Archive for December, 2006
happy holidays!
The holiday season has officially begun – and I’m sure it will end way too soon. So what do normal people do on Christmas? My family doesn’t really celebrate Christmas (obviously), but we tend to all migrate towards my parent’s house (occasionally referred to as The black hole), and our entire weekend may be summed up by these few key activities:
1) Eating.
2) Drinking insane amounts of chai. Insane.
3) Watching Seinfeld.*
4) Shopping, most often at The Bay.
5) Playing a “family board game”.
My parents bought me a beautiful digital camera (the Canon SD700) for Christmas, so for the next few weeks my entire life shall be summed up visually. Like this…
Christmas day:
Monopoly. We lost. My dad, the banker and accountant, won. Hmmmm…maybe he was cheating ;)
Boxing day:
oooooooooh. So pretty.
The camera has this really cool feature where you can take a picture where only one colour appears and everything else is in black & white – maybe all cameras do this now, but our current digital camera is pretty old-ish, so it is all quite exciting. Check out my flickr pictures (along the sidebar) to see about a million pictures using this feature…hehehe. Orange oranges! Pink roses! Yay. I love technology (and Nine West – how pretty are those shoes).
Happy holidays everyone!
*My brother got the Seinfeld season 7 DVD set for Xmas, so I think we watched 10 + episodes / day.
One of those days…
Today is just one of those great days. Maybe it’s the warm weather, Christmas approaching, the fun girl’s night out yesterday (yay Terroni’s!), or my BIRTHDAY (!!!) this weekend (yes I’m such a kid when it comes to my birthday), but it’s just one of those really good days.
What else could be asked of a day of work – listening to Rodrigo y Gabriela and Beyonce, eating shortbread cookies, and reading about LPS signaling in endothelial cells?
*I saw these beautiful wallets / purses that were Andy Warhol-esque at Urban Outfitters yesterday….soooo pretty. I think they were from the MoMa in NYC. I tried to find pictures online, with no success, so here are some Warhol flowers! Enjoy.
ANTM and other such fun stuff
While on the topic of obsessions and such things, I have to write a short post about the season finale of ANTM, or as it is known to the non-tv-crowd, America’s Next Top Model. I managed to make friends with a few other reality-tv physiology grad students, and we gathered together in excited anticipation last Wednesday for THE SHOW. As I learnt from my roomie-experience last year, being judgemental in a group-setting can be so – much – fun. Yes, it sounds evil, but seriously we all need to vent, and what better opportunity than when directed towards the 2-D characters on the television screen. They can’t hear you, you get to wallow in judgemental-ness in a group setting – it’s pretty therapeutic, really. It got me through a year of torturous undergrad, and hopefully will aid in the completion of my M.Sc.
Anyways, so last week was the season finale. They really should make it two hours, this whole one hour thing is not as exciting as it could be. Well, I didn’t really like any of the “potentials” left this season – they were all pretty psychopathic. Melrose was a little bipolar, and Caridee turned out to be a little wacko as well. As a default “sane” option, Eugena was starting to look pretty promising, until she was voted off the model-island. The show was pretty entertaining, but it could have been due to the good company (read: also willing to judge and over-analyze! yay!).
Moving on: another super cheesy reality TV show that we (I say “we”, just so you know I don’t watch this show alone. It could be dangerous.) watch is Flavour of Love, or “FLAVOUR FLAV!”, as some of you may know it. Flavor Flav was part of the group Public Enemy from way back when. Basically he’s hunting for a wife or mistress of some sort, and all these super scandalous girls have come on the show to be with him. Scandal item #1) he was born in 1959. This makes him 47 years old. This is scandalous because I highly doubt that a single girl on this show is over 25. Scandal item #2) he must be on some crazy drugs. He comes to “parties” and their “judgement” wearing ridiculous sunglasses, a huge clock around his neck and the flashiest clothing you have ever seen…need I say more? Actually Scandal #3) the fact that we even watch this show. It’s turning really…skanky. I think we switched to the Discovery Channel after a few minutes of the last episode, which says a lot.
Cookie count: 7
Yes, I have decided to come out in the open with my addiction. My love for this week (as fleeting as it appears to be) is the shortbread cookie made by Court House Shortbread Co., in Toronto. I bought the flavour “Stilton & Rosemary”. Man…they are delicious. I didn’t fully realize the extent of my addiction until I went to put away the cookies, and noticed that there were very few left…slightly suspicious, considering that I bought them yesterday. Hmmm. Well, anyways they are amazing, although each cookie is probably equivalent to about 5 sticks of butter (or something equally as unhealthy)….small, small details.
For the One of a Kind show post-show rant, here goes: I stuck to my budget!!! This was helped by the fact that I did not stop to look at all the pretty pretty pretty stuff that cost a million dollars, but instead ran towards a few choice booths where I knew what I wanted. As I mentioned before, I went to the Old Island Stamp Co. and bought up stamps like a mad woman. I LOVE making cards for people, and this stamping thing has opened up a whole new world of card-making! It’s insane, and a lot of fun.
Other purchases include a hugely frivolous and non-functional Swarovski crystal thing for your cell phone. You know, those things that hang off the top and look pretty (and have a high potential to be annoying when you are trying to talk on the phone). Lastly, as always, a whole bunch of steeped tea. I think I need to have a steeped tea party (some of you may know it as seeped tea?) to use up the huge stash I’ve accumulated over the past few months. Either that, or start selling it to help pay for my tuition.
On another note, today I “helped out” with this organization that my friend Eugenie introduced me to called CAGIS – Canadian Association for Girls in Science. Basically, it’s an association to introduce young (elementary school level) girls to the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. Today, they had a class on Flamenco dancing (!!), the science of Flamenco dancing (think: neurons and how they transmit the signal for your muscles to move), and the use of visualization techniques (a la Olympic figure skaters). It inspired a few of us volunteers to potentially (key word) take a couple classes at the dance studio….we shall see! In the meantime, here’s a video* from a Flamenco show that I went to last year in Sevilla, Spain. Apparently not the most authentic, but who cares? It was amazing.
Click here to see the video. It’s huge, and it will take a long time to download, but that just means more Flamenco for you to enjoy :)
*and while the video was uploading, I ate another shortbread cookie. Yum, yum. I think I need to hide them somewhere that I won’t be able to find them.
