The first day back at school this year was a bit of a mess. Half the class (including me) had a schedule that said we needed to be there at 11:30, but actually we were supposed to be there at 9:30. My leisurely morning was cut very short after I got that text from my classmate saying “WHERE ARE YOU!?!”. Yeesh. I found out later that September 5th is Be Late For Something Day so really I was just being festive, I guess.

The rest of the week went a lot smoother. It was nice to see all my classmates again. Everything was back to exactly like last year, haha.

So far we’ve pretty much just had each class one time. My initial impressions:

  • Applied Physiology (17 hours per week): OMG. This class takes up half of our time at school. 9 hours of it is labs! It is going to be intense. It’s the class that is going to teach us all the stuff we directly need for work. It should really be called Nuclear Medicine 3.
  • Physics (6 hours per week): Barry is back! He’s a really good teacher and we don’t have labs so I’m not overly concerned about this class. I think we’re going to be learning a lot more about the cameras and the reconstruction that the computers do with the images we take, particularly the 3D ones.
  • Pathophysiology (5 hours per week): The study of all the diseases that nuclear medicine generally sees. The notes seem extremely disorganized so far but I think the subject matter will be super interesting.
  • Human Behaviour (2 hours per week): Our other teachers call this class “Feelings”. Our teacher is a psychologist and we are going to get marked on BREATHING. In our first class we had to write down some social norms that exist in our class, so I wrote down things like “Don’t rub your face on other people” and “Don’t lick other people’s stuff”. I wonder if those will make the typed copy she said she was going to make for us.
  • Communications (3 hours per week): Not sure about this one yet. Topics include how to write emails and how to write a resume. Also apparently we are going to have to give presentations AND BE VIDEO TAPED AND REVIEW THEM WITH OUR CLASS AFTERWARDS. OMG that is my worst nightmare. HOWEVER, the teacher seemed pretty good so maybe the class will actually be useful. He is new. His Powerpoint was very snazzy and he did speak very very well, so hopefully we can learn from him.

Yep so that’s 33 hours of class a week. This year we alternate between two weeks at school and two weeks at clinical, but the clinical weeks are not going to be much of a break because they’re going to give us a lot of work that we are expected to finish during those weeks, plus we’re pretty much going to have multiple midterms every school week. Coming home from work to study and do labs is not going to be fun.

Bummer post. I just have to remind myself that I only have to suffer through this for one more year and then I can have a career (I mean, hopefully). ONE MORE YEAR.

Magnetic nail polish. Difficult to photograph… but COOL IN REAL LIFE! Magnetic nail polish is not magnetic itself (as SOMEONE *COUGH* ROSEMARIE thought), but you probably already know that because I am way late to the magnetic nail polish trend. But anyway what you do is paint one thin coat on every nail, then one nail at a time you do a pretty thick coat and then quickly hold the special magnet that comes with the nail polish up to your nail and it rearranges itself into patterns. It looks pretty neat in real life.

I had a really great long weekend. Warm weather, lots of food, a bit of travelling. It was a fantastic way to end the summer. 

Horseshoe Bay, BC

More Horseshoe Bay, BC

Me and the nosebleed shirt on the ferry

On Sunday I took the ferry out to visit Lesley who lives on the Sunshine Coast (HI LESLEY). We pretty much spent the day catching up (she was out in Nanaimo for the whole summer) and eating tons o’ snacks and BBQ. It was lovely. We watched a movie too. I can’t remember any other things we did but that’s not to say it wasn’t a fun visit. I would totally go back!

British Columbia is pretty

I stayed overnight and then we took the ferry back together on Monday afternoon.

BEFORE

I FINALLY painted our wooden IKEA Rast drawers. I have been meaning to do that for like 14 months!!

AFTER

I think they turned out decent. Not super beautiful or anything but kinda neat. At least they are more personalized now and not just ‘cheapest option at IKEA’. BTW, I am gradually turning our house into a rainbow kindergarten.

Yesterday Scott and I went to Washington, but I’m going to leave that for a separate post.

I have failed miserably so far at my photo of dinner every day plan, it’s September 5th today and I have a grand total of ONE dinner picture, and it’s from today. OOPS. I’ll wait until I have a few and then post them all at once I think.

All for now. Posts to come: our mini road trip to Washington, a back-to-school update, and MAGNETIC NAIL POLISH pictures.

Only 22 more days left for me to complete my summer goals list!!

  1. Finally paint the cheapo wooden drawers we got from IKEA. I think I’m going to go do this RIGHT NOW.
  2. Make delicious popsicles in my new popsicle mold. once (strawberry lemonade). twice (strawberry frozen yogurt). thrice (strawberry raspberry vanilla frozen yogurt).
  3. Go swimming in the ocean for the first time in Vancouver. done!
  4. Ride the rides at the PNE. well we went on ONE ride. :/
  5. Watch fireworks. done.
  6. Finish my Settlers paintings.
  7. Sell a pair of shoes or a shirt or a painting.
  8. Go to one of the night markets in Richmond. donetwice, actually!
  9. Regularly visit the farmers market on Saturday mornings. oncetwice. thrice.
  10. Read some books while I actually have the time. Insurgent (Veronica Roth), Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (Jenny Lawson), The Art of Fielding: A Novel (Chad Harbach), Geek Love (Katherine Dunn), currently reading Gone Girl (Gillian Flynn).
  11. Make a nicer looking menu planning board. done!
  12. Find a new person to play board games with. done!
  13. Try a new fruit. I guess fresh figs counts for this one.
  14. Do a successful venipuncture on a real patient. I’ve done about 75 now.
  15. Make a new blog header.
  16. Take more pictures. completely failing.

Last night was lots of fun. We drank enormous drinks that had candy in them and I ate SEVEN KINDS OF CHEESE in one meal!! (Our table shared a trio of fries [poutine, fries with gorgonzola, and truffle oil fries with parmesan], I had a three cheese grilled cheese sandwich, and my salad had feta in it). EPIC MEAL.

Scott stealing some of my drink.

I hope I can get a job at VGH next year. They are really fun/great people there.

Thinking of another challenge for me to do this month: take a photo of every dinner I have. I know I already post food pictures here and there on this blog but I only ever really post the special stuff. I think this month I’ll try to document every dinner so you can see some of our more regular dishes. We’ll see how it goes.

Tomorrow is my last day at the Children’s Hospital. The kids were pretty fun in general but I don’t know if I could ever work there. It is so incredibly sad and depressing seeing the sick kids. Cute kids with bathing suit tans but crappy organs or Stage 4 cancer, kids with horrible infections. It just sucks. Children should not be allowed to get that sick. I got all tear-y eyed if I looked at them too long.

Dad says that maybe working there would be the most rewarding, but I dunno. I dunno if I could/want to handle sick kids every single day.

Anyway.

Scott and I got to have dinner with a friend from Ottawa and her son the other night. (Hi Jane!) She was in town visiting her family and emailed me out of the blue inviting us out for dinner. We had a tasty dinner at Trilussa on Main Street. We ordered a whole bunch of the pizzas and shared them all. The best part was the strawberry and nutella dessert pizza. Mmmm.

So looking forward to this long weekend. I’ve got VGH work drinks tomorrow, I’m visiting one of my classmates at her family house on the Sunshine Coast, and then Scott and I are renting a car and going shopping in the US as well the day before school starts! Fun times ahead!!

Oh lastly, here are my Children’s Hospital inspired nails. I haven’t been painting my nails lately because of work and my weird hand skin problem, but the latter is getting a little better now and I figured this rotation was my chance to wear a little colour on my nails for once. Excuse the wear and tear, I have to wash my hands a lot, and I did this manicure last Sunday!!

PARTY TIME SATURDAY NIGHT IN POST. Scott is out at a Metallica concert and I’m in watching Gilmore Girls 2.0 I mean Bunheads. And I’m ok with that!!

We went out to the PNE earlier today. Scott’s work was having an event so we got in for free and they had a BBQ for everyone. I didn’t eat much there though because what is the point of eating boring BBQ stuff when there are so many other interesting food options to be had at the fair!!?!

It ended up being a double hot dog day. That’s a pepperogi hot dog. It had perogies and stuff on it. I had read about it on the internet last week and was pretty excited for it, but it ended up being pretty disappointing. It was so dry. I regretted choosing it. We didn’t finish it. We also had a slushie but that was it, I even passed on deep fried Oreo’s. Dunno why I’m so boring lately.

We also only went on one ride (Gravitron). Gah everything was so expensive!! And it didn’t make sense to get a ride bracelet on a Saturday. So we went home. :/

It is really hard to take a picture of the back of your own head!!! Also I should probably take pictures of my waterfall braid BEFORE I go to an amusement park.

Anyway so today didn’t end up being the most fun day ever, but it did make me even more excited to go to Six Flags Magic Mountain on the way to Fiji (hopefully).

Side note: I just saw on the Magic Mountain website that they now have the WORLDS TALLEST DROP RIDE. Scott is going to LOVE THAT!!!!

ALSO, what the heck, tickets only cost $39.99?? That’s like the cheapest good amusement park ever! I CAN’T WAIT!!!!

Lastly here is a creepy picture of myself doing a coconut oil hair treatment. I guess it made my hair a little bit softer but not really a significant amount. I think I’ll just stick to putting coconut oil on popcorn. (That is really good by the way.)