Oh, the frenzy

Unfortunately, there haven't been a lot of 'blog-worthy' topics/events occuring in my life recently, so I've been sadly negligent about adding updates and the like. Tonight, even though I'm dead tired after riding to and from ultimate practice, I am fired up enough to write a quick entry. In fact, I am writing this after firing off 3 letters: one to my MLA, one to the provincial government and a short one to Global News.

There is a frenzy going on in Edmonton regarding rent increases and rent control. Rent prices have been spirally steadily upward over the past 6 months, due to high demand and, in my opinion, landlord greed. This week, the Alberta government implemented some legislation regarding rent increases, which mostly stated that rent can only be increased once a year (no cap on the amount it can be increased). Unfortunately (or stupidly) the government didn't implement these new policies immediately, allowing a number of rental agencies to print out letters detailing HUGE rent increases in the days before the policies went officially into legislation. For example, a couple of my friends are having their rents increased by 100$ and 120$, from an original 650$ and 920$, respectively. This is greater than a 10% increase! I don't understand where landlords think tenants are going to find this extra money? An extreme example in the news described someone's rent going from 650$/month to 1000$/month. That's a 350$ increase!

I am aware that property taxes have increased in Edmonton, however I feel that the increases in rent are driven more by greed than cost recovery. I understand that a free market dictates that the landlords should be able to charge that which the market can bear, but at what cost to the renters? Will all of us students have to move into the ghetto and commute an hour plus each day on the terrible Edmonton transit system? It just seems ridiculous!

I could go on in a similar vein for awhile more, but I will spare you all, as I'm sure you understand the gist of my rant. I haven't heard from my landlord yet about changes to my rent, but probably will by the end of the month, and I'm hoping my landlord falls into the category of 'reasonable' and 'not greedy' so that I won't have to move. But if it goes up too much, I will not let The Man suck me dry. I will move and share a place with other grad students who are in a similar situation, splitting the rent to manage the costs.

The contents of this blog entry were contained in my letters to the government and my Liberal MLA, although with much less exclamation marks and with more facts, figures and formal speech. I'll have to see what sort of replies I get!

Ode to a science nerd

Now that I've been back in the lab for a full week, I am impressed with my superb nerdiness with relation to science. I base this assessment on my pleasure with, and anticipation of, the experiments that I will be starting in the next day or two. It just makes me excited to perform the experiments and find out the results. It's fantastic! This reaffirms that I am in the right field, where I will always have job satisfaction, if not necessarily financialy satisfaction.

Ju Huck Bien

I'm happy to report that the snow is long gone and Spring seems to have truly arrived. In fact, the grass is turning green and the bunnies are now sporting their brown coats. Edmontonians are going crazy and wearing sandals, skirts and shorts when it's a mere 9 degrees in the morning, but it sure does feel warm!

I started an ultimate team this summer with a bunch of friends and members from our dodgeball team. In previous years, I've played on other teams, but this year I decided to start a new team because I knew a lot of people who wanted to play but had never joined before. So we made a team, and following up on our dodgeball team named 'Je Dodge Bien', we named ourselves 'Je Huck Bien' (a huck is a long throw). Yesterday evening we all met up and had our first practice of the season in the springtime weather. It was really fun and everyone had a good time, although we did end up with an injury involving someone's head hitting another's eyebrow. Cuts on the eyebrow, as it turns out, bleed profusely and tend to gape open, by virtue of the normal eyebrow structure. Our team member ended up getting three stitches to keep it all closed up. I'm hoping our next practice is less...eventful and just as fun!

Oh no, it didn't!

Oh yes it did!
This was the view out of my bedroom window this morning:Spring will never arrive here.

Spa Day Superb!

Happy Birthday Amanda!

In honor of my sister's birthday (well, and the fact that I finished my candidacy and was taking a day off), I went to the spa to relax. In fact, this spa day was a birthday gift from Garrett to me, that I had saved just for this occasion.

So, I went to the spa and was treated to a chocolate bath and chocolate pedicure.

I wasn't sure what to expect for the chocolate bath - would I be in melted chocolate? Would it just be chocolate-flavoured bubble bath? Would I get to eat chocolate?

Turns out I wasn't in melted chocolate, nor did I get to eat chocolate, however there were chocolate-flavoured bubble bath and oils in the 'super-duper' bath tub. The room that the tub was in was dark and soothing, with rocks and candles and plants. The bath tub was this special relaxation, healing tub. In either end, there was magnetic therapy, which is supposed to help align you (your iron?) as your relax. In the sides of the tub were a multitude of little lights which could be yellow, blue, green or red, depending on whether you wanted to feel energized or relaxed. These lights flashed sometimes with the gentle relaxing music that played in the room. The side of the tub that you leaned against vibrated with the music to relax your back as you sat there. The water temperature and volume could be controlled with a dial. Overall, a super-duper bath tub!

After the bath, I was taken to the pedicure room where the girl performed a chocolate-y, delicious and luxurious pedicure on my little tootsies. It was fantastic and relaxing. I love pedicures.

It was a great day, and I hope my sister had as great a day as I did for her birthday! The day would only have been better if we could have had pedicures together.

And they will call her "PhD Candidate"

A few days late, but here it is...

I have completed my candidacy exam, I passed it and now I am officially a 'Candidate for PhD'! Hooray!

The exam was actually way better than I expected it to be. My five examiners were much nicer to me than I expected - they still asked really hard questions, but they were friendly and encouraging. I was so nervous beforehand, and it didn't help that one of my examiners came an hour late. We waited for him for half an hour before starting without him, so that half hour was a long one for me. I sat there feeling stressed out while my other examiners chit-chatted to fill the time. Awkward and stressful.

But eventually I was done and it was glorious! The euphoria didn't really hit me until the next day, when I no longer felt the stress of studying and thinking hard!

So, that was my last big hurdle until I defend my PhD in several year's time. Rock on.

You know you're studying too much when...

...you dream about that which you are studying. While in some ways, this can be a good thing (I thought of several items to investigate further during my sleep last night, which, surprisingly, were logical and useful when day came around), it tends to overwhelm your sanity after time. This weekend I have been cramming for my exam on Tuesday. I have also been sleeping fitfully (blaming stress and the cold for that) and having half-asleep dreams where I see all the words and topics I've studied surrounding me and my bed. It's like my brain cannot turn off even at night, so it keeps working and working and waking me up. I realize, however, that it does not make sense to get up in the middle of the night to study, even though I feel 'alert'. It has become a bit of a struggle to get a good night's sleep, and I keep waking up ON MY OWN at 7:30am and getting out of bed. That is NOT natural, that's for sure. To sum it up, studying and stress suck, especially with a cold to top it off, and I can't wait until Tuesday at 4pm when I am DONE!!! DONE DONE DONE DONE. And then it will be a glorious and carefree world again.

Edmonton dumb and stupid club

Last night, several team members, Garrett and I went to the bar-hosted Wrap-Up Party for the association that runs our dodgeball league - the Edmonton Sport and Social Club (ESSC). As you may recall, 'Je Dodge Bien' won first place in our dodgeball division, and as league champs, we were to receive free T-shirts saying so. However, we HAD to go to the party last night in order to get them. So, despite the fact that I was stressing about my exam next week, we saddled up and headed to the party. It wasn't all bad; pints and burgers were pretty cheap, but we didn't get there early enough to have a table with chairs - instead, we stood around a tall table to eat and drink. Not the end of the world, but not the most relaxing. The most irritating part of the evening, however, was the program the ESSC put on while we were at the bar. They started around 7:30pm, and had several draws for free prizes. I'm all for wining free stuff, however one of the guys doing the announcing over the microphone/speaker system thought he was way funnier than he actually was. He only got worse as the night went on as well, because as they started announcing the league champs from each night, division and sport, he thought it was a great idea to ask them mind-numbing questions like 'If a highschool student came up to you and asked you what it takes to win the Sunday night recreational hockey division, what would you say?". Not only did we not care, but people didn't have interesting answers, you couldn't understand them and he was making the program run way longer than it needed to. With all the general bar noise, you often could make out little more than an vague buzz over the speakers. Pretty annoying.

The finale to this stellar night was the fact that they ended their program and had not announced 'Je Dodge Bien' as a league champ. What the...?

At this point, I was annoyed, congested (from allergies or cold, whichever I might have**), tired and angry!! Where were our shirts? That was the ONLY reason we went there! We stood there for 2 and a half hours, suffering through the poorly organized program in order to get our shirts, and they had forgotten us! I went up and talked to the people running the show:
'Oh no, there seems to have been a mistake.' That's what they said. No kidding.
So, after letting them know I was pretty annoyed and giving them my contact info so they could correct their error, we left the bar significantly less happy then when we got there.

Tonight I emailed the ESSC to find out what they are doing to get us our shirts. I think they should have to mail them to me, because there's no way I'm going to pick them up again.

**It turns out I may not have allergies already - antihistamines weren't working for me, so I took some cold medicine instead and it got a little better...so based on this evidence, I don't really know what I have but I'm leaning towards cold.

I am an allergy sufferer

I hate complaining that spring is here, but it's only been about a week and a half since the snow has melted (if you ignore the two mini snowfalls we had) and I am already suffering from allergies. Nothing is even growing yet! Apparently, I'm just as allergic to brown, dead grass as I am to green, fresh grass. I'm sneezing, stuffed up and have a runny nose. I actually took an antihistamine today to relieve my discomfort.

When I lived in Vancouver, I had allergies in the last 3 or 4 years I was there. In my first year in Edmonton, I didn't seem to have as severe symptoms - perhaps the variety of grass out here was slightly different and my body wasn't sensitized to it yet. But that has changed in the last two years, because my allergies have successively gotten worse. I have taken an allergy test and I know I'm only allergic to grass, however, it's impossible to get away from grass, especially when I play ultimate in fields all summer. Plus, unlike other pollen-related allergies, which last only so long as the pollination season is occurring, grass is always around. ALWAYS!!

At least I can be thankful that I don't get allergies here like I did when I visited my sister in Cambridge - those was definately the worst allergies I have ever suffered. Just terrible.

I guess I'm not complaining about spring, rather I'm complaining about allergies. I'll gladly pop antihistamines every day if it means having warm, sunny weather on the horizon!

Bad Surprise

This was me around this time last year:Outside with Pumpkin, wearing just a short-sleeved shirt. It wasn't super warm, but it was decent.

This is what we woke up to this morning:Notice the difference? Freaking SNOW!! The winter has been so long and horrible and now, just when we think it is spring, we wake up to more snow. This happened last week, and then by the weekend it had melted. Now we are repeating this sequence again. It's the second week of April. When can we expect to stop having snow?

Unlikely search result...or is it?

Today I was searching on Google Images to find some pictures of cirrhotic (damaged) livers for the presentation I have to give next week at my candidacy exam. This picture came up when I searched 'cirrhosis liver':Interesting...

Well, we do know that Pam And has hepatitis C, which results in liver damage (including liver cirrhosis) and leads to liver cancer, so I guess it's not totally crazy that she would come up with those keywords...but still!
The other interesting part about finding her picture is the article that accompanied it regarding her hepatitis C infection. The article described how Pamela isn't taking the standard antivirals to treat her infection, but instead takes a daily medicine concocted for her by her homeopathic doctor. Pamela says her liver just "keeps getting healthier" from this treatment.

Hmmm...seeing as I work in a lab that studies hepatitis C and my supervisor treats patients all the time for the disease, I find it unlikely that her homeopathic doctor has found some miracle cure for her...but hey, whatever makes her feel happy, I guess!

Extra super sleepy

As I mentioned in my last entry, we stayed out quite late at the Keith's Patch with some friends. What I didn't mention, was that on Wednesday I woke up feeling a little under the weather, with a sore throat, headache and stiff neck that lasted all day. I took an aspirin before heading out to curling, which helped a bit, and I still managed to have a good time, but I was definately feeling a little off by the time we got home. I hit the hay right away once in the door, purposefully neglecting to set the alarm with the intention of sleeping in. And sleep in, I did.

I woke up at noon! Well, that's not entirely accurate - I got out of bed at noon. I woke up around 9am when my cat became far too annoying and I got up to feed her breakfast, after which I went back into bed. Other than that, I woke up briefly here and there to turn over and fall back asleep again.

Not until did I sleep until noon, I got up and changed into comfy clothes, in which I remained until the evening when we went to a get-together with our dodgeball team. I also relaxed on the couch under a comfy blanket all afternoon, napping here and there and generally taking it very easy. However, this strategy has already proven successful, because I feel much better today, with just a trace sinus congestion plaguing me this morning (nothing a little decongestant couldn't handle). My parents always did say that sleep is the best medicine!

Closed down the Patch

On Wednesday night, Garrett and I went to see the World Men's Curling Championship. We used our free tickets from helping with the bar promotion last week. We went early to the 7:30 draw and had dinner at the Keith's Patch, which is a glorified beer garden, the likes of which I have only seen in Alberta. Other examples of said large, concert-like beer gardens include at the Calgary Stampede and the Edmonton's Capital Ex. In any case, Wednesday night was Celtic Night so we thought we would be able to get some Irish food for dinner. Silly us. The 'Food of the World' turned out to be American: corned beef, scalloped potatoes and vegetables. Mmmm...pass. We ended up eating the oh-so-exciting 'Jumbo Dog', also known in other locations as a normal hotdog and more commonly found at a reasonable price.

The draw started at 7:30 so we found our seats up in the near-nose bleed section. I say 'near', because there was another level up that we could have been sitting in. But I shouldn't complain about free tickets. There were four games going on at once, however we focused mainly on the Canada/USA game and the Finland/Norway games, since they were the closest to us and were being televised by TSN, thus the highlights were on the big screen. Plus, both of these games were very close in score and so were more interesting. I won't describe much of the game in detail, because it would be boring in text (although curling is fun and exciting!) but we had a good time and enjoyed the high level of skill these curlers displayed. There was also a huge upset in the Canada/USA game when the US took 3 points in the last end to win the game. That was the first game that Canada lost, actually.

After the game we went to the Keith's Patch with a couple of friends. There was a Celtic band playing called McCuaig, who were really awesome because the lead singer played the bagpipes. While they played we had a drink or two with our friends, chatting and laughing. When the band was done, we looked around and realized that nearly everyone else was gone and we had basically shut down the place! Time to head home and end a fun night.

It's gone!

Today, I handed in my grant for my candidacy. I handed it in a day early, but considering I've been working on it for four months, I just wanted to get rid of it, now that it was deemed complete by myself and a few others. I was eager to get it out of my hands because I didn't want to work on it anymore. I printed it up and assembled all of the components, resulting in a 30 page document that I handed out to my committee members. I felt great for about 10 seconds, after which I started getting nervous again because now they were going to READ it and it was out of my control! Eek! I still feel nervous when I think about them looking it over, criticizing it (so easy to do) and thinking of really hard questions to ask me regarding it. Now, for the next two weeks, I will be at home studying studying studying, trying to anticipate what questions they will ask so that I have answers ready for them. I can't wait until my exam is over!