Ruthie's Journal

Perhaps I should make that one of my New Years resolutions this year.  I do seem to make this resolution every year, however, and it never seems to work.  But this time it's been almost two years ... two years since I posted anything.  That's far too long, in my opinion.  I don't know how many of the people I have on my friends list still use this, as Facebook seems to be the most popular method of communication now, but ... I wanted to give it a try.  So we'll see, huh?

I don't really have much else to say tonight.  I thought about maybe giving my journal a new look, but I rather like the way it is now, and I can't be bothered going through all the options LiveJournal give now.  However, a few new icons would not be out of the question, and I'm also working on a couple of new mood themes -- both Doctor Who-related -- one for the tenth Doctor, one for the eleventh.  They should come soon.  Until then, farewell -- until I write again.

... but I've been really busy, and we still don't have the Internet at home.  I just wanted to let you all know that I am still alive and reading entries whenever I can get to the library or the shopping centre, I just don't really have time to write anything; and besides that, nothing really noteworthy's happening at the moment -- just working and living.  My laptop has unfortunately died again this morning, so although I shall keep checking it and trying to get it working again, I think it's time I bought a new one.  I shall see if I can loan some money and order one, until my term deposit matures.  At this rate I'll have spent it all before I even get it back! :P  Anyway, just wanted to check in, see how everyone was doing and let you all know that I'm still around!

I had an Australia Day playout with the band on Monday, so I came home for it; then seeing I was already around, I decided I might as well stay an extra night and go to band last night.  Am heading back to Melbourne this afternoon some time (provided all the trains are running, which they seem to be), so I'll update you all before I go.  There's been a little bit happening recently.

First off, Friday we got all moved into the new place.  We had a bit of a team going, consisting of me and Christopher and Hannah and her mother and two brothers, so we did pretty well.  I had to go in the middle of it to an interview at the Pancake Parlour (it went pretty well; haven't heard anything yet, but I forgot to bring my charger home with me, and my phone died yesterday, so when it's charged, who knows ... ?), but I helped as much as I could with carting stuff inside and helping unload the trailer.  I think everything's in the new place now, but I still have to sort out my own room, because I haven't been there the last few days.  I shall do that when I get home.

Saturday and Sunday I was at the Australian Open.  My Dad had gotten some tickets for himself and Mum a while ago, but then work gave him some corporate tickets, so I got to go as well!  Mum and Dad's friends, Jenny and Paul, came on Saturday with their daughter Laura and Chris, Hannah and her mother came on Sunday.  And I got to go both days! :D  We saw some great matches, too.  Saturday we saw Serena Williams and Shuai Peng, Victoria Azarenka and Amelie Mauresmo and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Dudi Sela.  On Sunday it was Marion Bartoli and Jelena Jankovic and Dinara Safina and Aliza Cornet.  By far the highlight, however, was the last match we saw on Sunday: Roger Federer and Tomas Berdych.  Federer had a terrible start, being down two sets to love, but then he clawed his way back to win in five.  I must admit that I was terribly excited when I saw that I was going to get to see Federer play, having never been to the tennis before, and was rather disappointed in his performance in the first couple of sets, but he soon redeemed himself.  Then he demolished Juan Martin Del Potro in their match-up last night.

There are also now no Aussies left in the draw, our best hope, Jelena Dokic, having been beaten in three sets by Dinara Safina last night.  She did so well to get to the quarters, though.  Really.

Sunday night we came home, and I have been here since then, having only been out on Monday morning for the Australia Day breakfast with the band (they gave me a card to say goodbye), and for band last night.  It's too hot to do anything, and the only thing I'm not looking forward to is not having any fans in the place in Melbourne.  But such is life.  Next update, whenever I can.

Right, those icons and moodthemes I was ticked off about losing in that last entry?  I found 'em!  Well, not them exactly, but slightly earlier versions of them, which as far as I can see, I'm only missing the Wendy images I found since I backed that CD up.  Everything else seems to be there.  All the icons I'd made seem to be intact too; nothing seems to be missing.  Now I don't have to go through zillions of images to find them all again!  YAY!  Boy am I glad I tend to back things up more than once.  When I get back to Melbourne (as all my DVDs are currently in my room there), I shall continue with them.  Expect more moodthemes in the not-too-distant future.

Plus, Australia won the cricket today, beating South Africa, I have a bit of Lindt chocolate in the fridge, I have a job interview on Tuesday (and another one that I must e-mail my resume off to tomorrow) and I get to go to the Australian Open (tennis) on the weekend!  A happy Ruthie now.

So I've been living in Melbourne for the past week (more on that later), and am at home home for a few days while Hannah's off hiking with her brothers and Christopher's off to Canberra for a few days on Thursday.  I went in this morning to see what the go was with my laptop, as they've had it for almos two weeks.  It was ready, apparently, so I'm currently in the process of restoring and fixing it up.  So far, so good, except that for some reason a couple of the CDs I backed things up on are telling me they're blank.  So I may have lost whatever's on those, unless they'll come up on Christopher's laptop.  I've yet to really thoroughly explore what I may no longer have, but I know that the Doctor Who Christmas special from last year is gone, and all my e-mail data doesn't want to transfer, so I've lost all the e-mails I had saved.  Hopefully there's nothing really, really important there.  My resume is safe, as are my screencaps and the story I was writing, so I think it should be okay.  I will explore properly what I might no longer have throughout the evening as I check things out and re-install all those programs I backed up.

Otherwise, I'm really enjoying my time in Melbourne.  It's a really fantastic location we've got; 5 minutes walk from the train station (and about 20-odd minutes into the city), 5-10 minutes drive from Chadstone (where I could spend ALL day -- it's HUGE, and has absolutely everything that you could possibly want/need to buy) and close to a supermarket and library, where I can use the Internet until we get it hooked up at home.  There wasn't any point looking into the Internet earlier because we were going to have to move.  Now we've found a new place not too far away from where we are now, and we can start moving in almost as soon as we get back, I think, so I think we'll get the 'net hooked up once we're moved into the new place.  Anyway ... have been to Chadstone a couple of times, and have been into the city for a look around.  Have been doing some job searching too.  When we were driving home yesterday I got a call from a guy at a company I applied for a job with late last year, so I have an interview on Tuesday!  Yay!  I'm really hoping something might come of it, because I'm starting to run very low on funds right now, and I need a job.  Quickly.  Have applied for about 10 more in the last day or so, so will give those a little time should nothing come of this one.  Hopefully won't take tooo much longer.

And ... Goddammit, I've been checking out the CDs that wouldn't work.  There's only two, one of which holds that Doctor Who Christmas episode.  The other one has all of my website stuff on it.  And I can't get it to work.  Anything I've worked on since I last backed it up is GONE, along with ALL of my LiveJournal icons, moodthemes, EVERYTHING.  I am most upset about that.  The ONE CD I would have wanted to work, and it's GONE.  I'm not so upset about the website stuff, because I haven't done all that much new stuff since I last backed the folders up, but I AM upset about all the LiveJournal stuff.  All those moodthemes I was working on particuarly.  They take SO LONG and I was SO CLOSE to finishing one, and now I'll have to go through all the images AGAIN and see if I can find them again.  AAAARGH!  Couple of days and I may not feel quite so bad about it, but right now I am VERY cross about this.  the ONE CD I would have chosen to survive.  I'm really hoping I might be able to get it working on another computer instead, but I'm not going to hold my breath.  Importantly, my story, resume and screencaps did all survive.

Think that's about all for tonight, so I'm going to go and continue being cross about this CD, and continue looking for the PackRat cards I still need.  I'll write again before I'm back to Melbourne.

A proper one, I hope.  I'm still using Christopher's laptop, because mine's gone into the shop to get looked at.  Thinking it's the harddrive, but we'll see when he calls me to tell me what's wrong with it.  $66 just to get it looked at and whatever else on top of that if it's worth fixing.  Yikeses.

Saturday just gone was the big moving day.  We hired a trailer and took all my stuff down to the new place in Melbourne.  I'm at home home at the moment because Chris and Hannah are off hiking somewhere, and I didn't really want to be alone for my first weekend outta here.  They're back tomorrow, so the plan is to go back with them, though I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to hitch a ride or drive myself.  I shall cross that bridge when I come to it.  I'm going to have such fun setting up my new room, though!  All the boxes are as yet unpacked.  Yesterday and today I have spent working in my room.  I'm culling: two wardrobes down to one because Dad wants to turn my room into a guest room.  So I've been packing/shelving things.  Almost done; just have a few more things I need to sort out.  Got a new quilt cover and sheets for my bed yesterday, too.  It's all very exciting!  I just need to update my wardrobe and find me a job!

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And now that I've finished that rather long-winded entry, I shall return to stalking the New York PackRat market for the goodness-knows-how-many Scrooges I still need for this set.  Back into the room tomorrow and off to Melbourne tomorrow night sometime.  Will be writing again soon.

First of all, I had to go to Maryborough yesterday, to the Highland Gathering.  The band was playing there.  That part was good -- I always enjoy that.  However, I did get sunburnt, so under my eyes, my nose and my shoulder are a little sore at the moment.  But at least it wasn't as stinking hot as last year, and the wind was a little more friendly.  And the icing on the cake is the fact that my laptop died last night.  Completely.  Says there's no bootable devices, or can't read the harddrive.  Wonderful.  Whether it was a virus or it just conked out I don't know, but I tried completely restoring it from scratch and that did nothing.  I have restored its very basic functionality, so I may be able to keep writing, but I haven't tested if I'm able to install anything, and I can't get onto the Internet because it's not recognising the wireless card or whatever it is.

And since I have no money at the moment (well, I do, but it's stashed away and I can't access it until March), goodness knows when I'll be able to get a new computer.  I'm using Christopher's at the moment, since he's not home, so I'll be able to check messages and things, but I won't be able to do any of the things I would do on my own computer -- cap, make icons, that sort of thing.  Maybe I can talk someone into lending me some money to be paid back once my term deposit matures.  *sigh*  And I'm moving to Melbourne very soon (although that keeps getting pushed back for some reason), and I have had no success in finding a job there yet, so the little money I do have on hand will run out very quickly.  And that's the state of my affairs right now.  Brilliant.  So if you're wondering where I am or why I'm not around, there's your answer there.

Edit: In my rant, I did forget to mention that most fortunately, I had been having problems with the laptop for a few days before it died, so I had the sense to back everything up before it went completely, so I haven't lost any of the stories, games or anything else I had saved on there. :)

Haven't written in this thing for a few days, so I just wanted to post something to update you all.

Things not looking so good on the job-hunting front at the moment.  I haven't heard back from any of the job agencies I've applied to yet, and if I don't find something to do very soon, I am going to go mad.  I have therefore 99.99% made up my mind to make the move to Melbourne and look for work there.  My brother and his girlfriend are currently looking for places there, and invited me to move in with them.  They almost had this really nice place in Armadale that we went to look at on Monday, but unfortunately didn't end up getting it, so they're back to looking.  I'm going to Melbourne tomorrow to visit my Aunt in hospital and will probably meet up with my brother then and chat to him about what the plan is.  I'm nervous and anxious but excited all at the same time.  So I guess we'll see how that goes tomorrow.  I think it would be for the better; there'd certainly be more work around.  And I think that I do finally need to get out of Ballarat.

Otherwise, things aren't too bad around here at the moment.  We had all the carpets cleaned on Thursday, so while all the non-major furniture was out of my room, it got the very best vacuum it's had in years and I've re-arranged the furniture.  I think I like it the way it is now.  Now I can access the bookshelves and one of my cupboards better than I could the way it was, and I got rid of a table, now just using my desk for my lamp and alarm clock.  'Course, when I move it's not going to make any difference to me, but I like it for now.  And Dad replaced some of the old, dirty roof stuff outside my window, so my room's a lot lighter now too.  I've been writing quite a bit lately too, which I've thoroughly enjoyed, having not done any writing for a long time.  Not that anyone's ever going to read it, but I do enjoy writing little scenes that just sort of pop into my head every now and then.  It's a nice relief from my worries of the world and my place in it.

Um ... I don't think there's anything else I wanted to say today.  I do have a bag of stuff sitting on my desk that needs to be sorted out (or thrown out as the case may be when I've had a look at it), so I should probably do that, then I might do a little more writing, or work on that almost done moodtheme I'm making at the moment.  Need about 20 more pics.  Adios for now, though.

Oh, and good luck to theminxiekitten and madfruitbat on their NaNoWriMo entries! :)

Perhaps "your" Doctor is Tom Baker or Peter Davison; mine is David Tennant, and this article here makes me very sad indeed.  Yes, big enough news to even make it to Australia!  Alright, so I've only seen two Doctors, with the exception of perhaps a couple of older episodes, but David has been my favourite by far.  He's not quite done, having ... four, I think, more specials to film for 2009 (mind you, goodness knows when we'll get those, or even if we'll get them, having only just finished with the most recent series here), but when the actual series returns in 2010, it'll be without Doctor Tennant.  I'm sure his successor, whoever that will be, will be wonderful, but I shall miss having David's Doctor as part of my Sunday night.  Now I shall look forward to the Chrissy special and the four others even more, knowing they're my Doctor's last.

In other news, I'm still looking for another job.  Have put my name down at a couple of agencies this week (one of which I had to go and do a computing test for yesterday), and plan to do more next week in the hopes of finally being able to make some more money.  I have enough to see me through, but it won't last forever -- especially if I'm ever going to get out of here!  I'm sure I'll find something; the whole process is just very, very frustrating.  All I have for now, so laters!

Happy 21st, Steph (girl__upstairs)!  Hope you had an awesome day! :)