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Driving up the Sea To Sky Highway up to Squamish. CANADA IS AWESOME AND AMAZING.

Rose and Rob planned an awesome BBQ for last Saturday. They really had everything, delicious homemade hamburgers with tons of toppings including guacamole, delicious kebabs with TWO kinds of halloumi, and a variety of drinks including freshly blended lime margaritas! Rob rigged up a blender to a battery that could be charged from a solar panel. SO NERDY.


My burger. Om nom nom.

Me blending up a margarita (for everyone else, I’M NEVER DRINKING AGAIN).

Also check out that view!! It was a great location and the most perfect day for a BBQ.

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What a wonderful weekend. Friday afternoon/evening we had my class party and went downtown. I’ll write about that some other time. Saturday morning Scott and I drove up to Squamish in our rental car, and arrived at Murrin Provincial Park just in time for a wicked BBQ, which I will also write about in another post.

I have never been outdoor rock climbing before so everything was new. I was worried I was going to be as horrible at climbing as I was at Christmas when Rose took me in Ottawa, but either it was easier, or I was better, because I did actually make it to the top of three different walls. GO ME!

We did a few climbs at one area, then moved to a much farther away area, then camped overnight at a free camping spot north of Squamish, and then played on another mountain (Cheakamus) on Sunday morning before driving back on Sunday afternoon to clean up our pig-sty apartment and prepare for first day of work/Edmonton.

Rose being a belay slave. There were a bunch of n00bs so her and Rob did A LOT of belaying for us. THANKS GUYS.

Scott climbing a crack. He’s kind of scared of heights so that was kind of a major accomplishment. He did good this weekend. He climbed to the top of three or four walls!!

Me climbing.

That little kid is only 6 years old! She has been climbing since she was 3. O_O

More me climbing.

Scott looks funny.

Rose and Rob both up on the wall. Rob’s leg looks deformed!!!!

OK so I’m still not very good at climbing. At this point I didn’t know what to do so I just heaved myself on to this ledge bit and was now lying on my stomach. SMOOTH MOVES KATRINA.

Jen and I sitting around at the bottom resting and psyching ourselves up for the next climb.

Some spectacular views this weekend.

Rob’s friend Dustin hiked up this big hill and got soooo high up!! You can just barely make him out, he’s that tiny speck at the top!

This is the picture that Dustin took of us. You can see Scott standing at the top. Rose and Rob climbed this wall, and Scott and I hiked up. SO HIGH!!

They sure look relaxed for being that high up in the air suspended by a couple ropes.

Rose let me take her harness so I could rappel down. She’s so nice. This picture is her teaching me how to use the rappel thingy.

The worst part of it was moving from sitting on the rock above the anchor to hanging below it. Very awkward.

Rappeling is a way better way of getting down!!

Oh yeah, good place to relax. Woooo BC!

Ah, and if that was not enough pictures to satisfy you, you can see more in my Facebook album! Click HERE for that.

I still don’t feel the OH MY GOD I LOVE ROCK CLIMBING feeling, but I definitely did see the appeal more this time than last. I think I still would prefer to hurl myself DOWN things to get my thrills.

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Here we go… another nail tutorial! DIY nail decals this time.

I first tried this DIY nail decal technique a couple weeks ago, with not very much success. ATTEMPT #1. EW SO UGLY. Since then I’ve tried the technique three more times and have come up with a few tips and tricks for you.

ATTEMPT #2

I painted a huge thick gradient of three colours onto a Ziploc bag. It was very smelly. I let it dry overnight.

I then cut out ten pieces, one for each nail. One nail at a time, I painted on base coat, let it dry for 10 seconds, then peeled my DIY nail decal off the plastic bag and stuck it on to my nail. I used my thumb of my other hand to smooth out the part that was actually touching my nail as much as I could.

Here’s where things started to get difficult: the decals were far too big for my nails. Ripping off the edges did not work, so I used nail clippers to trim off all the extras, but that was not very successful either. Probably those small nail scissors would work the best, but I don’t have any. Once I got all the major flaps off I used a q-tip with nail polish remover to dissolve the rest and clean up the edges as best I could.

Two coats of top coat later, that’s what I ended up with.

Oh by the way, I use Essie’s Good To Go top coat now because my Seche Vite has thickened up wayyy too much. Rip off. Anyway Essie’s isn’t AS super fast drying, but it’s still pretty good and it’s not becoming thick. I like to do one very quick coat of top coat, very light and gentle so nothing gets smeared underneath, and then after that has dried, a second coat just to make sure everything has been covered. This makes my nails extra extra shiny and incredibly durable.

Well anyway that manicure looked pretty cool but it took a long long time, and getting rid of the extra bits around the edges was super hard and I wasn’t pleased at how jagged some of them ended up.

ATTEMPT #3

My nails still looked fine, so I got Rosemarie to come over so I could try another idea out on her nails.

The night before, I painted 30 hearts on a ziploc bag (so she could choose what she wanted).   Overnight drying seems to be good. If not overnight, at least let it dry for several hours!

She chose rainbow hearts, with gold underneath. I used pretty much the same technique as before: painted one nail at a time with the gold nail polish, then peeled off a little heart decal and carefully stuck it on her nail. I used a toothpick to push the edges of the hearts down gently. Once I finished all of the nails on one hand I went back and used my thumb to press the hearts down better.

Excuse her lizard skin please.

Two coats of top coat later she was done. There was much less clean up to do afterwards, no trimming necessary.

ATTEMPT #4

Rainbow nails, rainbow hearts + topcoat. I love it, I think it turned out pretty well!

It’s pretty neat how the two layers of nail polish end up fusing into one smooth layer. I haven’t had any cases of peeling whatsoever. The gradient manicure stayed on my nails for two full weeks, so it’s obviously nice and strong even considering you just stick it on to the nail as opposed to painting it on.

Tips & Tricks

– Thick is better than thin. Paint the nail polish on fairly thick on the Ziploc bag. I have not had any issues of the decals being too thick, but I HAVE had issues where the polish was too thin and the decal ripped.

– Probably best to just do little designs instead of the entire nail (the big decals were too much work, considering the results). Designs that have skinny or pointy parts (ie. stars) are going to be harder to peel off the bag than designs that are rounded (ie. hearts or circles).

– Do one quick light coat of top coat, then when dry do another coat, so you have less chance of smudging your hard work.

– You can use scissors to trim up your decals on the plastic bags after they are dry if you didn’t do a nice job of painting the designs.

– Let the decals dry for a while. At least a few hours! Also leaving my heart decals on the bag for a week did not seem to affect them at all.

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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.

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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….)