bento box

Blogging and etc

2011-11-15T19:05:00.000-05:00

Good news everyone!
I finally reached 200 followers on Flickr. Yay! I'm kind of surprised because I hardly EVER post there anymore, which I feel bad about so I should start doing that more. Anyway. Today's post comes to you in three parts.

Part one: What have I been doing.

This past weekend I worked at the Women's Show at the convention centre as part of my internship with RfR. There were a surprising number of men there. Basically I stood at our booth and handed out cards and told people who walked by what we do ("Heeyyy ladies! Got any events coming up? We rent out designer dresses at a fraction of the retail cost!") It was a little exhausting and I had to smile a lot but I really like RfR so it was okay. I also helped backstage for the little fashiony runway show we did each day, helping models not fall down stairs and stuff.

I cut my Smoke's shift hours down to one night a week so I could have more time for other things, like school and blogging, and it's been a lot better. Usually I work Friday or Saturday night, but this week I'm working overnight on Thursday. This probably has something to do with my boss firing everyone all the time, so we get a lot of new people in with different schedules and I have to train them and they drop giant things of gravy on the floor.

Part two: Tea education yaayyy

You may know that I have become fully obsessed with tea. So I'm gonna talk about tea for a while.

GATHER ROUND, CLASS.

Today's topic is...

WHITE TEA! Because that's what I'm drinking right now.

So, as you may already know, all types of "true" tea come from the same plant, Camellia sinensis. What a fantastic plant! Basically, the tea is picked, withered, oxidized, and dried. Sometimes people refer to the oxidation process as "fermentation," but that's not really what it is. As far as I know, oxidation is just when something absorbs oxygen and then the oxygen changes shit up. Like when you leave an apple slice out and it gets all gross and brown, that's oxidation too. Okay. Bringing it back to WHITE TEA now.

White tea uses the youngest shoots of this awesome plant, before the buds even open. The buds are covered in this silvery hair, which gives the white tea its name. It's allowed to wither for a short amount of time and the oxidation process just begins. Then it's heated to stop oxidation and dried.

Since it's close to its natural state and is often shaded for awhile during growth to reduce chlorophyll, white tea contains mucho antioxidants and is super good for you! It generally has a delicate, sweet taste and it's super smooth. For ultimate white tea happiness, steep it in well-below-boiling-temperature water. People say different things about whether it should be steeped for a short time or a long time, but I think it depends on the tea and on what you like. Generally I think flavoured white teas (that contain other things besides just tea leaves) should be steeped for a shorter time than straight teas. I have a flavoured white tea called buttercream from my favorite tea place, David's Tea (yay Canadian tea company) and it said to steep it for like 5 minutes or something, so I did, and I haaaated it and thought it was super super gross. So I came back to it a little later and tried steeping for just over a minute, and it was completely different and tasted awesome. So yeah I'm a fan of short steeping times for white teas.

White teas are one of the most expensive kinds of tea, probably because they require more hand processing and can only be picked for a little bit of time out of the year. They're also made in smaller batches I think. Apparently white tea is one of the least popular teas in the west, maybe because of the price? But tea really isn't that expensive. Silver Needle is the highest quality white tea, it's made with only buds (no leaves) and is produced only in the Fujian province in China and even buying this tea comes out to well under a dollar per cup.

Okaay, I really tried to keep this short hahah, sorry I kind of failed, thanks for reading all of it, I think this shit is super interesting. So yeah white tea, really nice, sweet, kind of young and delicate tea. If tea was music I think white tea would be Kimya Dawson or maybe like, Regina Spektor or something.

Part three: Zombies

I'm super into the graphic novel series "The Walking Dead" right now. I was always kind of freaked out by zombies and I don't really like zombie movies or anything, so I don't know why I started reading it. But it's awesome. I think they started making a tv series out of it, but I heard it wasn't very good. The books are about the characters a lot more than the zombies, obviously. It's more of a "what people would do in a dangerous, post apocalyptic world" story than a "totally laying waste to hoardes of zombies" story, although there are moments of that too. There are a lot of books and he's still writing more, I'm up to #6 now. In the intro to the first one he writes about how he's fascinated with zombies because of what they say about our place in society, and our society's place in the world, and how they're basically our own death personified which is generally what we fear the most. But they're also slow and stupid, and easily taken down by just about anybody whether they're an awesome fighter or a normal person and it's nice in a way to think about being superior to death. Anyway it made me think about zombies differently. The art is good too. So yeah check it out because it's awesome.

Okay, that is all, thanks for reading. Bye!

Important Hair Update

2011-11-11T19:36:00.001-05:00

Hi! I'll probably do a normal post soon. But I re-dyed my hair yesterday or the day before or something and I really like how it turned out.
Recall, if you will....
Original blue hair:

Which faded in a month and a half or so to this:

Which I liked but was getting a bit too green. Also my roots were starting to come in more. The blue-green was confusing to me because some people thought it was blue and some people thought it was green. On the same day a homeless guy yelled at me, "I like your SMURF HAIR!!!" and an old woman on the elevator told me I was all ready for St Patrick's day.
I didn't want to bleach again yet, so I decided to just go over it with blue but mix in some purple dye so that the red would cancel out the green. COLOURS!
Apparently blue dye + purple dye = purple dye. But since it went over already-blue hair, it turned out this awesome dark blue/purple/indigo colour. And it's super shiny yaayyyy

Awkward photobooth picture:

It's less dark and more purple in person. I very much like it.

Creative Title

2011-09-26T23:43:00.000-04:00

I dyed my hair blue! There's also some greenish parts, it looks kind of oceany. I am pleased.

Yay!

Suspicious package

2011-09-22T20:19:00.000-04:00

Hi! Okay so, it's fall now as I'm sure you're aware. The temperature here in Toronto has been hovering around 20 at the hottest, and as I walked through Queen's Park today a gust of wind came through and suddenly the air was filled with yellow leaves. It looked like a scene from a music video, it was awesome. Here are some pictures I found from last fall, when Kara and I went to the Brickworks.

So today, this happened and it was totally my train in the station when they made everyone evacuate! We pulled in and after a few minutes an announcement came on saying something about a delay and then "please leave the train..... please leave the station." The place I was going was only a couple stops away so it wasn't a big deal or anything. As I walked north up Yonge street, firetrucks and police cars sped by sirening. There were tons of them! Of course it turned out to be nothing... but the subway was shut down for an hour so I ended up having to walk home. Some people talked to me as we were leaving the station and then walking outside. I met one lady who said she never took the subway and the one time she does, some hooligans try and blow it up. There was one guy who was telling everyone not to worry, if it was a fire we would all be dead by now. That was my mild excitement of the day.

According to my blogger stats, someone found my blog recently by googling giant b'loonies! This makes me incredibly happy.

Mehhhhh

2011-08-17T14:20:00.000-04:00

I have a ton of photos to post, here are the last from that roll from the Golden Half. These are basically all the ones that were kind of mehh but I didn't want to just leave them to rot in my lightroom library. Except the one with the chandelier, I liked that one. But most people seem to not like it so much. I'm forcing you to look at it anyway.

I don't have to work at Smoke's today and I don't have to go to my internship thing and classes haven't started yet. And I don't feel like doing much of anything today except staying in and going through photos. I also have to finish this makeup tutorial thing that Kristy wanted me to do for the Rent Frock Repeat blog so I'll do that too.

I have nothing very interesting to post today, I really just want to get some more photos posted so I have more motivation to take my camera out. I don't know why I post all these pictures on here. I'm thinking about starting a tumblr or something like that.

Airplanes and updates

2011-07-28T13:06:00.000-04:00

Hi! I'm back from my family reunion in Burford. We went rafting and the Grand River tore apart my $6 flip flops. It was humid and fun and now I'm back in the city. It's nice and cool this week and it didn't even get above 25 degrees today. It rained a little and now it's really foggy. But when I ask people if they think the hottest days of the summer are behind us everyone's like "probably not, Toronto weather is weird." One person said "it all depends on the pressure fronts..." and started giving me an in-depth explanation of how weather works even though I was just trying to make light conversation.

I've started going to the gym with my friend Jose every weekday morning. We try to get to Hart House by 7am. At first it seemed unnatural and like it was still supposed to be nighttime but now we're into our fourth week and I'm kind of getting used to it. We usually stay for an hour and half or so and by the time I get back it's not even a double-digits hour yet. I also started drinking tons and tons of water everyday which has really improved my skin! The downside is that I have to pee like all the time. But it's worth it. I'm also eating lots of vegetables and taking vitamins. But don't worry, I'm still getting very little sleep. One of my favorite things to eat now is pieces of cucumber wrapped in nori and dipped in shoyu. One of the characters was eating it in a Murakami book and it sounded really good. And it is really good!

I signed up for fall classes and I got into the first year Japanese course! I couldn't get in for the last two years so I'm very happy. The book I was reading at Indigo that disappeared a month or two ago is back and I'm about 40 pages from the end. I wish it was longer because I really like it and once I finish it I'll have to find a new Indigo book to read and it probably won't be as good.

Reunion

2011-07-14T15:07:00.000-04:00

Hi! The Vermeulen family reunion is coming up soon, so here are some photos from last year's reunion in BC.

That was nice. I think I will start blogging again cause I have a lot of photos that I haven't put on flickr or done anything with. Yesterday I made boeterkoek, peanut butter cookies, salmon, and dulce de leche. So I'm going to go eat.

Victoria Day

2011-05-23T10:16:00.004-04:00

Hello, I've been back from Corvallis for about a week now. Toronto is getting warmer.

Since I dyed my hair from bleached blonde to jet black it started turning dark green in patches. It was really bugging me so I dyed it dark again on Friday. I used a dark brown instead of black and it covered up the ugly parts nicely. I managed to not wreck the bathroom or my hair but I now have dye marks all over my arms.

I have class Tuesdays and Thursdays now from 10-2, a three hour lecture followed by a one hour tutorial. I like the long lectures because I can settle in and concentrate and not have to think about anything else, but I don't like the tutorials because my TA kind of sucks. But at least she has a cool British accent. My professor is cool in a weird sort of way, he seems a bit run down but still very positive.

These pictures are from the fair forever ago, I just never posted them. I just scanned in like six new rolls of film and I have a lot that I want to put up, so I'll probably be doing a lot of little posts. But I like these pictures.

Today is Victoria Day here in Canada. Last night there were fireworks being set off in Queen's Park and I had a good view of them out my window. Basically Victoria Day is a joint birthday party for Queen Victoria and the current queen, but according to Wikipedia it also informally marks the beginning of Canada's summer season. Happy Victoria Day!

I'm tired of the old shit, let the new shit begin

2011-05-02T23:47:00.000-04:00

Oh, hello. These pictures were taken in Ithaca, at Cornell.
I moved to a new place and the school term is over. The past week has been a blur of cleaning, unpacking, organizing, allergic reactions, generally getting shit together, and much, much more cleaning.

As promised I have been baking and cooking my ass off and a few things have actually come out pretty well. I am pleased. On the 8th I'm going back to Corvallis. This is a mini post because I'm tired so I'm going to bed but I wanted to post so this is a mini post.

Pictures from Nova Scotia, thoughts from Toronto

2011-04-14T21:55:00.002-04:00

Hi! It was 70 degrees the other day so here are some celebratory photos from the summer, taken with the golden half in Nova Scotia.
I don't feel like these are strong as a set, so I'm going to type a bit between them as I sometimes do. This allows me to separate the photos and also lets me hear the rattle of the keyboard keys, which is one of my favorite sounds. It sounds productive and makes me think of rain. So this is really an everybody-wins kind of situation, except that only I win.

So a few of my things have gone missing from the kitchen in the past couple months. My roommates and I all have our own labeled cupboards where we keep our stuff, so it's not like it's just lying around. First it was one of my two Holga-print tea towels I got from Mom for Christmas. Then my tiny cutting board disappeared. This was distressing because it was what I always used to cut up the oranges I smuggled out of the dining hall. It was so little and easy to wash and practically brand new. My baking sheet was next to go, which was infuriating because in my quest to learn how to cook (which has taken a bit of a dive but once I move I assure you it will be back with a vengeance, I mean I will literally live upstairs from a grocery store), I discovered that baking can be tremendously therapeutic and something that I very much enjoy. I even made a baking mix on 8tracks. So the loss of my baking sheet was inconvenient. Soon after this incident, my bigger cutting board vanished, and then some of my tupperware.

Recently things started reappearing mysteriously. I wandered into the kitchen one afternoon to find my tea towel next to the sink, all dirty and folded up. The cutting boards materialized hanging from a hook on the wall. One of my tupperware containers appeared right back in my cupboard. My baking sheet, however, is still gone. I've looked everywhere it could be in my suite and it is for sure not here, unless it's in one of my roommate's rooms or something. Why would someone steal a baking sheet? That's such a weird thing to steal from a dorm kitchen. Now I have to go back to Canadian Tire to buy a new one, but that's alright because I like going to Canadian Tire. I like all those giant stores with really high ceilings and bright lighting. I usually like the walk there too, but recently someone got stabbed right along where I walk and now I'm afraid to go there.

I dyed my hair black a couple weeks ago and I'm still getting used to it. I wanted to try jet black instead of just going back to my natural colour. I don't think the roots will be noticeable so this way I can just let it grow out too. So far only one person has actually told me it looks good. My other friends say:
"It makes you look really goth..."
"You look so PALE"
"Why did you do that?"
"At least it matches your eyebrows now"
They say I should have gone back to my natural colour instead of jet black. Even though I did not ask for their opinions, obviously this is very valuable and constructive criticism of my important hair choices and their remarks will come in handy for cutting me down when I start to get too full of myself.

An unexpected dilemma came up a little while ago. I often hang out at Indigo (Canadian version of Borders) (although I heard Borders is going out of business, wtf?) and there's a book there that I read a little of every time I go in. I'm about 60% of the way through it now. But a few weeks ago I went up to the fiction section only to find that the very last copy had been taken. I stood and stared at the shelf for a good two minutes or so feeling lost. I thought they would restock it, but it's been a few weeks now and it's still gone. So. Guess I'll just start a different Indigo book or something.

Do you know what's really noisy? Toronto. Toronto is so fucking noisy all the time, ALL THE TIME. Especially when you live right next to like four different construction sites. Besides the construction it's mostly car noises. Douchebags like to drive down my side street really fast, revving up their engine like hell just so they can make sure that everyone knows that they own a car and they are driving it pretty fast right now, so the world can just step aside and make way for them and their loud, loud car. There's always sirens and car horns and people yelling and the occasional swearing hobo making his rounds. Garbage trucks and street sweepers and airplanes. But the other day I woke up in the morning and the intrusive, obnoxious racket was fuzzy background noise to a much nicer sound. Right outside my window I could actually hear birds chirping. And that's why I'm happy it's spring.

These are my last four days of being a teenager. Being 19 was pretty fun. Once I'm 20 I'll no longer be among the youngest people at pubs or 19+ concerts or liquor stores. I'll be closer to 30 than 10. Dear god, I'll be halfway to 40. In a week I'll be moving into an apartment where I won't have a meal plan or a floor don (RA for you Americans), where I'll write rent checks and have a room where my bed doesn't take up half the space. I won't be surrounded by only students and I won't unpack all my things knowing that I'll be packing them up again in less than a year. I'll be a person in her 20's and it will be weird but also maybe kind of cool.

That's all, sorry this post was so long and rambling. Bye!

Minna no Nihongo

2011-03-16T16:06:00.001-04:00

Well I still haven't gone to get my film developed, so here is some old stuff that I never posted. This is the first roll from my Minolta Anscoset (this camera - I even have the same case!) that I got in a weird little junk store in Nova Scotia. These first three were taken in Corvallis during the summer. They make me wish the sun would come out.

The rest were taken in early September when my dad and I were traveling east with all my stuff so that I could move back to Toronto.

I've started trying to learn Japanese again. I've been wanting to do it all year but it always seemed like I should get all my school work done first, but school just kind of never ends. So I decided that I would be happier if I picked it up again anyway. I am much happier, and also my school stuff now seems easier to do. Sooo. Probably should have done that earlier...

I finally went and saw The King's Speech yesterday, I knew it would be good but I didn't realize that Helena Bonham Carter was in it! That made it at least twice as amazing. I really liked the cinematography too, so it gets an A+. I saw it in Oshawa with a boy. I don't think Oshawa is really as bad as everyone says it is.

I like these photos because I can really clearly remember taking each of them. That's usually the case actually, but with these it's like a personal record of a trip that I enjoyed. I would explain better but I'm not really feeling very good with words today and I think I'm going to go take a nap.

bi-winning

2011-03-04T14:59:00.005-05:00

Hi! These are the very last pictures from Hawaii, taken with my Golden Half camera. I hope you like them.

Last week was reading week, so I was in Burford at Oma and Opa's house watching curling. It's pretty out there with all the snow. Now I'm back in Toronto and I'm happy because today it actually got warm enough to rain! I have a bunch of film sitting in my fridge that I need to get developed, but the place I go to is way down Bloor street, mehhhh.

Domestic Goddess

2011-02-07T22:36:00.000-05:00

It turns out that what I thought was a whale-shaped cookie cutter was actually a snail-shaped cookie cutter. Phew. This makes sense because all the other cookie cutters were woodland creatures. So a whale would have been kind of weird.
Anyway, I've been holding up my new year's promise to try and cook, and I have already learned a lot. So far the most important thing I've learned is that every kitchen is different, so recipes are more like guidelines than set rules. Also I've learned that I don't have the arm strength to mix cookie dough by hand without working up a sweat. I ordered an electric hand mixer from amazon with my Christmas gift certificate, but I had to have it shipped to the states so it won't be here for a month or so. But I am definitely looking forward to that.
These sugar cookies were the first things I made, with this deceptively simple-looking icing recipe. I had to clean the counter REALLY WELL before I could use it to roll the dough, but it was worth it because it was super fun to use my new cookie cutters. The icing was a lot more difficult to control than I thought it would be, and it turned out real thick so I had to add extra milk and corn syrup. Also I couldn't find "light corn syrup" at the grocery store, only "golden" and "lily white" or something. Golden had slightly less sugar so I went with that one. It was fun to make different colours with the food colouring, and my roommate Bonnie came along and helped. The icing was tough to manipulate but it dried hard and shiny and pretty. Here are some of my favorite ones that I did:

A green squirrel riding a green bear.

A radical 80s fox.

A bad picture of a morphed, icing-challenged moose.

A gradient of hedgehogs.

Closeup!

The cookies and icing both tasted quite good! I was pleased. I was less pleased with the breadstick dip I attempted to make. I got the recipe from the college cookbook my mom got me for Christmas. The book is good but I think I fucked this one up by not draining the tomato after chopping it? I mean maybe I shouldn't have put all the liquidy tomato stuff in, I think that might be why it turned out so runny. Not sure where all the bubbles came from though. That was weird. It was still liquidy and bubbly after being in the fridge for a day. So. I'll try this one again and adjust some things because even though it looked gross, it still tasted pretty good. I will include a photo only because want this to be a thorough report:

Thankfully the roasted tomato recipe from the same book turned out much better. Eventually. Here they are pre-roasting, all set out on aluminum foil on a baking sheet:

When they first went in the oven I was a bit alarmed at the loud sizzling and popping sounds being emitted, but I thought it was probably just the olive oil on the aluminum. After a while I started to notice some smoke so I opened the oven and some more smoke came out. I turned off the oven and took them out and opened the windows and main suite door and ran around with my Totoro fan hoping that the smoke alarm wouldn't go off and make everyone hate me. Luckily there was very little smoke so it was fine. I did some research online and spent awhile reading about the smoke point of oils. It was moderately interesting and I found out that since my olive oil is such poor quality, the smoke point is probably lower than 400 degrees, which is what the oven was set to. Then I read all about olive oil and felt very educated and accomplished! So I went back to the kitchen and set the oven for just under 350 and tried it again. It took longer to roast but they turned out pretty well.

I liked them but next time I will use less garlic, since the garlic was hella strong. Hella strong.
It was around this time that my first knife injury occurred. It actually happened while I was washing the big Ikea knife I got, not while I was using it to cut things up. So a little bit lame, but it was at least kind of bloody.

Today I made peanut butter cookies! They were simple and fun to make (except for the arm-killing time-consuming mixing part) and they turned out really well. I gave a bunch to my friends who live down the street.

I recently bought a $65 wok at Canadian Tire for $19.49! They have good sales and I got the very last one. My hands are suuuuuper dry and weird now from all the dish washing plus the Ontario winter. I want to get some of them dish washing gloves.
That's all! The Weakerthans and Jim Bryson were amazing and a Toronto band called the Sunparlour Players opened for them, and they were amazing too. The concert was in Lee's Palace, which was used in Scott Pilgrim! The next evening I went ice skating in the snow in Nathan Phillips Square and only fell down once, and afterwards we went to Rifqi's to warm up and play Monopoly. I lost horribly. It was fun though! Baaiiiii!

I'll think of a title later (no I won't)

2011-02-04T11:10:00.002-05:00

Hi! I have cooking stuff to tell you about but I will do that later. For now here are some old photos. I haven't gone through the last Hawaii photos yet because I've been busy editing some portraits I did for my friend's friend, but I'll post them soon. These are from Corvallis and Portland in the summer (except for the first one, which was taken in September and is the top of the building out my window). They were taken with the "jazz jelly" see-through green camera I found at Goodwill. I don't know if the pictures work so well as a set, but I like them each individually.

Tonight I'm going to see Jim Bryson and the Weakerthans! Yayyy!

An Ikea vlog.

2011-01-26T22:12:00.001-05:00

I will learn to cook I swear

Sandwiches, sandwiches.

2011-01-23T18:21:00.003-05:00

Hi! My god, why am I blogging so much?!
These are the last pictures from the first Diana Mini roll, and they were all taken in Hawaii.

Yesterday evening I went down the street to my friend's apartment building and a bunch of us watched hockey and ate sushi and shot pool in the club room. The actual reason for us being there was so that I could take some pictures of a girl I met through my friend. She's moving back to Japan soon and I'm not sure what the pictures were for but she wanted some nice photos of herself so Matt asked me if I could do that and I said okay. It was fun to use my digital camera again.

Kara and I have started going out for lunch every Friday, since there are so many restaurants and cafes that we think look cool but never go into. Last week we went to an Italian place in Little Italy and I had an excellent zucchini and red pepper panini. On the way back we stopped by an ice cream parlour that had one-dollar hot chocolate and chatted with the cute guy behind the counter about the decemberists. Then we went to Soundscapes record store and spent all our money on concert tickets. The week before last we went to this place in kensington market called the grilled cheese. It was a tiny place that looked like a log cabin inside and there was one woman working there and they had all these different types of grilled cheese you could get. It was amazing and pretty much my favorite place to eat in Toronto now.

On days that are not Friday I have been eating a lot of slightly expired Starbucks sandwiches that I get from my friend Shane who works there. I like how the wrapping makes the same crinkly noise as the wrapping on the sandwich that Beyonce gives Lady Gaga in the Telephone video. (Actually I'm not sure if that was a sandwich. It might have been something else.) Right now my roommate is having her soccer team over for a potluck or something and they are quite loud. I have to go out to the kitchen to wash a plate but I think I might just wait until they are gone.

My dad's and my brother's birthdays are coming up. As I was thinking about what to get them it occurred to me that I'll be turning 20 this year! Wtf! After that I will never be a teenager again!
......
...YAAAYY!!

(I should clearly be a knee model)

I think that's all. Tomorrow is Monday, so, 9am calculus with the prof that hates us.
Baaiiii!!

A problem that should not be such a big problem

2011-01-21T12:14:00.002-05:00

Hi!
Here are some more pictures from my first Diana Mini roll. The first three were taken at the Hawaii airport, and the rest are from the yurting adventure on the Oregon coast. Overall I am pretty happy with how they turned out, and I like how I can do overlapping exposures with this camera easier than with the Holga. Plus it's a very pretty camera to carry around!
Anyway, you may notice that I never post photos of Toronto. (Well I mean I have pictures from going around different areas with Kara and Rifqi and stuff, but never any actually decent photos that I put thought into). Even though I almost always have at least one camera in my bag, I can never seem to stop, take it out, and fire the shutter. WHY?!

One thing I have noticed about Toronto is that most people seem to be either in a rush, or very concentrated on getting where they're going. Usually both. So I think I kind of got into a fast-paced habit like that too. When I'm walking to class I always look around and see and think about the things that are weird or pretty or in any way remarkable, but I keep up my pace and walk on by. Now that I'm used to passing though and seeing things on the move, it takes a lot more effort to stop and think about a still frame. Sometimes I'll turn on my ipod, shove my hands in my coat pockets and arrive at class without even having thought about photography.

Another thing is that there are actually people here. A lot of people! Everywhere!! And it makes me self-conscious and paranoid about taking pictures. I am certain that no one will care or think about it for more than a second if I stop and take out a camera. Even if they did think it was weird or something (why would they?), why should it matter to me? And people take pictures in Toronto all the time, anyway. Plus you are more anonymous in a city than anywhere else! But these reasonable arguments can't stop me from thinking:
"They'll think I'm stupid for taking a picture of a tree!"
"I'll look like a tourist!"
"If I take a picture they'll think I'm stalking them!!"
"I'll look like I'm trying to be arty and they'll think I'm all pretentious!! OH GOD, AM I PRETENTIOUS?!?!"
I love looking at street photography in particular and it's something I would really like to practice, but these thoughts are kiiiind of getting in the way.

I'm also not used to taking photos in such a dense area. Things seem to be all smashed together and it feels more messy and less natural. Also, I know that there are tons of amazing photographers swarming around Toronto, so I feel like everything I could shoot has been done before, and better. Maybe the fear of coming up with terrible pictures is subconsciously keeping me from trying at all, like people who procrastinate because they're perfectionists and so they sabotage themselves so that later they can say "I only did poorly because I left it until the last minute." But it would actually be kind of good if my pictures turned out bad, because you have to suck at something before you can be any good at it. So I'm not taking pictures because I'm afraid I'll suck, but I suck because I'm not taking any pictures?!

It's the people that are most interesting in the city, but I never really got the hang of photographing people. I think it takes a lot of patience and intuition and some luck too. And the best street photographers are the bold ones who can get up close to strangers and, like, not freak out or apologize or anything but just take a picture and move on. That is something I'll definitely have to practice.

This sounds totally crazy and like I'm over-analyzing things! I should just throw all this away and go take some fucking pictures! I've already tried that though and all this shit keeps coming back to me so that's why I wrote this post, so I can stop it from cluttering up my brain and get it organized. Now my anxieties are out of my head and onto my blog. This was probably a reallllly uninteresting post to read but at least it is over now! Thank you for reading, or skipping to the end! Baaaiiiiiii!!

This is mostly about weather, sorry

2011-01-16T12:44:00.003-05:00

Hi! The first week of the new semester is over and the snow has arrived in Toronto. I forgot how sparkly snow can be. Queen's Park is now white, and everything glitters as you walk through. From the second floor of Pratt library I'm distracted by the Christmas-card images out the window. The old stone Burwash buildings adorned with crisp white play host to twinkling icicles while flurries of snowflakes dance in the wind. Spindly tree branches stand out like black text on a white page. Everything is untouched and silent and perfect.
....On the other hand, God seems to have spewed a huge dirt-flavored slushie all over the streets and sidewalks. I guess city winter has its ups and downs. Invisible rivers of wind tear like frozen hell between towering buildings. It's ridiculous.
To get my mind off of the cold, I'll post some warm-weather Hawaii photos. These were taken with my new Diana Mini camera on expired Costco film I found at Goodwill.

That was nice.
On Tuesday I'm trekking out to Ikea with Bachan to buy cooking things so that I can finally be able to cook things. I am very excited. The other night I got really really hungry before bed and everything was closed (except Rabba, the hobo-y all-night grocery store, but bad things happen when I go there) and the only food I had was candy from going to see Tron. I ended up eating some Kit Kats and going to bed but it didn't exactly fill me up. I'm sure that once I become a master chef I won't have these kinds of problems anymore. Literally the only things in my fridge right now are vodka and film.
I was just looking over concert listings and apparently Randy Newman is going to be playing at Con Hall, the Mean Girls building where I have physics and anthro, in March! Hahahaha, what the hell?
Ok I am going to go chill at the library for a while. Baaiiiii!

Oh hi holga I missed you

2010-11-18T11:12:00.004-05:00

Do you guys know who "Drake" is? I didn't know, but apparently he's a rapper and he lives in the building across from my building! I bet he has a lot of places though so he's probably not there all the time. I would be more excited if I knew who he was so I could recognize him if I ever saw him on the street. Then I could yell out his name and point and cause a big commotion, and I'm always looking for opportunities to cause a commotion.

Anyway, here are some holga photos that I never got around to posting or putting on flickr until now. I'm pretty happy with how they came out though. This film is called Portra 160VC and it's one of my favorites now. In this one I was testing out my macro lens thing, it's harder than it looks cause the viewfinder on the Holga is not actually a viewfinder and it has to be the exact right distance from the lens to be in focus:

This is from hanging out in the meadow with Claire when it was still summer and not freezing cold. The camera is my 60's Anscoset that I got in a weird "trading post" store somewhere in Nova Scotia.

The rest are from the Corvallis fair when I went there with Claire. That was like a triple rhyme. I win.

I posted the entire roll of film in this post. They aren't all that great but it's rare to have a roll that is even 50% good enough to show people so I'm happy!
It's supposed to snow tonight. It probably won't but I hope it does. I'm trying to convert myself to thinking in degrees Celsius, so far it's going pretty well. I don't know when American Thanksgiving is and I'm too lazy to look it up, so if it's today then happy Thanksgiving! If not then I take it back.

Greektown

2010-11-14T16:14:00.003-05:00

Hi! Yesterday I explored Greektown with Rifqi and Kara. We went for lunch first at a place Kara had heard about. It was pretty inside with Greek-looking pillars and everything. I had chicken souvlaki and we also got this appetizer thing called saganaki. Basically it's fried cheese and they bring it to your table and pour vodka on it and set it on fire and yell "OPA!!" Everything about it was amazing. I also tried a dolma which was I think rice and something else wrapped in a grape leaf. It was really really lemony and I didn't like it much. The hummus there was awesome though. Here's a picture of the saganaki:

Mmmm. We found a cool (non-Greek) store where we made Rifqi wear funny hats.

Bahahaha. I bought a badass hat there. Here we have Rifqi and me posing douchily.

This is inside a cafe we went to. We got a banana split to share. It was awesome.

Rifqi took the wafer bit, but I got the cherry. Poor Kara was too slow to get anything special. We also found a sketchy "discount store" where I bought a flashy deck of Pokemon playing cards for a dollar. The backs are all sparkly. I also got one of those awesome pencils with the leads that you take out when it goes flat and stick in the bottom, and there's a sharp one underneath. I haven't had one of those in so long! Rifqi was amazed that I was enough of a loser to know all the names of the pokemon on the cards. I tried to explain to him that Pokemon was cool, but he kept talking about how hot Misty was.

The Greek stuff in Greektown was mostly restaurants and travel agencies, plus a ton of old Greek guys milling about. It was overall a cool place to go and hang out. Afterwards Rifqi and I met Elise in the subway and then went to Eaton Centre, and then me and Elise went to a Kate Nash concert. It was really good, she is awesome live! The opening band, Peggy Sue, was amazing! I've never seen an opening band that good.

Anyway I know when I'll be home for winter break now. I get to Corvallis in the evening on December 17th and leave on January 9th. Yay!

Toronto-style nature

2010-10-25T15:18:00.003-04:00

On Saturday I went to High Park with Kara and Rifqi. It's a giant naturey area with greenhouses, nature trails, tennis courts, and a zoo! It was nice to get away from the city for a bit. A group of asian tourists offered to take our picture in front of the "High Park" sign:

It was super pretty because of all the colourful autumn leaves and everything. East coast fall is a bit different than west coast fall, I think there's just a lot more pine trees on the west coast.

Here's a picture of some nice ducks

Here's me taking that picture

Whoaa, right!?
We spent 4 or 5 hours going around there. There was a children's "adventure park" which was basically a condensed, fire-safe version of the old wildcat park in Corvallis. It was awesome! Here is some of it:

Doesn't it look just like wildcat park?! We sat on a bench near there and Rifqi told us about how much joy he gets from making little kids cry. Whenever a kid passed by he'd open his eyes really wide at them to freak them out. What the hell?! I told him he was a sociopath and he seemed really surprised that Kara and I didn't enjoy scaring kids. Here he is among some Canadian geese, which he had never seen before:

We checked out the little zoo, these are some mouflon sheep, or something:

There were also peacocks, bison, emu, llamas, yaks, those emo-looking furry cattle, and wallabies. So I guess I took a picture of the boring-est animal. :/ But my memory card can only hold 30 or so photos so I didn't want to waste them on animals sitting around.

Last week I went to the debut of the Weakerthans documentary thing with Elise. John Samson did a live set and the whole night was super amazing. We got to talk to him afterward and he remembered us from last year and said he liked my new hair! The next night I went to the horseshoe tavern with Kara to see them do a free concert with Jim Bryson, because they just released a collab album (which is awesome) and they were playing all the songs from it. I love Jim Bryson too so it was doubly amazing. We were right up front and part way through Kara passed out! It was super weird! Stephen Carroll, the Weakerthans guitarist, helped me get her to the back room, and John Samson came and stuff, and it was crazy! He was like, "oh hey!" to me and gave her orange juice and stuff and she was fine, but we got to chill in the weakerthan's room for awhile. I accidentally left my jacket back there so before we left I had to go back and get it, and Jim Bryson was back there! He was like "is your friend okay?" He seemed really nice! I talked to him for a little while and the weakerthans were milling around packing up instruments in the background and it was kind of surreal.

Anyway, I organized all my clothes by colour yesterday and suddenly I have a ton more space? How did that happen? I'm liking the fall this year.

Blonded by the light

2010-10-13T22:54:00.003-04:00

I went blonde. And like any sane, healthy person would do after a major hair change, I photobooth'd.

I'm going back in a couple weeks to go lighter.
And yes Claire I will bleach my eyebrows, at least a little bit!

I'm hungry

2010-10-07T15:04:00.008-04:00

So I found a pun in the Analects:

"15:38 The Master said, 'In education there should be no class distinctions.'"

Haaahahaha. Oh Confucius, you crack me up.
I was going to have an actual post, but instead I'm just going to put up these photos from my plastic underwater camera that I took back at home. They are a little different from what I normally do and people may not like them so much, but I really really like them, especially as a set.

Canadian Thanksgiving is on Monday, we get the day off of classes and I am celebrating by writing two essays and an essay proposal. I will probably have a bagel for Thanksgiving dinner. But that's ok because tomorrow I am going to a Hot Hot Heat and Hey Rosetta concert with Kara. She won free tickets because she is extremely lucky in freebie things. Then on Saturday I am going to see a movie with Elise and a couple other people called Scott Pilgrim vs the World or something, apparently it takes place in Toronto and mentions Burwash? Elise loves it and is horrified that I haven't seen it, so I'm looking forward to it.
Tomorrow is my mom's birthday, happy birthday Mom!!

Also - Today I passed up an opportunity to meet the Barenaked Ladies AND the cast of The Big Bang Theory (which I love) in order to go to philosophy class. Rifqi says it was awesome. What the fuck is wrong with me.

Fall in Ontario

2010-09-28T10:11:00.006-04:00

Hello! This year Kara and Rifqi and I have decided to try and explore a different part of Toronto every Saturday, or at least go out and find some cool free stuff to do outside of campus and our part of downtown. Last Saturday Rifqi couldn't come, but Kara and I went to Evergreen Brick Works out by the Don Valley Parkway. It's an old abandoned brick factory that they're turning into a community center/park thing. So they were having some kind of grand opening or something, even though it's mostly not done yet. But there was a lot of cool old broken buildings around, and a LOT of awesome free food.

Also we got a little lost and found these cool shelves.

Colourful milk crates! The food was amazing and very autumn-y. There was spiced apple cider that tasted like liquid apple sauce (which is a good thing), and I had roasted corn for the first time and it was awesome. There were pumpkins lying around and the fall colours were just starting to come out.

East coast fall looks different to me than west coast fall. I think there are less oak trees here. It's really pretty.

In the evening we went to a mini film festival on Queen St that we had free tickets to. They showed 7 short films, 4 Canadian and 3 international. They were better than we were expecting them to be. Before we went to that, though, Kara wanted to get poutine...

...so I had my first-ever poutine experience.

It tasted pretty much the same as it looked.

Still unloading photos from the summer

2010-09-24T18:40:00.003-04:00

I will post pictures of my room and stuff soon, I just need to neaten things up a bit and get around to actually taking pictures of it! School is going well and I like all my classes, especially physics, premodern east asian history, and philosophy. Today I spent a few hours volunteering at the massive book sale going on at the Vic main building, working at the coat check. It was weirdly fun. Tomorrow I'm going with Kara to some sort of park opening/farmer's market event, and then in the evening we're going to a film festival we got free tickets to. I found a little camera store about three minutes away from my building where I can get film developed, yay! I think shopper's drug mart might also have some kind of 1 hr 35mm thing, I'll check next time I'm there.

A while ago I got this little blue plastic underwater 35mm Snap Sights camera from Goodwill. I took it out of its casing and ran a roll through it, and I really like it. Here are a few pictures from it, I have more from this roll though. But these were taken at the fair.

For some reason I really like this picture I took while waiting outside Claire's forest path. If you look close you can see the deer in the yard. Click to make it bigger. Blogger makes everything so freaking tiny.

I'm so hungry! They closed my favorite take-out place on Yonge for renovations. :C
I must look like I live here now because a lot of tourists have been asking me for directions! And I'm actually able to help them most of the time! First years have been asking me where things are too. Oh shit I forgot to do laundry today! Bye!

Celebrities everywhere!!

2010-09-13T22:47:00.005-04:00

It was the first day of classes today! I had calc and physics in the morning, and east asian history at 6. When I left for history I went out the door and saw....

THE FONZ!!! (Better known as Barry from Arrested Development)

I only had time to take one picture but I like how it turned out! He was a few steps down the street at Bader Theater (where I have philosophy!) because they're screening movies there for the film festival and I looked it up and his son wrote the screenplay for the movie that was there tonight. Uma Thurman was apparently coming in a second, but I had to get to class.

Later tonight I went with Kara and Rifqi to where Natalie Portman's movie was premiering. It was a lot more crazy and even though we got there almost an hour early there was still a HUGE crowd at this barrier they had up around the pathway that the people walk down. I pushed through a little but it was so packed that I couldn't get any further. So almost all of my pictures came out like this:

Reaching as far up as I could, because I am short and everyone else was normal-sized. Fortunately there was a very nice tall guy next to me who saw that I was freakishly short and offered to take some pictures for me. Thanks, tall guy!! Here's Natalie Portman:

Winona Ryder was also there, I saw her but didn't get any pictures. Also Barbara someone and Dominic someone (not Charlie). I got this picture of the white tent thing they walked into so that the paparazzis could get photos. I think the person in there is Mila Kunis, cause I know she was there but I wasn't sure which one she was cause I couldn't see very well. All I know is that people started shouting "MILAAAAAA" when she came out. It doesn't really look like her, but I think it is?

Here's a terrifying picture of the paparazzi...

It was definitely a weird experience. I preferred bumping into Henry Winkler though. Here is a closeup of him and an intimidating asian guy. And a girl who looks weirdly like me in the background.

I need a rug

2010-09-07T22:01:00.003-04:00

Hi! I got to Toronto yesterday and brought all my stuff up to my room, and now it's about 85% unpacked and organized. I'll post pictures of my room after everything is finished. It's bigger than my room last year, plus I don't have a roommate! I have a normal, non-lofted bed and a normal desk and a bookshelf and a closet. I got the suite at the end of the hall on the fourth floor, and I have three suitemates, and one of them is the don of the floor. This means probably no parties in my suite, less suitemates, and a bigger and nicer common room in my suite! Yaaayyy! I haven't met the other two girls yet. One is from New York and one is from Quebec.

These are some photos from my second roll of film from my Fujipet camera. I bought it off of someone from Flickr cause it's hard to find, especially outside of Japan. I didn't post the first roll cause it didn't come out very well, except for this picture of a guy juggling basketballs on a unicycle in Corvallis:

So anyway, here are some pictures.

Today I spent the day shopping for stuff for my room and toiletries and stamps and school supplies. And unpacking and organizing my room. Then I went to a free concert with Kara at a record store called Sonic Boom (where I saw the Weakerthans last year). It was a Toronto band called The Beauties who are "alt-country folk rock." They were not very good but not very bad either. For a free concert I would say it was worth it. Then we went and hung out at Kara's place for awhile. Then I walked home. Soon I might watch a movie with Hilary the don and someone else.
Tomorrow I'm going to the clubs fair in the morning since Elise is getting everyone to sign up for Amnesty International because she's the president and pretty much the only member right now. Then Kara and I are going to Little Italy to see Little Italy, and also to buy Matt & Kim tickets at Soundscapes. Then I'm going with Kara and Paula and probably Paula's boyfriend to a luau-themed frat party, even though I hate frat parties. However, I was assured that this one would be different... since it's luau-themed.
On Thursday I'm going to Ikea with Bachan! I hope I can find a good rug. If I don't find one at Ikea, I have absolutely no idea where else to look! So yeah I hope I find one there.

Hauling all my stuff across the continent

2010-09-02T20:18:00.001-04:00

Hello! I'm in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. We are waiting out some storms here and going to Brantford, Ontario early tomorrow morning.

These are some photos from a Holga roll I shot in Nova Scotia (except the first one which is in Portland). Half the roll came out like crap and half I really liked. The mastodons are from Mastodon Ridge, which is halfway between the north pole and the equator, and we played mini golf there.

Right now my dad and I are staying in a slightly sketchy Ramada. When we first got here and went to our room, there was someone's stuff still lying around in it. So we tried to go back down to the lobby, but the elevator was broken and this latino lady kept saying all the stairs led to nowhere. So we eventually made it down through the parking garage elevator, and they assigned us to a new room with a little microwave in it.

We went for dinner at restaurant/bar close by and the food was really good. We sat next to a huge window so we had a good view of the lightning storm that started up. There was a lot of lightning, it was really cool. At one point all the streetlights went out and it took a few minutes for them to power back on again. We thought we were going to have to walk back in the torrential rain but luckily it stopped raining right before we left.

So, I move in in four days and classes start a week later. I hope my room is alright. At least it will for sure be better than last year. That's all! Tomorrow we will travel to Canada early in the morning.

Robocam

2010-08-29T16:02:00.000-04:00

I got this little Korean toy camera off of ebay awhile ago for really cheap. It has three lenses and a robot on the front!

I ran a test roll through it awhile ago and I thought it was kind of cool.

I went with Claire to the fair. There was a clown that made me frown.

I leave on Tuesday so I'm supposed to be packing. Apparently Ian and Scott are trying to make cookies upstairs and Scott just put a metal saucepan in the microwave. I just ordered a mini fridge to rent for the school year, it will be nice to be able to keep all my film in there. Now I am going to pack. SO MUCH PACKING. See you in another life, brotha!

I really don't have a title

2010-08-27T21:45:00.005-04:00

I'm in Portland right now! Marinna is leaving tomorrow and then I'll be the only one left in Corvallis. Except Jonny, who I'm supposed to go to Coffee Culture with. I won't be able to get any medium format film developed for awhile, since I'm not back in Toronto until the 6th, and then I'll have to find somewhere to get film developed, and such. Between Tuesday and then, I'll be in Apsley partying with Finn and Ollie. I guess I won't be able to get any 35mm developed either. But between now and when I leave I'll be able to get 35mm developed if I want, since it takes only an hour or so and for medium format I'd have to wait at least a week, by which time I will be gone... so I guess you get it now and I should stop typing about it.
Anyway that's okay for me because I have a ton of film photos backed up right now. A TON. Here are a few. This is a Holga roll from way back in July or whatever month I was in Apsley with Edward (except the first two are in Halifax).

lol edward.

The senior photos went pretty well and I'm finally all done editing them and I've given them out on disks to Jonny and John's parents. Now I just need to pack up all my shit before I leave!

Portraits

2010-08-18T09:25:00.001-04:00

Hi! Everyone is leaving now. Soon I will be all alone in Corvallis again. But not for that long, because we're going to Canada around the end of August. These pictures are from my Holga and taken in Nova Scotia. I thought that it was colour film when I was shooting, but it was actually black and white. AAUAGHHGHG
But it turned out ok, I like them a lot more as a set of photos than as individual photos though (except for the lamp picture above).
Today I'm going to take Ian and Jonny's senior pictures. Tomorrow I'm doing Claire Fro's brother's pictures. I've never really done anything like that before, so I'm looking forward to it. Also it will give me a chance to do some digital photography, since I've been doing a lot of film stuff recently. I don't have any really great portrait lenses, but I have a couple that I think will work alright.
What do you think makes a good portrait photograph? I think something that reflects the subject's personality and captures them at their best is desirable for a senior photo. I never came forward and said "hey let me do your senior photos," so I'm happy that people thought of me to do senior photos for them.

Airplanes

2010-08-11T19:19:00.001-04:00

Hiii. Summer's almost over. Classes start for me on September 13th and I move in on the 6th. We're going to Canada early though, to stay in Apsley for awhile. I'm not sure when we leave... but I should probably find out so that I know when to start packing. Packing should be pretty easy for me though, since I never really unpacked.

Here are some airplane-themed photos from my Golden Half camera. It shoots half a frame at a time on 35mm film. I hope I can find somewhere in Toronto to develop film for me...

I have my full schedule now. I got in to my physics class and both of the practical sections that I needed. There was only one spot left in one of the sections and two in the other section, and I got in to them both! Hooray! So next year I'll be taking Physics, Calc, East Asian History, Anthropology, and Philosophy. Edward is in my anthro class! I can't wait to see him again.

Umm, I changed the blog layout. I really liked the other one but it was getting old. Now Domo-kun is going to be my blog guardian for awhile.

In order to whore out my posts for more comments, I thought maybe I'd ask a question at the end of each post. Do you think that's a good idea??

It's August!

2010-08-05T19:14:00.004-04:00

Hii. I'm blogging again about nothing in particular. Mostly so that I can post these photos that I took quite awhile ago!

They're from my Holga with expired black and white Kodak film. I took most of them at Hoover school when I went there with Claire and Domo-kun, and a couple are from when I went to the riverfront to watercolour paint with Claire Fro. I wasn't sure whether or not to put these up, but I figured I would anyway since I don't think most of you look at my Flickr and I wanted to make a post. It's my first-ever roll of black and white film!

I found an awesome website! This one: http://www.happynews.com/
Hooray!

Tomorrow I'm going to camp in Claire Fro's backyard. I've heard tales of hobo sightings in that area, hmmm. I've also heard that Marinna will be there. That girl is always stirring up trouble. But I'm sure it will be fine as long as Claire doesn't give me anymore Vietnamese "candy"... I don't think the taste will ever leave my mouth.

Soon everyone will be leaving for school and I'll be left behind all alone in Corvallis once again, as my school doesn't start until mid September. I was told I'd get a move-in date soon, so I'm still waiting for that. I am really excited for next year! I hope I can get into my physics class... I'll find out tomorrow. I can sign up at 6am Toronto time, which is 3am here. So I'll be setting my alarm tonight... ohhh the suspense.

My mom heard on NPR or something that they're going to make a movie out of Norwegian Wood, a book by my favorite author, Haruki Murakami. And they're going to be premiering it at the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall! During TIFF last year I was just getting used to the city, so I didn't really pay all that much attention to it and I didn't see any celebrities even though they were apparently swarming all over Toronto. But next year a couple of my friends and I have decided to go star-spotting, which I think will be cool! I hope we see some people.

Edward was telling me about a creepy experience he had at Casa Loma, this old castle place in Toronto. It freaked me out. So, do you believe in ghosts? Tell me!! Baiiii!

Cool for Cats

2010-07-27T10:32:00.002-04:00

Hello the few of you that still read this. It's still summer and I'm eating Froot Loops. I once found a Froot Loop with a heart-shaped hole, but I didn't take a picture because I was too hungry.

These pictures are from a Holga roll I shot at the Whitakers' house, where I sometimes cat-sit. I was really happy with how it came out!

I recently returned from a Vermeulen family reunion in Sooke, BC. I haven't been to a reunion in many a year and it was nice to see everyone. It was at my great-aunt and uncles's house, which has a loft and a huge high peaked ceiling and huuuuge windows looking out at the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We slept in tents in their backyard.

Now I'm going to take a break from all the extremely hard work I've been doing on this post to go pick up some negatives from Oregon Camera.

Yay, I'm back! Why is it so busy downtown? I'm so hungry. Our freezer got stuck open or something and now everything is frozen together by tons of ice. I hope the microwave burritos are okay.

Hooray, they are okay! I'm eating one now. This post really doesn't have a point, except to post some photos. This burrito is awesome, too bad they don't have them in Toronto.

I signed up for classes and got into all the ones I wanted, except for physics, but I have to wait until August 6 for that. The other classes I'm taking are Calc, Premodern East Asian History, and Philosophy. All of the Japanese classes overlap with at least one of my required classes, so I'm looking into Japanese summer programs. But I'll try to keep studying it myself during the school year.

I got a single room next year, so no roommate, hooray! I am looking forward to having my own room. Also I'll be in a different building, so maybe not so many Burwash Bugs? Last year I was on the first floor, which was bad because there were less people and less sense of community on that floor, but good because it was close to the common room and I didn't have to go up and down stairs all the time. Also it made moving in a lot easier. Next year I'll be on the 4th floor (but there are elevators in my new building).

I went and saw Inception awhile ago with the Claires. It was really good. I'm bad at reviewing movies so that's pretty much all I can say. Ellen Page was in it, I like her. I want to see it again sometime because I think I would be less confused the second time around and I'd probably understand things better in the end.

That's pretty much it (because this is the last picture lolololol), life will probably get more exciting as school gets closer but for now I am enjoying the relaxed nature of things.

Popcam

2010-07-18T00:09:00.003-04:00

I haven't blogged for a month, so I thought I would. I just got back from a long trip to Canada. I went to Nova Scotia and Apsley and got to see Edward. I took pictures but these are not those pictures. These are from awhile ago from my popcam. I opened the back cause I thought there was no film in it, but there was. So a few exposures got completely destroyed, but for the most part they just got super lightleaked and I like it.

Also tonight I met OK Go with Claire and they said they liked my shirt. I felt like a hero.

Also, here's an old Holga photo from Portland that I never put on flickr and was just floating around on my computer:

The double ex turned out well, I don't know why I never put it anywhere.
I'm so tired!

Plastic Fantastic

2010-06-18T13:26:00.000-04:00

Awhile ago I opened the back of my Holga camera to find that the batteries had leaked allllll over the inside. This apparently happens a lot with the Holga models that have built-in flashes. It was pretty un-salvageable, but I managed to save the lens and the top of the camera, as well as a few little parts from inside that could be useful for future modding/repairing of another Holga, with minimal skin-on-battery-acid contact.
I went down to Oregon Camera and bought a new one, this time one without a built-in flash (a 120N instead of 120CFN). It was only about $35 and once I got home I started tearing it apart..... so that I could make it better! 8D
I modified the aperture and the focus like I had done to my old one, and put in a bunch of foam and cardboard to make it able to shoot 35mm film. So these pictures are from the first 35mm roll from my new Holga! Hooray! I already put most of these up on Flickr, so if you are a good friend like Claire and check my flickr page you've probably already seen them, but there are also a few that I didn't like enough to put on flickr. But I liked them enough to put them all up in hurrr.

Today I went to the dentist and I don't have any cavities! Hooray!
Also today I was reading about Japanese onomatopoeia and ぴかぴか (pika pika) means "to glitter, sparkle." Now I love Pikachu even more!

domo arigato

2010-06-13T22:25:00.002-04:00

Hiii. I haven't blogged in awhile, but it's summertime now so whooo cares!
I think I might have a bit of allergies or something, cause I've been all stuffed up and getting headaches the past few days. But not it's not too bad or anything, just annoying.
I've been out of school for almost two months. I didn't think I would miss Toronto now that I'm in Corvallis, since I missed Corvallis so much when I was in Toronto. But I actually do miss the city. Just not as much as I missed Corvallis.
Anyway, a week or so ago Claire and I went down to Hoover elementary with Domo-kun.

It was quite lovely and sunny outside, but the path down through the trees was still pretty muddy. The lens I brought isn't the best for scenery-type stuff, but I kind of liked this picture.

Domo was having a good time on the playground.

Then Claire decided to start throwing him in the air, and we thought some mid-air shots would be nice. Here is Domo flying by the forest...

"Waaahh!"

Here he is breakdancing on a tree...

This one is my favorite:

Wheeee!

That is all. Life is looking good right now and I'm happy.

Free time in Corvallis

2010-05-11T21:03:00.002-04:00

O hai. So I'm still in Corvallis waiting for everyone to come home. It's prtty dull here with no one around. Yesterday I watched Lost In Translation, which was really good. Speaking of things with... Lost in the title... last week's LOST was SO SAD, why did Sun and Jin have to die by DROWNING?! That's like the WORST WAY TO DIE. Also they willingly orphaned their child, wtf?! But yeah, very very sad. And then there was this week's episode, which was major and also kind of weird. Only one more episode til the finale aaahhhhh

Today I hung out at the train at Washington St....

...with Jonny!!

(crouching tiger hidden jonny)

What a bamf. I took tons of pictures but haven't gone through them all yet. I want to start taking pictures again, all of first year was just too busy and full of distractions. Afterwards we hung out at my house and I pwnd him at super smash bros, pokemon puzzle league, and mario kart, and he skype-met edward.

In other news, I got my hair cut short again and I'm still getting used to it. But I don't miss my long hair like I thought I would. I wish it was naturally lighter so that I could dye it without killing it. I like being back home but for now I'm just waiting for everyone to come back too. That's pretty much it. Baii!

Hello summer

2010-04-26T20:59:00.001-04:00

I'm back in Corvallis! I still have to unpack though...

That will be fun.

To do:
-unpack/clean room
-update resume
-roam corvallis searching for a job
-sort out next year's classes

It's Oregon raining outside. I'm so happy to have my own room again. But I miss Toronto and the people there, especially because none of my friends are back from school yet. At least I have a head start finding a job! Yaayy...

Burford and Apsley with Oma and Finn

2010-04-23T19:46:00.000-04:00

Finn is obsessed with the song Fireflies by Owl City.
Here is a vlog for you!

The Weakerthans

2010-04-04T22:43:00.005-04:00

Hi how are you whats happening. So I haven't blogged for awhile. But now I am blogging.

Mostly I was putting off posting cause I wanted to post about meeting the Weakerthans, who I decided were my official "favorite band" early this school year. I really, really love them and it was amazing so I wanted to do a good post on it but I kept putting it off cause I don't think I could possibly do it justice. Soooooooo instead of trying to explain it I am just going to type out what I wrote about it in my diary because yes I keep a diary that's what cool people do. So there's prolly bad sentences etc and also I left stuff out but pretty much this is what happened.

[side note, John Samson = vocals, guitar; Jason Tait = drums; Greg Smith = bass; Stephen Carroll = guitar]

Thursday, March 25
Yesterday was awesome.
I went to Bathurst to get my credit/debit cards that someone turned in. I saw a cool record store while looking for the bank called Sonic Boom and went in, looked around. There was a sign on the door that said The Weakerthans, March 24 but I thought at first that it was for that concert in May, I thought, this must be the place they're playing in May. But once I'm out, I think, but they can't have just made a typo, wtf. So I go back inside and to the guy working there I'm like, are the Weakerthans gonna be here tonight? And he's like yeah. "Are there... tickets left?" "It's free." "Dude" "Yeah." He said get there by like 4:30 and it starts at 5. So I tried to get Kara/Rifqi/Elise to go. But Kara and Rifqi couldn't. I finally found the bank (after asking someone at a CIBC bank) and got my cards back. Then I went home, it was like 3:00.
Eventually I got Elise to come, it was close though and we only got there for the last 2 songs. I pushed to the front. Jason Tait looked at me at least twice. When they played Night Windows I got goosebumps. I bought a $2 poster and got it signed by all of them. When I came up to John Samson I was like, "...you are like, MY GOD." He was so cool and a bit distant but later he was really nice. I got a picture w/ him. I look like a creeper in it.

[you're not seeing that photo btw]

I said hi/got all of them to sign. I was shaking it was amazing. Elise doesn't listen to them but thought they were good. Stephen gave me a high-five. We asked Greg when his art thing was. He told us, 1640 Queen St W at 8pm. (He had talked a bit about it during the show). We hung around among the records like creepers and talked about music while glancing over at them until they had left. When he was leaving Jason looked over at me and waved bye. Ahh! Elise and I walked back to Vic and had dinner before going to Queen St. We started off a bit late and took the subway to Lansdowne, planning to walk south to Queen.

[Omitted because it's just boring crap about how we got lost while trying to get there]

It was like an hour and a half after it started but there were still people, it was really really small and pretty crowded. Along with Greg's art there were instruments made with gears, pvc pipe, etc. and some tree silhouette drawings. All 4 of them were there. John was wearing a black hoodie. Greg reminded Elise and I of a young Jack Nicholson. He eventually saw us sitting awkwardly and was like "heyyyy!! You guys came!!" And I was like :O. We met a guy named Wayne who was like early 50s maybe and works for CBC. He said earlier that day or recently or something, he had worked w/ the Barenaked Ladies. He was cool! He was like, "so you're a big fan of the Weakerthans? Do you know the hockey song?" and I was like, "...do you mean Elegy for Gump Worsley?" and he's all yes! You're a true fan very good! And he told us all about Gump Worsley and old-school hockey and stuff. We talked to him later and he was like "I saw you talking to John" and I was like "yeah it was pretty much the best part of my life so far." and he's like "lol nooo, I think the best part of your life is studying astronomy!" What a sweet thing to say! He was like "they're just guys" but holy SHITTTT it was so amazing. Like fucking hell. So awesome. I talked to all of them while we were there. There were no screaming/crazy fans except for us, it was a very "in" crowd I guess and most people were like 25-35 and seemed to know each other. I asked John if he liked Toronto more than Winnipeg and he was like lolno. We talked about Portland a bit and I nearly fainted. Before we left I said goodbye to Greg and I was like "your art is awesome. Your music is awesome. You're awesome." and he was like "YOU'RE awesome!!" and gave me a big hug. OMG. I said bye to Jason and basically was all up in his grill being like "Sooo I'm leaving but just thought I'd say bye and you're awesome and I played the drums too and you guys are my favorite band and you're amazing and oh my god you rule okay bye" and his facial expression was like "whoa what's happening this girl is crazy!" but he was smiling. Best fucking night ever. Wayne told us how to get back to the subway station. While we were waiting for the streetcar I literally almost started crying out of happiness and disbelief. On the streetcar/subway ride/walk home Elise and I talked about religion. Because it had come up before when I was talking with Wayne and her about astronomy. It was really interesting. It was the best night. Of my entire. Fucking. Life.

So anyway thanks for reading all that if you did in fact read it and now here are some lovely pictures that I shakily took while staring in awe.
Apparently Greg Smith is headbanging, or being sucked into a vortex or something.

Afterward someone made them pose so they could get a picture, and I nonchalantly but totally creepily took one too.

Here is my poster, you might notice that it's awesome

Okay fine here is the creepy picture of me and John Samson.

Sooooooo

She blinded me... with SCIENCE!

2010-03-17T10:43:00.013-04:00

Hi!
On Saturday I went to this thing with Elise and Kara called Kollaboration, it's basically an Asian thing where they show off Asian talent and there's a competition thing like a talent show. Wowww that was a really good description. I'm too lazy to change it. Anyway it was in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, right next to the CN tower, and it was super rainy and windy and we went around for like 20 minutes trying to find the right place, but we made it eventually. Pretty much everyone there was Asian (mostly Korean) and everyone was like "yay being Asian!" and I was like, does half-Asian count, and feeling very conflicted about my background and where I belong STORYOFMYLIFE. Other than that it was really fun. I basically went to see David Choi, musician and ultra cute "Youtube sensation." Maybe you have never heard of him before. Maybe you have. But Elise and I are both Youtube geeks and follow all the same people etc, and we were in maximum fangirl mode. Kara probably thought we were insane. After the show we bought his album and he came out to the lobby and we were like "YOU ARE SO AWESOME AAHEEHEHEHE, WILL YOU SIGN THIS OH MY GOD THANK YOU CAN I GET A PICTURE WITH YOU?!" Of course it was the one day I didn't have my camera with me, but I got a picture on my phone. But I don't know how to get pictures from my phone to my computer. :/ He said I looked like one of his family members. Afterward Elise and I were like damn we should have given him a hug cause he is SO ADORABLE. There were like 30 people waiting for him to sign their stuff but we waited our turn (Kara left) and when we got to him we were like "ummmm can we have a huuggggg?! heehehhehee" and he was like lolsure. It was fun to hug him because he's so short, about an inch taller than me. He was really nice too, like he actually talked to us and stuff. So YAAAYYYYYY I met David Choi! We got a cinnabon and took the subway home.

On Monday I went to the Japanese Cultural Centre with Bachan and my cousins Paige and Emma, who are 7 and 8 (I think) and their parents for Nikkei Kids Day (Nikkei=Japanese migrants and their descendants). Paige and Emma love me and I'm not sure why since I'm really not that great with kids. I never really know what to say to them. Anyway it was cool to go there, because I never ever see Japanese people around. Toronto has tons of Asians but they are almost all Korean or Chinese. There were a bunch of activities set up for the kids to do and they won little prizes and stuff, it was very cute. There were soooo many mixed-race kids! There were a few tables for different Japanese prefectures and two of Bachan's cousins were at the one for Kumamoto, where her parents were from. I had never met them before so that was cool. There was a whole room with artwork and information about the internment camps, and I learned that both sets of my great-grandparents were in the Tashme internment camp in B.C. and now it's a ghost town.
After that we all went to the Science Centre. I had never been there before and since it's March break there were a million pushy tourists and their annoying pushy kids, but it was still pretty cool. In April some Harry Potter exhibit is going to open (they already had one of the 16 cars they used in the movie for the part where Ron drives the flying car and is like "come on then 'arry!" and rescues Harry but I can't remember which book that is). As a kind of preview they were going to do a "sorting hat demo" so Bachan and I went to check it out before we left. It was basically this blonde lady with a really fake British accent and a witch costume inviting kids to sit on a stool and asking which house was their favorite. Then they would put on the "Sorting Hat" (actually she would just hover it over their head cause I guess they were afraid of spreading lice or something) and this recorded background voice would come on and sort them into that house. 90% of the kids chose Gryffindor. So over and over we heard, "brave, courageous... a good heart... better be... GRYFFINDOR!!" It was brain-numbing but we really just wanted to sit down. Waiting for the bus back to the subway station, I tried to teach Bachan how to text.

Also I made a new skirt recently with Bachan. I was getting bored of my robot dress so it got cut up. I am way too lazy to take nice pictures so here is one that I took in a mirror. I forgot to take a close-up. But you might remember the robot dress anyway... I'm sure Claire will.

:D

Today I got a Visa bill for 65 cents. lolwat
Yesterday there was finally a non-canceled observing session for my astronomy class. It was on top of the 15-story McLennan building and I went up there at sunset and it was soooo beautiful. Yeah, I didn't have my camera. But once the sun went down you could see all of Toronto and all the city lights. There was a telescope set up and we looked at Mars and the Orion Nebula. The TA took some of us inside to see 2 of the more hardcore, non-portable telescopes. It was pretty cool. That's pretty much it. Bye!

hello how are you

2010-03-10T10:31:00.009-05:00

Yesterday CBC was in my sociology class in con hall, filming us for a documentary called "information overload" about technology and how it affects our generation. I didn't think it was a very original topic, but it was kind of cool, there were camera guys creeping around the stage and filming our prof as he was lecturing and other camera guys going around filming the students. I was sitting next to one of my friends at the end of a row and they put a camera about 5 feet away pointed right at us for like, 5 minutes. I am a huge dork and kept glancing over at it and starting to crack up. The documentary comes out in October, maybe I'll be on tv! But I probably will have forgotten by then anyway. :/

My last exam is on April 15 and they kick you out of your res 48 hours after your last exam. So I get kicked out on April 17, the day before my birthday. Depressing. Molly doesn't have her last exam until the 20th though, so hopefully I'll be able to stay a little longer and just say that I'm her guest or something. Apparently I have the same birthday as America Ferrera, Melissa Joan Hart, Christian Slater, Conan O'Brien, Eric McCormack, and James Woods. Also, Albert Einstein died on my birthday in 1955.
:/
Extremely depressing.

Mountain Dew scented NES controller soap? Yes please.

It's been really warm and nice recently, and it's supposed to rain on Friday. I miss the rain a lot. When I'm sitting in the middle of Con Hall and I can hear everyone around and above typing on their laptop keyboards, it sounds like rain. But we never get real Oregon rain here.

I went to breakfast today with some people and they were talking about concussions the whole time. It made my head hurt.

Yesterday at the end of sociology we watched a short documentary about how Coca Cola is taking over the world and Americanizing everyone. It was terrifying. Don't drink Coke.

Zeus

2010-03-07T15:17:00.007-05:00

It's finally been getting warmer in Toronto! Apparently this is supposed to be a "false spring" and it's going to snow again soon, but I hope they're wrong.
Yesterday I hung out with Edward for most of the day and we wandered around downtown Toronto. In the evening I went with Kara to a free concert at Soundscapes, a music store in Little Italy.

The band was Zeus and they were actually really good. They remind me a little bit of Wilco, but more rock-y. The store was crowded to the back when we got there, but we pushed and shoved to the very front. Yay us! Here is a bad picture of the small crowded store:

Soundscapes does free in-store concerts pretty often. A lot of the bands are from Toronto, which is cool. Of Montreal played an in-store in 2007! But they're from Georgia, not Toronto.
Since we were at the front, the band was about 5 feet away from us:

They had a pretty long set for a free concert and played most of the songs from their album, which we bought afterward. The band members were hanging around later and most people had left, and for some reason I had a sharpie in my purse. So we got our albums signed by all 4 of them:

Walking back, we saw Zeus on the cover of Now:

Sweet. After listening to the CD I think they sound better live (which I think is impressive). But I still really like the CD too. When I got back I played Super Smash Bros (N64 version) in the common room with Neil and Naufil. I kicked their asses. Well, I kicked Naufil's ass. Neil kicked my ass.

Horrifying Rifqi quote of the day:
"Elton John is part of the Beatles, right?"
AAAGGGHHHHH WHHAAAATTT

First Evan, now Rifqi. What is it about Elton John.

The Cosmic Perspective

2010-03-01T23:24:00.000-05:00

Hi, hello. Here are some updates on my exciting life:

-I am a terrible Canadian and didn't watch the hockey game. But I was on Bay street which is right next to Yonge, which got closed down because of all the partying and chaos in the streets, and it sounded pretty crazy.
-Instead on Sunday night I went to see Shutter Island with Edward. The movie was thoroughly fucked up and I liked it. It wasn't as scary as I thought it would be, but Edward got pretty scared. I mean he was clinging onto my arm for like half the movie.
-Thanks to Kara I have discovered the gym in Hart House, which is awesome and free for students. No more running around in the freezing cold!
-Tomorrow is my astronomy midterm, then I am all done with midterms. My last final exam is on April 15, right before my birthday.
-I went to a pub night a few days ago with some friends but all they wanted to do was take annoying pictures for facebook and stuff. We hung out in one of the lower house common rooms when we came back and they had 2 laptops out with facebook going and I wanted to go out and actually do stuff but everything was about facebook, it was stupid and I missed you guys.
-I got new glasses, they are sick.

Wtf, raccoons, why are you so scary. And why are there two of these pictures, which I found like a month apart:

Today I went grocery shopping.
How to go grocery shopping like Erin:
-Feel hungry. Realize you have no food because last time you went to the dining hall you forgot to steal stuff in tupperware. Decide to go to Valu-Mart to buy some food to keep in your room.
-Wander around Valu-Mart. Consider buying different things, but put them all back. Decide that you can just get food from the dining hall for free next time you go.
-Go to the drugstore next door and look at nail polish.
-Feel distressed by how much more expensive nail polish is in Canada than in the US.
-Go to Indigo (Canadian Borders) and pick out random magazines. Sit down and go through them one by one for a long time but don't buy any of them. Go to the music section and read about Bob Dylan for half an hour.
-Feel hungry again. Go across the street to Tim Hortons and eat soup and a donut. Go back to res.

I need to start taking more pictures cause I haven't really had any lately. That's pretty much it.
Bye!

Reading Week vlogging

2010-02-17T03:09:00.003-05:00

Here is a late-night vlog for you.

And here's a picture from Apsley. The white space behind the trees is the frozen, snow-covered bog.

Bye!

Study break

2010-02-04T14:47:00.009-05:00

Hello, I hadn't updated in a while so I thought I would. Recently I have been busy preparing for midterms and getting caught up in classes and figuring out majors and programs and courses and what I'm going to study. I finally did figure it all out, but I don't feel like posting about that.

Pretty much every day for the past couple weeks has been libraries, notebooks, and running to and from class. It hasn't been bad though, because I really like everything that I'm studying now. Everyone said "college is better than high school because you can study what you want to" and it came true!

This week I finally realized why my sociology prof always looks so familiar. He looks just like Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. He does. Google image search "Robert Brym" and you will see.

Rifqi is trying to set me up with one of his engineering friends. That is fine with me, because I don't have to do any work. Also this guy has a blog that I like so he obviously can type competently (unlike someone...). Points for him.

Reading week is all figured out. On the 12th I take the subway to Yorkdale, where Oma will pick me up, and we will all hang out in Apsley with Carolyn and Jay and Finn and Ollie for awhile, then we'll go to Oma and Opa's house. To get back to Toronto I will take the GO train. I am so looking forward to reading week. It will be a very nice break from all the libraries and Burwash food.

Sorry for the short boring post. I should go back to studying now. Miss you all!
(picture cred: Ryo Tomo)

SKIRTS

2010-01-22T13:37:00.002-05:00

Oh hai. I just listened to two Jack Johnson albums and I'm feeling super relaxed now. That guy is soooo chill.
As most of you have heard, Bachan has been teaching me how to sew. I've finished two skirts so far. This is the first one that I did:

That thing on the top left is the zipper, usually it is covered by fabric but I kind of tucked it into my mattress since I was too lazy to put it on and take nice pictures, so the fabric got pulled away.

And this is the latest one, I really like it and it reminds me of Nancy Drew:

There's a belt that goes with it that's made out of the same fabric but I'm not wearing it in the pictures. You can see the belt loops in the first one though.
Sewing has been really fun and Bachan is a great teacher. I made the brown skirt on the same sewing machine she used to make my mom's wedding dress!

Tonight there is a semi-formal chocolate buffet in Old Vic (the main Vic building right outside my res that looks like a castle). I am strategically planning to wear a brown dress so that if I get chocolate on it it won't be noticeable. After that there is a pub night in The Cat's Eye, which was supposed to be closed for reconstruction but apparently is not closed anymore.

I really really like astronomy so far and my Women in Ukrainian Lit course is actually mega interesting. I have to go to at least one "observing session" for astronomy where you meet up in a small group at night and look through telescopes in the astronomy & astrophysics department. It sounds cool. So I will sign up for one... after I finish this post. Which is now. Bye!

Little India and stuff

2010-01-18T16:21:00.010-05:00

Hi! Things have been going much better lately, but my workload this semester is large like a sperm whale. Like a sperm whale figurine that is sitting on my magazine holder. That Claire Fro got me for Christmas. Because she knows that I just love whales. What was I talking about?
Anyway, this is kind of olllld news, but the weekend before last I went to Little India with Rifqi and Kara. Here is a pretty bad picture of us:

We all look odd but it was the only one we got where all 3 of our heads were in the frame. Anyway Little India was really cool, it was basically 90% sari shops, 6% Indian restaurants, and 4% random little stores. Here is Rifqi lookin dumb in a sari shop:

Here's some badass icicles on an Indian convenience store:

HAHAHAHAHA:

We came across some kids sledding down this little hill. It looked like sooo much fun. You can see the CN Tower in the skyline!

We went into this little store with a ton of Indian books and statues of gods and bangles. I liked the books best. Especially this one:

Fried food is always fun. Definitely a recipe for happiness. Also this guy:

Badass.
My favorite sari store was this extremely colourful one:

We had dinner at an Indian buffet with really good butter chicken. It was AWESOME. We stayed there for a long time talking, then trekked back to the subway station to go home.

In other news, I don't think I will be doing a linguistics major anymore. I don't like the class or the subject and it's just kind of boring to me. As it turns out, I love studying other languages, but I don't like studying language itself. I think it's mostly because I like to find out about other cultures, and language is a huge part of any culture. So I like to study other languages, but mostly for the cultural value, and not because I'm particularly fascinated by the science of language, phonology, morphology, syntax and all that. Linguistics has been kind of helpful in learning Arabic, and it will be helpful in learning other languages too, so it's good that I have a better general understanding of language now. But I don't feel motivated to pursue it.
My plan before was to do a major in linguistics and a double minor in Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations (NMC) and East Asian Studies. Now I'm leaning more toward a double major in astronomy and literature. Perhaps the Minato haze has started to lift?

I'm already a few weeks into the new semester so I'm kind of late talking about this, but I mostly like my new professors. I have three full-year courses, but even for them I have new profs.

My new linguistics professor is much better than my last one. Instead of showing Powerpoint slides and reading them in a monotone with a heavy, hard-to-understand accent, she uses the blackboard and actually lectures. She doesn't make us print out stuff for homework, and she's obviously really, really into linguistics. She talks like Joan Cusack and when she smiles she looks like Meryl Streep.

I have a new Arabic professor too, her name is Suha and she's short and fiesty. Our class is down to 16 people now. I like her more than the last prof, but the last one was good too.

My new sociology professor is the guy who wrote our textbook. His lectures are a lot more interesting and informative, and it feels more like a real class now. He has a slight Australian accent.

My Women in Ukrainian Literature professor is named Maxim Tarnawsky. He got his BA from University of Pennsylvania and his PhD from Harvard. And his name is Maxim. TOTALLY BADASS

I have two professors for astronomy. The first week we had Dr. Reid, he is awesome. He reminds me of Bill Nye the Science guy! Plus he used to live in Hawaii. He seems really cool and totally not uptight but also not a pushover.
Dr. Mochnacki is kind of boring so far, apparently he does most of the more physics-y lectures. But I've had two lectures with him and so far it's just been going over stuff we read in the textbook already. Mehhh.

But yeah, mostly awesome professors this semester.

That's pretty much all I wanted to post about. I should probably go read some depressing Ukrainian anti-serf literature now. The book of stories we're reading out of is called For a Crust of Bread. I have to read "Artichokes" and "The Accursed Mill." We are also going to read "Marriage Contract." One of our other books is called On Sunday Morning She Gathered Herbs. It's going to be an exciting class. Baiiiiiiiii

I hate everything

2010-01-12T20:07:00.006-05:00

Ughhhh. This goes beyond a bad day. And you all get to hear about it.
Soooo yesterday, I realized that I had procrastinated on some readings for my Ukrainian lit class. I had to read a 65-page story and two 10-page poems (computer-printed, 8.5x11 pages) (it doesn't sound like a lot but HOLY CRAP IT IS!!!). So all day I carried around this thick stack of papers. THIS THICK, IN FACT:

Sorry for the weirdness. But I can't have a pictureless post! Anyway, I read slowly. Especially if I'm reading a poorly translated, extremely depressing Ukrainian tale about village folk in the 1800's. I went to Wymilwood, got a bagel, and read while waiting for Naufil to show up, since he just got back and I told him I'd meet up with him there. Then I went to the Reading Room in Birge-Carnagie and read for about 2 hours. Then I went back to my room and read for half an hour or so, until it was time to go to linguistics at 2. From 2-4 I had linguistics, and I read during our 10-minute break at 3:00. I had Arabic from 5-7, so from 4-5 I was planning on reading, but the building I wanted to read in was having some kind of poster-frenzy and there were loud people everywhere. So I wandered around for a while and found a creepy deserted hall. I sat down and read until the dim light started making my eyes hurt and I felt nauseous. I went outside to get some fresh, freezing cold air, and started walking toward Bancroft Building, where I have Arabic, reading as I walked. There was 20 minutes or so until class started, so I went into the Environmental Sciences building across the lane and found a nice seating area where people were working and reading. Unfortunately right after I sat down, these two girls came in and started giggling and chatting in painfully strident voices about something, apparently oblivious to the many "shutupshutup" looks that were being shot their way. They did not leave. I had barely read a page by the time I had to go to class. After Arabic, I went back to Vic and had dinner in the dining hall with Rifqi before shutting myself in my room at 8:30 and reading nonstop. I read for 7 hours before realizing that I was spending like 25 minutes on a page because I kept reading a paragraph and not getting it, and reading it again and again and again, which I had been doing all day to some extent, because I can't focus on reading anymore (which is a whole other problem...). So I set it aside for a bit and did my linguistics homework, which was due the next day too. I spent about an hour and a half making X-Bar trees and it actually really helped me understand things better. Then I started reading again. At around 5am. I FINISHED EVERYTHING at around 8, set my alarm for 12:30pm and my other alarm for 12:45pm, and fell asleep.
That was yesterday.
My class schedule for today was this:
2-3: Women in Ukrainian Literature
3-4: Linguistics tutorial
4-5: Astronomy
6-8: Sociology

I didn't wake up at 12:30, or 12:45. I slept through both my alarms. When I woke up, it was...
.....
......

4:08pm.

I literally screamed as loud as I could out of frustration and scrambled down my ladder from my stupid lofted bed. Over my pajamas (sweatpants and a t-shirt), I put on socks, a sweatshirt, a coat, and my boots, crammed my notebook and pencil into my bag, and left for astronomy. Classes start at 10 after the hour so I had 2 minutes to get there. Usually in the snow it's a 10-minute walk to Con Hall, but I ran the entire way and got there in 5, and I only nearly died once, when I slipped and fell on an icy patch in the street and almost got hit by a car. I made it to astronomy a few minutes late.
But I didn't make it to Ukrainian literature. Or linguistics.
After astronomy I went back to Vic for dinner, where I realized I didn't remember to put my wallet in my bag during my 4:08 rush. Without my key card I couldn't get into my building, and without my student card they wouldn't give me any food. I went into the dining hall anyway, since it was really cold and I thought maybe if I just told him my student number he'd let me in, since apparently it's worked for other people. There was a lineup in the dining hall, which NEVER happens, except on Indian food night. Which it happened to be. When I got to the desk I asked if I could use my student number instead and he answered with a definitive "NO." Then I saw Molly a few people ahead of me and borrowed her key and went and got my wallet. Lucky! After dinner I went to soc, then came back here and emailed my professors. I know my linguistics homework will not be accepted late and is worth nothing now, and now I have a whole new set of reading to do for lit before Thursday.
Also I just went to Wymilwood with Rifqi where 3 people, including him, commented on how horrible I looked.

Why can't I be a light sleeper?

Oh hai

2010-01-08T10:24:00.005-05:00

Hello! I'm more or less settled into university life again and I have some new classes and new professors for the old classes. My suitcase did eventually reach Toronto and is presently all unpacked and stowed away. South House sweet South House. Oh how I've missed the flimsy internet connection and lack of closet space. But here are some pictures from the winter break, featuring B'loonies and the coast. These are from my little camera so I didn't bother editing them or anything. Sahrry.

The top picture is in Queen's Park in the early evening. I walk through there many times a day and it feels cinematic with all the snow. Today I went to lunch with Oma and Opa. I met them in Dundas Square and we went to Salad King, this Thai restaurant. It was awesome to see them and I hope I can figure out the whole Go Train thing well enough to visit them in Burford soon! Also today I went to see Up In The Air, the George Clooney movie. Jason Reitman directed it so of course it had lovely music and enough of an indie-vibe to be quirky without being pretentious. Basically I loved it and you should go see it. Tomorrow I'm planning to go to brunch with Kara and check out the Danforth/Greektown with some people. Yesterday there was a chaotic but fun club night and the day before that they showed Love Actually in the Isabel Bader theater as part of Winterfest week! I'll have a better post later prolly but I really just wanted to put up my winter break photos. Bye!

Yes there's a lot of photos, Yes you will deal with it

2009-12-09T11:00:00.013-05:00

HEY GUYS, GUESS WHY I'M SO HAPPY!
NO, it's not because I almost broke my phone while slamming my head into my desk!
NO, it's not because my friends said they'd go to lunch with me and then ditched me at the last minute!
NO, it's not because my linguistics exam is on Friday and I still can't concentrate on studying!

IT'S BECAUSE...
....
.....

IT'S SNOWING YAAAYYYYY!!

At this point I would like to apologize to Claire, who is in Foco right now where it was -13 degrees FAHRENHEIT this morning. And she has to go to aerobics. -13 degrees is not aerobics weather. It is weather for staying in with a heater and a blanket and hot chocolate. Did you know that the lowest recorded temperature in Colorado was -61 degrees, in 1985? What the hell! But that was in Maybell, not Foco. Just some handy weather facts. Colorado is friggin cold.

ANYWAY, it is not actually snowing anymore here, it is more slush-raining, which is really nasty. And I dropped my toothbrush on the disgusting bathroom floor this morning so I have to walk to Shoppers Drug Mart to get a new one, so I'm trying to wait until the slush stops falling for a few minutes. But last night at about 1am I looked outside and everything was white and there was snow falling from the sky!

I grabbed my little camera and ran out into the quad and threw snowballs at stuff for awhile, and took some blurry pictures from the doorway because this camera doesn't handle nighttime very well.

I also took an incredibly creepy myspace picture.

I went back in and continued studying linguistics until around 2am, when I texted Naufil to see if he had any food. He said we should go to Rabba (the 24/7 "grocery store" about 4 minutes away), and I wanted to go outside so I said okay. Usually I avoid Rabba because it is gross and sticky and there's always a pack of hobos outside the entrance. Most of the food is moldy and the people working there usually look at you as if you're the most exasperatingly bothersome thing they've ever had to deal with. But it was snowing! So we went anyway.
I donned my new black-version-of-the-Michelin-Man coat and put my big camera in my bag and we had a snowball fight all the way down St Mary's street. We pretty much walked backwards the rest of the way because of the violent wind, which made the seemingly innocent snowflakes feel like needles and sparks smacking into our faces.
Rabba was its usual grungy self but once we got outside I started taking some pictures.

I like this one especially because of the apartment building filling up the background and because of the snow on the right side of the pole, and the light flare at the top, and just the overall mood. I feel like it's one of my favorite photos I've taken. But I think this may be one of those pictures that I really love, but other people don't really get, like this one. I freaking loved that photo! I remember exactly where I was and what I was thinking when I took it, and I love the gradient of bright blues and the wispy clouds and how the airplane is small and heading off, out of the frame and how it all looks and seems together. Basically I liked everything that people told me was wrong with it, but I totally get why they might not like it or think it's uninteresting, cause it's also a really personal photo, and when I look at it, it immediately brings up all these feelings. Like when you hear a song you used to listen to a lot but haven't heard in a while? When people first started dissing on the plane photo, I was like "wtf! this is a great picture!" and got all insecure about it but i've realized that it's pretty much the same deal for most photos that I feel that kind of connection with. Not that I'm tremendously concerned with how well other people like my photos... I just noticed this trend and thought it was interesting. Plus I kind of like how a photo can be really meaningful to one person, and the rest of the world would just see it as a mehhh photo. Like a secret between you and the picture! ANYWAYY, did not mean to ramble on forever here are some other photos I took.

Green bike (the same bike that's in the top photo). I like red/yellow/green together (rasta? traffic light? anyway it reminds me of italian food) so I love the little accents of colour of the red and yellow bokeh dots at the top and the green bicycle frame. Also I liked the shadow of the bike on the pavement. But I think I could have done this shot better if Naufil hadn't been rushing me. >:[

Speaking of Naufil, this is his sincere attempt at looking badass:

He is completely serious. I laughed for a long time.

I don't like this all that much, but I thought it was kind of cool. Sushi Club is also a pretty good restaurant. I had butterfish sushi there! :O ("we'll take another round of the butterfish...")

On the way home, RJ hall in the background

Back in the common room... I parted the curtains a bit and took this through the gap. It's weird and I like the blown-out diamond of the light contrasted with the perfectly-exposed, snow-covered tree limb, and I like the negative space a lot. I guess I just like it cause it's kind of weird. Click to make it bigger if you want... cause the mini version looks kind of dumb.

I took some photos of the festive decor in the common room...

This is a closeup of that red shiny tinsel-y string stuff that you can see in the bottom of the bow picture. THIS STUFF. What the hell do you call that kind of thing??

Anyway we watched Seinfeld in the common room for a bit and then I studied more and then Rifqi called and was like "let's go outside it's snowing!" He ended up running around in the quad while I took pictures from the soho entrance. He even fell down once and I caught it mid-fall! Ohohoho!

He wanted his mom to know he hadn't forgotten about her, so he wrote MAMA in the snow.

I will leave you with a couple almost-not-fail shots of my favorite mini Harajuku girl.

Dirty head fail

Not-quite-in-focus fail

Um. Sorry this post was so long and, uh, expository... I've been writing too many essays.

Melancholy vlogging

2009-12-04T21:32:00.003-05:00

I'm sorry about this. You may have to turn up the volume cause I was talking kind of quietly so that people in the hall wouldn't hear me talking to myself. The walls here are REALLY THIN.

Soo, here are some pictures of my room! Notice the awesome posters and not-TOO-messy desk.

Hahaha, my side is cooler than Molly's boring side!

So anyway, see you soon.

The story of the American Apparel sale and the greatest store in the world

2009-11-29T14:32:00.003-05:00

Hiii, happy late Thanksgiving. On Thursday I didn't even realize it was Thanksgiving until Mom called me in the evening and told me.

Yesterday I went with Kara from 3rd floor and her boyfriend Indra to a huge American Apparel rummage sale. It was a much bigger deal than I thought. To get there we took the subway to King and walked through the theater district and a place with a bunch of restaurants with people standing outside saying "bonjour, miss." We knew we were at the right place when we saw the massive lineup:

It was really, really long. Longer than it appears in the photo. Like Target on Black Friday. Holy crap, we said, that is a very long line of people. But we got in line anyway. We stood around for awhile and eventually I ran up to the front to scout it out. It was in the basement of this building, and apparently inside there was also some woodworking thing going on. I asked some girls who had just come out with shopping bags how it was. They said they had been there since 9am and it was crazy inside, people pushing and grabbing stuff and buying things and then re-selling them. But the prices were amazing. I went back and reported to Indra and Kara. We waited for awhile longer and noticed some people getting discouraged and leaving. Kara and I devised a brilliant plan. We decided to run up to the front, and then walk back along the line slowly, talking loudly about how apparently there's NOTHING good left and everything cool had been taken. The people will surely drop like flies, we thought. So we went up to the front. It was kind of a cool building and we decided to check out the inside a bit before carrying out our plan. There was no one at the door and we just walked in. We checked out the woodworking thing and admired some lovely drawer handles. There was a sign for the sale pointing at the basement stairs. We peered down, thinking there must be some kind of security or something, it wouldn't be that easy to get in. Some girls came out with shopping bags. I knew there was some kind of ticket system going on so I asked if you needed a ticket or something to get in. They said no, as long as you're in the building you're good-- they were taking tickets at the door. Whaaaaaat? We went down to the basement and we were in. Kara texted Indra and he came and joined us. We considered going back and waiting in line cause we felt kind of guilty, but we didn't. The cheap hipster clothes were calling to us. It was crazy and most of the good stuff was gone, but I ended up getting two jackets, gold and silver ($18 each), red tights ($2), yellow tights($2), and the comfiest gray sweatpants ever ($10). Including tax, it came out to $56.50. The regular price of ONE of the jackets is $62. Woot! In fact, I added everything up, and if I had bought that stuff at normal price it would come out to $194 plus tax. I didn't take any pictures in the basement, but I found this one on a Toronto Tumblr blog. It looked like this, except EXPLODED, with a million people.

After that we walked to Kensington Market for MORE SHOPPING. We went to Blue Banana Market, which is the coolest store EVER. It is amazing. They have stuff from lots of different sellers, from local designers to Paul Frank. It's giant inside, plus there's an upstairs. It's like the best of Etsy plus non-pretentious Urban Outfitters, combined with a candy store and multiplied by a million. It is everything that I love, in one store. Some things are expensive, others are super affordable, and there is SO MUCH STUFF. If any of you ever visit me, we are for sure going there. Because it is amazing. I will definitely be doing some Christmas shopping there.

Random News

2009-11-22T21:07:00.004-05:00

Today has been very productive. I got up at 10:30, which is extremely early for a Sunday, went for a run, bought toothpaste and shower gel (on sale!), took a shower, had breakfast (lunch), went to Pratt library with Rifqi and studied Arabic for four hours, went out to sushi with Rifqi, Naufil, and Kara, practiced violin in Marg Ad for an hour, and helped Rifqi clean his "fish bowl" (tupperware... he does have a legit fish bowl, but there's a male beta in it named McLovin and McLovin kept biting the two female betas he got... so we transferred the females to a tupperware container). And after I poast I'm going to do some more Arabic. Because there is always more Arabic to do.

I just opened two of those tiny packs of Skittles and neither of them had any purple ones in them! wtf?! Oh well, everyone knows the red ones are the best anyway.

The day before yesterday I saw the hugest Burwash Bug I've ever seen. Running across my floor. It was not okay. I've seen little ones, maybe an inch long, that are creepy but easy to smush and be done with, but this one was like the one in the picture. HORRIFYING. About three inches long, with a million creepy-ass legs and running waaayyy faster than any bug should run. I screamed and Rifqi smashed it with a shoe. Yay Rifqi!

Also the day before yesterday, I went to a Mario party in RJ (one of the residence halls) and destroyed people in Super Smash Bros (N64 version) and diddy kong racing, which is like Mario Kart but lamer. There was also guitar hero but only one guitar, and ddr but only one dance pad. :\
Afterwards I went back to the south house common room with some people and we watched 10 Things I Hate About You. I've seen that movie a million times, but this is the first time I've figured out why it's named that. It's actually pretty obvious. Anyway, Naufil kept saying "oh my god Erin that girl is EXACTLY LIKE YOU!! AAhahahahahhahaha!! She's such a bitch!!" The fire alarm went off at about 2am. This happens waayyy too often. But we all hung around outside for awhile, and then came back in and finished the movie.

I don't really have any pictures of anything good right now, but I don't like doing picture-less posts. So here's a little shrine dedicated to my favorite cat, who the Claires apparently saw today because they are in Corvallis and who I miss very much.

Pretty Houses

2009-11-17T13:41:00.000-05:00

Traditional Japanese houses are SO BEAUTIFUL. I love the sliding doors and big open spaces and mats and floor-to-ceiling windows. My ultimate goal is to live in a house like this. Think of the natural light!

I think Totoro actually originally made me start liking Japanese houses. The house in that movie is awesome. Off the chain, if you will. And guess what! They made a REAL ONE.

Speaking of Totoro, peep these cute Totoro cupcakes.

Click on them to go to their websites, because they are pretty awesome.

In other news, I am pretty much better now, I still have a pretty sore throat but I can talk and swallow things again. Less than a month till winter break!
I went and saw the movie 2012 a few days ago with Rifqi and a few other people. I have mixed feelings about it.
Cons: extremely depressing and traumatizing, two and half hours long, some really lame lines especially near the end
Pros: John Cusack, really good special effects, not boring
We were going to see it at 10:40pm, but that showing was sold out so we hung around in Dundas Square for awhile and saw it at 11:15. They have winter decorations up now, I thought they were kind of weird but kind of pretty.
And here's a lovely washed out by the flash photo of me and a stoned looking Rifqi.
Lawl.

pictures pictures pictures

2009-11-09T11:27:00.000-05:00

As most of you probably already know, I have been sick for the past week. And I am still sick. Last night however I finally busted out a fever and so this morning I went to the student clinic and they gave me muchas drogas (they don't really give a damn if you don't have a fever). Soooo hopefully I'll start to get better now?
Anyway, not much has been going on recently except for a whole lot of bedrest and cough drops, so this is a post about the past, not the present. Basically a huge pic-drop of photos that make me a bit nostalgic. I'm too energy-zapped to write anything else so here you go:

Goooooooooooodddd tiiiiiiimess. I'm going back to bed.

Halloween

2009-11-01T13:34:00.001-05:00

Happy November! Look how pretty Con Hall looks with all its ivy turning fall colours. That's where I have sociology! It's supposed to snow on Tuesday. But it might not. I'm pretty sure the REAL snow won't get here for another few weeks or so. Then it won't go away until April, or so I'm told. Good thing I have a badass coat and winter boots now. Also, since Halloween is over, it is officially the Holiday Season! Yaayyyy!

Right now I'm in the Trinity library. Technically Trin is Victoria's rival college, but they sure have a nice library. Naufil and Kara are sitting studiously at a table, but all my tests are over now, so I'm lounging in an armchair and blogging. Ohoho. But after this I'll prolly go over some Qur'an stuff. :/
Last night was Halloween. I spent it with Kara, Elise, Abby, and Paula, who are also from South, Abby's boyfriend, and Paula's friend Ryan from Hamilton, who is a cool drummer guy. We didn't really feel like, uh, playing chess, so we went to dinner and then went trick-or-treating in the expensive Annex neighborhood. Margaret Atwood and Rachel McAdams live in the Annex, but we didn't see them. We may have knocked on their doors though. I guess they're not fans of giving out candy on Halloween. :/ A lot of people did give us candy though, and it was super awesome. Then we went back to res to sort and trade candy, and Abby and her boyfriend left. Then we watched Psycho and The Night Of The Hunter, which is this super, SUPER weird film noir. Mattresses were dragged upstairs to Kara's room and we had a slumber party, woooo! We were all still up at around 3AM, when the fire alarm went off. I think someone in Gate house (next to South) pulled the alarm, or a bong got tipped over or something. So we went and huddled around outside in the cold until the firemen came. Then we went back up to Kara's room and fell asleep in a sugary Halloween candy haze.

It was overall a very successful night. I also wanted to throw in this picture for Marinna of a "Charlie Chaplan" costume that I found at the store in Kensington market where I went to find my Halloween costume.

I heart robots

2009-10-28T11:57:00.000-04:00

Hi! Well, I did as Claire said and finally busted out my big, quality, awesome camera. When I got it out and held it and looked through the viewfinder I got his huge wave of "OMG, WHY DIDN'T I DO THIS EARLIER I LOVE THIS SO MUCH" feeling. But then I attached my favorite lens, the 50mm f1.4 that used to be my dad's, and the focus mechanism didn't work. This was the problem we had had with it before, and we had sent it in to Canon to get it fixed. Soooo, really disappointed that that happened again. But after messing with it for a while trying to fix it, I sadly took it off and got out my macro lens, which I love almost as much. It was like midnight and all dark out and the only lens that would really be good for outdoor stuff at that hour would be the 50mm to get some bitchin city light bokeh, and I would rather not go on a walk at night with my expensive camera out anyway, so I stayed in my room and took portrait shots of my weird toys.

That was a couple days ago. Yesterday was Tuesday and the ROM was free for students, so between my linguistics quiz and sociology class, I went with my friend Naufil, who lives on the second floor. He insisted on me taking touristy photos of him at every possible opportunity.

We didn't have that much time, so we kind of just went quickly through everything since he had never been there before. (Lame, since he's a second year and has been living right next to it for so long.) But it was fun and I saw a neat little video about meteorites. Huh! The dinosaurs reminded me of when I went to the ROM with my cousin Owen. I don't know why, but that just kept going through my mind when I was there and I was all, "wahhh I miss Owen" even though I JUST saw him last weekend. He is pretty cool. And for a 6-year-old, he knows a lot about chemistry. As he told me, it would take hours to go over it all.

Naufil quotes of the day:

Erin: Aw it's like a prehistoric chickadee!
Naufil: Erin, it's a bird.
E: ...What do you think a chickadee is?
N: Oh, I thought you said chicken.
E: ....Uh... chickens are birds too....
N: Well yeah, but not the REAL kind.
E: .........

N: Wowww, that photo's from 1673!!
E: I wonder why it's in colour.
N (extremely indignant): So what, are you saying there were no colour cameras in 1673?!

E: You bitch a lot.
N: Yeah, but at least I'm not like, mean, like you. Like, I don't just go, oh hey, those are bad shoes.

(Talking about the Dead Sea Scrolls)
N: I thought they were like, dead sea creatures.
E: What?! No!
N: Well then why do they call them the DEAD Sea Scrolls?

Pretty crystal! And that's the story of my trip to the ROM and my broken lens.

Shawarma & TV

2009-10-26T12:55:00.001-04:00

This is super old news, but for some reason I never got around to watching Blur's music video for their song Coffee & TV. I don't know why I never did, since I knew it had milk cartons in it and I LOVE MILK CARTONS. Well I finally did watch it, and it's awesome! Um I don't think it will let me embed it here since it's copyrighted or whatever, but you should go watch it.

I spent most of this weekend with my mom's side of the family. We got together to scatter my grampa's ashes. It was nice to see my cousins, and I got to drive them around in a golf cart thing. I went to a cool espresso bar called Z'Espresso on Bloor St with my mom while it was raining a lot. I had a coupon for a free latte from the U of T timetable book, and I got a Nutella truffle thing too. Observe:

On Saturday night I went back to Vic and studied with Rifqi. I have a big Arabic term test on Wednesday and a linguistics quiz on Tuesday. So we studied. While everyone else partied. But at around 2:30am we decided to go out to get something to eat, since in Toronto there are more things open 24 hours than WinCo and Shari's. First we went by this pet store Rifqi knew about, to look in the window and see if they had goldfish, since he wants some for his room. But it was just a pet boutique, not a pet store. They had mostly doggy jackets and jewel-encrusted food dishes. Fail. So we went to a shawarma place on Yonge street. When I first got here everyone was so surprised that I had never had shawarma before. There is so much Arabic culture here. I don't remember the name of the place, but in this picture I took it says "Best Shawarma Doner." Sooo I'm not sure if it's actually called that or if it's a typo and it's supposed to say "Best Shawarma Diner" or what.

So we hung about there for a bit and then left with our food to go find somewhere to sit down. We settled on the steps outside of Starbucks.

Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

Some pigeons started gathering around us. Rifqi is scared of pigeons and we were disturbed when one started eating a piece of chicken.

There was like, twice that many when we left.

I miss you guys. :( But I'm having a good time here too. Last night we watched Dazed and Confused and Pulp Fiction in the common room. Now I have to go to linguistics. And memorize the IPA alphabet and some charts by tomorrow.

Learning is Fun!

2009-10-20T16:49:00.000-04:00

I went to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) today with Rifqi and Jeihan (see photo), since it's free for students on Tuesdays. The special thing until November is that the Dead Sea Scrolls are there, and I really wanted to go see them. I had to pay $6 since it's only general admission that's free (for regular people it would have been $28! HA!), but it was very VERY worth it. I might even go again next week. Rifqi and Jeihan are cheap and don't care about learning and culture and all that, so they went and looked at butterflies and dinosaurs. I spent almost two hours looking through all the stuff about the history and culture of ancient Israel and all the super old stuff they had out, and then finally the actual scrolls, but I still felt kind of rushed since I had to be out of there in time to go to my linguistics tutorial. (My tutorial TA is like a real-life jpmetz!) I could have spent all day in there! I would have really liked to have had more time. But I can always go back next week!
I love having the ROM two minutes away from my building, especially now that I know about the free Tuesdays thing. I wasn't allowed to take pictures inside but when we got out I took some quality photos of a tour bus and one of me and Rifqi. And some squirrels in the quad. Those black squirrels are EVERYWHERE. There are some gray ones too. But really, you can look around at any time and there will be literally three or four running around. Last night I was walking back to my room and I saw the hugest raccoon ever eating out of a garbage can. There were three of them but one was HUGE. It was like a husky.

I need to work on balancing out my study habits. On Wednesday last week I studied Arabic for 6 hours and then the next day I did 7 hours. Then the next 2 days I did nothing. :/

I went and played pool at the Cat's Eye (Vic pub type thing) with Naufil tonight, like we do a lot. I'm actually getting pretty good now! I beat him twice and he beat me three or four times. When we left people starting playing Super Smash Bros and it made me miss Ian. I wanted to play but I had to go do school stuff. >:[

What should I be for Halloween? What are you guys being? I have nooo idea. Apparently there's somewhere in Kensington Market selling cheap costumes so I guess I'll check that out. I want to go there soon anyways. Kensington is really close by and it's this neighborhood of vintage and indie and weird shops and cafes, and it's a bit hipster but very awesome.

In sociology today my prof told us that almost 50% of Toronto has something other than English or French for their first language. I thought that was cool! I always hear people speaking different languages on the street, a lot of Italian and Chinese and Urdu and stuff I don't recognize. But it is a bit unfortunate when you get a professor with a hard-to-understand accent.

I really want to see the movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape! I don't even know what it's about but I know it made Claire cry. And I think Johnny Depp is in it. I also want to see Weird Science. That kid from The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, Anthony Michael Hall, is in it. But I looked him up and he's real creepy looking now. :( But Weird Science was made in the 80's so it's okay. Did you know the jock from The Breakfast Club, Emilio Estevez, is Charlie Sheen's brother?? Hunh! And Charlie Sheen's real name is Carlos Irwin Estevez! No way! I'm pretty sure I wrote about this in my letter to Marinna but now it's surprising all over again.

Eyyyyy

2009-10-18T19:20:00.001-04:00

Hi! I'm starting a blog. Because I felt like it. And because I wanted to show you these pictures, but I didn't want to post them on Facebook. Yay!

Here's some slightly blurry/grainy photos of my room. I'm still getting used to my new little camera.

My side:

Close-up of my cubby hole thing that holds my earrings and headbands, belts, etc:

My desk:

I love the built-in shelves:

This is our disgusting, non-working "fireplace":

And we can't even decorate the mantel, because these stupid tall shelves were built right on top for some reason:

Molly's side and my side:

Outside Upper Burwash:

South House!

Here's my across-the-hall neighbor Rifqi, looking scared:

Here's a delightfully odd photo of me, taken by Rifqi in his room:

I took this blurry picture while walking back from soc in Con Hall (MEAN GIRLS) because I thought University College (U of T is divided into 7 colleges) looked pretty:

I took this for Claire Fro while I was in J-Town. Look! Cowpiss in bottle AND can form!

These two were during Nuit Blanche, which is this art night thing that happens every year in Paris and Toronto:

Hooray, photos!