Mary Freakin' Sunshine!

After checking back through my last peck of posts, I have realized that in every one of them there has been some element of complaining about something: fatigue (school-related), overwork (school-related), overscheduling (school vs. actual life of fun vs. work vs. sleep), or apocalypse (North Korea -- thanks, Kim). Anyway, I don't want my negativity circuits to overheat, so here is a post of happy things, many from Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving was lovely, so, so lovely. My flight there went completely smoothly, and my moment of freakout at the ticket counter that the flight left at 17:55 instead of 7:55 p.m. was completely unfounded in reality. Phew. When I got in, Boopsie and I stayed up late watching Parkour videos on YouTube. Look how cool! Look! Look! The ones I like best are when the people in them don't look like gymnasts gone AWOL from their neo-Stalinist training compounds; it's cooler when the parkouristes just look like regular people.

The fam is A-OK, and on Friday I went into the city and had lunch with my madre and her boss, Diane, at Booster Juice because Earl's was full. We discussed the importance of not spoon-feeding your students. I called Becca on the spur of the moment (well, actually on my cell)and went with her to genetics class and then the library. Her genetics prof sort of vaguely reminds me of Mrs. Kelly, my grade twelve English teacher who I love dearly Anyway, there was a lot of phosphorylating happening and something about reaction regulators. Apparently it all had something to do with the movements of bacteria and their responses to stimuli. Becca can probably explain it better than I can.

Similarly, Heather can explain Darkwing Duck better than I can, because she has it on DVD. (!!!) She came over for a bit and we watched a couple of episodes and it was like being nine again and watching weekend morning cartoons. Only in the afternoon! And then I went skating, like you do, and met Boopsie's friend Kelsie and Kelsie's boyfriend, John From St. John. Like me, John was in town for the weekend. Unlike Ottawa, Newfoundland is multiple flights away. Yuh.

Anyway, Mum and Dad abandoned us Saturday night, so I replaced them at dinner with Laura, Becca, and Katie, as well as Katie's puppy, Gromit. It was most lovely, of course, for they are most lovely people (and a most charming puppy). It is a source of continual amazement to me how different my friends have all turned out from each other, and from me. Laura's in anthro and regaled us with tales of totally terrifying lab exams where they give you a bone splinter and ask exactly what bone it is. Katie and Becca are both so much into the medical/animal side of things, and I'm into... whatever it is I do. And Laura's a Pi Phi, so she can tell you absolutely anything and everything about the Greek scene at U of A (she was happy that there had been a fraternity "Myth Busters" type of feature in the campus paper a week or so back). Katie and Becca are actually in a few of the same classes, which I hadn't expected, but I suppose even in third year the animal science people and immunology people have quite a bit in common. Then we watched Beauty and the Beast and realized that our irony detection powers have developed considerably since childhood. Shopping for dinner supplies yielded new botanical knowledge for Boopsie:

Sunday afternoon was a cup of tea with Tom, who was doing carpentry but has decided that it is not for him and is going back to Games Workshop. After tea, it was back home for the production of Thanksgiving dinner -- Mum, being enterprising, had put the dolma together a couple of hours earlier, and I had stuffed my veggie variation, tofuma. My request for dolma meant that there was no cranberry sauce, natch! We considered putting some out anyway, to garnish the rice with toasted pine nuts. It was just a nice, quiet dinner at home.

Before going home, I also managed to squeeze in a cart ride with Katie and Cricket, one of her two miniature horses. I met her new kitten, Chester, and marvelled at how very, very tiny he is. Tawnie and I had brunch and walked around on Whyte for a while, too. And then it was home for a couple of hours, and off to the airport. All is well, all is well. School is insane, but there are a certain number of good things going on in my life that makes all the crazy not matter so much.