10:08

It took me a good 90 minutes, but I read one article for my fish class. To be fair to myself, I did manage to check my email 50 +/-2 times in those 90 minutes as well, so it wasn't all wasted on fish. After all that hard work, I'm going to take a coffee/rockband break and go visit a friend before reading my second fish article :-)

The unthinkable has happened...

I have lost my u-pass (bus pass for the nobody that reads this blog and doesn't know what that is). Hopefully this is just a temporary dilema, but I am unable/too cheap/too impoverished to pay the $5 it will take me to get home and back without it tonight. Consequently, I am going to sleep in the forestry building at uni and hopefully manage to get some work done. I've told three or so people of my plans to sleep/stay here tonight and everybody seems so against the idea. It's not as though I'm the first person to sleep at school. Some people are just no fun!

Whatever they say, I'm going to do it. And here shall rest the chronicles of my adventures...

Poverty strikes... as per usual

I've been trying to maintain the active social life I had in South Africa, but it is significantly more financially... unpropritious here than it was there. Now, I realize that I've been MIA for a year, but I refuse to believe that inflation is really this bad. As with everything, I'm going to blame it on the Olympics, but, unlike the rest of my accusations, I feel this one is at least somewhat founded. For example, a beer that used to be about $4 in a pub, is now closer to $6. That's a 50% increase in price in a year! Madness!

I suppose it has been worth it, since I haven't seen my friends in a year and would like to spend time with them. I'm sure it will settle down in a bit, so I should just enjoy it while I can! Also, there were a few places that I really wanted to go to since I've been back. The Yale is a rhythm and blues bar with a fantastic house band (Brickhouse...Youtube is your friend) and it's one of my favourite places to go out in Vancouver. It's super chill and very unVancouveresque or possible very Vancouver, just Vancouver in the 1880s when it first opened. That and my other favourite bar, the Fringe, which is very...Jack Kerouac-esque and thus fantastic! They're the kind of places that are few and far between in our world of Lady Gaga and Britney, and I missed them greatly. So, I suppose, it's worth the economic strain.

Despite my own miniature financial crisis (based entirely on the Olympics and not my own inability to control my spending), the Olympics are kind of growing on me. They reopened the ice skating rink under Robson square and they often have live music playing beside it. They are also having a lot of free concerts and events around Vancouver during the Olympics. Hopefully all the free entertainment next month will make up for my overspending this month. It's all about balance... and free stuff. Oh, student life... how I will miss you!

School Daze

First of all I need to apologize to my one or so reader, I've been kak at updating this blog, especially since I got back from SA and I'm going to try to be better at it (watch this be my last entry for the next 6 months...knock on wood).

Now that that's out of the way, I can tell you about what's been going on in my life. Mostly just school and catching up with friends I haven't seen for a year. This is my last semester, if all goes as planned, of my undergrad and probably the most relaxing semester I've ever had. Although in hindsight this is only because I chose to take 6 classes every other term of my university career. I'm only taking 3 real classes (remote sensing, fish 2, consevation policy) and doing a thesis.

On the class department, so far so good. I've been the most organized I've ever been and have mapped out when I'm going to work on every project I have. We'll see how long that lasts...

Remote sensing is my favourite class. The first day we learned why the sky is blue, whcih I kind of already knew (ie. light scattering on particles in the atmosphere), but not to the extent of why blue and not some other colour. Although my friend tells me that we learned this in high school geography...minor detail. Another perk is that my prof is Australian and hilarious, which makes listening to him all the more interesting and means that I don't zone out every 20 minutes (the threshold for the human attention span). The actual subject matter is pretty fantastic as well; I love messing around on the computer with technology I barely understand! I usually end up understanding it a lot better than just if told what to do.

My fish class is pretty interesting, but very similar to the first fish class. Obviously it's more advanced, but the teacher's the same, so it kind of just feels like an extention of the third year course.

Conservation policy is...incredible aggravating. I like the prof, but most of the people in that class had him for "Foundations of Conservation" with me and hated him. I can kind of understand it, he tends to play Devil's advocate and bring up contentious issues. While I do find this interesting to a certain extent, people tend to personally attack him for this method and he just goes with their attacks, so that the class goes in circles and nothing gets resolved. For example, the past two classes all we've talked about his how we can never harm future generations because they don't exist yet. So, whatever policy we do create, be it good or bad, will change what future generation is created, but not harm that future generation in itself. See what I mean? Really interesting, but not worth 3 hours of discussion. Well, that's not entirely true... It's probably worth more discussion, but not within the scope of everything else we need to cover in the class.

Ok that's all for today, but I'll let you know about things other than school tomorrow :-)

I <3 Buses

I realize that this post will make all of my posts since I've been back in Vancouver about the bus, but I just can't help it. I'm a transit kid at heart!

I stayed late at school on Tuesday night, so I could go to karaoke night with some friends (our duet of Your Song by Elton John brought tears to the eyes of many). As fun as this was it resulted in having to rush for the bus in an attempt to catch the last one. Unfortunately, my friend's bus had just left and all the other's didn't seem to be leaving any time soon, so we decided to walk to a more bus accessible area to ensure more busing options.

On our walk to this BAA, we walked in front of an out of service bus waiting at a red light. Now, being the transit kid that I am, I've had a lot of luck in my day with out of service buses giving me rides places, so I decided it can't hurt to ask. Besides, he might have at least had advice on the easiest way for me to get home. As luck would have it, the driver was kind enough to give us a lift as far to our respective places as he was going. He ended up being an incredible nice person with tons of really interesting stories. He was Quebecois, but has lived in Vancouver for the past 7 years. Apparently he used to drive trucks from Quebec City all along the East coast of the US. He even happened to be on a highway in NYC during 9/11 and had a hell of a time getting out of the city to make his delivery. People are always so interesting when you take the time to talk to them :-)

Then again today, I took the bus home from getting my grad photos done and there were two little girls sitting near me, who had me cracking up the entire 30 minute bus trip. At first they were quiet and the little one just looked up at me and when I smiled looked away to her nanny. Then back to me and back to her nanny a bunch more times, but never really reacting to either of us. For some reason this made her sister laugh hysterically. Then they proceeded to make faces at each other for the rest of the trip and had everyone who was paying attention smiling.

It's such a simple thing and not even that great of a story, but it's little things like that, which always make my day extraordinarily fantastic. I think I just love listening to people and their stories. Just people watching and seeing such joy in everyday life. I think that's why I love buses so much...

Bus Fanaticism

It appears that in my absence I forgot just how fantastic buses are. Sure driving from point A to point B my be a little faster, but not nearly as entertaining. I took the bus into White Rock today (in an attempt to find a 24 newspaper and complete the crossword puzzle there within) and it made my already pleasant day increase exponentially on the awesome scale. On the way into White Rock there was a man sitting at the front of the bus chatting with the driver. He was discussing things that he likes about White Rock and proceeded to exclaim with much enthusiasm "It's not like that Surrey place with all them panhandlers" This exclamation was greeted by much laughter on the part of the rest of the bus, all ten of whom began to participate in discussing panhandlers in Surrey and the term panhandler in general. To make it even more fantastic, my ride home on the bus was coloured by two elderly women almost climbing over each other to sit as near to the young bus driver as possible. They appeared to be having a "who can be a more ridiculous flirt and make the poor bus driver reddest" competition of which I, the self-appointed judge, say Edith wins :P

It's official

I'm going skydiving on Saturday!!!

It was touch and go there for a while because, for some reason, no one wanted to go with me. But finally, new BFF consented and... I'M GOING SKYDIVING ON SATURDAY!!!

Eeeeeep!