by ·3 Comments

Blossoms on our street.

Another week gone by, nothing from NAIT.

Nothing from BCIT either yet, but since I did the bio challenge and finished the first half of physics (I got an A) I should hear from them any day now.

We just want to make some plans!!!

Ah Canucks in the Stanley Cup finals! We watched the last game downtown. It was nutso, as soon as they won people started screaming and honking their horns everywhere downtown. It was crazy noisy! We all rushed down to Granville Street where everyone was singing and cheering and high fiving each other. Apparently 20,000 people flooded Granville Street! That wasn’t even the finals!!

 

We took some videos too. Maybe Scott will post one on his blog IF HE EVER WRITES AGAIN.

Work has become very very very boring. I’ve mastered all the different documents so nothing is challenging any more. I could do it with my eyes closed. Well not really, but almost. I’ll obviously keep at it for the next couple months but I will admit I have been dreaming about my last day for a while now.

Well time to do something productive now… so I’m off!

by ·3 Comments

Woke up this morning to an offer of admission to Michener, for xray. Hooray, kinda. Michener is Plan C at this point. Nice to have something though, as long as they don’t force me to decide yes or no too soon.

As promised I have some food to talk about.

“Mexican Lasagna”

We had a bunch of tortillas that we needed to use up so I invited some kind of mexican lasagna. Mexican food amuses me, because it’s pretty much always the same ingredients, but in different combinations and formats.

For this one I stir fried some red onions and garlic, dumped in a can of rinsed black beans, and a tin of diced tomatoes (not ideal, but I was feeling too lazy to use fresh tomatoes), some frozen corn, and cumin and chili powder.

When that was cooked a bit I layered it with some tortillas and cheese in a baking dish. From bottom to top: mixture, tortilla, mixture, tortilla, cheese, tortilla, mixture, tortilla, cheese. Then I baked it at 350ºF for about 25 minutes, then topped it with some green onion and avocado. Delicious!

Homemade Strawberry Daiquiris

Our local grocery store has big boxes of Californian strawberries on sale a lot. Last time I bought one I ate all the ones that looked decent (three years working for Shouldice has turned me into a total strawberry snob) and then cut the top off the rest and froze them.

To make the daiquiris I tipped a bunch of frozen berries, a couple tbsp of sugar, a couple shots of rum, and a little bit of lemonade at a time into the blender. I always end up making too much though because you have to use a fair amount of liquid to get the blender circulating. :/ Anyway they were delicious and I like the all natural bright red colour!

Black Bean Burgers

Ugh WORST PICTURE EVER! This was the leftover patty. We devoured our burgers too fast to get a good picture!! Anyway these are really really delicious and I highly recommend giving them a try if you want to have something other than a beef burger.

  • 1 can rinsed black beans
  • 1/2 large green pepper, diced really small
  • 1/2 onion, diced really small
  • 2 cloves garlic, diced really small
  • cilantro, optional if you’re one of those who hates the stuff!
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tsp chili powder
  • 1 tsp cumin
  • 1 huge squirt sriracha
  • 2 pieces toast, chopped up

Preheat the oven to 375ºF. Mash the beans in a bowl until they are pretty demolished. Add everything else, and mix. Form into patties, then bake ~20 minutes. Be careful when you pick them up, they sometimes crack.

Use in a hamburger bun with mayo, spinach, tomato, cheese, and/or whatever else you like on a burger!

Vegetarian Sushi

So I had my first go at making sushi with no supervision. It only had avocado, cucumber, sweet potato and marinated tofu because there was a bit of a seafood shortage that day. Well they tasted good but I don’t understand why all my fillings ended up on one edge and all the rice on the other! I need a sushi lesson.

by ·0 Comments

The West Edmonton mall was very very cool. It really had every retail thing you could think of, except maybe IKEA. Although they did have The Brick so you could still furnish your house, do not worry!

It had a pirate area, a Chinatown, a Bourbon Street, an ice rink, an aquarium, a sea lion show, and SO MUCH MORE.

Check out this water park! It looked so awesome, but I wasn’t in the mood for going in by myself. It’s really really heated inside so that would be a lot of fun in the dead of winter I reckon.

On the other side of the pool, you can go rock climbing, and then bungee jumping!

I also saw a wicked high ropes course.

The looping roller coaster was probably my favourite part though. I liked that it is indoors yet has three loops. It goes right up through the ceiling rafters too, which is neat. Unfortunately it would have cost $10.50 to go on it if I just bought tokens, so I didn’t go on it.

I didn’t shop too much. I finally found a certain cheap H&M skirt that I’d been looking for for a while (and saved $0.90 because of cheaper tax rates in Alberta) and I got some new underwear. I had Taco Bell for lunch. Haha I still love that place and we don’t have it in Vancouver. I think the further away Taco Bell is from home, the more I want it.

The rest of the time I window-shopped and people-watched and rested my sore feet on benches.

Finally I could check in to my hotel room so I went back to the hotel. After a bit of a hassle I got my room and did not come out until the next morning, fully rested and feeling a lot better.

The NAIT interview went well. It was very similar to Michener. I messed up one question pretty bad because I didn’t read it properly, but everything else was fine. We also had to a little career investigation report and I felt quite confident about that part.

The interview didn’t take near as long as I expected so I was out of there pretty quickly. I went straight back to the airport hoping to get on an earlier flight home, but they wouldn’t let me switch for free. Instead I sat there and read my book and watched the election results start to come in. Flight back was uneventful and then FINALLY I was back in Vancouver with Scott. What a trip.

by ·0 Comments

I’m back! What a trip!! 7,000 km, two interviews, two nights with less than 2 hours sleep, tons of public transit, tons of food.

I’ll just start with Friday for now.

My flight to Toronto was not great. WestJet seats are tiny, do not book for overnight flights!!! Also it seems like you can pick your seats ahead of time, which I did not know about, so when I got to the airport there were only about 5 seats left and they were all middle seats!

When I was boarding the plane I got stopped by a body builder in the first row who was wedged in beside a rather fat guy. They both looked very sad and uncomfortable and the body builder somehow convinced me to take the window seat next to him and for the fat guy to take my middle seat a couple rows back. Woohoo, then I was only squished on one side, instead of both. Unfortunately the body builder stayed up all night teaching the girl on his other side about protein powder and I barely got any sleep at all.

I arrived in Toronto at 6:00 AM and my interview was not until 2:30 PM so I had a lot of time to kill. I was so tired I just stayed at the airport and lay down on a bench, occasionally watching bits and pieces of the royal wedding. Eventually I left the airport and headed towards Michener where I got some lunch and then took a nap in a study booth in the library.

The interview was quite intense, but went well I think! This one had 8 stations and even had one with an actor, and one where you had to work with another interviewee.

It was the same format as the Calgary interview but SO much better because instead of the interviewer just staring at you, even when you finish talking, these ones had follow up questions and actually smiled and stuff. That makes such a huge difference… it’s really hard to have a ‘conversation’ with someone when they are not providing ANY feedback cues. Very unnatural.

Anyway we all left smiling and they said we could start hearing from them this week.

After the interview I did a little wandering downtown and then I took the subway to meet up with my aunts and my cousins. We had thai food (I had thai basil mango beef and shrimp with rice) and then I headed to Janine’s where we chatted for a bit until couldn’t hold my eyes open any more.

by ·5 Comments

Just a quick update post before I have to get out of bed and actually start accomplishing things.

My epic 2.5 hour BCIT interview went really well. The first hour the guy gave me a crash course on nuclear medicine, and asked little questions all the way through that sort of tested your thinking skills. I got all of them right and he seemed quite impressed. I felt clever. For the second hour I followed nuc med techs around and watched them scan patients. It was neat to watch them deal with the patients and also ask them questions about the job. I really enjoyed it, and was glad to see it was more relaxed than I pictured the job before. Then finally I had to write a quick essay.

Anyway I could tell by how the guy was responding that I did pretty well. Then the next day I called the department head to follow up like I was supposed to and she was really really positive! She asked if I thought it would be a good fit (I said “YEAH! I had a lot of fun yesterday, I’m glad I got the opportunity to do that!”) and she said she had a chat with the dude and he thought I would be a great fit as well. She still wants me to write the bio challenge exam, and take a physics refresher course, but she said once I’m registered in that they can give me a provisional acceptance pending completion of the courses.

…..

YAHOOO!!!!!

Anyway, in other news:

– the Canucks suck now. Poo-ongo let in 5 goals last night and Scott cried as the Canucks chance at the cup slips away in the first round. The series is 3-2 for the Canucks at this point.

– Scott’s aunt is in town for a week, which is neat. We’ve gone out for dinner with her and had her over to our place. It’s the long weekend now so we’ll take her around to the Granville Market and things like that! Next week she leaves on an epic 3 week trip from Vancouver to Victoria to Whistler to Banff to Jasper, then on a train, and then a cruise all the way up to Alaska and back! JEALOUS!!!

– Scott and I booked our flights to Ottawa for the party. Air Canada had a sale so we decided to be optimistic about BCIT/NAIT and buy the tickets. If we end up having to move to Toronto I guess we will cash the flights in for credit and fly to Mexico in a year or something.

Anyway, still a lot of waiting to do. I won’t hear anything definite from any of the schools for another month or two, so we still can’t make any definite plans about this summer or next year. Cross your fingers for me though, we’d like it if I got in everywhere so we can just sit down and make the best decision.