My childhood: here I learnt to be creative, enjoy life, the importance of family…

Married life (current season): Here I’ve learnt, and am still learning, about patience, love, forgiveness, responsibility, joy.

Pepper (current season): Here I’m learning about responsibility, helplessness, unconditional love, happy tears.

Uni (the first time round): Here I learnt about resilience, teaching, passion, eLearning, adaptability, friendship.

In fact, one could describe me as an ‘anti-people person’.

It’s not that I don’t like fixing problems or what not, I’m just not that good with people. I get grumpy and frustrated easily. So this is something that I’ve really had to work on and try to improve, and by goly, being nice to people works WONDERS!

So it has been my mission the last few days to be nice to people and not get frustrated with them. It’s hard sometimes, but I’m getting there! Of course, this is mostly relevant to work, but is sometimes related to at home and socializing!

In other news, my parentals and A-mon-o-me (Amon) came home from Myanmar, formally known as Burma. Click the links to learn more about it via Wikipedia, though it may romanticise it a bit… So here’s a little collage of the weekend…

1. The rose I picked from my parent's garden. 2. The new iron we bought. $100. 3. Luke playing the burmese harp my parents and Amon brought back from Myanmar. 4. The white gold and diamond bracelet my parents bought me from Myanmar as my graduation present. 5. Amon and Luke trying on Myanmarian clothes...

Of course, I also enjoyed taking lots of photos with Rachel, and catching up with Zoey and her family (including the always adorable Mayana!) randomly at M’ba.

Disappointed. University. Professional. Family. Gone. iPhone. Rachel. Tears. Hurt. Camera. Dinner. Moroccan. Big vs Small. Questions. What now?. Mistakes. Remember. Annoyed. Peace?. Hate. Hard. Tired. Stress. Memories. Thirty-one. Hayden. Nana. Two. Bored. Gown. Mint Green. Effort. Worthless. Future. Luke.

YESTERDAY I was taking some snaps of my friend Pete, who’s a mime. Here’s a sneak-peak shot- no others have been edited yet. I really enjoy taking photos, and I’m going to be doing a photo course with Carmen and Rachel in a few weeks/months, so that’s pretty exciting.

Poiter, the mime.

Taking photos those makes one TIRED! And I seem to spend so much more time in post-production then actually taking the photos. Is this NORMAL?!!?!

AND I have so much to do! I’m making a bag for my fabric ruler. It’s my first sort of patchwork thing, so I’m pretty excited.

I GRADUATE tomorrow. I’m a little non-excited about it, and a little nervous. More nervous about my hair actually, and it’s black roots… My initial thoughts were, “I’m wearing that cardboard hat, so it’ll be okay” and now I’m not so sure… I’ll be calling Suanne today to see if she can fit me in for an emergency colour. Rachel is so much more organised then me… *hangs head in shame*.

Also, I thought I would post it out there that if you are following me on twitter, @sunshinetalia is my personal account, and @taliacarbis is my geek/education account. If you’ve never re-followed @sunshinetalia from the handle swap a few weeks ago, then you’re probably missing out.

Saturday was a scrapbooking day at Rachel’s church. So we went along for a bit of scrapping fun!

Organising my front page...

I cut the letters out of paper and stuck them to the cardboard ones!

I wanted to do some journaling on this page. The Velum layer means you can read the writing easily, and also still see the photos. You can lift it up if you want to see the photos clearer.

After all that I realised that I need a few more supplies. A box to store my papers in, and something for all my other bits- stickers, diecuts, brads etc.

We’re graduating at different times for different reasons, but the point is that we’re not all at Uni anymore. Before our lives, though different, were all consumed by a common factor- Uni. Now we’re all in different places and we talk about different things. Every school holidays Katie comes back to the coast (her and Alex moved to Emerald to teach), and we all get together for a ‘uni night’. It’s always fun to talk and catch up and hang out with these people that for the last 3 years I have spent so much time with!!

The thing I noticed about Monday night (our most recent Uni night), was the different conversations that went round the table, and how the amount of conversations that included everyone was decreasing. Rachel and I could talk about puppies, Katie and Carmen about graduation… there were conversations about being married, getting engaged, engagement rings, churches, friends, girlfriends, children, houses… the list goes on.

I guess the thing I love is that even though we’re all at different places in life right now, we are still able to get together and talk for hours and hours. I hope that this never dies, as long, good friends are hard to find.

Thank you to everyone who came! It was made very special by the variety, and loyalty of the friends who shared it with me.

It was held in our newly (almost) finsihed place. Picture of the main room, with floor down and everything, here:

There is nothing quite like having friends to share your love and your time with. I would like to give a special things to Rachel, who gave quite a touching speach. Also a big thanks to Dad- who is always one of my biggest fans, and always manages to gush over me at exactly the right times (i.e: during speaches dedicated to me).

LUKE’s speach was very well thought out, and I am thinking that I will write it out (he gave me a copy of his notes- yes, he wrote notes!!), in a new post. I LOVE him SOOOO much.

So this is my special dedication to Rachel, who helped with all our moving on Monday, and then when ‘the car incident/ accident’ happened on Monday arvo she was over at our old place cleaning! Then last night helped clean again. And we were cleaning for HOURS last night. And to top it off she buys pizza on the way back to our new place. She is ADORABLE, and I am indebted to her. Last night I realised how much I don’t deserve a friend like her- someone who is willing to sacrifice her time and effort, and time with her sister (Kathryn- who helped us clean), just because we’re friends, and I needed help. I am seriously in awe, and this little paragraph in no ways explain how grateful I am, or how much I am amazed at your commitment, friendship, loving heart, and specialness! I am seriously trying to find some way to thank you properly.

Oh, can I also give a big shout out to Kathryn, who was an excellent cleaner! She came over to clean, and I am very, very thankful!

Thanks to Carmen, who was the first one to help us clean, and when I had messaged her to ask if she could help she so quickly replied ‘yes’ and sounded so excited! You really gave me hope, Carms, that this whole cleaning thing would be okay.

Jeff deserves a huge shout-out as well. He helped us clean all the places we forgot, and then after dinner, at our new place, he washed up!! I am so blessed to have a friend like that as well!!

Thank you to my husband as well, who did all the little things on the list I gave him yesterday- including the washing up, and finding some plates in a box. And thank you Luke for taking responsibility with me for cleaning our old place. I really appreciate you and the way you look after me- especially when I have nose issues at night, and feel like I’m dying. I love you.

THANK YOU EVERYONE!

Oh, and thanks to Aaron for coming to eat Pizza with us and play Absolute Boulderdash. haha.

Our bedroom is the only finished part of the house, so everything else is just scattered in the enourmous space we have (it’s taking a bit of getting use to!) Mum and Luke are painting the last wall of the lounge room today, and then there’s the floors to do- but it should be done by the end of the week!! Then we’re on our way to doing the main area- kitchen, study, living area, dinning area. Which is exciting!

We had some great friends, Rachel, Aaron, Pete and Jordan who helped us move yesterday. Thanks guys!! Rachel did some cleaning as well, which was a real blessing! Pete took some photos of the move, which you can view here.

Oh, and Luke had a little accident in our car… no one’s hurt, but if you could all pray (or do just whatever you do!) that it doesn’t cost us heaps and heaps, and that it gets fixed quickly, that would be great!! Thanks. xox.

And my mum showed me this awesome thing today: http://www.simplesavings.com.au Check it out!