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1. The Katrina Roll. From Rosemarie’s BYOI (bring your own ingredient) sushi birthday party a bajillion years ago. This roll had salmon, shrimp, avocado, cream cheese and yam. YUM YUM. Other ingredients included banana, mango, smoked salmon, tofu. This was a very fun party.

2. I won a scholarship for my performance in second year at BCIT. I don’t know what criteria they used but I’m v happy that they picked me!

3. I have been working a lot since I got back from Calgary. I had a few more weeks of training and am now covering holidays. Hooray for March break being two weeks long here! I don’t have anything in April or May yet but fingers crossed that changes. If it doesn’t perhaps I will go back to the data centre for a few weeks. Once summer arrives I will be ok, since I am already scheduled to work almost every week.

4. Superstore had very little produce today due to the truckers strike. Things are going to get very interesting if they don’t resolve that soon!

5. The pollen report website is working now and says HIGH every day. I feel relieved that I wasn’t just exaggerating things.

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This past weekend I competed in the BCBSA BC Championship Race up in Whistler. It was a big race for all the different levels of skeleton and bobsled to wrap up the sliding season. Provincials! We had official training on Friday night, then heats 1 & 2 on Saturday, and heats 3 & 4 on Sunday.

There were 7 of us sliding from corner 3. Our coach said we would do a consistency race since we are all different sliding levels. The person with the smallest time difference between their slowest and fastest run would win. Maybe not the best way to calculate consistency in a four heat race, since the track had quite different conditions each day, but that’s what they decided on.

Training went fine, and my first and second runs were okay. They weren’t my best runs ever by any means, but they were very consistent. I was sitting in 2nd place with a time difference of 0.12 seconds after heats 1 & 2. Unfortunately my third run was very very slow. The ice was very soft and there was snow on the track. My gap widened to ~2.5 seconds!!!! For my fourth run I just tried to slide something in that (very large) window between my first couple runs and my third run, which I did. But that 2.5 second difference put me out of the running for medals. Bummer.

Ah well, it was still fun hanging out with all the other sliders. No one crashed and everyone had a good day. All in all it was a very enjoyable race experience. I will have to wait till next year to try and get my first skele medal!!

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The Weather Network Vancouver pollen report website STILL says “pollen station not in season” yet my eyes have been burning and my face has been itchy for a week now. I swear I’m not imagining things!!

I will start my own Vancouver pollen report.

Thursday March 13th, 2014

Pollen Level: EXTREME HIGH!! 9 sneezes out of 10!! Horrible!! TAKE 20 ANTIHISTAMINES NOW!!

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You may have already seen it on Facebook, but my first night skeletoning back at Whistler after Calgary was quite eventful. I was super nervous about sliding fast again after slow and bumpy Calgary. But my first run was fine. It felt so smooth and lovely. My second run was even better. It became really obvious to me how much I learned the week before. Everything was making sense!

And then on the third run I tapped after corner 6, entered corner 7 super late, dropped a toe to correct…. and then ended up spinning around backwards!! It was freaky. I didn’t know I was supposed to bail if that happened, so I just stayed on the sled. It was surprisingly smooth, and I was pretty calm (since I didn’t actually know how dangerous it was). My coach was SO MAD. I got quite a lecture for not ditching my sled. Apparently I am the first person ever to go around Thunderbird backwards ahahha. I went 112 km/hr BACKWARDS??!! I feel so lucky that nothing bad actually happened.

I took a few days off after that, haha.

Rosemarie and I had a girly weekend up at Whistler last weekend. She watched me slide on Friday night, and she skied and I slid on Saturday, and then we skied together on Sunday. SO FUN! We stayed at the athletes accommodation which was nice and comfortable. I love sister time.

This coming weekend is the last bit of skeleton for the season (except for the BBQ). It’s the provincial championships and there are going to be a lot of people competing this time! It sounds like there will be about 12 people going from the top, around 8 from corner 3 (including me), and another 8 from corner 7. Us corner 3 people are apparently doing a consistency race. The person with the four most consistent runs will win. I think this is pretty boring, but it’s because we’re all at different levels so can’t really compare. I have a feeling we’ll all still be looking at the times in the end though, haha.

My fancy new helmet arrived last week and I’m feeling good about my sliding. I fixed a major problem last week that I had been struggling with for a few weeks (that darn tap after corner 6!!), so I’m very excited to race this weekend. Here’s hoping I have four consistent fast runs.

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When I was in Calgary I stayed part of the time at my teammates’ girlfriends’ parents’ place (holy apostrophe) and part of the time with my friend Ally and her hb (from my university days in Halifax!). Couch surfing like that saved me a ton of money and also it was fun. It’s always enjoyable catching up with awesome people that you haven’t seen in a while.

Ally took me to her barn and I got to ride her horse! Actually that is not her horse in the picture above though, that is her friends’ horse. We swapped for a bit because I couldn’t get Ruffino to go anywhere that I wanted him to, haha. I had a lot of fun riding around. I think the last time I had been on a horse was in Girl Guides.

Lesley came to Calgary for a few of the days that I was there too. Ally took all of us to Peter’s Drive In where we all got cheeseburgers and milkshakes and an ENORMOUS bag of fries. It was very tasty, and very reasonably priced.

The extreme Olympic watching carried over from Ottawa to Calgary. Ally even had a 5AM hockey party at her house. I slept through the first ten minutes but smelled bacon cooking so I got up to watch too. Having a morning party is pretty cool because breakfast makes great party food.

I went out with Matt’s friends one night in the city. We went to The Unicorn for dinner and a couple drinks. I had perogies and kielbasa that was pretty decent. I was super nervous about riding the train around downtown with no tickets but 2 days later I found out that it is free, hahahaha.

Then it was finally time to catch the bus back to Vancouver. It was 16 hours but it was cheap ($49 including taxes). I’ve never been through that part of Canada so I picked a bus that left in the daytime. The weather was perfect and it was a very beautiful drive. My butt did start to hurt a lot by the time I got back to Kamloops though.

Canmore seemed really pretty. Is Canmore the Squamish of Alberta?

Also I have never seen so much snow as I did around Revelstoke!!! I’m from Ontario but still, oh my word there was so much snow. A meter tall column of snow perched on top of a tiny phone pole??! HAHA! More on the ground. Avalanche piles everywhere. Snowbanks as tall as the bus! Those snow shed tunnel thingies were interesting too. SO MUCH SNOW!!!

I think this was Shuswap Lake. It looked COLD.

The only really bad part of the bus ride was the dinner stop in Kamloops. By that point I was super sick of all my bus snacks that I brought and just wanted something with some vegetables in it for dinner. I didn’t have high expectations, even a McDonalds salad would have done the trick. From the bus stop I could see a ton of decent fast food options, but they were JUST far enough that you wouldn’t have time to walk there and get food and walk back in time. Especially because I wasted a few precious minutes using the washroom. Blergh. Torture. The bus stop restaurant actually had zero vegetable items. Unless you count green jello, cuz they had that.

But yeah that was the only bad part. I think I would take the bus again, if it was still so cheap and I still had a whole day to waste. Buses have internet and plugs on them now so it’s not even that boring.