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I got SO riled up on Friday night about skeleton. I was watching the final race of the 2012-2013 Skeleton World Cup season, which was in Sochi on the new track that they will be using for the next Winter Olympics. I’ve been watching all season long and was REALLY excited to see how all my favourites do on this track that was brand new for all of them.

I follow a lot of skeletoners on Twitter and for the past two weeks they had been tweeting about cancelled practice sessions and poor ice conditions and horrible hotel food and all sorts of negative stuff. And the fact that it was 17ºC out!

Anyway man oh man the mens race was BANANAS. Especially the first half of the first heat.

  • Tomass Dukurs started pushing his sled, then at the last possible second decided it wasn’t a good push and quickly managed to stop his sled, do a u-turn and carry his sled back to the start line to try again. This is allowed as long as long as they haven’t reached the first timing eye, and they do actually start within the 30 second start window. It was very surprising because I have never seen any one do that before.
  • The start groove was really NOT straight and many sliders hit in to the walls right at the very top of the run.
  • One guy smashed into the side and a mini avalanche of snow and ice fell down on to the track. And then no one cleaned it up!! So the next few sliders had a big disadvantage because they had to slide over a bunch of ice chunks.
  • The track has a totally unique uphill section.
  • The outrun looks super dangerous and several sliders hurt themselves trying to slow down.
  • There is exposed wood in several places down the track, and the ice is super bumpy. Many sliders pinballed down the track. Some sliders opted out of the race because their brain was too rattled from training runs.
  • Everyone struggled except Martins Dukurs, he made it look easy as usual. He is an INSANELY good skeletoner from Latvia. If he won this race he would win €100,000 for the “Triple Crown” by winning three specific races during the year. It was close between him and a Russian but of course Martins won!! HE IS AMAZING! I think he finished the season with 8 gold medals and 2 silvers, in 10 races, plus the title of World Cup Champion. And when he won a race he won by a mile.

The womens race wasn’t as exciting. The ice was deteriorating quickly and each person coming down had a slower time than the person before them. At least they straightened out the start groove so there wasn’t near as many wall smashes. My favourite non-Canadian slider Noelle Pikus-Pace won the race, and a German girl won the World Cup.

Well now I’m sad that the skeleton World Cup is over, but I’ve still got one more weekend of sliding to come in two weeks so that is good. And I can’t wait until the Olympics!!!

PS My skeleton coach was Martins Dukurs coach in the Vancouver Olympics. :D You can see him yelling at him to run fast in the Olympics footage.

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Hmm what have we been up to in the last 11 days? I’ve been a terrible blogger lately. SO BUSY with school stuff, all in preparation for my big vacation that is rapidly approaching (YAY!).

  • Scott made a cool loaf of bread.
  • We went to a friends house to play Ticket To Ride and eat pizza. Panago butter chicken pizza really doesn’t taste like butter chicken at all.
  • Went out for drinks at the pub after school.
  • Lifted lots of weights at the gym.
  • A FREAKING LOT OF HOMEWORK.
  • Went out for a yummy Peruvian Valentines Day dinner of fish ceviche, deep fried pork, and amazing sweet potato chips.
  • Woke up at a painful hour of the morning to make it to work on time for my hotlab rotation.
  • Had much more success putting in IVs.
  • Went to bed at 8:00 PM.
  • Watched Amour, slow but good.
  • Ate a lot of Nerds.
  • Went to the library and got a bunch of books that I won’t have time to read.
  • Chatted with Rosemarie who is now back in Fiji for her second semester.

That is actually a pretty good representation of what I’ve been up to, if you multiply the homework by 50. I just keep reminding myself “it’ll all be worth it soon”.

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Thanks to Scott’s work we got to go to a Canucks open practice yesterday morning. It was pretty cool because we got to sit nice and close and watch them practice power plays (which they actually weren’t very good at) and shooting and stuff.


It was funny to see Alain Vigneault wearing skates instead of a suit.


I enjoyed myself. And I got to invite Vipi (one of my classmates from the other set who I haven’t seen since last semester) so that was nice.

Some of the pucks went over the glass right in front of us but all the kids snatched them up, to Scott’s disappointment. Burrows was flicking extra ones over but we didn’t get any. I think they were just generic black pucks though, not Canucks ones, so oh well.

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I haven’t been sleeping well for the past week or so. I lie down and my mind just races. I think it’s because of a combination of having 500 things on my To Do list, and also having so much exciting stuff to look forward to!

  • 2 days until the end of this school rotation!
  • 24 days until skeleton!
  • 30 days until Scott and I go to L.A.!
  • 34 days until I am in the same country as my sister (FIJI!!!)
  • 52 days until family reunion!
  • 100 days until I’m finished school!
  • 205 days until I’m finished BCIT!!

The week right before my big trip is going to very hard. So far we have 4 midterms scheduled, a big assignment for our online class, and a huge paper due within one week. I can’t really complain though because this is very good news for my holiday… so far it looks like I won’t have to do a single piece of work while I’m gone for 3 weeks!! YAHOO!!! That makes it ALL worth it.

Scott and I have been a lot more active lately. Scott has been running almost every day for the past couple months, and I just joined a gym last week and have gone a bunch of times already. I found a good place to go that is really close to our house so it’s pretty easy to work it in to my daily routine. I’ve been lifting weights and doing cardio. The weights are so I will be totally ready for skeleton next year, and the cardio is good for my fast heart.

I figure if I write about it all on here, that will keep me motivated because I don’t want you guys to yell at me if I get lazy again!

PS I thought exercise was supposed to help you sleep but it’s not really working for Scott OR I. Yeesh.

PPS I am nominated for a 2013 Homie Award in the Healthy Cooking Blog category. I don’t really expect to make it to the next round, but it’s been pretty neat to get so many new views from people checking out all the blogs. It would mean a lot to me if you voted for me as well to keep me up near the top of the list. :D You have to register but it only takes 5 seconds. THANK YOU!!!

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The other day I got a text message from someone about a textbook I listed on Craigslist like two months ago. We agreed to meet at Metrotown in front of the A&W at 3:40 PM. Pretty specific, no? I thought it was, especially because it’s already the end of January and I thought the textbook selling period was over.

So I arrive there holding the textbook and there is a guy there who nods at me and comes over. He looks at the book and is like “oh this is the wrong book, I’m looking for the book for Sociology 1000. my friend must have given me the wrong info” and I’m like “that sucks” and I go home.

As soon as I get home I get all the text messages from the guy saying “where are you? i met someone at metrotown but it wasn’t the right book” so I text back “nooo that WAS me, you must have gotten the wrong info” but then they write back and say “nooo there is another guy here right now looking to buy another book!” WTF.

So I headed back to Metrotown and the (right) guy pretends like it’s not the right book again but he was joking around. He said that not only was there another book sale going on in the same specific place at the same specific time, it was also by another girl!! The other girl went to MY guy and THEY THOUGHT THEY HAD THE WRONG BOOK TOO!! But then I guess the two guys talked and they figured out the chaos that was happening. Anyway I ended up selling the book and all was well and I laughed all the way back to my house (again). LOL.

Remember when I said I wanted to go to medical school……..

 

 

 

No I’m just kidding. It’s a flyer for a nuclear medicine conference.

The view from the Seabus on the way back from skeleton last last weekend. Pretty. Kind of reminds me of those CSI memes…

OK I’m done.