heat addled...

Warning, whiny emo post coming up. {via}

I feel flat, demotivated...

I went to school this morning until 11 when I bailed. I'm sick of telling people that I still don't have a job, still hoping, 50 rejections to my 52 applications, yes, hopefully I'll hear from the school I volunteer at, yes, I'm keeping my phone close at hand, no, they haven't called.
But you'll be right, you'll be right.
And anyway, isn't there a teacher shortage?
Yes, unless you're a graduate.

There's a job I should apply for today but I can't bring myself to do it. I haven't had so much as a look-in, so a general sense of apathy has settled, and I've adopted a 'why should I bother?' mantra. Which is terrible, I know, but that's how I'm feeling.

And I feel worse, still, for digging myself into a kind of hole. I didn't apply for summer jobs when I finished Uni because I had relied on doing emergency relief teaching, which now, thanks to bureaucracy, won't happen... still, I booked a trip to visit Dad in January which, if I hadn't done, I might have been working the last couple of weeks, taken the trip to NZ in December, come home and worked somewhere all throughout January. As it stands,  I have such a mishmash of time before February (when school starts) that certainly nobody will hire me.

I went to lunch with my step-mother & step-grandma and ordered calamari & a pot of green tea. My part of the bill came to $28 and I just about cried in the damn cafe thinking I should have gone with the cheap salad instead.

And it's hot today, muggy. I came home, read a book, and went to sleep for an hour. I only got out of bed because I knew that if I kept napping, I wouldn't be able to sleep tonight.

It's seriously getting to a point where I want to write this as my cover letter:
To whom it may concern,

I'll be short and sweet. I love kids. I love teaching kids and watching them learn. It lights up my life. I become friends with all the kids I teach and I help them do well. I want to be the very best teacher that I can be, so that the kids I teach grow into amazing people.
If this doesn't sound like the kind of teacher you want, that's ok. If you want someone passionate and absolutely committed to teaching and learning, give me a call, I'd love to hear from you.
Kind regards,

Emily.

Think that'd go down well?
Maybe I should do it, just to see what happens...? ha.

(might need a little refinement first, not sure it's getting my message across 100% yet (eg. I'm frustrated because I'm awesome and no one will give me a job and I really just want to hang out with a bunch of kids next year and do some really cool stuff so please give me a job sir, thanks)... but it'll get there)

Sorry for being such a downer, y'all!

how engaging...

On Saturday night, Nic and I drove up to rural Victoria for the engagement party of our two closest friends, Jason (my Man of Awesome) and his fiance Damien. It was a 1850-1919 theme so that they could wear top-hats and tails, and was set in an old town hall built in 1870. The party was fun though there wasn't much dancing (until I took over as resident DJ), just mingling and chatting. It was a family affair, with Jason's sisters cooking most of the food, all of us pitching in to set up and pack up, we did folk dancing and the Dads gave speeches...

Anyway, I was talking to Damien near the end, and said how we hadn't done our engagement party yet, we'd been engaged over a year, and were having the wedding in November- could we still do an engagement party? He didn't seem to think there'd be a problem, and that we might as well... I'm still not so sure! I mean, we're planning an engagement picnic lunch at a local park, in March. So, there'll be 8 months until the wedding... That being said, i don't think we're planning on doing hens/bucks nights, so maybe we're allowed to have another sort of party, especially as we're having such a small number of guests... Thoughts?

I did make up an invite, though... just in case.

Click on it to make it bigger. 

ageing, kitten speed...

The other day, the radio played a song by the band 'Hungry Ghosts', local to Melbourne.

It was amazing- instrumental, full of feeling and prettiness and awesome.

Unfortunately I think they disbanded, but anyhoo. I actually bought their album in itunes (I tend to download... er... moving on) and a song is playing at the moment with Eastern European influences, full of guitar and accordian and violin. This song could be the soundtrack to a movie. Possibly a sad, Nazi-era movie, but a movie none-the-less!
Oo! Look. Here's the song they played on the radio:

I do love me some 6/8 time music.

In other news! We decided our colours were too nautical and changed, again. We were tossing up some possibilities, and I was at school today where the kids were colouring in their 'life-cycle of a whale' diagrams... and two girls had used green, blue (the colours I wanted originally) and purple. And it was -pretty-. So. Two more tubs of paint later, books have been painted, and I think we might be getting somewhere.

Also, you guys... Darcy is nearly a fully sized cat now. He's 7 months old. It breaks my heart- they grow up so quickly. :(

Look! (you can click 'em to make 'em bigger, if you want)

I think he's very handsome, though.

More pictures of semi-grown-up-kitten below the cut.

so the diy bonanza begins...

So, since we now have a location, we decided to start getting things rolling on the wedding side of things.
Contemplating colours, we considered macaw birds, rainforest-type things, and then I found this picture:

{via}

And I liked the colours- the dark blue, the turquoise, the yellow. I put them into kuler, it gave me colours. I figure they might be a tiny bit seaside for our rainforest-room wedding, but whatevs. We also want a splash of purple in there. We're not really going traditional, here, we want to brighten up the room.

So then we started thinking about us. About our lounge room full of books. I'd seen books used as centrepieces before, I figured we go down that route.

Cue spending $40 on $2 books (that's a lot of books) from op-shops, and a heap more money on sample pots of house paint in said colours, glue, brushes and sponges....

We now have books drying in the colours. We figure we'll stack them up, maybe 3 or 4 in a pile, then put some tea-lights or flowers on them. 

We also got some tall & skinny cookbooks, which we'll glue most of the pages together (leave some select few non-glued and 'white wash' over the writing and pictures) and in the middle, have a ribbon marker, and the menu. Menus in books! How novel. (get it? That was an UNINTENTIONAL pun, y'all).

The last project I started working on this weekend was a wacky idea based on this image:

And I thought: yes! We were already going to incorperate plastic animals into the setting somehow (the wedding is at the zoo after all). So we bought a pack of 5 wild animals for $1 (so, if we have 50 ppl that's $50 on place-holders + some card stock and better textas than I used below) and I painted them- one test white lion who has taken FOREVER to dry, and one test silver gorilla, who I wanted to come out more chrome than shiny, but oh well, I think he looks more 'classy' this way.

Cos, y'know, having plastic animals feature at your wedding is high class.

All I had were whiteboard markers, so the writing on the cards looks terrible, and I don't know if I'd have coloured or white card, but you get the idea. Test run! Also, the lion needs another coat of paint, so he's a bit splodgy. But you get the idea.

When the books are dry, I'll stack 'em up and see how they look, too. It's all happening! How exctiting!

jobs, dresses, spiky-things.

That's an ECHIDNA. He was at the zoo. I like them- they're one of my favourite Australian animals.

Things are coming together around here, despite the fact that I still don't post as much as I'd like to. I suppose I feel a bit like I don't know what I'm writing for, and have a bit of the 'who cares what I write?' hat on at the moment. Blogs, like lessons, need purpose (gag). So. Riddle me this: Should I write more about teaching and kids, about wedding planning (which is finally starting to kick off), or a combination of the both with some gardening and cooking thrown in? I think I still prefer the latter. This feels like some kind of ongoing conversation with myself. The blog, that is. Maybe that's ok.
But it feels rather self-absorbed.
OH WELL.

730 days and counting...

On Saturday, we'll be meeting with the functions woman at the Zoo. Unfortunately between the time I emailed her, and the time she checked it, the 10th of November had been taken. BOOOOO. So, we're going with the 3rd of November because in Melbourne, we get a public holiday on the first Tuesday of November (for a horse race can you believe it???), so that will coincide nicely with any anniversaries while we're still in M-Town. (I just made that up. It's kind of lame).

Speaking of, it's Nic and my (not sure if that's grammatically correct) 2 year anniversary (of being together) today! Go us! We made it through moving straight in together without dating, putting up with my mother, worrying about whether we were both rebounds, having housemates move out on us with a week's notice, and having very little money while I've been studying... and of course all the good stuff... But it's been an action-packed 2 years. We've done a serious trip together (6 weeks in North America), added two furballs to our little family, moved house twice, gotten engaged, I finished my degree, changed jobs, quitted jobs...
So. Yay for us!

In other news...
I find out in 7.5 hours if I'm qualified to be a teacher or not.... eeeeeeek.
The good news is that a job has come up where I did my rounds/where I volunteer. Although there's a lot of stuff I'd like to change about the school and how they do things, they seem to be pretty switched on, flexible, and they don't teach from worksheets or text-books which is awesome. The teachers there are already talking like I've got the job. Unfortunately since it's a government (technically) position, I have to go through the whole thing with the application and everything so... I'm hoping my app doesn't stink so bad that although everybody else has rejected me, they won't reject me as well. If they do, I'll know I'm really doing something wrong!!

photoshop mad...

So you know how last time I said we'd decided we were getting married at the zoo? Well, turns out our ORIGINAL date, 10/11/12 was still free. Me being me, however, I needed to make sure there was nothing better. Nothing against the zoo, I just have to exhaust all my options to be completely comfortable in the choices I've made so I don't spend ages second guessing myself.
So we went to some really adorable venues today- like, super rustic, very Australian and probably what we'd originally be looking for... BUT... they didn't do anything for us, we kept saying: the zoo is better. We love the zoo.

SO....
Zoo it is!!!

Which means I've been spending the last 3 hours or so photoshopping like crazy (because I can), since we have overseas people we'll want to get save the dates to earlier rather than later... I want to keep hush hush about the zoo till the invites go out cos it's cool, so our random STD mightn't make sense but hey, it's fun and I think it's pretty. I think we'll get it printed on post-cards and then glue magnets to the back so people can put it on their fridge.
Infact, that could mean that the superfluous stuff (eg, everything except "Save the date!" and the date) could possibly go on the back...

Anyhow, if you'd like to see what I've done, click below... If you have any suggestions, if you think I've gone overboard with the fonts/borders/glowy stuff, tell me.... I'd appreciate it!

Arg! This thing is becoming real, FAST!!!