yay for lack of work

Let's see. The weekend before last was the Tommie Ball. We all got dressed up and headed to the Hilton for the college version of a prom with alcohol. It was a lot of fun, an interesting night to say the least. The next day I woke up for the 8AM football game and for once ND won, yay!

Last week I actually had a ton of work! Mostly because I didn't do anything the previous week or weekend and had to finish everything before Friday morning-- but still I pretty much worked non-stop from Monday to Thursday night, ridiculous.

This past weekend all the ND kids went to the Albany area on our last ND-sponsored trip. On Friday, we left at 730 in the morning to start driving down south. We stopped at a Forest Heritage Center, had lunch at a cute little English-y place, and went to a really interesting integrated Aboriginal and White-culture museum. In the evening, we arrived at the lodge we were staying at in the Porongorups. It was really nice, groups of 4 had Chalets to stay in with lofts and a balcony with a great view of the hills.

On Saturday we spent the day climbing Bluff Knoll in Stirling Range National Park. The views were pretty impressive, it was really cool. The hike was a lot of fun; however, I was really tired (I think from lack of sleep the previous few nights) so I struggled up the seemingly endless stairs quite a bit.

Sunday was another mostly bus day but included some fun stuff too. While the others were at church, a bunch of us helped get rid of some invasive species from the bush, helping out the Australian environment. Later in the day, we did the Tree-Top walk (420-metre-long steel-truss walkway that is 40m above the ground, in the tree-tops), which kind of made me tingle all over. It was built to protect red tingle trees which have their root system very close the surface. They are only found within a 15 kilometre radius of Walpole, so it's a big tourist destination. The view was really pretty, not only of the trees, but in the distance they were doing controlled burning which resulted in a pretty amazing sky. After the walk, we were able to go into the “Ancient Empire” where they have some older tingle trees that have been through a fire. The inside of the trees was burned and only part of the sides, so you could go inside them, which was neat.

Yesterday I took my test and turned in my paper to finish off my massive amount of work. Now I should be all set until next week, though I should get a start on the work I didn't do last week (because I was busy with the stuff due Friday and yesterday) and the stuff that's due next week. Ah, but it's so hard when no one forces you. Today was soo nice out. I skipped my afternoon classes and headed to the beach, which was so nice. The water was quite warm and the waves were massive! They scared me a bit sometimes, and even knocked me over a few times. Also, I learned a few things about my frisbee skills, namely that I don't have any, I should work on that.