Christmas is coming

Today was the last day of the "Santa Claws Pet Photos" at Petsmart. It was soooo busy almost all day. Lots of customers got photos of their dogs with Santa, and even two people brought in their cats! It was a great day. The afternoon Santa was late, so I filled in as Santa for about an hour. It was kinda fun, but really hot. I only did one picture with two dogs, but it was fun!

Me playing Santa

I also had an awesome dinner (courtesy of a patron at the library who gave me a gift card) at Montana's. SO full now. The cookie skillet for dessert didn't help! And now I am sooo tired. I bought my cat two gifts today while I was at Petsmart and have them hidden. The cat knows exactly where they are and is crying so that will make for a fun night of listening to that!

Back to real life tomorrow. Will blog about more important things soon!!

What a week!

This past week has been insane. Just totally nuts. I marked exams for hours, upon hours, upon hours this week. And I finished them all by Thursday night which was awesome. Monday night we held an e-readers course and it was busy! I think all 12 spots were filled and we helped people with Kobos, Ipads, etc. set up their device to read ebooks. Tuesday night I had a busy class at my regular library with 4 people showing up. 4 is the perfect number since everyone is doing something different.

Wednesday after a full day of marking, I spent 5 hours at Courtney's house making centrepieces for our biology department Xmas party. They turned out awesome!

The prototypes

Many, many bottles

I didn't get home until after midnight. Thursday I marked literally every second of the day until my hair appointment at 5:00 PM. I went to Luce for the first time, my friend Sarah gave me a refer a friend 20$ off coupon. The stylist Emily did an awesome job and although it was a long 2.5 hours, it was a relaxing 2.5 hours. I soaked up all the free stuff that I usually say no to, drinks, hand massages, etc.

The new hair

 After that I met Court to go shopping for a) Christmas sweaters and b) more stuff for the party. Then I went back to the lab, and we discussed activities for the party while I finished out door decorating. Each year our dept has a door decorating contest. This year our theme was "Santa does field work". I taped an obscene amount of fake flowers and grass to our door, and put all the students in our labs faces on elf bodies, and my supervisor was Santa (basking in the sun and doing no work of course). Then Court and I spray painted (after cutting down) a bunch of branches. I made it home by 11:30 that night.

Spray painting twigs late at night

Our door

Santa

Sarah trimming the tree

Me playing with butterflies

Blaire

My X-mas vest

Friday was spent running around like crazy people all day trying to get stuff for the party. The Xmas tree, the table cloths, the prizes and decorations. It was a CLOSE call. Just as people were arriving we finished putting everything together and up. The venue looked great. The food from the caterer was great, the lasagna especially was delicious and the bar was obviously good too. After last night I think that gin and tonic is my new drink... soooo delicious. All of the activities we planned were also really successful and everyone staff, faculty, undergrads and grad students were good sports. We played a model organism game where you had to dress a member at your table up as a model organism. SOMEHOW my supervisor's wife convinced him to let us decorate him....but first he had to go get another drink from the bar...understandable. He made me swear to never posts pictures of this on the Internet, so I won't....for now. He was supposed to be a mouse, and it was not obvious what he was, he literally looked like a pig/hamster gone horribly wrong. Even the head of the dept came over and asked "what the hell are you???" We also had candles lit on all the tables, and our tissue paper ignited! Oops.

The party all set up and ready to go

Centrepieces looking great

The party in full swing

Cleaning up afterwards was rough, but it all got done. One of the things I was in charge of was the Sears wish tree drive, where people donated money towards a gift for a kid on the wish tree at sears. I got there today, and ended up getting a nice watch for a teenage girl. I was happy with the purchase it was so nice!

Tonight, I need to seriously, get my life together... my apartment is a NIGHTMARE. And I have absolutely NO groceries. I have spices and oil, a few frozen vegetables and some dry pasta. I literally think that's it. I don't think I have cooked this week, other than maybe a grilled cheese and a few eggs which I am now out of all of the above I think. I have eaten subway, or cans of soup or just eaten somewhere on the run all week. I want to cook, just no energy to.

Tomorrow, I am doing photos with Santa all day at Petsmart again, just like I did two weeks ago. And then going to dinner.... so I guess no cooking tomorrow either!

It's only ten days until Christmas. SO crazy. This time next week I will (hopefully) have a rental car and be packing it up because one week from tomorrow morning I am headed home for Christmas!

Winter is here, at least for a moment

Last night we got a lot of freezing rain, rain and snow. I went to bed thinking "winter is finally here". And this morning, it has pretty much recovered. There is a little snow on the ground, but that's it.

Today will be a busy day, like Mondays always are. I have some time at the library this morning, and then need to get marking those exams. In fact, I managed to work for MANY hours straight yesterday and finish 100/400. So that's not bad. I also have a meeting today with a few Biograds-we have formed an ad-hoc committee to help plan out our grad student research day in January. We have done NOTHING for this, because a) it wasn't our idea it was the faculty's idea b) we have no idea what is expected. We are hoping to come up with a proposal this afternoon and send that off to the faculty and most importantly, see if they will pay for it. Tonight is the last Monday night course of 2012: Ebooks and overdrive. Not one I am terribly excited (or knowledgeable about) so I won't be sad when it's over!

I am excited to get marking over with and start working on my project again. I have a potential collaborator in Australia which is really exciting and I can't wait to explore that!

I also FINALLY submitted my Gradifying blog post last night, if it actually gets published I'll post the link here.

Off to start the day, BYE!

Quick update

It’s a Sunday morning, well, afternoon I guess, and I am sitting here at my desk in my office, with my favourite earl grey tea latte and waiting to start marking the final exam for the course I TA. Not the greatest way to spend a Sunday but I guess it could be worse.

The last few days have been busy, I taught 2 busy classes at the library this week, and made a lot of progress in terms of developing a PhD project. I will get more detailed about this when I have more time to blog. I am relieved that I finally have something to get started thinking about and am excited to develop my project further and get everything figured out. It will be an experiment…which is always nerve-wrecking but it will be SO cool.

On Friday night my friends Sarah, Kari and I, joined my little sister from BBBS at the BBBS Charity Gift Wrap at the mall. It wasn't very busy but everyone had a great time and we raised some money for them which was great.

This week brings lots of marking, amongst other things like helping prepare for the biology Christmas party, the actual biology Christmas party, getting my hair done (nicely… I HOPE…for a change), lots of meetings, and more.

I will try to be a better blogger soon, I swear!