It’s raining. I’m not going to complain about it though because we had FIFTEEN straight days of sunny warm dry weather here in Vancouver. Man it has been nice lately. Studying outside, walking to school again, not wearing a jacket…. so nice.

Hopefully it doesn’t go back to 10°C and rainy until the last week of August like last year.

I still have five exams to go, but they are less stressful ones thankfully. Last week sucked.

I liked this pretty blue bird we had on our balcony. Scott identified it as a Stellar Jay, British Columbia’s provincial bird (thanks internet). I like his mohawk!

Homemade chicken banh mi and potato wedges for dinner last night. Delicious. Love the crunch of the pickled carrots and daikon.


Scott is going to Edmonton for work soon. He’ll be gone for 9 days! I’m gonna be so loner-ly. Although maybe his trip is around the same time as Rob leaves so Rosemarie and I can hang out and be loner-ly together.

Today was rough. We wrote two important and difficult final exams. Both of them didn’t go very well for me. :/ They didn’t go well for anyone, really. We’ll see what happens when marks start popping up. Fingers crossed for bell curving.

We also got our work schedules for the summer. Oooo boy, a lot of 7 AM starts for me. Please keep in mind that WE ARE NOT GETTING PAID. Actually I shouldn’t complain too much about my schedule because VGH has some of the latest starts compared to the other hospitals where they have to be there at 5:30 or 6:00 AM sometimes. The earliest I have to go in is 6:45 AM. ANYWAY the moral of the story is that I am going to be tired this summer.

How much longer is this program?? Ugh.

SIX MORE FINALS TO GO!

Tomorrow I have to go scrubs shopping. I’m thinking head-to-toe neon yellow, yeah?

Happy Mothers Day to all my mom’s friends and all the other mother-like-figures in my life. Thank you for stepping in and making me feel like I’m not missing a big chunk of my family any more. Rosemarie and I are extremely grateful. <3


Also, mom, thank you for cooting the fla.

On Thursday we had a physics class field trip to TRIUMF, a laboratory out near UBC where they do particle and nuclear physics experiments. They have the largest cyclotron in the world, which can make 500 MeV protons. Cyclotrons used for PET only go up to 10-20 MeV, for comparison. TRIUMF stands for Tri-University Meson Facility, although they do much more than meson experiments now.

This was the view from on top of the cyclotron. All of those yellow concrete blocks are for shielding and each one is almost the size of a shipping container!!


Cyclotrons accelerate particles using electric and magnetic fields, which were still pretty strong even outside of the machinery, as you can see from my gravity defying paper clip. There were signs everywhere there that said “do not linger” because you were also exposed to some radiation. Don’t worry dad, we carried a pen dosimeter.

We stayed there for around 4 minutes, you know how I know that? We realized the next day that everyone’s analog watches were 4 minutes slow! SCIENCE.

They also showed us all sorts of other complicated stuff. These things can measure the weight of particles, and the half-life and stuff.

I have no idea what that thing does, but it looks pretty crazy.

There were wires EVERYWHERE at Triumf. I have no idea how people can build this stuff. What if someone accidentally knocked one wire out, I bet it would take a week to figure out what is the problem.

They do all sorts of experiments there, astrophysics, particle physics, nuclear physics, electronics testing, etc etc., and they also do eye tumour treatments. Oh and they make PET radionuclides for a medical centre down the road and shoot the vials of radioactivity down an underground air pressure transit tube where the vials reach a top speed of over 100 km/hr! They have to do that because the half-lives of PET radionuclides are really short, like some are only 10 minutes, so they don’t have time to drive the stuff over.

Anyway. It was a very good and delightfully nerdy tour. I enjoyed it, and if you like science and are in BC, you should also go and do a tour, I’m pretty sure they have some for the general public.

After the tour we all went to the Irish bar at UBC. It was fun to hang out with everyone, including our physics teacher, who bought us nachos and snacks.

Vancouver has been having some excellent sunny weather for the past week.


In the back of Gillian’s velour car.

The bar had the most delicious drinks. I had strawberry lemonade vodka thing, and Clare had something peachy. Some day I want to have my own slushy maker and I will keep it permanently full of strawberry lemonade – the most delicious flavour of life.

Back to studying! (Or did this blog entry count….)