scholarly celebrations and one long website address

i don't really have a lot to report but thought it was probably time i reported something. my life has been a lot of the same. dance is busy, our show opens 3 weeks today and i think this caught a number of people by surprise so now all of a sudden the rehearsal schedule has been turbo-charged. and my apparel design class is still going strong. we have 3 weeks left of that too. last week we had to design and create some kind of children's wear garment. i made a little pink quilted vest with hearts on it and a hood. it was pretty cute actually. i liked it. it's a shame i don't know how to do nice finishing things, cuz it looks nice on the outside but it looks like a trainwreck on the inside... weird things are happening in this post. for some reason the pictures are different sizes and all of a sudden my text is blue and underlined. like one big website address... hmm. i'm choosing to ignore it. speaking of sewing that little love vest, I was a busy little bee this weekend. Friday night we had a youth event. it was an iron chef event and it was pretty fun. It was made much more fun by my nephew lending me his spiderman apron and chef's hat. so even though our food didn't taste very good, i at least looked the part.

saturday (ooh the blue is gone) i worked at the flower shop. i actually really enjoyed it. I was given complete creative freedom to make foam arrangements (where the flowers are stuck in the foam block, not arranging foam). I was happy with the way they turned out and my boss seemed pretty impressed. I would have liked to have taken pictures of them but, alas, i have no camera. anyways, i worked until 5 and then kyle and his parents picked me up and i had to fancy it up in a hurry for kyle's grad dinner at prov which started at 6. we were cutting it a little close. the dinner was goodish. the food was good but the atmosphere was crappy. it was in their gym and they didn't decorate it at all and the food was cafeteria style and the speeches were bad. kyle and i kind of went into it expecting it to be lame and it was, but we also realized it was actually a pretty significant weekend in his life and we were glad to celebrate it, even if the event was poorly planned... here we are: (we kept getting in trouble for ruining the grad photos. this is one of the better ones...)

after the dinner we went out for gelato. i had raspberry and passionfruit sorbeto after much deliberation. why is it that little decisions (like what kind of gelati to have) are the hardest ones to make? i had to test out a number of kinds before i settled. (and by settled i mean i pulled one of my usual tricks... i made the person working there decide for me - lindsey, you're familiar with this trick...) but in any case, it was delicious. and big. (note: i did not wear this big blue thing to the grad... i was cold. i'm wearing kyle's jogger)
Kyle got presents. He got a watch from his parents and money to buy new rims for his bycicle (woot). and he got an argentinian soccerball from his sister who's in argentina. he was pumped.

after the grad dinner and gelato excursion, we had to go way out to charleswood for my dance social. which was a hoot. which means it wasn't really and we only stayed for 20 minutes to see if we won any of the prizes. we didn't.

and then there was sunday, which saw us at the providence college convocation. it was also long and boring. and many people complained that it was hot. but i thought it was nice... look at kyle in his funny suit. the hood was the funniest part. although there were some other outfits that were much funnier. all the faculty were wearing different mideval suits. it entertained me.

hooray for graduating.

indelible strength top-coat

it's a beautiful sunny day today. the first really warm day we've had this year. so warm, in fact, that i wore open toed shoes to work this morning, which in itself was exciting, although i had to say goodbye to an old friend of mine. On January 13th, Lindsey and I went to get pedicures before she left for the Phillipines. We got to sit in massage chairs and they did cheesy little designs on our toes. This isn't all that exciting, really, except that the little vietnemese women had a pedicure secret weapon. they have super powered nail polish. The design and the polish was still perfectly intact on my toes this morning except that they were half grown out so the top of the design has been cut away. i realize this sounds disgusting. but i was impressed. especially because i'm really hard on my feet. i've never had a pedicure that doesn't chip away within a week. i don't just sit around all day wearing shoes and socks. i'm always bare foot and jumping and sliding around which makes it almost futile to paint your toenails. so i was kind of wanting to see how long this pedicure would last. but sandals were more important to me this morning so that's the end of my little experiment. but i should note that it took me a very long time and a lot of cotton balls to get the little buggers off my toes...

a brief synopsis of my week

nothing new to report really... let's think...

monday i had my class. it's a good idea to design a raincoat with no seams on the shoulders to prevent rain from seeping in.

tuesday kyle and i went on a coffee date. we've never been on a coffee date before. it was fun. i even got a present. he bought me lullabies for little criminals by heather o'neill. i think i would use the word bittersweet to describe this book. it's about a little girl who ends up more or less a street person in montreal. it's sad but not crying sad and beautiful too... it's really well done... that was a poor description of the book, but in all fairness, i haven't finished it yet so i can't be expected to have all my thoughts figured out just yet.

wednesday i drove kyle out to a little school off talbot because he's filming a promotional video for samson's (part of YFC). i ended up staying there with him which was kind of hilarious. he was filming a jr high girls volleyball recreational league game and everyone seemed to be getting flustered by his being there... including kyle. i don't think the girls realized his microphone is much better at hearing things than normal human ears and they kept saying stuff like 'do my legs look fat?' to which another girl would reply 'i don't know, why don't you ask him' and then they'd giggle and keep staring at kyle. it was fun to watch. kyle was all uncomfortable and flustered and cute and the girls were all goofy and giggly but trying to be cool and good at volleyball at the same time. everytime they screwed up they would be like oh no i hope he didn't see that. or ugh of course i screwed up when he was looking. it made me laugh...

and last night i worked. it was slow. my boss at the flower shop bought the cute trenchcoat i liked. so that was a little sad but for the best since i can't afford it anyways.

and tonight kyle and i are going to see a dance show. and my brother's coming home from thailand 75 days earlier than planned. turns out solo traveling is not his cup of tea. he misses his friends and family so it'll be good for him to be home.

and this is the bay. i've included this picture for no reason other than i like it and thought my post needed a picture. kyle took it when we went to the cannes liones at the art gallery with his parents. it's pretty.


and that's that...

I've been informed that it's time for a new post

So. To summarize my last two weeks or post-free activity, last week was spring break which was lovely but, as always, too short. Christie and I had a homework and laundry slumber party, which is slightly less fun than normal slumber parties but slightly more fun than laundry and homework on their own. And on monday night we had our class and on Tuesday morning Kyle and I hit the road for the good old city of Saskatoon. I knitted the whole way and we listened to a lot of radio shows that Kyle had downloaded for the trip. It was a nice little journey. We got there on Tuesday night and met up with Kyle's cousins Erik and Yuriko. Had dinner, went to a movie. This is their place and them (sorry, the picture's a little dark on my computer):


And this is their rather energetic dog Chaco. She tried to eat my slippers. And Kyle's hand. She looks like a bat in this picture but she usually looks like a chocolate lab.


Some highlights of our trip included the zoo (ducks are more fun to watch than you'd initially think, and swans are huge),

the Great Lake Swimmers concert (we were excited about this because we were disappointed about missing them in Winnipeg because we'd be in Saskatoon, but the funny thing about bands on tour is that they play in more than one city, and it just so happened that after Winnipeg, they went to Saskatoon. They were amazing. We love them now more than ever. Especially because they now have a song about modern dancers),

Tim Tam Slams (which is an incredibly delicious snack involving hot chocolate or coffee, and Tim Tams - a variety of australian (i think) cookie. So good. Can you put brackets inside other brackets?)

and the art gallery, which had a really neat exibit called containment and a conservatory in which we saw these crazy looking tulipy flowers. I liked them.


On the way home we stopped in a miniscule town and met my sister and her family at the Chicken Chef (mmm) for lunch. She was on her way to Midale, Saskatchewan to visit her birth father and his family. This is Solomon. I think it might be my fault he crosses his eyes all the time. Jack has learned all my tongue tricks and Solomon is on his way to having active eyeballs like his aunt...


On the way home we also saw this weird UFO-like light in the sky. We have no idea what it is but Kyle had to stop and take a bunch of pictures of it.


And since we've been home, I started dance again. It's been nice because we started off easy. I've been done early all week. Although I realized that we only have 5 weeks left until our show and we've hardly done any work on our piece so I'm anticipating a sudden stressfull push to get everything done in the next little while.

And I have a new job. I still work at Poppie every Thursday night and every other Saturday but now I also work at the little flower shop next door to Poppie on the alternating Saturdays. So that's fun. I had my first day today and had to make arrangements and corsages and I even got to take home some orchids that are beautiful but are getting a little too old to sell. So it's a fun little job and I think it'll work out well because both places are small and can't afford to give out a lot of hours so they get to share me and I get to work more consistently and try to pay off my visa after christie's birthday pilgramage.

And yesterday we went to church for good friday and then Kyle's great aunt took us out to the Royal Fork buffet to celebrate her 90th birthday. She loves birthdays. She had a big birthday helium balloon tied to her walker so everyone could see it and would stop to wish her happy birthday all through our lunch.

And tonight we're having dinner with Kyle's parents... for which I am late...

And tomorrow I think we're going to go out to my cottage to see my grandparents who just got home from texas and have a little easter fiesta.

And i think now we're all caught up on my various activities...
my posts always end up being way longer than i mean for them to be. i'm sorry if they're really boring to read...