Tonight I went over to Lindsey's house for a farewell BBQ, as Lindsey will be leaving us for London on Tuesday! I've known Lindsey since year 8 at Rangeview Intermediate and he's been in my class at high school as well.
When I got there, I realised it wasn't the same house he had his birthday BBQ at last year, as they recently moved houses! All his cousins were in the garage sitting around the table eating, while the ex-Rutherford guys were elsewhere. I grabbed some food and joined Sarena, Claire and Ellyce who were sitting around the outdoor fireplace thing.
We ate and talked for a while before Shen and Nick arrived and joined us.
After a bit more talking, everyone went over to the garage to watch people have a go at smashing open the pinyata! A few people gave it a pretty good go but didn't manage to crack the horse open. I was pushed into having a turn, so I had an unsuccessful attempt at it. A few people later a girl managed to smash off the and all the chocolate came poring down!
Us ex-Rutherfordians went back to sit around the fire and kept talking about all sorts of random things, like the Double Down Burger, sharing scary stories and communist countries.
Eventually I had to leave and say goodbye to Lindsey, as I won't be able to see him depart on Tuesday!
While it's quite exciting to see my friends leave, it's also a little sad having to say goodbye. Shen, one of my other good high school friends also told us he's got a job in Singapore and will be leaving in the next 4-6 weeks. Both him and Lindsey will be gone for the next two or so years. Amy left a couple weeks ago for an engineering job in Hong Kong, and David left for a job with Google in Australia earlier in the year too! A few of the others are considering going overseas in the near future too. Our circle of high school friends is definitely shrinking!
I guess at least it'll mean I have connections all around the world!
It's Friday the 13th today! Oooooh scary! Fortunately nothing totally bad happened at work today. This girl I caught up with at the pharmacy the other day (who recognised me from the one meeting we had at church earlier in the year!) invited me to her uni fellowship meeting tonight, called the Overseas Christian Fellowship (OCF). I've always wanted to check it out so I decided to bring my brothers along and attend.
We got there slightly late as I had just finished work. They started off with worship, and it was quite good! There were a couple people singing, with several people on guitars and one on keyboard. The music was really uplifting and everyone was into the singing!
After the worship, there was a guest speaker who got us to sit in groups to answer questions about a Bible passage his talk was based on.
My brothers and I had to leave early to make it to our own youth group as it was activity night and we were meant to organise it. Just at the last minute we decided to play theatre sports with the youth group!
The youth group was split into groups of four, with each group getting to play one game such as Let's Make a Date, the multiple-headed oracle and the rant game (each person rants about something for a minute before passing on a topic of their choice to the next person).
I just happened to be the person they all picked on tonight, with them all making fun at my singleness! Oh I can't wait to prove you all wrong!
We truly love you mummy for giving birth to us and everything else that you do for you!
Yesterday I thought I better get something for my mum on Mother's Day, so while my mum was out, I walked down to West City looking for something to get her. I had no idea what to get so I started off at the Reduced to Clear store, then went over to Kmart, thinking that maybe I could buy her some towels as we have plenty of holey ones at home! The towels were quite expensive! I also wasn't too sure what kitchen appliances she already had or wanted.
I then came up with a really, really good idea - electronic bathroom scales! Our bathroom scales have been giving us the wrong readings for a long time now, and I'm sure our family would be able to make good use of it, even if my mum didn't like them! I couldn't find any at Kmart though, and I was about to try The Warehouse when I thought I'd give The Appliance Shed a go.
Just my luck! There were these Weight Watchers bathroom scales that could even tell you your % Body Fat, Bone Mass, etc. There were quite a few scales to choose from, The more expensive they were, the more features they offered. A sales person came over trying to entice me to buy. He was also trying to push this cleaning kit on me! I ended up going with the scales, but not before checking thoroughly...
I asked the sales person what the maximum weight the scales could handle. His reply...
"It should hold up to 180 kg so I think your mum should be fine!"
Now I'm sure you'll think I'm insinuating that my mum is fat and that's why she needs bathroom scales to constantly check her weight, and what a horrible, horrible present it is. Well, it turns out she actually liked it! She thought it was quite useful too!
The next day at church to celebrate Mother's Day, all the children went on stage to sing (along with a few of us older 'angels').
After the performance, some of the Oddfellows handed out the presents we had made for the mothers a few days ago at youth group - a bookmark with these dangly things on them.
To top it all off, the men were in the kitchen cooking lunch for us all. They cooked rice with several different types of meat and it actually tasted good! Too bad they ran out of rice so soon and had to cook some more...
Today was finally my big day! It was to kick off with a breakfast in this giant marquee at uni for graduands and their families at 8am, but as usual our family set off from home late (like 7.50am late!) and were stuck in traffic! We didn't get to uni till just before 9am when the procession was about to start. We parked somewhere up Queen Street, so we had to walk all the way to uni. I only just made it in time!
We had to line up together with people graduating with the same degree. When I first saw the others from pharmacy, I noticed they all had different hood colours to mine since I hired mine from this Chinese place instead of the official place! Fortunately there were a few others who had done so too so I wasn't the only one!
As the procession started, we walked down the road onto Queen Street, with onlookers lining up the footpaths taking photos and cheering us on.
I even bumped into my old high school principal Mr Edmeades along the way!
It was amazing just how many people were walking down Queen Street. I don't think I've ever seen that many!
When we finally got to Aotea Centre, all of us taking part in the ceremony had to go to this back room where we had to line up according to the seat number we had. I discovered it was based on what sort of honours you got, with those with First Class Honours lining up near the front! I was around the middle, since I was graduating with Second Class Honours.
After a while of everyone sorting themselves out, we finally filed into the theatre, with the audience standing watching us as we came in.
The ceremony started off with all of us singing...or attempting to sing the official graduation song. It was all in Latin and no one really knew the tune either so it was a bit of a fail. The organ playing the music made it extra hard to determine the tune as well!
The medicine students then the nursing students going up on stage one by one. As their name got called out, they would cross the stage, pretend to be capped and then walk off and receive their degree off-stage.
It was a loooong time before it was pharmacy's turn! I was sitting next to Natalie, my best friend in pharmacy, and she was busting to go to the toilet, so it was lucky there was a music performance by a music student before we were set to go on stage! She made it back on stage just in time!
It was finally my time to go up on stage to get capped. I was seriously hoping I wouldn't screw up buy tripping over, shaking hands wrongly or not putting my cap on the right way!
Fortunately as you can see it went without a hitch!
After me there were still quite a lot of people to get through, along with all the masters and doctorate students needing to be capped too.
When they finally had their moment on stage, we all sang God Defend New Zealand before the staff and special guests left the stage, and we all followed afterwards.
I was quite hungry afterwards, but I had already started receiving text messages from friends saying they were already at Albert Park waiting to take photos with me! My mum and Aonghas went to Burger King to buy some food while my dad, Hamish and I went back to the car to drop some things off.
We then met up at Albert Park where I also caught up with some friends to take some photos.
It was also a really good chance to catch up with some old friends. I even caught up with Mandy, a really old primary school friend who I hadn't seen since, well, primary school! She had recently moved back to Macau but came back to New Zealand for a visit and I was lucky enough to catch up with her while she was still here! I'm so grateful for that, as I was always wanting to catch up with her once again after all this time! To be honest I wasn't exactly too sure if it was her or not at first!
I also managed to catch up with many of my old pharmacy friends! It was cool seeing all their graduation toys too! I had borrowed my friend Nadine's graduation bear as her's had the proper pharmacy hood while mine wouldn't since they had to order them in. I also had my graduation pig with me too!
Amazingly I had been at Albert Park for over five hours and it was almost 4pm, and so I thought it'd be the right time to go visit my workmates at my work (Campus Pharmacy). Apparently it had been a busy day today, so maybe it was a good thing I wasn't working! I could see they had heaps of boxes to unpack in the dispensary! We took a few photos together and I introduced them to my family before Aonghas had to take off for one lecture.
Our church friend Winston had just finished his research work for the day, so we met up with him at Albert Park to take some photos around the place as Winston knows how to take the good shots!
We had to be at the photography studio to take photos and to return my gown by 5.30 and we were already running late, so I rang them up to let them know we'd be late (twice in one day!). We parted ways with Winston and got to the studio where we had to wait our turn before having our photos taken.
We took quite a few photos, spending almost half an hour there! We tried different poses and different combinations, with me on my own, with my brothers, with my parents and with everyone altogether.
We'll have to revisit them in a week's time to view the photos and choose which ones we want developed.
To end the evening, we went to Wing Wah Restaurant in Avondale, where we were pretty much the only people there. That's probably why we got good service with one of the ladies hovering around our table waiting to refill our teapots and rice pots!
We got home by 9pm since we all had work and uni the next day. There was one more surprise left for me later that night, when one of my best friends Chen came over with a bouquet of flowers and a graduation teddy for me! That was a really huge surprise as I wasn't expecting that! We had a bit of a catch-up before he had to go as he's got to be at Middlemore Hospital early next morning.
And that officially marks the end of my time at uni!
