NSERC round 2?

Last night, after I returned home from dodgeball and before I met the girls for coffee, I got a letter from NSERC.

I applied to NSERC, a national science scholarship institution, during the February 2007 competition. I found out in March (around my birthday, no less) that I did not get awarded a scholarship. At the time, I was very angry at NSERC and thought about photocopying my tuckus and sending it to them....good thing I didn't!! Because now, I will gladly take their money after all!

The letter from NSERC told me that I have now been awarded that very same scholarship, due to the fact that they received more money to fund more scholarships. So now, I get an NSERC, which is a major award and gives me a lot of extra bonuses now that I didn't have before! It's a great deal and a great surprise for a random Monday evening.

We won!!! Finally!!

Tonight, our dodgeball team won its first game this season! Not only did we win, we beat a team composed of some really aggressive, talented dodgeball players. We played a GREAT game tonight! We were dodging and catching, and playing as a team! We played with patience and supported our team mates when they needed it. We were so excited! The final score was 10-8, and we were in the lead for most of the game, aside from a few points in the middle. I'm encouraged that we are finally starting to pull together and get some mad skills. We sure paid our dues through all our losses the past few weeks! Let's hope we keep coming out strong in future weeks!

Rocking out for Halloween

Axl Rose in da house!!

For Halloween this year, a bunch of us got dressed up and celebrated in style. I was dressed as a rock and roll star - the leader of Guns N' Roses, named Axl Rose. I dressed as him from his days in the 80's, like this:Compare Axl in real life, to me in my costume:
Not bad, hey?!
So, the evening was fun and we all had a good time in our costumes. Here are some pictures:
Kim as Axl, Bonnie as Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction (Uma Thurman's character):Us again, acting our parts. Bonnie is Mia Wallace from the part where she overdoses and they stick a syringe full of adrenalin into her heart to start it up again:Here are Mic as Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction (John Travolta's character) and Bonnie as Mia:Randy as Fry from Futurama, Joelle as an Expo's fan and Bindi as a devil:Joelle again, and Ian as a creepy ski instructor:(Side note, Ian was wearing a pair of WOMEN'S snowpants, which is why they look a "little" tight).
Next, Ian's mullet wig starting making the rounds. Melany the witch, with the mullet wig:Trevor arrived late in the creepiest costume ever. We learned that he was actually a rodeo clown, which he does indeed look like once you think of it, but at first, he just seemed like a really scary clown.Lastly, Fry is serenaded by the creepy ski instructor:

I AM that teaching assistant

There is an online comic called Piled Higher and Deeper (or PhD, at http://www.phdcomics.com/) that depicts the lives of graduate students. Recently they had a string of comics describing a Teaching Assistant (TA) and the tutorials she had to run. I know they are a bit small, but I hope you can read them:I've been TAing a course this term and with the midterm approaching, I am running tutorial help sessions for the students. I spent some time on the weekend studying the material and making up practice questions for the tutorial. I spent another afternoon writing up the answers to the practice questions so that I would be able to answer my own questions. I found some name tags that I wanted students to wear, so that I could learn their names. Finally, tutorial time came around and I brought all my stuff to the classroom a few minutes early to set up. Once I had hooked up my computer to the projector and organized my stuff, I sat down and waited. And waited, and waited. Finally, one student came in. ONE STUDENT!! He was the only student to come during the entire hour. The next day, I brought candy to my tutorial. Again, only one student came (the same guy as the day before!). So, perhaps you can see the irony of my situation when you compare it to the comics!

University Nationals - semi-finals

Sunday arrived bright and early - a third day of sunshine and warmth. However, we were up early again because our game was at 9am against SFU. Our team was excited for a rematch when we would be fresh and ready to go! We showed up early and eventually found our field (they had moved us way over near Thunderbird Stadium, and we got lost trying to find it). My parents and grandparents showed up partway through the game to watch me play, and I hope they were kept entertained by the game, even if they didn't know exactly what was going on all the time. The game was very intense and we all laid it on the line to score some points. We definately made a better showing of ourselves in this game against SFU than we had the afternoon before. In the end, we simply ran out of time while trying to catch up in points, and they won 13-10. So close! I felt pretty disappointed that we lost, since we had tried so hard and seemed so close to winning. With this loss came the end of our tournament, since we only got to play another game if we had won.

Here is our team:

After the game, I spent the rest of the day with my family. We left Joelle with our team so she could fly home with them that evening, and went to Kyle's house so I could shower and change. Later, we had a nice dinner and then Mom, Dad, the grandparents and I headed off to catch the last ferry back to Gibsons.

University Nationals - round robin day two

The second day of round robin play started with a bye in the first game for us. Again, we would go without a mid-day break for any sort of lunch. Joelle and I were happy to get up a bit later and take our time bussing out to UBC. In fact, we even stopped and had cinnamon buns for breakfast on the way to the fields!

Our first game of the day was against UBC team A, whom we expected to be really tough - and we were right! Although we didn't expect to win that game, we also didn't expect to be thoroughly trounced. UBC-A was an awesome team, and we really stepped up our intensity against this team, but to no avail. They spanked us with a final score of 13-1. The game finished 40 minutes early. However, we didn't feel terribly bad because they had beat every other team in a similar fashion, with the closest score being 13-3. We also didn't just roll over and let them win - we made them work for their points!

Our second game was just as difficult as our first game. The University of Victoria team brought a very large roster with some pretty awesome players. It's pretty easy to have a strong team when you live in or very close to the sponsoring city! Anyway, we made UVic play very hard to earn the points they did, and we could tell they were getting frustrated with how hard they had to work to score. Halfway through the game, they started playing a huck strategy to score their points, and similar to our game against U of S, we had trouble shutting it down. They beat us 13-6, but again we were happy with our game because we had played hard and well.

Unfortunately, though, we had poured too much of our energy into the first two, really tough games, so when we finally came across teams we could beat, we didn't have enough juice in the tank to get the job done. Simon Fraser University and McGill University were both beatable for us, but we didn't have the stamina to get all the points we needed to win. We lost both games, leaving us in 7th place out of 9 teams.

Kyle had arrived during our last game to watch us play, so after the game he kindly dropped us off at my friend's place downtown. Joelle and I had planned to have dinner with Lauren and Mike that evening, so we just showered at their house once we arrived there. After getting clean, we called my friend Carson to meet us, and we went out for sushi - AGAIN! We had a really nice dinner and visit with them, and lingered a long time to keep chatting and catching up. Afterwards, Joelle and I bussed back to UBC to meet our team at the tournament party that was happening at the Pit Pub. That's right, the Pit Pub. The tournament organizers chose the crappy campus bar as the place for the party. Even though the Pit has had a renovation since I was there last, it was exactly the same - dingy, loud and dirty. Plus, our team didn't show up until almost 11pm, so Joelle and I sat for about 45 minutes by ourself before they arrived. Since we were both pretty tired, we visited our team briefly and then met Kyle outside for the drive back to his house for the night. Both Joelle and I fell asleep in the backseat on the drive home, and then crawled into bed for a short sleep before morning.

Departure for University Nationals and round robin day one

I have really taken my time writing up my exploits from our trip to England and Rome, so I haven't updated my blog regarding my more current activities. In any case, I have been spending a lot of time practicing ultimate frisbee with the U of A ultimate team since I returned. This is because I am playing with the team at the University Ultimate Nationals in Vancouver this weekend and am representing the University of Alberta.

My flight left Thursday evening and Ian kindly drove Joelle and I to the airport. Joelle and I were staying with Kyle all weekend, so we had intended to travel together, however we bought our flights separately. Thus, she was leaving on an Air Canada flight an hour later than my Westjet flight. So, Kyle met me in Vancouver and we had a beer and visited until Joelle showed up awhile later. We drove all the way out to Kyle's place in New Westminster and basically crashed on the hide-a-bed right away because we were pretty tired by then.

We rose early on Friday, because our game started at 9am and we had to be there an hour early to warm up. Add to that about an hour commute time from Kyle's to UBC and you get an early wake-up call. We were both pretty excited about playing, though, so we woke up fairly easily and packed up to leave. Plus, surprisingly, the weather was beautiful in Vancouver - sunny and warm! (Well, warm to us Edmontonian's, at least).

The skytrain trip went without a hitch, considering we only sort of knew where to get off that first day. Eventually, though, we came to the end of the line and got off to find our transfer bus ready and waiting. After a few stops on the bus, the rest of our team just happened to climb on the same bus as us, coming from their hostel. Good coincidence! We all rode the bus all the way out the UBC and then wandered over to the fields to get ready for our games. We had four games to play that day, the first of which was against Queen's university and would be the first real game our team had played together. As a result, we started off a little slow as we struggled to gel as a team, however we really picked up our pace by half way through the game. Unfortunately, we were too far behind at that point and lost our first game 13-6.

Our second game was against the University of Toronto, who were seeded second out of the nine womens teams at the tournament. However, U of T didn't come out as strong as we expected, whereas we really stepped up our intensity in anticipation of a tough opponent. As a result, we beat them 13-7 and earned ourselves our first victory!

Our third game was against the University of British Columbia team B. We used our momentum from our last game to win over this team in a fairly tight battle, winning in time cap with 11-6.

Our last game was next, but unfortunately our tournament schedule didn't allow us any breaks during the day. In fact, we were probably the only team without a bye in the middle of the day. Since we had to play four straight games, none of us really had a chance to rest or to really eat lunch. We were starting to get worn out, whereas our next opponent, the University of Saskatchewan, was just coming off of a break and had some fresh legs against us. They ended up being a really tough team and had a mean hucking strategy that we had trouble shutting down. They ended up beating us 13-7, I think.

After our games, we did some cool down and stretching before we split up for the evening. Joelle and I bussed back to Kyle's, where we showered and rested and watched the hockey game with Kyle and his room mate. We also picked up some sushi from nearby for dinner and chowed down, since we hadn't much to eat the rest of the day. We thought about bussing out and meeting our team for dinner, but it was too far away and we were too tired. We finished up the evening at the grocery store and bought some food for the next two days of ultimate, since the food at the field was quite disappointing. We ended up getting to bed by 10pm, and slept soundly until our alarm at 7am the next day.