How excitement!

It’s been a bit of a strange week so far & today I took a turn for an even stranger ending to the week. Locked myself in the house for both Sunday & Monday to finish rewriting Ch 6 before a day at uni on Tuesday. Tennis as usual that night & didn’t play well. Back again at uni on Wednesday which threw me off pattern a bit seeing that I haven’t spent that much time at uni in any week for a very long time. I was there to meet an academic who is based in ADFA (Canberra) but was travelling up that day for his own meetings. He squeezed me into his schedule to talk a bit about finishing off my thesis (unfortunately not ‘for me’, but more like ‘help me finish it’ kinda thing). Kev (supervisor) & I had talked about bringing him on board as a co-supervisor also so the more reason to meet with him. Now the end is finally very near. There’s just some paperwork to do next week to sign on the new co-supervisor & get on with it. The worst bit, though, is that I still haven’t had from someone who had they were going to give me an answer about 3 weeks back & I don’t know where I would be/how much time I would have in the next few months for the thesis. It’s simply unsettling. Hassled the guy again on Tuesday via email but still no reply. Is he off his nuts or just ignoring me & put me on the blocked list? Must investigate more next week.

Meanwhile, after pretending to be sick (mentally, obviously) so I could go to uni yesterday (some strange logic here, but it’ll make sense if you read on) I returned to WESTIR today for ‘work’ work. Still no word from freaking Penrith Council, i.e. can’t start on the new project --> sitting around without much to do. That part of my life has turned out to be a real boring drag, ‘cause you see there are only so many relevant websites & report that one can visit and, more importantly, endure. Without the go-ahead for this new project, we don’t have much to go on because the new Census data won’t come out for another 8 months. But luckily, as far as I can tell we’d get some answers from Council early next week & start delegation immediately. Have not been this eager to be given work in a long time.

But just as we were all settling back into the mundane boredom after lunch today an unexpected excitement came along. Barb was coming back from lunch & she saw black smoke coming out of a roller door next to out building’s entrance. Soon after the fire brigade arrived & Faye, who was taking a ciggy break at the time, was told by the firemen to get ready for an evacuation. Evacuation! Not a pretend 1, but a real thing! Haven’t had that for a long time! The smell of the smoke was not very pleasant anyway so it was better to be out than in. The alarm finally sounded & we made our way down the fire stairs & out the building. Stupid thing was that roller door wasn’t that far from our fire stair exit (probably about 20m, 25m max) & the smell of that smoke was just overwhelmingly intense as we exited & were rushed to the left (roller door on right). We haven’t even been out of the building 5 minutes, & needless to say haven’t even half finished joking about the situation (eg, “must be some disgruntled fatties trying to bomb Jenny Craig”) (Jenny Craig was the 1^st shop next to the roller door) than the roller door started exploding!! OK, so it wasn’t like the-plane-crashed-into-the-World-Trade-Centre kind of exploding, but a more like a quick succession of loud pops that went on for maybe 3-5 minutes. We were of course hurried off by the fire brigade to get away. The floor fire wardens stuck around to find out what was happening & we were told we wouldn’t be able to get back into the building for an hour or 2 (mind you, this was only ¼ past 2 even after all that excitement. It’s taking me longer to type this up than to live through the whole thing!). We decided it wasn’t worth it to wait around so an early mark for everybody! Yippy! Seeing that my ride wasn’t getting off work until 5, I had a bit of time to kill. I checked out stuff at Westfield, went to the library, checked out stuff at the mall, I even had time for a hair cut before finally decided to go pass the office again at ¼ past 4 to see if it was safe to sneak back in (It was). Oh my beloved Internet, how I missed you! Thus ended the excitement of the day.

Curtains.

The end.