely needs to be to someone's beach house.

we're going to bonnie doon

fresh back from my bike ride, it is now time to go on my long awaited road trip to bonnie doon for my birthday

check back in a few days for all the juicy goss and photos!

the ride!

wow. 600kms later and i am still alive.

and i made it all the way with no trips in the SAG wagon and no flat tyres at all! those bindi eyes didnt beat me. but some people in my team got over 4 flats in the 6 days

the course was 1094kms and there were 4 teams. between us we had to cover all of the roads. our team was allocated 600kms of that cause we were the strongest. 11 men and me.

i felt i had to prove myself so i made sure i was up the front a lot of the time and didnt take anytime off to sleep in the bus while others were riding. a couple of the guys did so i felt pretty good about making it the whole way

the route took us through some pretty crazy country. we started in doncaster really where the buses and cars transported us to the start line in kangaroo flat (5kms out o bendigo).

day 1 we rode around 96kms to charltom
day 2 was 104kms (to make up for the 4 missing the day before) to balranald
day 3 was only 70km to griffith cause the 46 degree heat was causeing a few people to almost fall off their bikes
day 4 we made up the difference by riding 120km to finley, it was also 46 degrees in the shade but we were not yeilding today
day 5 was another 113km to rochester
day 6 was the hardest 90km i have ever done (head winds) to bendigo

each day we had lunch and dinner with the local rotary club and stayed in little motels. luckily they all had swimming pools and a lot of us jumped straight in with our cycling nicks on.

some of the lunches we had with local schools were there was no rotary club. one school only had 11 students!

as part of the yellow team, another one of our roles was to visit all the local holden dealers to take photos. holden had lent us 3 cars so we had to repay them in PR. it took up a bit too much of our riding time though. one day we had to visit 2! all up we went to about 6 of them. but we will be in all the local papers next week.

the highlight of each evening was the "chardonay club", the bar that came with us to serve us thristy riders and drivers wine and beer.

the exchange students were great too. there were 57 riders all up and 13 of them were students. we only had one of them in the yellow team and he can really ride!

i think the ride raised around $40,000 for the Australian Rotary Health Research Fund. They have been doing the ride for 18 years and have raised over $500,000 in the process.

for me it was more about the ride, but i mamaged to raise $400. $250 of that was from my boss for putting the words "www.mandip.com" on my helmet and the promise i would get in as many photos as possible. I got the nickname "movie star" at one point cause every time we went past a photo stop i was at the front of the pack

it was lots of fun and if i am in the country next year i will definately do it again.

one week

so for the next week i will be off on a 1000km rotary bike trek around northern victoria raising money for health research.

wave or toot if you are driving past. we are the people in the yellow jerseys and blue bike shorts coming soon to a town near you

i wont be back till thursday arvo so until then, happy blogging and happy riding!

???

alrighty then..

momix

when to see momix passion last night in at the state theatre with my mum. it was very cool.

i got the tickets through the concierge at the windsor so i could get what are called "house seats", ie the best seats in the house.

when i went to pick up the confirmation fax on monday they had given us the wrong ones, we wanted to be up in the circle so we could look down onto the stage. mum is short you see. we tried to call while i was there but i was in a rush and noone was there to answer.

but when we went to pick up the tickets from the box office, the concierge must have kept trying to get through after i left cause we ended up in the circle after all! and only one row back, and there was noone in front of us to block the view. lucky! now that is service, and i dont even work there anymore :)

and the show was amazing. what people can do with their bodies! i am glad i went.

talking of taxes..

did you know, that if you work in a field that is related to your course while you are studying, you can claim back all of your uni expenses such as text books. but you cant claim back your hecs..

i learnt this from my trip to the accountant today to finally find out how to be a "contractor". its about time, i have been doing this job for the past 3 months and still hadnt figured out what to do with my tax...

all i have to do is hold on to 20% or so of it to pay to the tax man in july. and i dont have to pay GST cause i earn less than $50,000.

your tax paying dollars at work

For some reason unbeknowns to me, i have been recieving sms spam from a bar at Knox that i have never been to. nor do i want to ever go to

Now being a marketer, i know my rights when it comes to email spam, but i wasnt sure how that corresponded to sms spam. I know that you have to give the option to opt-out if you dont want to recieve the main anymore

Well this sms didnt have that option, and you couldnt even reply to the sms cause it came from a faked number.

So i went to the trusty tool that is known as google and discovered this site.
The Australian Communications Authority are the ones who deal with this and they have a nifty form on their page where you can fill in your complaint and details.

I filled them in not thinking that i would ever hear from them agai, but only 2 days later i get this reply. They are actually going to do something about it for me! Go tax payer funder systems! They do work for the people sometimes.

Now i havent recieved another sms from Lou Lous as of yet, but time will be the test to see if the ACA works.


Dear Carly,

Thank you for your complaint about Lou Lou Bar. To enable us to make
further enquiries and to help to stop these messages and provide the
following information:

1. The exact full text of one of the messages, including sender details
and date received;
2. Confirmation of the mobile number you are receiving the messages on;
3. Your mobile phone carrier (i.e. Telstra, Optus, Vodafone...); and
4. An indication of whether or not you consent to the ACA passing on
your mobile number to Lou Lou to ensure that you are unsubscribed.

Thanks for your time. We look forward to your reply.

Regards,
Anti-Spam Team
ACA

strange fashion happenings

Now i dont like to admit that i was watching star struck on TV last night...
but i noticed something interesting in the paper this morning.

Host of Starstruck Catorina Rowtree was wearing exactly the same dress on the show last night as she did to the TAG cocktail party that she apparently attended yesterday.

Now i am guessing that the show would have been filmed a while ago, so is it just a coincidence do you think?

Strange. It was a odd kind of dress anyway, a bit too fancy for that kind of show.
and for some reason her cleavage just didnt look right.

weather worry

Was there a storm on friday night? or did i sleep through it again.

On the way home from the city on saturday morning i had been sleeping peacfully on the train (as peacfully you can on those seats) until i got to Ringwood station and was rudely awakened by an annoucement

"Everybody out, Everybody out. All change. there is a tree across the tracks."

This is the second time this has happened to me. The first time the train actually hit the tree (i wasnt on this train luckily but was waiting to get on it at the next station)

I think connex should take some proactive steps and check out along the lines where the trees are looking a bit precarious..

we're going to bonnie doon

i was sending out some sms invites to my birthday party, and i got a reply along the lines of

"Who are you?"

I was sure that all the people in my address book would have me in their address book too, but still maybe i am not a popular as i hoped

I write back

"how many people do you know who have a holiday house in the aforementioned location"

Then the phone rings and a make voice on the end says (was expecting a female voice so i was suitably shocked)

"I still dont know who you are but I'll come to Bonnie doon with you!"

Thanks but no thanks. Only taking people i know and who wont trash the place. But i will have to check up on the real phone number of this friend.

akward situation #1

today i had a lecture with a teacher i havent seen since last semester

as i was leaving the lecture theatre he calls me over and tells me about how he read my blog!

apparently he found it by searching for a particular admin staff member's name (who now no longer works from swinny) and found my rant about how pissed off i was with this particular staff member and how they treated me one day when i had a problem with my course!

lucky i didnt say anything about the lecturer himself