Life gets in the way...

I've been a tad absent. And that is mainly because of life. That and I've had many ideas for a new blog post but haven't had the motivation to actually write them.

Not much has happened in my online world over the past couple of weeks, apart from me falling in love with Tyger Drew-Honey, tweeting him, and getting a reply. That was nice!

A fair amount has happened in my real world though. Again, my relationship with TransPerth has verged back on hilarity. The other day I had to go into the city for a university field trip. After that was over, my friend and I made our way to the Perth Underground entrance on Murray Street. Anyone who has been to the Perth Underground knows it's like...crazy town down there. Even I, a Perth born and raised girl who frequently uses the train system, always gets a bit confused in the Underground.

Anyway, I was taking the Joondalup line to Warwick, which is 4 stops from the city, and my friend was taking the same line to Currambine which is 9 stops from the city. As we were coming down the escalator to the platforms, my friend said 'There's a Whitfords train (6 stops from the city) about to leave, you can grab that one'. I looked up and saw that indeed, the board was flashing to say the Whitfords pattern was leaving 1 minute.

I started leaping down the escalator two steps at a time, shrieking 'SEE YOU AFTER THE BREAK' to my friend, took a flying leap off the last step, legged it across the platform and got onto the train about 2 seconds before the doors started to close.

It's probably one of my finest moments using the train.

As well as that, it's now Easter break, mid semester break, and school holidays, which means for the next week, I have no uni and no dancing. I actually have two weeks off of dancing. And so begins a week of me trying to decide what I'm going to do to keep myself occupied.

One of those things will be to plan my future trip to Scotland, i.e. the reason I created this blog. It's not even a definite thing yet and I'm already excited. Later in the year, however, I am going to Bali, and I will be flying there by myself, as my family are flying up a few days later. It will be my first time travelling solo, and it's an international flight, so I'm a little nervous and a lot excited. Nervous because I have no idea how to fill out immigration forms and excited because I'll feel like a proper adult. Haha.

Well, I've forgotten what the point of this post was. If I think of anything else to say, I will post again.

Peace.

Xo

Crack out the party poppers!

I warned you when I started this blog that the chances of me staying on topic are about on par with my chances of becoming the Queen of England. So I hope you enjoy having something entirely different to read every time I post! I like to keep it fresh.

Anyway, this is a special post, for today, it's a special somebody's birthday!

Aoife! (collaredjumpers.wordpress.com)

This amazing girl is somebody who I met through the ever psychotic hot mess that we call the Criminal Minds fandom on Twitter. Today she is 15, and I hope when she turns 16, we are still the amazing friends we are today!

I'm not 100 percent sure how Aoife and I started talking, but I'm pretty sure it was the day I nearly fell on the train tracks at Warwick train station (which she subsequently has not let me forget). The story behind that: Aoife, myself, and another girl called Kara were all joking about slipping aphrodisiacs in a certain couple's (anyone who knows me will know who they are) food to entice them to have another baby (low and behold, they announced they're expecting another baby just two weeks ago). Aoife tagged Nathan in one of the tweets just to be silly, and HE RESPONDED. And I promptly tripped over my shoes in surprise and nearly fell off the platform because I had my back to the tracks and my backpack was probably heavier than I am. By some stroke of luck, I caught my balance in time to step away and catch the train that pulled in about three seconds after I almost fell.

Ah, the memories.

We've been through a LOT. We had a HUGE blowout in like...October. It was really stupid and I'm glad we got over it. We trust each other a lot and we tell each other everything. We discovered we do a lot of the same weird things, which I will not list for the sake of both of our dignity. We love to share our story ideas with each other and we have our own repertoire of inside jokes (*cough cough* frog squats) which never fail to make me laugh. Although I think my near death experience with a train makes the top of that list.

Aoife never fails to make me laugh. She always brings a smile to my face if I'm having a bad day, even if it is in the middle of a lecture and I have to duck under a table when I start laughing.

We also have the stupid things that make us laugh. Like the time I emailed her a story outline and realised afterwards that I had sent her the longest run-on sentence EVER. That got a laugh. And the day AJ announced her pregnancy, Aoife was FREAKING out and I was sitting on a public bus grinning like an absolute idiot. What a contrast.

She's a beautiful, stunning, kind hearted girl (who looks just like Chloe Grace Moretz, I s*** you not) who I hope remains one of my friends for a long time to come.

One day, we will meet and it will be joyous, hilarious, and wonderful.

Have an awesome day beautiful! Love you!

Xoxo.

Criminal Minds Thursday - 6.11.14

Wow.

What a day.

So I made plans to catch up with my friend Damian in the city today. Parking in the city is an absolute nightmare, so I elected to take the train instead. I said I would drive to the train station, but my mum and her friends were going to Joondalup for my sister's school choir event, so she said I could just come with them and catch the train from Joondalup. So after having coffee with them, I walked to the train station (which is actually right underneath the shopping center for all you readers that don't live in Perth).

As I tagged on, I looked at the timetable and it said "Perth - 6 car - 9 minutes". I thought 'awesome, heaps of time, I can wait around for 9 minutes'. This was at 10:40am.

I get down to the platform and started scrolling through Twitter on my phone to see what was going on with the new episode of Criminal Minds. I had been scrolling for maybe a minute and then I glanced up at the train board again. It said 11 minutes.

This struck me as weird. I watched it for the next few minutes and it kept flicking between 9 and 11 minutes. Then it jumped up to 13 minutes.

I waved it off initially as a time glitch with the timetable board.

I kept watching the board and it seemed to work it's way down every minute with no problems, until it got to 8 minutes and it decided to jump back up to 13 minutes. By now, I had been on the platform for 15 minutes, 6 minutes past the time when the train was supposed to have arrived.

I messaged Damian to let him know that something was clearly not going well on the trains today and that I would keep him posted. Then I rang my mum, who was still in the shopping center, to let her know what was going on.

I watched the board again and this time it read "Perth - 3 car - 14 minutes". I assumed something was wrong with the first train and they had sent a replacement.

After another five minutes of watching the board jump around and play up, my mum rang back to see if I was on the train yet. I said no, and she told me to go up to the ticket booth and ask if anyone knew what was happening with this damn train.

By now there was a LOT of people accumulated on the platform. I made my way through them and headed up the escalator to the ground level (Joondalup is a sunken station). I asked a security guard what was going on, and he told me there was a problem with the timing points at the Butler station (which to clarify, only opened about a month ago). I thought 'well that explains the problem with the board'. Basically, when a train runs over a timing point, the sensors send a signal to all the digital timetables at the stations ahead of that train. If a timetable reads "Perth - 6 car - 2 minutes", when the train runs over the timing point a minute away from the station, the 2 changes to a 1 and the whole line of text flashes to alert people that the train is arriving.

I looked over the balcony back at the station and got a new surprise - the whole timetable had blacked out and instead had a single line of text scrolling through it. "SERVICES DISRUPTED BETWEEN BUTLER AND PERTH. WE APOLOGISE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE"

Great.

Right in front of me was a bus to Whitfords Station, which is two stops down the Joondalup line in the direction of the city (JO line goes Perth - Leederville - Glendalough - Stirling - Warwick - Greenwood - Whitfords - Edgewater - Joondalup - Currambine - Clarkson - Butler). I got on that bus, which was due to arrive at Whitfords at 11:25am, 25 minutes after I was supposed to meet Damian.

There is a train service on the Joondalup line known as the Perth W/Whitfords W pattern. It stops all stops between Perth and Warwick, skips Greenwood, and terminates in Whitfords, where it waits in a siding after unloading passengers until the next Perth (full pattern) train passes, then it heads back to the city following the pattern it left in. I decided to go to Whitfords and wait for one of those trains, as they would not be affected by the delays in Butler.

But when I got to Whitfords, I discovered there were no more W's until 2:45pm.

I ended up ringing Damian and getting him to pick me up.

GET THIS THOUGH. 10 Minutes after he texted me to say he was leaving the city, A TRAIN FROM BUTLER TO PERTH PULLED IN.

Damian came, so we went to Hillary's Boat Harbour and had pizza. It was really good to catch up. Lots of laughs and bitching about Transperth.

Then I got home and prepared myself for the Criminal Minds episode. Hence why this post is named so.

In the episode, JJ has an argument with her mother about her mother telling Henry (JJ's son) about JJ's deceased sister. Rosaline (JJ's sister) committed suicide when she was 17. JJ was only 11. It's clearly a touchy subject in the family, and it was made very clear that JJ doesn't just not talk about her because it hurts, she gives the subject a berth wider than the Pacific Ocean. Anyway, at the end of the episode, Henry can't sleep, so JJ tells him a story of two sisters who loved each other very much - Jennifer and Rosaline.

It was a touching episode (aside from you know, the murders). I definitely had tears in my eyes at the end, especially when JJ's voice cracked and she was clearly fighting off tears. AJ Cook is an incredible actress. I don't know how she brings on the tears so convincingly, but she does and she kills it every time.

Also, Chloe had a scare with her results yesterday. A spot showed up that was potentially a tumor, and if it was a tumor, she was basically done for. Her doctor rescanned her spine yesterday and phoned her mum today to say IT'S NOT A TUMOR! Chloe is officially 5 months in remission!

Anyway, so today was very eventful, and I'm sure I'll have more to say tomorrow.

Catch ya!