Do you ever have too much time on your hands? Suddenly, all those bits of boring paperwork and telephone inquries seem like really attractive ways of biding time.
A paper I submitted got accepted for presentation at a conference in May. I’m really excited. The 10 minutes on the podium and 5 minutes of post presentation ‘polite grilling’ will be awful but :
- it’s nowhere near as traumatic as an all day clinical exam
- it’s going to be at the Hyatt Regency Coolum
- the resort was featured in InStyle earlier this year – so it must be chic if not good
- Mr SSG is packing his bag and golf ‘sticks’ and coming along for the 5 days
- Mr SSG has heard nothing but good things about the resort from the ‘guys at work’.
Except that there is the tedium of deciding what to wear and filling out audiovisual presentation sheets. How on earth am I supposed to know what version of PowerPoint the work computers operate on? I thought pretty old was an honest answer. What on earth is a 4:3 aspect ratio anyhow? It sounds like we’re talking art not scientific data presentations.
The other worrying thing about this conference is the change to drug company sponsorship materials. Someone in their infinite wisdom has Banned Drug Company Stationery. This means my annual chance to replenish my pen and sticky note supplies will no longer exist. Usually the tea breaks at conferences are a maze of drug rep stalls – all decked out in drug advertising material, colour co-ordinated bottles of water, snacks, pens, sticky notes and quirkly toys. It gave me something to look at, besides the buffets of hotel food.
So I probably shouldn’t be wasting my sticky notes on jobs like this.
Has anyone else got renewal advice from their health insurer recently? It’s a 5 page document of easy reading tables. Basically, premiums rise about $6 per month for 3 paragraphs worth of reasons. I panic whenever I read the waiting times for various aspects of the cover. A morbid fear of presenting at St Elsewhere’s Private Hospital with an emergency and then realizing I’m not covered and then being shipped out or facing a hefty up front bill washes over me.
Because of my Luxury Of Time situation, I rang up my provider. It’s all good – I’m covered for everything and anything.
I love starting a sentence with ‘because’. It’s Breaking Rules and would have deserved a red pen circle in Ms Watson’s Year 10 English class. Ms Watson Rocked. Somehow she managed to harness the wandering, angst ridden and self absorbed minds of Year 10 at SSG’s alma mater Ladies’ College and create intelligent and articulate writers out of the majority. Even if they had ratty long fringes as their preferred hair ‘style’ and rolled their ankle socks and wore black hair ribbon rather than bottle green. Eventually, the school board gave in and allowed black hair ribbon as an accepted hair ribbon colour. Kelly, I don’t have an old school photo, so this memory is all that I can contribute.
Ms Watson was the first person at school to suggest that Perth wasn’t the centre of the modern world and that The West Australian tended to take a rather parochial view of the world. This was before we had widespread internet access and the explosion in electronic media. It was Revealationary teaching.
I imagine teaching English now would be vastly different. With the passion for self expression online, perhaps creative writing comes more easily to the school girls of today? Albeit in sentences less than 140 characters, or else in snappy paragraphs punctuated professionally with photographs either of their own or from established media sources.
Perhaps the most useful piece of paper of the day was another new menu to add to our Kikki K takeaway file. This is a prized addition because it is a Chinese takeaway menu. Also, despite both the lord and lady of SSG Manor both having Chinese names, neither of us can cook authentic Chinese food. The things I do with Vietnamese Noodles or Thai Curry Pastes do not translate to my ancestral foods. Donna Hay, you need to do more Chinese in your magazine. We are going to have to try this place out soon because it’s the first takeaway menu we’ve seen that features One Fish Two Eat. It’s a fish dish where half a whole fish is fried and the other half of the flesh is in a stir fried sauce.
Happy Wednesday! Be safe and responsible for St Patrick’s Day. Refrain from ‘Irish Colloquialisms’ if you are not Irish yourself. Wonder at the reason behind Peter Costello’s attack on Tony Abbott and also the metaphor of Mick Dundee our Longest Serving Federal Treasurer used. “That’s not a paid maternity leave policy, THIS is a paid maternity leave policy.” I wonder what Ms Watson would make of it.