This was by far my most tiring, busiest, and most fun weekend in a while. Here’s how it panned out:

On Saturday, my amazing driving instructor picked me up from HHRay’s house for our 8:30 am driving lesson. We limited the lesson to an hour because he knew I had to be in Fremantle that morning and practiced parking. I actually did quite well and am starting to feel like maybe I won’t become a safety hazard when and if I ever get my actual license. I’m still doubtful that they’ll want to unleash me onto the roads of Perth, but we’ll see.

I then quickly got ready in 20 minutes or so and HHRay’s dad’s girlfriend was kind enough to drop me off at the Cockburn train station. I caught up on much needed sleep on the bus and when I finally reached Fremantle the weather was just getting seriously hot (well, seriously hot until real summer actually kicks in).

Wayne flew in from the U.S. that Friday and we were meeting in Fremantle before our trip to Rottnest on Sunday. I knew Wayne to be a great hummus lover, so decided to feed the addiction by bringing him some hummus as a Perth welcome gift. Now, by this time the hummus wasn’t exactly cool. In fact, I wasn’t sure if it was even still edible due to me carrying it around for 2 hours in the heat. Wayne tasted the hummus with a suspicious look on his face, sniffed, and declared that it was “OK”. By this time anything better than “It’s gone off. I’m going to die.” was great in my book.

We spent the day semi-exploring Fremantle, pretending to be related, honing our Ninja skills, eating ice cream, comparing iPhone apps (my collection was, of course, superior), wearing zombie masks, and drinking some sort of blueberry tea. I think the biggest surprise of the day was that Wayne had no idea what a Snuggie was. What kind of a fashionista is he? Every reputable girl knows what a Snuggie is, even if she doesn’t have one. Wayne, for your convenience I made this so that you would be able to picture how great you’d look in a Snuggie:

Anyway, when I got back to HHRay’s house the weather was still nice and warm. I suffered through a soaking wet bear hug as he got out of the pool, we had dinner, and I caught the bus back to my house as HHRay went out clubbing with some friends. I hadn’t eaten except for ice cream all day, so the dinner didn’t exactly fill me up and I ordered something delicious and nutritious from Eagle Boys pizza.

I tried going to sleep early, I really did. But the Rottnest 5km Fun Run which I’d be running tomorrow (the same day as the Rottnest marathon) was keeping me up. I made sure to prepare everything for the day: triple check the dates and times, make sure I had our tickets, grab a sufficient number of pins for the race numbers, make sure the race numbers were in their envelopes, make sure my running clothes didn’t suddenly shrink or stretch overnight, and all of that other good stuff. I even went for a 2km run just to make sure everything was in working order.  Finally, after an episode of Stargate Universe and a movie, I managed to fall asleep at about 2am.

Fast forward to 10:30am – start of the race. By this time Wayne has successfully managed to convince a lady that he’s my father and we have picked out our two “targets” for the race – the people we’d be striving to beat. His was a fast and fit-looking young man. Mine was a 10-year-old looking girl.

So the race started and I took off – or rather shuffled off – on the course. At first I was thinking “Hey, this isn’t as hilly or windy as I was expecting!” The wind never ended up bothering me, but I was so wrong about the hills. Slowly I felt myself starting to climb. I ran up the first “big” (in my book) hill, but had to actually jog/walk up the second. Thankfully, the ascent in the first half of the race could only mean one thing on the way back – a downhill run. At one point I saw Wayne pass me, not looking tired at all. I thought about being jealous, but then remembered that I could never be jealous of someone who’s never seen a Snuggie and continued on my way. I looked something like this (reenactment):

By the end of the race I was sweating profusely, my legs felt like lead, and I struggled to keep up my breathing pattern. All of a sudden I see this flash of vampire-like skin approaching in the distance and realize that wow, this must be Wayne coming back. It was. He ran with me the rest of the way, which wasn’t as long as I expected, and I got a good sprint in toward the end.

Wayne finished something like either 6th or 11th, we won’t know until the results are posted on the WAMC website (which they have been for the Marathon, but not for the Fun Runs as of yet). We ate, had a rest, and then decided to hire out some bikes and explore the island. I learned that Wayne takes great pictures of himself. I can never get the angle just right when I’m camera-whoring, but his form and lighting was excellent:

We tried to get a photo of us feeding a quokka  a leaf, but by the time we got my phone out and turned on the camera the quokka was no longer interested. So Wayne took a photo of me accepting a leaf instead, so you can see what the quokka would look like if it wasn’t being so snobby and rejecting our offering:

Other than that we also climbed a sand dune:

I make fun of him, but we’re both pretty much just as pale as each other:

Anyway, it was a fun weekend and I was thoroughly exhausted by the time I got home. I had it easy, though. Wayne had to do a 2-hour talk straight after we got back from Rottnest.

That night I was very happy to see and make up with HHRay, but there’s a whole another story there so I’ll leave it for another post. We still have some things to resolve, but it was great to see him and get my dosage of cuddles.

Also that night, I realized that I forgot to put sunscreen on my back, so my shoulders are pretty burnt (though thankfully not peeling…my skin isn’t the peeling kind I think, it just goes red). I’m so happy that I have tomorrow off. I need a sleep-in. Not to mention my laser eye surgery consultation appointment is tomorrow, so it’s going to be very exciting!

Overall, I had an excellent weekend.

I am half-relaxing half working. What a tiring, but good, day. Had a driving lesson early in the morning. Met up with a friend whose name I will not mention because then I won’t be able to talk about incriminating “froggy” evidence I have on him. Hung out in Fremantle, in the heat (37 degrees today!). Then got back, had a dinner with HHRay (after a very wet after-pool hug), bussed it back to my house, took a 2km run, had a shower, got my things ready for tomorrow, ordered some sides from Eagle Boys, and am now working/relaxing/watching Eagle Eye.

It’s such a nice, relaxing, warm night.

When RB tweeted that Tweetie 2 is out for the iPhone I immediately bought it. I bought it because 1) I heard great things about Tweetie 1 and have never used it before and 2) I am on a crazy app buying spree which is probably going to leave me broke in the near future.

My very first impression of Tweetie 2 was not good. I put in my Twitter details and when the app sent me to view my tweets, a keyboard immediately popped up. I could not make this go away to view my tweets properly, but what’s worse, the keyboard looked completely screwed up. It was still usable…if you managed to find the keys properly.

I restarted the app and have not been able to reproduce this problem again, but to be honest I didn’t exactly try very hard. I couldn’t be bothered uninstalling Tweetie 2 and re-installing it again to see if the issue would pop up once more.

Anyhow, I haven’t seen this happen since that first launch of the application and since then I’ve been loving it! Tweetie 2 originally looked much more bland than the free version of Twitteriffic I’ve been using until now, but it is much quicker and more polished looking. I love the Nearby filtering feature, where you can actually view tweets near your location on a map or in a

list. I loved watching people Tweet in the city as I did my shopping earlier today.

So far I would say the $3.99 AUD I spent on Tweetie 2 is well worth it, despite the freaky keyboard issue on my first launch of the application. I’m just aching to submit a bug report somewhere, though.

Steve Jobs is back! I’m so happy that he’s OK. He looks very thin, but not bad. After listening to him talk about how he wishes we were all generous enough to register to be organ donors I feel like doing it.

I finally get to take HHAries to taste some of the best burgers ever at Jus Burgers in Leederville. He is going to die of awesome burgerness. My run today may not have been successful, but my dinner sure will be. This is actually the first Saturday in a while that I actually got to relax at home and do pretty much nothing. I had a (successful) driving lesson at 8:30am, then a (not so successful) run, and since then I’ve been lounging around, watching TV and working on the site redesign. It’s so nice to have some free time.

Years ago, back home in the U.S., I read four books by what would become one of my favorite authors. The author’s name is Amelia Atwater-Rhodes and she wrote the first of the four books when she was 13 years old. When I moved to Australia I searched everywhere for these books, but nobody had them in stock. Finally, I ordered all four in a “quartet”, compiled into one book, from amazon.com. These books are meant for a younger audience, but they never lost their appeal and bring back great memories. They revolve around a world of vampires and witches who hunt them, humans who are turned into vampires or become unwilling prey.

These books have always made me wish that vampires were real. What is it about them that attracts people so much? I’m not a fan of the Twilight books at all, but I am somewhat of a fan of tales about vampires and werewolves. I think what attracts pepole to vampires so much is the power and the ‘taboo’ around them. Vampires embody all that is evil and wrong, and that’s what makes them so appealing.

As I think more about this I look up more and more information on modern vampires. What I’ve found so far has suggested that modern vampires firmly believe that they are human and most modern vampires are psychic vampires, feeding off of people’s energy (also known as “psi”, “chi”, “life force”, etc.). I have done a lot of studying about this type of energy and I, like most of these psychic vampires, don’t believe that it is anything magical or paranormal – I just think that science hasn’t found a proper way to measure it yet. It’s a very interesting topic overall and I’ll need to do more reading about it.

Ugh, finally. Apparently my last Wordpress theme linked to Malware. The only way I could see to get rid of it was to change the theme seeing as no matter what I tried (or whose help I enlisted), I couldn’t find the offending code.

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Keeda and I cycled over 8km today. We were both so tired by the end. 

Went to HHRay’s uni friend’s pool party tonight. It was really fun, but tired me out so much. We were playing volleyball in the pool…I know there’s a name for that sport, but I’m too out of it to remember right now. My team was on the deep end, where I couldn’t even reach the floor on my tippy toes. I must have swallowed a gallon of water. It was fun :)

I was in Carousel with HHRay last night and bought a green Clam Shell pool for Keeda to wade in at home. HHRay was very sweet and carried that huge thing through the whole shopping centre for me. We were quite a sight to passersby.