21st birthday - Spoiled Rotten!

Hey Gang,

Last Friday, September 14th, was my 21st birthday. The whole weekend was phenomenal and definitely gave me insight into how caring my friends and family are.

Friday flew by so fast. I had a morning class, birthday lunch with my mother, and another class. After class ended I whipped up to Calgary to spend the evening with my closest high school buddies. We kept it pretty low key and stayed in which was nice after a very busy and long week. They got me a strange assortment of treasures. I think the highlight is the package of paper clips and each one is shaped like a different style of mustache. They're too funny!

Saturday I spent with the boyfriend. He's house-sitting for a relative out near Cochrane so it was nice to go spend time walking the dogs through the woods and sit out on the porch and enjoy the sunshine without the hustle and bustle of the city. He surprised me with flowers, my favorite cake, and an awesome owl necklace. Considering I told him not to get me anything (repeatedly), he really outdid himself. He even forgave me when I fell asleep watching one of his favorite movies later that night ;)

Sunday was a lovely BBQ with the family. At my request, we had bbq teryaki chicken, garlic parmesan quinoa, grilled zucchini... yummy. Earlier that day, my pa had stopped by the farmer's market and scooped up an absolutely out of this world carrot cake. It was SO good and it was the only occasion all weekend that I got candles and sung to. Thankfully, it was an absolutely honking enormous cake and there are leftovers in the freezer for whenever I visit next :) The birthday that keeps on giving!

I'm glad I have such happy memories to relive because this week has been piling up on me. I just about dropped out of school today when our group sat down to work on our physiology lab. What we learned several hours later after the 8 of us had given up is that the prof hadn't given us all the data we needed to complete the lab. *Sigh*

I know there is no way I'm stopping now but it does make me entertain the thought of taking a bit of time off before I do a master's degree. This semester is going to burn me right out. Fortunately, I am able to look at it as only 3.5 months. I've lived through many 3.5 month periods of time in my life and I can think of several that were guaranteed worse than this. Hurray for the brightside!

Cheers,

Jacqueline

And We're Back

Howdy Folks,

Classes started last Wednesday and I have one doozy of a semester ahead of me. I was right to think that physiology would be one of my tougher courses. The first thing the prof says to us is how important it is that we have the prerequisite course because of all the references to that material that we will be making. Thankfully I have taken it... two years ago. To put it mildly, I am rusty. Some reviewing will definitely be required.

My semester will basically boil down to the balancing act of labs, classes, studying, and reading. I am fortunate in that only 3 of my classes have required textbooks and I was able to acquire them extremely cheaply compared to other years. My roommate was not so fortunate. She ended up paying over $800 for hers. Yikes.

So speaking of roommates - I really like the place I'm living in. That townhouse is really nice, really well taken care of, modern, and a great deal. Only down side is that it is slightly farther from campus than I would like. Thank heaven for bicycles. I may be singing a different tune in December when it is 4 feet of snow but we will get there when we get there.

View from my room: picture of the sunrise taken by my (very poor quality) camera phone

My roommates seem like a pretty level bunch. Both girls are serious students and fairly clean. We're still in the stage of learning one another so I don't want to form too strong of an impression one way or the other but I think I will only go minorly crazy in comparison to other years.

So far I've managed to get involved in a bunch of little things. For example, I helped tour the new international exchange students around the campus, volunteered (for class credit -woo!) at a Parkinson's disease fundraiser, rebooted my healthy eating/working out lifestyle (down 2 lbs already!) and have been catching up with my Lethbridge peers. Tomorrow evening I'm doing dinner with a bunch of friends celebrating a Baha'i festival. It's all been nice and I know this doesn't really make sense but honestly something feels like it is missing and a little piece of my happiness is missing with it.

Wish I knew what it was.

Jacqueline