How the hell is a girl supposed to carry all her stuff in just two suitcases?

11:40 pm - Where there's a will there's a way.
You know, I think this could be close to my last entry for a while. I'm packing my computer up and sending it home (along with the fridge and radio) on Sunday. I don't know when I'll be back online for good, though I will try to check email sporadically.

We had the research group farewell lunch today, and we went for Vietnamese. It was nice and laid back, though we had a little too much red wine. My supervisor suggested that I should forget my accommodation at Kansai and catch the bullet-train to Tokyo and then spend the night discovering the local night life. Tempting though it was, I think I'll stick with checking out the "temple town" instead. Lunch extended from 12:30 pm to 3 pm, and then we sauntered back to the lab for a slack afternoon.
I don't have too much to say at the moment, I have a few things to do tomorrow, but I may as well wait for them to happen first.

I have three main groups of friends. The college friends I met upon arriving in Canberra so many years ago, the DX friends who are the most recent, and a bunch of others who I will call miscellaneous (it doesn't mean I love them any less). I feel confident and bold amongst DX, and yet nervous and shy among my college friends. I hate to sound self-explanatory, but it's because the new me is happy and confident, while the old me was shy and afraid. I don't have much time left with any of them alas, the only positive spin I can put on it, is that maybe now with all my new friends I can be my true, happy, confident self.

The long goodbye.

Don't worry, I can't write for too much longer. Yesterday my college friends and I went to a pub in Ainslie. It was Heather's birthday and a farewell for me. It was nice and relaxing except for one of the guys who is still homophobic towards me which hurt a little. We drank away, and then went back to Burt St to have ice-cream and watch "Shrek" which I hadn't seen before, but which I thought was very funny.

Today is the Australian Federal election, so I guess I'll go vote and get it out of the way. I suppose this could serve as an entry-point into a discussion on the relative merits of democracy, but not today dear I have a headache.

7:40 pm - Today has been ok. I went and voted and then went to the lab to check my email. I put my phone numbers up on my web-page since they won't be valid after Tuesday, so who knows, maybe I'll get a mystery caller. I went into Civic and couldn't find much to do, though I ended up buying the latest copy of Fortean Times and a copy of "TCP/IP for Beginners". I figured I'd geek out for a bit, but I had to meet Maddy at 12:30 pm for lunch. It was nice and we wandered around shopping till about 3 pm. I was tired, and so I crashed out for a while.

Miscellaneous late-night thoughts.
Well, one thing I won't miss about living here is having to walk through the common room to get to the shower.
Howard has won, he played the race-card to get in, and that really sickens me. Refuges don't want to be refuges generally, and instead because they don't have the same skin-colour it's Ok to send them back to terrible suffering and the prospect of death. Fear of "the other" is a deep instinct in humans, but our gift of mind and conscience means that we are obligated to rise above it if we wish to call ourselves "humane".