Water Auditing and Synchronized Skating - Week 8 of Classes - April 23-29, 2007

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Alright it's getting to be busy time here in Perth, so I won't be able to update too too frequently. Hopefully once I'm on holiday in 1 month and 5 days (but who's counting?) I'll be able to get fully caught up. Until then, we continue to play the catch-up game...

The Water Audit Begins
On Monday morning I began my formal water audit of a building on campus as part of requirements for my water auditing class. I thought I had a great place to do it - a fairly small building, no pesky irrigation system to worry about, and only staff and grad students as my occupants. But of course, the truth came crashing down on me quite quickly.

I had been almost too optimistic when I had completed my flow rate tests the week before, and gone on this bright and sunny Monday to put up my log sheets. The occupants of this building had been given warning about my experiment, and really the task was easy. Just make a check in the appropriate box every time you use a water source (sink, toilet, drinking fountain, etc). You'd THINK they could handle that.

But of course the two weeks that followed were insanely stressful, and my biggest fear became entering the second floor men's toilets, where, without failure, there was always some sort of immature graffiti on my log sheets. There were also many instances of taps being left on, and complaints about how unhygenic it was to have pens in the toilets.

*sigh*

But the hard part is over now, all I have left to do is calculate and write up a report.

I may write up a list of some of the graffiti I received and include it in my report, so I can write that here when I get that compiled.

'P' Party!
While at Shaun's BBQ the Saturday before (see last blog entry) I was invited to a birthday party that was on Tuesday night this week. The theme of the party was 'P' as in you had to dress up as something that started with the letter 'P'. Quite an ingenious theme, I think.

I didn't have much time to prepare a costume, so I decided to be a Punk since I had most of the costume already. Some classics were the Pope (who was with a different girl every time I saw him...), a Priest, my friend Trista who was an excellent Penny Lane from the movie 'Almost Famous', Partly cloudy with a chance of showers (the birthday girl's creative costume), 2 pandas, LOTS of pirates and princesses, and, most disturbingly, a pedophile...

I took pictures, but they're on my film camera, so if you wanna see you'll have to wait until I get home!

Wednesday was ANZAC Day, Australia and New Zealand's day of remembering those who died in the world war's. As such, there was no school! Instead, everyone stays home and watches the historic...footy match. Seriously. What was it...Collingwood vs Essendon? Or was it Sydney? I'm no AFL (Aussie rules Football League) fan, I really couldn't tell you...

Gala Competition!!
We had an extra skating practice on ANZAC Day in preparation for our first synchronized skating competition of the year on Sunday! It was an interesting experience, seeing an Australian skating competition. We were against no one, since we are the only junior team in Western Australia. And we will be against no one until Nationals. But luckily there was a technical specialist there to give us a score so we could see how we're going (for those who don't understand the new skating judging system...it would take a long time to explain. Ask me in 1 month and 5 days.)

Our skate wasn't the best, a lot of the girls were VERY nervous and it showed. Some of the elements went decently but overall it wasn't the best we could do. We're hard at work training for the next competition which will be the first weekend in June. We'll be skating both our short and long programmes (we only did our short at Gala).

In the end we still got certificates for coming first so I put mine proudly up on my wall.

Hmm I don't really have pictures for any of this so I'll put up pictures of the building I did my water audit of.

EDIT: I copied some pics from our monthly newsletter, so I added the pics from Gala. They're pretty small since they're from a PDF document, but just to give some visual to the story...
Also appologies for getting so far behind, I'm at a very busy time in the semester right now. I'll start getting caught up after exams are done on June 13.

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Photos

Podium pic
We won!! Granted, we were the only team...