When I Turned 21...

HEY!

Allow me to explain.
...
Nope - wait a moment-

Ok I'll get on with it.

Well the other week it was my birthday! Yes! I turned 21.

But not only that - my older sister Courtney gave me one of the ultimate gifts that I've always wanted but never thought I could have.

BEHOLD! The Bamboo Touch n Draw! The ultimate in drawing devices! With it I can actually use it to draw like I would with a pencil and paper - except ON A COMPUTER! It's so cool, I can't tear myself away from it.

Thank you Courtney!! :D

Now I can do all my drawings through Photoshop and it'll be awesome!! I just need a little more practise though (as you can see from the anime pic - sorry I rushed it!).

"But what about Paint?" you may ask.

I honestly couldn't give a damn. I sorry to all you Paint lovers out there but for me - there are several reasons why I am glad to upgrade. First of all - IT TOOK FOREVER to do a single picture, until I got used to it. But it was so frustrating and I could never get it to look the way I wanted it to, especially when I was drawing detail. And because of this I refrained from blogging because it was so tedious to do a few drawings. Furthermore, my computer mouse is about 1/5th the size of my hand - seriously, it's tiny. It's bad enough trying to draw with a mouse let alone when your entire hand engulfs it. I've broken it several times too. Plus, Paint is too... pixelly for me :[ and my anime pics always turned out sucky. Foo.

But now I'm freeeeeeeeeeeeee!

So on the weekend of my birthday I went up to stay with my Dad and Stepmother. My 21st party was going to be held after I finished my placement.

Anyway, I was being absolutely spoilt all day. Everything was great aside from the weather - which was AWFUL! Rain, thunder, lightning and the wind - ohhhh the wind! But we didn't let that dampen our spirits. First of all we went out for cocktails in the city followed by the most amazing 3-course meal I've ever had. However making our way from place to place was a bit interesting.

When we got to the restaurant we had a delicious meal as mentioned before. However, I have to make a special mention to Dad when dessert came around. We all shared some gelato with some candied orange for garnish.

It was a class act.

Afterwards we finished the night off with more drinks. We caught a cab home and the driver was somewhere in between absolute maniac and accelerator psycho - but I was in a state where I didn't really mind so much.

= psst - I was drunk =

The next day Dad and I went shopping! I needed a dress for my party the following weekend. It took about four hours and I still couldn't find anything. Also, after trying on dress after dress I was starting to get a little irritated.

Honourable mention to Dad as well, who was able to stick by me all that time and was insistent that we find an awesome party dress.

Ok, it wasn't the $400 Alannah Hill dress that I wanted, but I really liked this one too. And it is completely unintentional that it is blue and my blog character always wears blue (I don't always wear the same thing in real life, that dress is just one of my favourites).

I originally wanted a dress that was strapless but...

Well, at least not enough to hold up a strapless dress.

The night of my party was great. People kept buying me drinks regardless of my drunken state. I don't think it was as sentimental as it should've been - but I was just glad to kick off my heels (literally - I couldn't stand them after an hour and switched to my ballet flats) and party with all my friends.

Honourable mention to myself for somehow being able to get changed into my pyjamas when I made it home at 0430hrs. I think I undressed myself like this:

I've done quite a bit throughout my life so far - I may not be famous (yet) but I plan to cover many stories in this blog - so stick with me please! I have a lot of my friends to thank for all those great (and questionably strange) experiences and I hope that we can continue to make many more awesome memories in the future.

Anyway, so now I am an adult. There should be no excuse for me to behave like a kid any more.

Theatre Days

I am towards the end of completing my final placement for my Bachelor of Nursing. As you know (I hope) I am working in theatre, which is the area where I want to work in the future. It's fantastic, I am absolutely loving it. There's so many exciting things going on and I'm learning so much from the amazing staff. I have seen some awesome and quite gory operations (which doesn't bothere me) and have even gotten to 'scrub in' for heaps of procedures! And yes I get to wear scrubs!

For those of you who aren't theatre savy, to scrub in is a process in which you prepare yourself for an operation. You might have seen parts of it portrayed in movies or medical shows where you see the surgeon scrubbing the heck out of his hands.

So it is easy for you to follow, I'll show you what it means to scrub in in a graphically and highly stylised manner.

Yeah - that's how you do it... sort of.

When you are scrubbed in, you are sterile from the neck down - and you have to stay that way.

You cannot touch anything that is not sterile. So if you have an itch - you have to deal with it.

Also, when you're scrubbed in, everything seems to jump out at you - trying to break your sterility.

So you pretty much have to be on your guard all the time and never lose focus.

Before I was able to scrub in, my job was separating the paper from the plastic which held the instruments. The hospital likes to recycle everything. I'm pretty good at it now.

Now I am in my final week and I've gotten to do HEAPS of stuff. It's so great. I feel really good about becoming a theatre nurse now - eeyay!

I would talk about some of the procedures I've seen but they're pretty gory - like when I saw all these cysts and then the surgeon accidentally popped one and it explo- ... sorry.

My apologies also for the long gap in between posts. I thought once study was over I could find more time to blog - but working 10 hours a day kinda takes it out of you (this post also took a lot longer than I anticipated). All I wanna do is sleep and eat mountains of food and read volume upon volume of Immortal Rain. Ohhhhhhhh so good.

I'll finish this post with a picture of what I looked like after spotting a real hottie who was assisting the surgeon during a procedure.

I never saw him again after that *sniff* Oh well, I move on quickly ;D

Oh and here's a picture of me as Nurse Caz - the super hero. She's armed with the Mood-Launcher. Awesome.