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Thanks to my friend Janine (my old roommate from first year of uni!), Scott and I got free tickets to the Vancouver Fan Expo, and the Canadian Videogame Awards. We just went late in the afternoon, but we still got to see a lot of people in costumes, and it was still quite busy!

The FanExpo was mostly about comics. But they also had a few things I recognized, like good ol’ R2D2.

And the Batmobile from the old Batman and Robin TV show! I used to watch that after school! BAFF! Scott and I watched the old live action movie as well on the weekend, to get into the nerdy mood. Good thing they packed that shark repellent!

That’s Robin in the Hawaiian shirt. I would not have recognized him if he was not sitting underneath his sign. We also saw Batman, he was very tan.

I really wanted to see Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off but he didn’t show up at his table for autographs at the time he was supposed to. Bummer. That is my favourite movie.

I wasn’t really in to a lot of the stuff they had at the expo. They mostly had old comics, t-shirts, and some figurines and stuff that probably never get taken out of their packages. I did like these wallets though, especially that red one in the middle.

ANYWAY. After the Fan Expo we went to the Canadian Videogame Awards. Since we were VIP we could also go to the VIP reception.

As you can tell from our pictures above with R2, we DID NOT KNOW that it was actually going to be pretty fancy! There was red carpet, and photographers all crammed into a corner, interviewers, etc etc. I kind of shrunk down as small as possible while I skulked past the media area, so no, I didn’t get my picture taken.

They had TVs and couches and consoles with video games to try that hadn’t even come out yet. There was also free wine and beer and snacks. We stuffed our face as much as possible while awkwardly meeting new people.

“Hi, I’m Bob, I designed this video game that is nominated for 4 awards. What do you do?” “Ummm…. nothing?” At least Scott could make small talk about games since he actually plays them!?! One lady said to Scott “She doesn’t play ANY games?” but then I butted in and said I always beat him at NHL 12. Hehe.

At one point Scott went to grab a beer from the waitress and she kind of leaned away and said “its for THEM” and then he turned around and realized we were standing in front of a group of actors from The Killing. Haha. They laughed, and Scott talked with them a bit. I don’t know that show but Scott had watched the first season so he could be a real fan.

He got his picture with this guy, Billy Campbell, from The Killing and The Rocketeer.

And this girl, who apparently dies in the first 5 minutes of The Killing (not even a spoiler). Haha. I just realized she is wearing a pixelated tie, that’s pretty cool.

They were filming the awards for TV but it wasn’t live so sometimes we had to listen to the same thing twice. It was pretty fancy for Canadian standards though, haha. None of the “celebrities” were really famous at all but when surrounded by normal people I guess the host of Reviews On The Run counts as a celebrity. Haha.

That’s a picture I found on Twitter, of the table that won 8 million awards (for Superbrothers, and Deus Ex). CAN YOU SPOT SCOTT? AND MY HAIR?!

All in all, a very funny night. I’m glad we went. Thanks J9!

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Half the trouble of my nuclear medicine program is just keeping track of EIGHT DIFFERENT CLASSES. Every single day after school I have to do this elaborate sorting routine for all my different subjects, keeping on-going stuff out, old stuff filed, and new stuff waiting for me to work on. Papers everywhere!!

We had a fun weekend. We went out on Saturday to the Vancouver Fan Expo/Nerd Convention, and then attended the Canadian Video Game Awards… as VIP. I think I will write about that in another post though because I have a lot of pictures to prepare and I don’t have time right now. Teaser: It was hilarious, and Scott almost swiped a beer from a celebrity. LOL.

We also went curling with Scott’s work at the new curling facility in Vancouver. It was the first time we had been since our curling season in Melbourne, and was very different. The ice was actually flat! There were no channels or chunks of ice missing. They had scoreboards!! (Electronic ones, actually!) They had 8 rocks for each team! Actually the biggest difference for me was that we didn’t have to throw the rocks so dang hard!! Our team won 7 to 2, woot.

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School has been pretty crazy for the last little while, which is why I haven’t been posting as often. We just have so many midterms I am constantly studying for something.

Hockey is distracting, especially since Sens games start at 4 PM. Usually I get most of my work done between 4 and 7 PM! Yesterday was good wasn’t it, Sens and Canucks win!

We did venipuncture again today at school. Two pokes each, once with a regular needle and once with a butterfly needle. I did pretty poorly on my first one, to be honest. I didn’t have the cotton swabs close enough to me and I got really flustered while I tried to reach them and forgot about releasing the tourniquet and stuff. Poor Lesley. The second one went a lot better. I wish we could practice more often than once a semester, because it sure is going to be scary with our first patients!! I took a tourniquet home to practice with because I often get my gloves pinched in it and that would probably not instill confidence in a patient. :/

Heh wordpress doesn’t like the work “venipuncture” or “instill”. I am spelling them correctly I think??

Last weekend Scott, Rosemarie and I had dinner with our first cousin-once-removed and our second cousins. My grandma introduced us over email as her niece Julie a couple weeks ago, but I didn’t make the connection that Julie is my dad’s cousin until Julie asked about him!! Duhhhhh. ANYWAY they live out in Maple Ridge so it was a pretty long trek to get there, but I’m glad we went! Their family was very friendly and nice, and their house is very beautiful, and the meal was delicious!!! We had an awesome roast beef dinner with potatoes and asparagus and strawberry salad and croissants and more! With cheesecake for dessert. Lovely.

It was also nice seeing another part of B.C. Their house had a great view. Even when we got off the bus in Port Coquitlam it felt like we were in a whole new city. The mountains were a lot closer!! Scott joked that we were now in Alberta.

I should have taken some pictures. I don’t know why I didn’t. Hopefully we stay in touch and maybe we’ll see them again this summer.

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1. OK this is really a hypothetical question, I have not gotten any job offers, but it’s just something that I’ve been thinking about. So I am studying nuclear medicine technology right now, which is basically training us to be nuclear medicine technologists that work in hospitals. That’s fine. But sometimes our teachers tell us about other job possibilities like radiation safety officer, or central pharmacy worker, or something at BC Cancer, for example. Would accepting a job in something different like that be a good idea? As a first job? What if the job might not last forever? I worry about what would happen if I did something like work for a central pharmacy for a while, but then the job ends, and then I would have been several years out of date with things like working with patients etc. etc. and I wonder if it would be very difficult to get another job after that. Is that realistic? Are other types of jobs a good or bad idea? In the overall life career sense, I guess.

2. How do you decide when you can afford something, like going on a trip? I mean, if you are putting money in savings, and gradually accumulating money, how do you decide if you should do something fun or not? We don’t really have any specific savings goals at the moment since we don’t need a car or a house here, and are socking away money for the future… but then decisions need to be made like ‘can we really afford to go on three vacations this year’ or something like that and I have no idea. Any advice?

Anyway I would love it if you left me a comment with anything about these topics that you know something about or have thought about before. Or if you have no idea either.