Lovely Weather for a Sleight Ride Together...

Until Thursday we had almost no snow at all, and then BAM! we get 20 cm in one night! I can't say I mind very much, I got a long weekend because Friday was a snow day and there is now enough snow to go cross country skiing and snow-shoeing. Both of which I am really hoping to be able to do sometime this winter but the way things are going on the school and work front, it looks highly unlikely. I don't have a cable to hook my camera up to my computer or else I would have taken some fun pictures, so instead I stuck my lap top out the front door in an attempt to show you guys just how much snow we got (but while avoiding the cold). The picture is basically the view out my front door, the white picket fence surrounds our yard. The picture just doesn't do it justice. I happen to love PEI in the snow; the city stays so much whiter for so much longer than Toronto where everything turns brown within minutes of a snow fall. The downside is that the sidewalks barely get plowed at all, making trudging to school, the grocery store and to work a lot more work in the winter.

Walking home from work on Friday night, I had to walk along University Avenue because the sidewalks weren't cleared and I couldn't actually tell where they were supposed to be. The snow was knee deep and walking along the side of the road seemed a much better option. I was about half way home when I heard this thundering roar behind me, I looked back just in time to see a giant plow booking it down the street. I jumped into the snow bank as far from the road as I could but still ended up narrowly escaping being plowed and got absolutely covered in snow. It took me about 3 minutes to climb out! It was one of those moments when you look around you to make sure no one else saw before permitting yourself to laugh at the hilarity of the whole situation. Hilarious but only because I narrowly escaped death by plow. Not my ideal way to go, I must admit. I think my preferred way to go would be shark attack. At least then I could feel as though I'm giving back to the food chain, and if I did manage to survive I'd have some pretty bad-ass scars and a wicked story.

In other news, this video of the Burloak Canoe Club Sr Woman's War Canoe from Nationals '09 in Sherbrooke was recently posted on Facebook and I thought I would post it here for your viewing pleasure. It was a pretty awesome race, specially since it was very likely my last war canoe race ever. Kind of sad actually, thinking that I won't be racing war canoe any time soon. It is, and always has been my very favorite boat to both train and race, and I think that might be the only reason I was ever decent at it. Adam Vank said in an article once ( I have no idea what article though, or where I read it) that if you're going to be good, you train for hours a day, every day. If you're going to be great, you love every minute of it. I think this is particularly true of war canoe. When you're in a boat with so many other people, it's easy to think you're going hard when you aren't really, and easy to think that you can slack without being noticed (although any one who has ever been coached by Kyle can testify that this isn't true...he notices everyone), specially if all you can think about it how much you hate your life and how tempting it is to bail and swim back to the dock rather than finish the time control. Obviously we've all had those moments, but I really loved that the better I paddled technically, the more I could move the boat with the same amount of effort, so if I could just paddle better, and learn to paddle harder than I could move the boat that much more. Not to mention how awesome it feels to paddle efficiently and well and powerfully and actually feel as though every stroke your taking is making a difference even in such a big, heavy boat. Anyways, enjoy watching the burloak ladies kick some serious butt!

He Strikes Again...

I am extremely disappointed in how clever this silly mouse is. Doesn't he know it's for his own good to get caught? He has officially expired his second strike, and I have a feeling that by tomorrow morning his opportunity to be set free into the wild far far away from Gerald Street may be dunzo.

Today was awesome. I talked to the internship coordinator and learned that I will be getting a whole month off over the summer! There has apparently been a slight change in placement scheduling which now allows for a bit of time off to enjoy the summer and an opportunity to maybe get some work in to compensate for working for free for three months. I am really excited that I'll get a chance to go home, specially for a whole month. I also get a week off between the end of exams and the start of internship. I think my parents are thinking about visiting that week and I am really excited for that too! They have yet to see my new house or to be on island at the same time as me since I moved here for school. As a bonus I wont have any classes or school work to have to worry about during their visit, I can bum around the island with them and actually enjoy the week.

I also went for lunch with Jessica and Lydia today. I have been hearing for the last few years about how amazing the curry is at Churchill Arms and I was not disappointed. We each got a different type of curry so I got to try a little of everything. I'm not sure if the actual curry was really good or if it had just been so long since I had had curry last that made it taste so good. Either way I recommend checking it out if you're ever in Charlottetown.

House Mouse: 1, 26 Gerald Street: 0

Last night we were super excited to set up the humane mouse trap that the landlord dropped off. We spread some peanut butter over a cracker and set the trap in anticipation of finding a furry little friend in there in the morning. When we woke up this morning, excited to see if the little guy took our bait, but all that we found was an empty trap. Some how he escaped with the cracker! Pesky little bugger! We've decided to give him three chances to surrender until we resort to the messy traps that won't be supplying him with free food.

In the past few days since the internship announcements were made, I have found out that I will have to stay on the island for the summer. I had anticipated being able to intern in Toronto as I knew there have been previous placements in Toronto for UPEI students. Unfortunately, we don't have the opportunity to work off island until our second work term next summer. The idea of staying on the island was not exactly welcomed with open arms. Winters here suck, super windy, it snows then rains then snows again, its basically miserable. Not to mention there are people I was really excited to see and spend time with over the summer at home. I was bummed to say the least.

The more I think about it though, the more excited I get to be here this summer. Everyone keeps telling me how awesome it is in the summer and now I will finally have the chance to experience it first hand. Plus, I think that having all the interns in one city for the summer will be really fun and I'm hoping we'll all hang out when we're not working. Almost all of my friends have had a summer away from home so far; Rach in the states, JP in Australia and Court in Halifax so I suppose it's just my turn to be missed.

I went for a run around the city tonight and it solidified my excitement for staying here in the summer. It's a crazy warm two degrees today and I couldn't help but take advantage of the weather and get outside. I ran from my house to the end of the board walk (a perfect 6km route!) and then looped around downtown for a bit, not wanting to go home yet. I wasn't running very fast, but I'm ok with that because for the first time in my life I'm not training for anything. Who cares if I chill on a run and just enjoy the fact that I'm running? (Plus, I managed to master the snot rocket in one run!) I did a little mini tour around the confederation building, a whole bunch of historic sites and old churches and decided that this place could quite possibly be awesome in the summer. The board walk runs for about 1.5km along the ocean and has the distinct scent of salty seaweed that comes off the rocks. Plus I found a public outdoor pool at the end of the board walk in which I hope to run to, swim in, and then run home from in the summer. I keep having to remind myself that not only will I be working full time for free as an intern, I will also be trying to work as much as possible on the side to pay the bills! I have a tendency of making extravagant plans that always fall through due to the demands of reality. Psh, reality.

As for right now, I'm trying to keep up with a super busy semester of classes! Which means that I procrastinate by cooking. Tonight after my run I came home and made an attempt at a curried lentil soup. It's decent but not as heavenly as the one I had at the Farmer's Market. I'm going back on Saturday to ask her if she'll write down her recipe for me! I'm crossing my fingers she'll have more soup too!

The Mouse Ran Up The Clock...

A couple nights ago, after Age commented on the sound of scurrying that comes from her walls at night, I too heard it but from the insides of my floors. I ignored it after having only ever heard it once and not hearing it again for a few days. Unfortunately, Age woke up this morning to find that her cereal box had been chewed through in the middle of the night by what we can only assume was little mouse teeth.

Having mice (or mouse) in the house doesn't bother me. It reminds me of the time I woke up at home to my cats chasing a mouse around my closet at 3am. I plunked a bucket on top of it, covered the bucket with a chemistry text book (just in case it was stronger than the bucket) and left it for my dad to deal with later. I assumed that at some point during the twelve hours I was gone that day (swim practice, high school, weights at MCC) he would have disposed of the mouse. I got home however, and the bucket was sitting right where I left it. I really, slowly carefully lifted the bucket up a tad to see if he was still in there (no idea where I thought the little guy would have escaped to..) half expecting it to book it out from under the bucket, causing me to round up the cats and start the whole chase all over again. Unfortunately (but luckily at the same time?) the mouse had probably suffocated throughout the day and all I had to do was put it in the compost outside.

I think I would much rather be more careful about what food I leave out and live harmoniously with the mice (or mouse) than set up traps. My roommates however disagree, and decided that immediate action should be taken to rid the house of the pest(s). Luckily, on my walk home from work tonight, my landlord drove by and we chatted about the mice a bit and he knows a guy who knows another guy who happens to be cousins with his cousin and this guy has a bunch of humane traps that he wants to try because he (and I quote) doesn't want to snap their heads off. Not only am I very pleased, it further confirms my theory that everyone on the entire island is somehow related, and if not currently then they will be soon via marriage.

If the humane traps don't work and we eventually are forced to use the traps that are not so humane, I might have to ignore Lynne's advice and sneak nolan's Cheese into the traps overnight while my roommates are sleeping!






For the time being, I am watching the bachelor and finishing up a laboratory report on carbohydrates. In food lab, we baked 4 different batches of muffins, each with a different type of sweetner (sucrose, sucralose, fructose and cyclamate) and I am discussing how the maillard reaction and gelatinization impacted our final products. Interesting stuff, and for the record...NEVER cook with sucralose (Splenda) if you want your product to taste delicious or be nice and golden brown.

In other news...I am officially an intern!! I am really really excited but there is a lot of work to do this semester before I start my first placement. I am hoping to intern in Toronto this summer but there is a very big possibility I'll have to stay in PEI for the entire summer to do my first round of placements here. A lot of stuff to figure out between now and the official start date-April 26th! This internship was the only reason I came to PEI, and I've been stressing about it for the past four years so I'm especially glad all the stressing and worrying is finally over!

Today was super unproductive, although I did watch an episode of Glee, buy a new swim suit, swim for two hours and eat the most delicious sweet potato of my life so it wasn't all bad. Despite a fairly uneventful day, I did come away from the weekend having learned a couple of things to note:

• My sister was right when she said that champagne and pizza was an unbeatable combo
• More than my three devoted followers read this...shocking, I know

• After studying enteral and parenteral nutrition (tube feeding hospital patients), it's a) super cool and fun to figure out which formulas you need to use on patients depending on their condition, the severity of the gastrointestinal function, protein and energy requirements etc and b) I never ever want to have a tube stuck down my nose and threaded all the way into my jejunum or stomach.
• Lastly, that the (drum roll please...) internship selections have been made and are available to candidates at 10am Monday morning. This time tomorrow I will either be strategizing my back-up plan and looking hard core for a summer job, or I'll be officially an intern. it could go either way at this point, but my fingers are crossed.
  

Speaking of internship, here are some pictures from the FANS "yahoo for interviews being over" party on Friday night:

FANS and Friends before heading to the Olde Dublin

Roommates Extraordinaire

Officially Out of My Hands....

Saturday mornings are one of my favorite times of the week. Mostly because the Charlottetown Farmer's market only operates on Saturday mornings but also because there's enough of the weekend left to be able to relax and chill out. This morning I woke up early to babysit for my swim coach on campus for a couple hours and took advantage of the opportunity to catch up on my Sesame Street and Thomas the Tank Engine. Lucas is just over a year old and super cute, but also happens to be a snot making machine, I'm still a little bit puzzled as to how it's even possible to have snot running down to your chin all the time. Of course being a nutrition student I automatically think about the impact this may have on his fluid requirements but choose to ignore myself instead.

After, I walked across campus to the Farmers Market for some grub and was really feeling the need for some java after a late Friday night. I ended up getting a big bowl of Curried Lentil Soup and a newspaper and had the most delightful brunch of life. I ended up skipping the coffee and getting a loaf of bread and a cupcake for each Age and Sam instead from this new cupcake place called City View Bakehouse. I didn't try any of their stuff so I can't actually testify to their deliciousness.

The last couple of days have been really great. Friday was my long awaited internship interview. A panel of three people, one prof and two dietitians from the community, interviewed everyone who had submitted a complete application (rumored to be between 14 and 20 people) and are hopefully making their decisions sometime in the next week. I wasn't really all that nervous until the day of. It was really just while sitting in microbio about an hour before the interview that I was freaking out a little bit and feeling really unprepared. To be honest I spent more time stressing about what to wear than I did what to say. Which is ridiculous anyways, but especially because I have had four classes with this prof already and normally show up right after swim practice with a wet heap of hair tied in a knot on the top of my head, reeking of chlorine with giant red goggle and swim cap marks covering my face. (It's a really good look btw, I recommend it) Once I actually got the interview and was waiting in the hallway to see the panel I calmed down a lot despite sweating profusely. The first two thirds of the interview were relatively normal, the typical job interview questions. The last third was dietetics specific scenarios which went questionably. But on the bright side it is officially out of my hands. There isn't anything else I can do to influence the panel's decision.

In celebration of the end of the interviews, a whole bunch of the nutrition girls from my class all went out the the Old Dublin last night. A whole bunch of the girls came over for some snacks and drinks before the pub and most of them brought friends with them. It made me realize how awesome our class is. We don't get very many chances to all get together outside of class but we really need to put in more effort to do so. It's PEI music week so every pub has local musicians playing all week. Last night the Grass Mountain Hobos were playing and they were awesome! Dancing ensued and a great time was had by all. I highly recommend checking out their music, super fun!

Panther Pride

So although my time as team mascot was disappointing and not nearly as awesome as I thought it would be, here is some photo evidence that it did in fact occur: