real life unfolds...

Happy Birthday (yesterday) Mom! We will celebrate again when Bern and I are home.  Hopefully the flowers will suffice until then...

Snow day was great. I'd forgotten it was one of the side benefits of being in school...Spent the day mostly cleaning and doing work or trying to...

Just figured out that my reading week is not going to be much of a reading week. Before the reading week, I have an assignment. At the end of my reading week, the Sunday before school starts, I have a project do. Then that week following reading week, I have a presentation, midterm and firm training on top of all the normal work. Reading week looks like its shaping up to be a whole ton of fun .... But then I must be thankful that I'm not in engineering, they only get two reading days!

Oh yeah and who says you can't get your brain stimulated or thinking from watching TV, I'd totally forgotten about this quote from grade 10 English: "There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune but omitted, and the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat and we must take the current when it serves or lose the ventures before us." - Julius Caeser .... interesting....

posted by: amh at 11:57 | link | comments |

SNOW DAY! My appreciation for Waterloo is growing....

posted by: amh at 09:12 | link | comments |

Just when I started to complain that there weren't any good shows anymore, I hit jackpot! One Tree Hill on the WB!!! After one episode, I am hooked. Some might say it's reminiscent of Dawson's Creek but I don't think it's significantly so. The setting is nice (filmed also in Wilmington), the actors are easy on the eyes , and what’s best, the dialogue, characters and story lines are an unbeatable combination. I've watched all ten eps of the show at least 2 or 3 times each already, hahahaha...If you liked Dawson’s, watch an ep of this and let me know what you think…

 

"What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few, and those perhaps not accurately."
- John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

posted by: amh at 20:58 | link | comments (1) |

It’s been about three weeks since the start of school, and like all new environments, there are adjustments to be made, places to discover and people to befriend. All in all, life is pretty good so far…

 

Loo as a city… well actually other than going to the train station and valu-mart I haven’t seen much of it… Even if I did take on some crazy notion to venture into the pneumonia inducing weather, there wouldn’t be much to see… it snows like nuts here!... Just when one day of sun comes, and the snow starts to melt into that nice brown stuff we call slush, I wake up the next morning to find snow falling from the sky only to be followed up the next day with howling winds and blowing snow … the sky is white, the ground is white, the buildings are white and the ppl are white (as in being covered with snow). Where was this snow when I went snowboarding on Boxing Day? My butt sure would have appreciated this snow then!

 

There’s also no bus pass and the university plaza has a variety of restaurants but no decently-priced supermarket nearby. All the supermarkets are like 20 minutes (walking time) away… in this weather, walking is not fun. The mall is even further! I don’t even know where the movie theatre is…. Sigh….Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. After all, I know I've got lots to learn and this is my opportunity to do it.

 

Loo as a campus… let’s just say… hmmm… how to put this nicely…..it’s not the most aesthetically pleasing… The majority of the décor consists of brown, orange, black, and beige, and of course, wonderful, attached to the desks, plastic unstable chairs. Ivey may have spoiled me but boy, do I miss those padded armchairs, wireless internet, new classrooms, beautiful buildings and bench seating areas. I have no idea where everyone goes after class… My theory is either people go home or to the library… which leads me to …

 

Loo the people… considering that people in my program have known each other since first year, they’re all very nice and friendly….A few people have even gone way out of their way to make sure us non-loo-originating students don’t get lost and know how to get from one place to another. I’m starting to even learn these underground tunnels. My favourite one goes from HH to ML’s Timmy’s… Hmm… what else was there I wanted to say….

 

I went to CCF for the first time last week… and wow, on a slow day the ppl who come just about outnumber the ppl that come to ACF on a big night event…CCF also made me remember how old I was… I went that night looking forward to new ppl and making new friends …. When I got there and looked around, all of a sudden it hit me.. I had forgotten that this was my fifth year… everyone here was mostly 1^st/2^nd/3^rd years.. with a handful of ppl closer to my age….I felt so old so suddenly... hehe.... I also started going to Women’s Cell since I always liked going to that at ACF. That was fun, there was good food (well junk food) and good laughs… they came up the funniest ice breaker questions…I was laughing to the point of crying with some of them….A guy in accounting is also starting up a prayer group for us Christians in the faculty so I’m looking forward to that too…

 

The church I went to here, CFC reminds me a lot of Northpark in London. The pastor’s voice even sounds a little like Pastor Terry’s to me…they have skits and musical performances mixed in with the actual sermon too! Hmmm… maybe at some point I’ll visit KWCAC (another church) and give it a look-see too…

 

Oh yes, and of course, my housemates are next… I live in a house with 5 other ppl: 4 girls and 1 guy, 2 electrical eng, 1 systems eng, 1 comp eng and 1 masters of architecture… Everyone’s nice and friendly and fun...(Joyce, I think I’m starting to actually remember that I’m talking to your sister and not to you, hahahaha….) One of the girl’s gave me a welcome hug the first night I was here…which was very very nice. The two EE’s are really strong Christians too…I’m already learning things just by watching them. We have a lot of nice convos too as a house… On Sunday, as we were all prepping our lunches, we started comparing our movie collections and ended up watching Memento that night…

 

It’s a good movie.. requires thought though.. which probably wasn’t such a good idea for me considering I’d had 4 hours of sleep the night before and had been doing a tax assignment the whole day. I ended up looking it up on the web to try and make sense of it and I came across this website http://dir.salon.com/ent/movies/feature/2001/06/28/memento_analysis/index.html?pn=1 The guy analyses the whole movie, even writes out the plot in the right order (the movie goes partially backwards and partially forwards – I told you.. you need your brain to watch this movie) and at the end, he still can’t come to a conclusion about the Sammy Jenkis story… good analysis though…

 

Hmm… what else….oh yeah,

 

There is a huge number of Chinese people here and after coming from a primarily-Caucasian uni environment…there was a little culture shock…and maybe it’s a side effect of having so many Asians together in one uni, but I find that people here, at least in my program, study a lot… in fact, they do more work than they have to….they’ll do work that they’ve been told they don’t need to do in order to get a good mark…in comparison, I’m a slacker… hahaha…. For those of you, who msn/icq’ed me the first week I was here, I was kinda stressing out about my schedule and all the work that I was going to have to do… well between an all-nighter and lots of introspective debating, followed by re-aligning my course choices with my career goals, I’m feeling more relaxed now …. But if someone does find the “keener”-ness that I lost somewhere between now and 2^nd/3^rd year, let me know.

 

Oh yes and another peculiar quality of Loo students that I’ve noticed so far is that on the weekends, they like to go home… home home… Toronto home….strange, I thought ppl went away to university to get away from home… I must be missing something…But then who knows, maybe this is a habit that I’ll pick up… after all, I am going home this weekend.

posted by: amh at 10:36 | link | comments |

Testing... testing...

posted by: amh at 16:12 | link | comments |

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