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The Democratic Republic of Calum

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Calum Anderson

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cartoons movies music sport news media politics
I'm a guy from New Zealand, half Chinese half Kiwi who goes to school and tries to make the most out of my un-extra-ordinary life!
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July 19

Relocating

I have finally decided that I will no longer be continuing to update this blog, but will instead stick to just updating my original blog at 

http://www.calumanderson.com

(http://mrcalum.blogspot.com)

See you there!
April 13

Missed the Fools Again!

(Thursday 1 April 2010)

I completely forgot it was April Fools' Day again for the second year in a row! I had an aseptic dispensing lab all morning and only realised after midday when I was in the toilet! Grrrrr!

Aseptic dispensing lab wasn't too bad though. We got to go into a real sterile uni which was cool! We wore these full-body gowns from head to toe, with masks and everything! We then went in and had to aseptically dispense some eye drops. One of the guys cut himself trying to open a glass ampoule, and afterwards he asked me if his experience felt the same as mine!

We spent the rest of the lab trying to get the tutors to sign off our competency sheet, which had a list of different skills/tasks we had to complete and get checked off to indicate that we were competent at them. It was slightly annoying having to wait for a tutor to see if we could do things like changing a syringe needle or open a glass or plastic ampoule. After the guy cut his finger opening the glass ampoule, everyone ended up wanting to use the plastic ampoule opener!

Once the afternoon workshop was over though (which happened to be on stroke and DVT), uni was over for half the semester and it was time for holidays!!!

Bye Bye Period Pains!

(Monday 29 March 2010)
 
I finally got my members pack for joining the Auckland Pharmacy Students Association (APSA) today. This year each pack has a random assortment of drugs and other stuff.

In my pack I had:
- Nurofen for Period Pain
- Four condoms
- Cream for sore heels
- Immune tablets
- Paracetamol + Ibuprofen tablets
- A lolly

I don't think the Nurofen will be too helpful! I came to the conclusion that this pack was probably meant for the girl. I mean, just look at how many of the products are designed to make a girl feel good/better? :O

I had a discussion with a few people. On the condom pack it says nominal width is 56mm. That is quite wide!
 

Frantic Sales

(Monday 29 March 2010)
 
Yesterday I finally attended my very first Dessert Club event of the year! OK well....I almost did! The Dessert Club was running their 'Movie Day' from 10-3pm, selling some cakes together with entry to the two movies. I promised that I would be there towards the end of the event to help with the clean-up since I had church in the morning.

As soon as Sunday School finished, my mum dropped Aonghas off at work and me at the bus stop. I realised I was at the bus stop half an hour early! While I was waiting for the bus I ate my lunch and got fooled by *someone* texting as someone else!
 


I soon got into the city and before I went to the business school where the Movie Day was being held, I dropped by the public library to look for some music before going on to the Dessert Club event.

I got there just as it finished! One of the club members who came out of the lecture theatre and heard me apologise for being late laughed at me, thinking I had arrived to attend the event!

The turnout turned out to be not so great so we had a whole lot of cakes left with a huge possible loss. After sitting there in the foyer thinking about what to do, we decided we'd try sell as many as we could, so we headed off to the Information Commons and walked to each table at the bottom level, asking everyone if they wanted to buy any. We had chocolate swirls and green tea swirls, as well as custard puffs. I was surprised at how popular the green tea swirls were, especially amongst Asians!
 

We managed to sell a box by the end of the day, before we decided to call it a night and pack the boxes away in one of the guys' cars before we all left for home.

That night I was asked to text half the club members to let them know we would be selling cheap cakes at uni since it was such short notice. I was doing it through the computer so it didn't take me as long as it would on the phone, but I still ended up texting till after 1.30am! I got a few interesting replies such as

"You're very dedicated sending txts at midnight"

and

"It must be fun sending spam txts at 1am"

I admit it's not the best thing to do, sending texts after midnight!

I joined the Dessert Club members at their makeshift stall at the bottom level of the Information Commons after my lecture today to help them sell the rest of the cakes. We didn't know if we would be in competition with any of the cafes so we tried to keep our cake sale as low key as possible. I wasn't even sure if it was possible to sell them all, but we were selling two for one after all, and surprisingly people must've checked their phones, as we managed to sell out before 4pm as we had hoped!
 

In the end we managed to save the day!
 

Now for the Not-So-Good News

(Tuesday 23 March 2010)
 
Just when I do a post on good news...and then some really bad news just has to come along and ruin everything!

I came home today and my mum told me some news about one of my relatives which I couldn't believe. I don't know if I can say much about it except that it's really sad and he definitely does not deserve it.

My dad was especially upset and went over with my mum to visit my relative for a while.

Let's just say it has definitely taught me to appreciate life while you've still got it and as they say in the Vodafone ad, make the most of today.
 
 

Love is in the Air!

(Tuesday 23 March 2010)
 
I am so happy for a few of my friends after this weekend! I won't mention names just in case but here are my yay's:

#1 YAY:

Let's start with Pita and Estee. They're engaged! Yay!!! They're both high school friends of mine. I still remember way back at the end of year 11 when we were in the same science class and they would bicker with each other, and then in the next year they started going out! It's cool how they've lasted for so long and are still going strong!

When they kept going out together at uni, we all knew they were made for each other and that they would go the full distance, and we talked light-heartedly about them eventually getting married. Our circle of friends also joked about who would get married first, and that Estee and Pita would be strong contenders! It looks like they're early favourites to take out that competition! 

It's quite surreal though, that you think for so long that you and your friends are still quite young, and that you don't really think of a relationship as too serious, but when they start getting married, and others graduate and go out into the real world to get a full-time job, you realise everyone is growing up! It's a little scary!

Nonetheless I'm so happy for Pita and Estee! 

#2 YAY:

While not engaged yet, Sunday marked the anniversary for one of my other friends and his girlfriend! I'm so happy for him!

#3 YAY:

One of my other good friends has finally found a boyfriend after many years and I'm very happy for her! 

Jennifer's 20th

(Saturday 20 March 2010)
 
Jennifer had a birthday party to celebrate her 20th birthday (well duuh Calum!) and so her theme was 'Cooking Mama', where everyone had to bring a plate of food to share. Us Anderson brothers can't cook of course... we're guys! Our mum did all the cooking, but we will learn...eventually!

After the morning music teaching and violin lessons, we went to West City to buy Jennifer a birthday present before we got home to prepare for the party.

The Facebook event said that the event started at 4pm, but when we arrived, the house looked quiet and empty with no cars around! We weren't too sure if we had arrived at the right time! We just decided to go in anyway. There were only a couple of Jennifer's friends there, Marco and Sarah, who we got to know a bit better. It turns out the party was actually starting at around 5pm!

We just sat around the table while Jennifer attempted to introduce us to them, but kept getting us mixed up! I kept having to remind her I was Calum! At least it helped them remember my name!
 

After a while, more people came and it was time to bring out the first dish! We tried each dish one at a time till there was so many people that all the dishes were just put on the table. As for our dishes...or should I say our mum's dishes, she cooked sausage rolls and some vegetables. The sausage rolls disappeared quickly!

We all just hung around and talked. I got to know this guy Alton, and also discovered that another of Jennifer's friends from engineering, Ying, had met me a year or two ago at one of the Kiwi Asian Club events! That was pretty cool!

After a while Jennifer got us all sorted into four mixed teams, and we started off with 'Oo La la, Tri-vi-aaa!' which was a trivia competition between the teams. After one of our louder team mebers kept answering the questions wrongly our team lost this first round.
 

In the next rounds our team went head on with another team in this drinking game where two people from each team had to finish their cup of coke, only by drinking it through a straw with a hole in it. I don't think we won that!
 

In the next round we challenged another team in Jenga. The tower was almost collapsing when it was my turn! Fortunately I was able to pull out a piece and put it on top of the tower without it falling! The unlucky person who caused the tower to collapse was Nadine!
 


Our team then had two rounds of guess that song against two different teams. In the first round our team got slaughtered, mainly because one guy in the other team was able to name all the songs, both Chinese and English!

In the next round I had a bit more luck in getting in there quick, but I got a few wrong! I guessed a Michael Jackson song twice and got it wrong both times! I managed to redeem myself slightly by correctly guessing a Lion King song!

It was then time for the birthday cake! Each of Jennifer's different group of friends took photos with her and the cake before we all sang Happy Birthday to her and she cut the cake.

As we were enjoying her cake (I think the cream was taro flavour?), one of the guys chucked some of the cream at Jennifer! Aonghas, who was standing near by got caught in the crossfire and got a bit of cream on his t-shirt! What ensued was a cream fight!
 

Jennifer got changed and returned to start some drinking with some of the people!

By then Nadine, my brothers and I decided it was probably time to go as it was getting a little late. We all took a photo with Jennifer at the door and then it was bye-bye!

We didn't see Jennifer at church the next morning, but it sounds like she had a good time, and so did we!
 

Not Ripped to Sheds for Once!

(Friday 19 March 2010)
 
I had the very daunting dispensing lab this afternoon. After the first dispensing lab a couple weeks ago, everyone was on edge about this one. I guess we didn't do so well in the last one because it was pretty much a surprise, so this time hopefully it'd go a lot better now that we knew the format of the lab ASSESSMENT!

In the dispensing lab we have to dispense two prescriptions. The first prescription is actually blank and we have to make a recommendation to the doctor and fill it in
ourselves. That one is based on one of the cases we had to work on in the workshop the day before. Fortunately it was the same case my group worked on! 

Time management is a big thing in the dispensing lab and so as soon as we got in we had to hit the ground running! I had everything almost planned thanks to some of my pharmacy friends who helped prepare me beforehand (admittedly they're using me as a guinea pig but that's OK, I'd be clueless without them anyway!). 

For the first prescription, we were to be assessed on a roleplay consultation with a 'doctor' (actually our tutor), and then our counselling roleplay with the 'patient'. I wanted to avoid doing the doctor roleplay with the same tutor as last time because she ripped me to shreds the last time! When I saw the list of people waiting to see the other tutors though, I just thought 'what the hell' to myself and went for it! I might as well prove her wrong or suffer trying!

Last time she complained me for dithering and waffling and not getting straight to the point. Well this time I went straight for it. I was talking faster than a speeding bullet since we only got five minutes, but I tried to explain everything I had prepared, and made my recommendations, and surprisingly the tutor stopped the timer and applauded me for improving remarkably! That definitely boosted my confidence a whole lot!

From then on the dispensing lab was a much more cheerful affair! I may not have been able to say everything I wanted for the counselling roleplay, but at least I dispensed both prescriptions in time! 

After that lab I'm feeling just a teeny bit more confident about becoming a pharmacist!

So Much for Choice!

(Monday 15 March 2010)

Last Monday we had a long lecture/presentation where 25 different projects were presented to us 4th year pharmacy students for our PHARMACY410 research project. The idea was that each of us would rank from 1-5 the research project we preferred and let them know by the day after. They'd then try give us our most preferred one and we'd be grouped with with others who had chosen the same project. Well here's how I ranked my preferred research projects:

1. Imported prescription medicines: patterns and trends over time
2. Determining the effects of methamphetamine 'P' addiction on cognition and executive function in the human brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).
3. Is the Polypill the answer for ischaemic heart disease?
4. The role of pharmacists in inhaler technique education in asthma and COPD patients admitted to Middlemore hospital.
5. An investigation into the teaching of extemporaneous compounding skills in schools of pharmacy in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United Kingdom

Guess which project I got given? My last choice! If I had known I'd be given my last choice, I would've thought a bit harder about it! After a bit of thinking though I've come to the conclusion that it's not too bad though, and that at least it's not all science with big fancy words and concepts I have to learn. That will definitely make my life a lot easier!

Also on the plus side is that there are some other cool people in my group! All girls actually, so that will be interesting...

Let's hope we can get along well this year!

Camping with the Congregation

(Monday 15 March 2010) Thanks to Tim for the photos..I stole them off him!

This weekend our church had a camp at Willow Park Christian Camp, with the aim of getting the congregation to get to know each other a lot better.

Due to our flat tyre ordeal we had to pack in a rush and impressively managed to do that in just under an hour! We were supposed to have dinner before arriving there but we ended up just having a bite in the car on the way there.

Because one of the car tyres was a temporary tyre, Aonghas had to drive no faster than 80km/h, but somehow we managed to get to the camp on Buckland's Beach just in time!

Everyone else was there already of course, but at least we weren't exactly the last! We unpacked all our bags, signed in and were directed to our cabin upstairs. There were two sets of stairs opposite each other, with the girls' cabins up one set and the guys' cabins up the other. Us three Anderson brothers shared a cabin with Jireh and Andrew, two guys from our youth group, as well as two adults.

While we waited for camp to kick-off, a few of us went over to the trampolines to play on. Jireh was showing off his somersaults while I...gave up and just lay there!

The bell finally rang and that signaled the start of camp! We all filed in to the hall where we were welcomed and given the camp booklets which had the timetable and the church concert lists. It looks like most of us Oddfellows would be in the same group!

After the introductions and welcomes, we played a few ice-breakers, including one where all of us were divided into two groups by a curtain. One person in each row would sit on either side of the curtain and as soon as it dropped the people would have to try be the first to name the other. If they didn't they'd have to go up on stage for punishment. I got an easy one - Ada one of our church pastors! Those who found themselves on stage ended up having to spell their names with their backsides!

We all then got together in our concert groups to discuss what we'd do for the concert. Half of the groups were given a song to perform while the other half of the groups were told to perform a skit on a certain topic. Ours was 'welcoming new people to church'. Originally we came up with a bit of a rhyming musical where one by one, a person with a unique background/situation came to church and they'd all be welcomed in the same way.

We didn't really decide on anything before it was supper time. During supper time we just sat around trying to flick a pen like how you see Asians do it, and I showed a few people my Community Pharmacy textbook with all those gory pictures!

I was told by my youth group leader Gabrielle that I was in charge of making sure that everyone had left the room by midnight, and so as we were approaching midnight I started shepherding everyone upstairs. The older fellowship stayed downstairs a little later, and so I thought I'd just leave them there.

I didn't really get much sleep at night due to a combination of reasons. It was so uncomfortable in a sleeping bag and there were quite a few loud snorers in my room!

Aonghas and I had to wake up early so that Aonghas could drive me back to West Auckland to teach music. Before I went to teach, we went through a McDonald's drive-by for breakfast.

Teaching didn't actually go too bad, a whole lot better than the week before! All the students were attentive and followed what I taught!

At the end of lessons as I was locking up the classroom, I was drinking the remaining of my hot chocolate when I felt something hard and thought maybe it was just a clump of sugar or chocolate. I decided to spit it out on the lid, and it turned out to be...

A BLACK BEETLE!

That was going to be the last I'd go to McDonald's!...or so I thought....

We got back to camp just in time for lunch, which consisted of burgers with pork ribs, which tasted really nice!

After lunch we had some spare time where we went to the gym to play around for a while. Some of us played badminton, while others played a bit of indoor soccer, some even played on the piano and others played with the small gridiron ball.

Free time soon came to an end when the group games began! We were put into random groups and then had to compete against other groups in games such as one involving blowing flour in a plate to try find a lolly and get it to another table with only your mouth, moving as many balloons from one place to another with a partner, balloon hockey, shifting water between containers with your hands, shifting rice between containers with only your face, building the highest tower with plastic cups...you get the picture! Unfortunately our group (group 1) almost lost every game!

After the games we had more spare time where we had planned to have our inter-fellowship soccer game. The only thing was...the other fellowship never showed up! Therefore we just formed random teams and played against each other. It got a little brutal at times with several injuries! I also kicked the ball up into the balcony, but fortunately I didn't hit anyone! It was quite even at the beginning but the other team scored a few more times after a while.

We were all pretty exhausted by dinner time. There wasn't much time after before it was the evening concert! We had half an hour to prepare our group's skit. We probably only spent five minutes sorting everything out!

The evening concert got underway in the hall, with a few of the groups leading songs, getting the audiences to join in. There were also skits but they were in Mandarin so I couldn't understand much of what was going on.

We were the sixth group to perform. In our skit, I was the minister preparing for the Sunday service, when different groups of people came in and I welcomed them all the same. There was Gabrielle the loud talker on the phone, Amelia with her Atheist friend (Eva), Ben the emo, James, James and David the geeks, Rebecca, Fiona and Nadine the druggies, Hamish and Aonghas the homeless people, and Jireh the fobby Asian tourist. After that skit I had people telling me I should become a minister! I'll have to consider that...



During supper we had to sit with our game groups to get to know each other and enjoy our snacks.

After supper we were free to do anything we wanted. I was given orders to keep an eye on the Oddfellows youth group, and to ensure they went to bed as soon as the older fellowship went to bed. They stayed up for a while as they were celebrating one of their members' (Shirley) birthdays and ended up playing Uno with this machine!

Some from our youth group just sat around a table talking. I went upstairs to my room to practise a couple of children's songs I had to help Gabrielle lead at the service the next morning, when some of the younger guys came in and started sharing jokes. I have to say some of them were quite random!

We all eventually came back downstairs to play cards for a while before some of them went back upstairs and I joined the others from my youth group who were just sitting around. It was approaching 1am when the older fellowship went to their rooms upstairs. It was now up to me to try get my youth group back to their rooms! They really wanted to stay up late though and some had even suggested switching off the lights and staying downstairs all night! I really didn't want to let Gabrielle down and tried to get them back upstairs. Claire started drawing a picture of me as a 'party pooper'! I ended up making a bargain with them that they could stay up till 1am and then they'd have to go upstairs. Even at 1am they were a bit unkeen to move until they heard some random noise which scared them!

I have to say I did feel slightly hurt, as if I was being blamed for everyone not being able to stay up late, but I guess that comes with the responsibility, and hopefully they'd eventually get over it...

Once again the sleep wasn't great. It took me ages to go to sleep, and when I woke up at 5am I couldn't get back to sleep, so I went for an early shower.

We had breakfast before Jireh and I went over to the trampolines to play around. Everyone else soon followed, before I was called in to rehearse for the church service. I discovered that while I was there, everyone else had gone down to the beach without me! I was a little gutted about that!

By 10am the church service started. Some members of the congregation showed up just for the service. Besides leading a couple children's songs with actions, the service was pretty much like any other church service, except we were in a different environment.

After the service we had a big group photo out on the field before going back into the room for some group games, which involved dressing up one person in the group with random objects we had to find. We ended with a fashion show before we all went back into the hall for lunch. Our cabin group had to prepare lunch so we had to put out the plates and the cutlery.

Lunch was nice, we had corn and lasagne! I had a second serving, not realising there'd be dessert afterwards!

We had a final clean up after lunch before the final prayer and then everyone began leaving. We finally left after a while, but not before taking one final walk along the beach with Nadine and her mum.

We were so exhausted after the weekend that as soon as we got home we all went to sleep!