Today I finally cracked it with my iRiver and it’s constant turning off and shaking. So this afternoon I went up to JB Hi-Fi at Chadstone, I ended up walking out with a 30 GB iPod as well as some AV accessories. All in all my excursion up to JB cost me over $600 as I also bought some DVD’s and some CD’s (haven’t quite adopted iTunes yet). However my iTunes library has synced and I’m listening to my new iPod in all its glory and I must say I think it sounds way better than my old iRiver and the video quality is much better as well. I also like the dock, which seems to fit with the iPod much better than my iRiver dock ever did with the H340. Well I’m off now to rip some of my new cd’s to iTunes.

Well today was my 18th birthday which was pretty cool. I ended up getting a 32″ LCD HDTV which is pretty awesome, much better than my current TV. Anyway I just got home from dinner and am now sitting down to a nice Stella Artois and watching a bit of Family Guy. It’s quite weird thinking of myself as an adult, however I’m sure I can adjust. Today was a good day, with about 100 people saying happy birthday, Luke also sang happy birthday to me 3 times which makes me feel like I’ll need to do something equally musical for his birthday (something like 8 days away).

It seems at school, no matter how simple you try and make something, someone will come right along and make it far more complicated than necessary. Take for example the end of term assemblies. These are held at each precinct and Senior School (me) prepare a Power Point presentation to show the little kids about the events held at Senior School during each term. So your thinking well that’s easy, just create a Power Point for each term and send it to the three precincts. Well yes! I thought it would be that simple, but it seems I’m doing three Power Point’s each term to cater for each precincts individual needs. Then throw in the usual, “well a picture of the Rev drinking a can of Coca-Cola isn’t setting a good example for the children” and you have exactly what I put up with every day (I mean seriously how is him drinking a soft drink not appropriate).

It also seems that for moderately minor things you need about 25 people’s approval, and for major things nothing is checked - this is particularly evident when dealing with money where we have never had to get authorisation from anyone to do anything.

Also another thing, my brother is in Year 7 and has been given a 150 word project on supernova’s (seriously 150 words, my references are more than that). It got me thinking about the dumbing down of the curriculum which is clearly evident with my younger brother and sister. My sister cannot even do basic addition without a calculator, and don’t even ask about subtraction. While calculators are a common thing, basic addition and subtraction is vital for everyday life, from adding up what something is going to cost, to working out how long until the train comes (answer: usually a very long time, if ever).

Well my big news is I will be 18 in a couple of days. It’s one of those things that sounds exciting but really isn’t when you think about it. Anyway I will on Thursday be able to;

-legally able to buy and drink alcohol (I already drink so its not really a big thing).

-Buy tobacco related products (don’t smoke so again pointless)

-Vote in state and federal elections (probably the only thing that I can’t do now)

-Gamble (again something I already do now, however the one thing I will be able to do is go to Crown, which I’m doing in two weeks time)

I will also be able to go for my license, however due to me being lazy and VicRoads being stupidly far behind my test isn’t till late July. My other news is that it looks like my iRiver is about to die so I’m in the market for a new music player. I have been looking around at some but I’ve found that there seems to be all these 1 or 2gb devices around and not many +40gb. So it looks like I might end up having to go for an iPod or one of Creative’s hard disk players. Any suggestions would be welcome.

In other news, today I was dragged along to my brothers football game to watch him play his 50th match, it wasn’t all that exciting and they lost by 1 point which was pretty disappointing. But I did get to see the assistant coach from the other team hit a kid in the throat, anyway he got reported and will most likely get banned which kinda reminds me of a certain hockey coach at a certain private school in Melbourne. Well tomorrow I have a Sociology SAC, and another Sociology SAC on Thursday, however there’s no school on Friday which is good, and of course no school the following Monday due to the Queens Birthday (the sole reason I believe we should not become a republic, we would lose a public holiday). Well that’s it for now, at least that’s all I can remember, I hope everyone enjoyed their weekend and will no doubt see most of my readers during the week (except the guy from Spain).

Today was the Year 6 Leadership Day at each precinct. I had the wonderful privilege to head to Castlefield, which was pretty good as they have the only staff that I actually enjoy talking to. The day went off without a hitch, with a couple of unplanned events such as Sam saying “screw this lets go play soccer”, and my quick 15 minute game of dead fish, I would have made it go longer but the Year 6’s realised that it wasn’t really a game of dead fish but rather just a way of shutting them up. Lunch of course was provided by Castlefield, which consisted of $40 at the canteen for 4 of us, this only happened after I bitched earlier this week that every precinct was doing a BBQ and Castlefield was giving us nothing. Overall it was a really good day except when Abbi gave a speech on good leaders and included Hitler in that speech. This was greeted by a year 6 kid putting up his hand and saying “well I’m Jewish” (not because he was offended or anything he just felt that it this was special enough that we needed to know) but apart from that (it was more the awkward silence than anything else) it was a great day.