It is definitely time to make some serious updates to kirilisa.com, particularly to Faces of Nadia.

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I will not go into our experience with U-Haul this past Sunday. Suffice to say, my sonnet was well-deserved. Suffice to say, we did not get a truck at all, period. Suffice to say, it is a 60 mile round trip from our old place to the new, and it takes 5 trips in my car alone.

Suffice to say, there is one U-Haul truck in the lot with a good, Kirilisa-sized dent in the passenger side door.

I definitely must learn to control my temper.
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In brighter news, ->insert hidden entry here<-. No, honestly, in other brighter news, The University of Queensland has accepted me into their Masters Program in Ancient History. Of course, as soon as I got the acceptance letter yesterday, I went into a panic and decided I have definitely applied in the wrong course, what was I thinking???!??! I should have applied in Anthropology!... No... Geology!! Astrophysics? Wait, that's totally off, I hate Physics. So right now I'm in a big fuss trying to figure out if I have applied into the wrong program, because I don't actually have a burning interest in Ancient Greeks and Romans and Egyptians (I would like to learn about them, and study Ancient Greek again, yeah! but I don't want to do thorough research on any of them) -- my interests go farther back than Ancient Greece and Rome.

And yet, I went again to UQ's site, and I couldn't even find that they had a Masters in Anthropology. They definitely have a Bachelor’s, but no Masters! And the PhD’s seem to be completely open, there is no list of flavors of PhD you can achieve; I guess you can pick your own research absolutley, as long as you have a professor to work under? And then I vaguely remembered that the reason I applied in Ancient History in the first place was because I couldn’t find a Masters in Anthropology when I first searched the site.

I don’t know how this stuff works. Maybe Ancient History is fine, and I can do that for a year and a half while defining to myself what my PhD research is going to be? Is Ancient History a decent background if my ultimate aim is something more like Social Anthropology but I’m not exactly sure what and I don’t believe that humankind is very ancient anyway?

Maybe this costs too much. AUD $8000/semester (USD $6100). Are PhDs always stipended? What’s that word?

Oh, I’m all frazzled about this. Someone tell me something useful.

How do I hate thee? Let me count the ways.
I hate thee to the deepest black abyss
My soul can reach, I wish that I could piss
Upon the creature who called forth thy days.
My hatred for thee sets my heart ablaze;
Ten years of life I’d give to press the kiss
of death upon thy brow; t’would be remiss
Were I to patronize thine foul place.
Incompetance does not cease to amaze!
How can one such as you outlast us all?
I would that you would wither from my gaze;
Collapse; break down; to utter ruin fall;
Burn up; and let the winds of blessed change
Blow you forever from this earth, UHAUL.

(I thought of you as I was writing that, hyperfl0w)

I do love starburst.

The Free Stuff Giveaway has worked brilliantly. All sorts of people have descended like vultures and picked our apartment clean. All we have left for giveaway are two wooden chairs. The stuff we’re going to have to haul to Salvation Army will fill only one small U-haul box. Yeah!

Yesterday was my last chamber music. I’ve been playing with that group for well over a year now — it hurts me to leave them. I know I’m not going to get around to playing violin for a long time now… Oh well, I left a legacy, in the form of donating all of my dead or almost dead plants to my pianist’s wife, who is one of those brilliant plant-people that just breathes on plants and they grow. I gave her the Hawaiian plants Mike and I picked up almost a year ago in Hawaii… she promised to send pictures when they bloom.

My poor apartment looks so horribly bare and lonely! I love this apartment a lot (despite its stiff price) and I am sorry to leave it. Still… adventures await!

Voice-recognition software is freaky. I HATE talking to a robot woman as if she’s a real person. Makes me wriggle with distress.

Man, this pet business is complicated. I just called Song to find out what their rules are about pets. It turns out (and I should have remembered this) that there is an embargo on having pets in the belly of the plane when the temperature is below 45 degrees or above 85 degrees (BLAH. This is *BOSTON*. When is the temperature ever not one of those??) And they never take pets when it is 20 degrees or below, so I can only get a note from the vet saying that all pets can handle 45 degree weather, and cross my fingers that it doesn’t turn into an oddly cold Thanksgiving with temperatures below 20 degrees.

Of course, I can’t ever actually remember a Thanksgiving where it was below 20 degrees, but then, I could always be unlucky.

Now I’m talking to Quantas. They only will ship pets on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, and, although there is no embargo regarding temperatures (THANK goodness), they do not ship pets during the holiday season. But they said December 4 or so would be okay.

****** Comments on Quantas’ bizarre shipping policies ******

Now Quantas seems to charge in a very bizarre fashion. They don’t actually weigh the pets/crates, they do it by the dimension of the pet’s crate. Fine, you say. What is odd, is that once they have the dimension of a crate, they figure out the volume and (arbitrarily, consulting some chart they have) decide that that volume is equivalent to some certain weight in kilos. And then they charge you $X per kilo to find out the final price.

—> $1807, bare minimum.

***** End Comments *****

I must say I thought it would be worse, but that’s still pretty steep.

It looks like it is going to cost exactly as much to ship 3 pets as it does to buy two people tickets. $1800-1900 for the pets, $1800-1900 for the people.

I’m really damn tired. I hate moving. We aren’t actually movint till this Sunday, but for the past month I’ve been selling things on craigslist and slowly packing up or getting rid of our stuff. I’m trying to get it down to really minimum since we can’t store anything at my mom’s place and I don’t want to have to pay so much to ship stuff to Aussie.

Anyway, now, in this last week of living in my lovely apartment, the reality that for the next 3 months I will be living with my mother is hitting hard. It’s a funny kind of… panic… I feel. Even though Zaubi will be there too, and we will have my old room in the basement as well as the rest of the basement to ourselves, so we’ll be somewhat removed from the rest of the house, it’s a stressful thought. I was terribly unhappy living there all through my childhood and teenage years, which is why I applied to MIT when I was 16 and left home shortly thereafter! I only hope that old ghosts won’t haunt me too much.

The actual moving is such a pain in the ass! I’m so sick of lifting boxes, taping things up with that horrid plastic tape, and writing emails to set up appointments for these craigslist assholes to take something or other. Yesterday morning we walked around our neighborhood and postered that we were having a huge free stuff giveaway every night this week and please come over! Last night therefore a lot of people came over and relieved us of a lot of stuff. If the next few days go well, people should take everything and then we won’t have to haul much to Salvation Army

I don’t have a lot of faith that U-Haul will remember our reservation (U-HAUL SUCKS) but we shall see.

Ugh, ugh, I hate moving. I’m so fucking grumpy.

If I buy you all food will you come lift boxes for me?????