Another weekend approaches!
Had a win with CASA today. I had my aviation medical certificate renewed last September, and the temporary one is due to expire tomorrow. Two months is supposed to be sufficient time for them to process and post the replacement certificate, but even after two phone calls it still didn't even appear to have been posted.
What else was I to do than front up in their head office today and not leave until they printed it off for me and I had it in my hot little hand? Without this certificate I can't fly, which means while Saturday is OK, I wouldn't be legal on Sunday - not a good situation.
Thankfully, the oompa-loompas were in a reasonable mood today (perhaps being a lovely warm afternoon, and a Friday to boot helped) and I was able to leave happy, and even before my parking meter expired!

Halloween is supposed to be scary, isn't it?
Although its not normally a festival celebrated in Australia, but Elli was keen to do at least something, and even though its right in the middle of final assessments, why not indeed? But we had to at least do something actually scary, instead of the disneyesque carved pumpkins and shakespearean witches, broomsticks and black cats.
So after dinner we hired a couple of movies; naturally they needed to be scary movies, so avoiding Hollywood's comparitively tame efforts we ended up with one Korean and one Japanese dark flick, brought along some refreshments and popcorn, and headed off to...
the faculty building at uni, no less.
As some of you would know, there is a fully decked out traditional Japanese tatami room in that building, complete with sliding paper doors, tatami flooring, and all the trappings of your traditional 'washitsu'. And there's a TV, so we could watch the movies.
Of course, watching those films isn't ever the best way to relax, and the Japanese take on horror movies - shared by the Korean - scares you slowly rather than with loud noises and violin shrieks. Slowly, but scares you rather more effectively. We were in particular scared by hearing the door to the tatami room, a heavy sliding door, slide closed while we were one floor above making popcorn in the microwave. Sure enough the door had closed in the time we were out of the room between movies - though we couldn't find anyone else in the building at the time - about 1.30 am.
We locked ourselves in after that.

Simply being in that room in the middle of the night was eerie enough - enough light filtered through the paper walls from city lights outside that the room was visible, but dark and shadowy. The sensory juxtaposition of seeing this room which is so very very Japanese, smells and feels like any number of places all over Japan, with the knowledge that it is in fact the middle of Canberra, something wasn't quite right about that.
Normally the room feels right - in daylight hours at least, and definitely without having watched those couple of movies beforehand. Yet at the darkest hour of the night, there was something eerie.
Halloween is supposed to be scary, isnt it?

However the night was excellent. I've had sleeping in the tatami room on the list for quite a while now, and finally able to tick that off - cutting it fine, with a matter of weeks left before graduation! Though, no, we didn't get a great amount of actual sleep, of course.

About 2,160 days after finishing my last class of high school, I finished my last class of university - and the two days could not have been more different.
Specialist Maths with Gordon, integrating functions to the bitter end, contrasted with Law with Kent, sitting around eating lunch, everyone telling their favourite Japan anecdotes - worlds apart.

The end of school was surreal - from memory an overcast Thursday afternoon - and it was gearing up to be a rainy day this time around too, but Friday turned on the best day you can imagine, with not a cloud in the sky. It hasn't quite sunk in yet, and likely won't until assessment is done and out of the way, but I'm another stage finished!

Kampai!