surprise! I'm still here!

Well hello hello,

It's been a long while since my last update. The guilt's getting to me and so with no further ado, voila La Vie de Josephine, the return from the abyss.


Let's talk about vaginas. That's what the pink leaflet for the Vagina Monologues, now posted on my corkboard, shouts. Holly, Jenn and I went last week and get this: the power went out five minutes before show time!!! After 45 minutes of taking silly photos of ourselves (until a feminist in the backrow yelled at us to stop flashing... the camera flash that is) we began to think the show would not go on. Luckily the cast decided to proceed with a handful of flashlights. And so, in almost complete darkness, the actresses began to shed light on the too unacknowledged subject of the vagina. Among many amusing accounts, supposedly based on real interviews, one chick with a buzz cut (and dressed in a busty, spiked, black pleather dress and wearing slabs of red eye shadow) did a scene on moaning. I'll leave that one to your imaginations. The power did eventually come back on: the actress said "and THEN my husband had an affair," (the theatre lit up) and the audience Oooed, ahhed, and applauded. Ironic?

Besides talking about vaginas, I've also had the good luck of taking a few getaways. A weekender to Byron Bay (where Dennis slept in the hostel shuttle van because he couldn't figure out how to open the door to our room in the middle of the night) and a daytrip to Burleigh Heads beach on the edge of the Gold Coast were both memorable.

Five days of hiking on the Overland Track in cold Tasmania beats them both though. Ron, Holly, Jill and I flew down to the southernmost part of Australia, Tassy, and hiked hiked hiked... and played with a pregnant wallaby named Rodriguez. In total we walked about 70 kilometres, which I'm pretty proud of because we're talking constant ups and downs, a couple of mountains, mud, patches of rain and snow, and best of all we did it all with 20 kilogram packs on our backs. Everyone warned us to buy thermal underwear, boots, and gators, but of course we decided to wing it. So while all (and I mean all) the other hikers we encountered wore such gear, we became known as the crazy Canadians in jeans and runners. One day we walked 25 kilometres (it took us a solid 8 hours) but this cost us some arch and knee ligament injuries so after that we eased it up to 3-5 hours of hiking per day. At night we slept in (cold cold COLD) wooden huts, wrapped up with all of our dry clothes and huddling together for warmth. We also ate a lot of chocolate. This is probably boring you so I'll cut it here. Suffice it to say it was a challenging, AMAZING experience, but I wasn't complaining when we finally got to take a shower, even if it was in a trailer park since the hostel was full.






Back in Brisbane, heaps of other sweet stuff has happened as well. Damn, I really should have been keeping this blog updated... In short...


There was the masquerade boat cruise--a scenic cruise along the smelly Brisbane river with a DJ and all the tacky dance moves you can fathom.

There was Union Ball at the golf course...


















And there was Race Day--a day where all university students get the day off school so that they can get dressed in their snazziest outfits, drink champagne, and go to the horse races!

















That pretty much sums up the big stuff, though I'm sure I've forgotten something... I'll try to throw stuff on here more often so you can hear about the smaller things that would otherwise slip my mind...

As for now, my superhero duties call... Up, up, and away!