The End of Work, My Trip to Saskatoon, and School Again

Whoo-hoo, Kirstin the Student is back! As different as this year will be (I'll explain later on in the post), I'm still really glad to be a student. I LOVE the student life!

The last week of work came and went surprisingly fast considering that these sorts of things usually crawl by. It was a flurry of payroll chaos - mostly fixing up the temps boo-boos, then letting Barb know where I was, saying bye (Mei stopped by to see what's up as well!), drinking bubble tea (yummy!), and then leaving. My last day was fun - I ran around like crazy writing manual cheques, organizing my lunch, and not following up on stuff because I was leaving. It was great to get some phone calls and inquiries and not have to worry about them! Whew! For lunch we went to the Urban Diner - http://www.urbandiner.com/urbandiner.asp - I had their super tasty Salmon Burger with Mango Salsa. YUMM. Super tasty. It was a nice dinner - there were a few people there, including Excel's President (which was a HUGE compliment!) - there were so many we had to have 2 tables! I didn't get out of there until 5pm, which didn't surprise me in the least. After the insanity that was my summer, I would have been shocked to find a payday-friday so organized that I could leave early. As it was, I only got 30 minutes to let Barb know what was up! That was frusterating.

On Saturday morning I went to Saskatoon on Westjet. It was an uneventful trip over - I had no problems with baggage because I didn't put any gel/liquid products (including lip balm) in my purse. All I carried were 2 books (I almost finished Both!) and my tickets. It was nice to see Dad and Pat again. It had been a few months. Saskatoon's a cute and sleepy town and they've got a very nice (and quite large) house. Their Labradoodle Osito is cute as well! He's 11 months old and he's still very much a puppy. My whole stay there was a power trip on his part - though I didn't mind much. He kept pushing boundaries and trying to boss me around - it didn't work well. The first evening there, we just vegged around and went to get groceries and wine. On Sunday we started the day with fresh ground Argentinian coffee - OH MY GOD! I love Argentinian coffee - I'm tottaly going through withdrawl even though it barely has any caffeine in it - it just tastes sooooo good. I spent the whole time there drinking ~2 cups each morning! We went downtown and walked from Broadway Avenue (the Saskatoon version of Whyte Ave) to the downtown mall across the river. Dad and Pat bought me these 2 really cute sweater/shrug things from Smart Set! Yeah! Then we went to this place called Wanuskewin - http://wanuskewin.com/ - it's a native museum with a lot of interactive programs to experience and some amazing walking trails. We went on the blue trail and the views were amazing! It was a good day, but did we ever walk a lot! The funny thing about Saskatoon is the small-townishness of it. We tried to go to the McNally and Robinson bookstore - http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/ - near their house. It's a fairly large bookstore and it was closed Sunday and Monday! So funny! On Monday Pat left for Las Vegas with some friends to spend a week vacation their. It sounds like tonnes of fun. Dad and I went out to this little retro-dinner thing for lunch - it was super tasty. Then we went home and just relaxed. On Tuesday Dad worked so I walked down to the bookstore (how many people would be crazy enough to go on a 6 km round trip to visit a bookstore) - I got Blindness by Jose Saramago and This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jalloun. They both sound amazing. I've read Double by Jose Saramago before and I loved his writing, but I've never read anything by Tahar Ben Jalloun. I'm excited to start them! That afternoon I caught my flight back home. It was equally uneventful and much shorter (no connections in Calgary). Mum picked me up from the airport, we went to the Whitespot for supper, and then tried to go grocery shopping but it was INSANE. Between all the students and 10% Tuesday or whatever, it was impossible. She dropped me off at home where I met Serena, my roommate, for the first time! She seems very nice and funky. It doesn't feel too weird having her in the house (considering I still think of it of our house). After chatting with her for a while, I ran over to see Jen and Stacey at Stacey's house. Busy, busy.

Wednesday was the first day of school. I have Greek 101 at 9 am, then Latin 301 at 11am, and Classics 480 from 2 - 5pm (only on Wednesdays). I was excited about starting Greek. I heard it went at a much slower pace than Latin - very true. We do about 1 chapter a week maximum while in Latin we did ~3 chapters a week. It was mind numbing. Althought our prof did give us a quiz for friday, it was good. I felt a bit odd with the greek tattoo though - I look like a total Classics Geek! I was scared shitless of Latin 301. My Latin is a bit disorganized, but we're going to review 101 and 102 for a month, so that makes me feel much better, though I'm going to have to work really hard to stay on top of things. My Classics 480 class seems cool - it's about Roman Africa. I don't know much about it yet, so I'm not sure if I'm interested, but it appears to be a really interesting class with a neat prof, so it should be great!

I ran into Tim and Tessa as well. I ran into Tim on purpose. It was his first day of University! I think it went fairly well. It was nice to see him - I haven't seen him since last semester! We both ran into Tessa on our way to the humanities centre. It was super nice to run into her as well! We all sat on the grass and chatted until my last class.

Thursday was an odd day. I had to go buy books because of my Greek Quiz. I usually don't do that until friday afternoon because the bookstore is dead, but I couldn't wait that long this time. It wasn't too bad there - I went at 9am. I then spent the next few hours studying the greek alphabet in SUB. I ran into a guy I sort of knew from Lister, though he didn't know me and approached me to talk about my tattoos. That was weird. He was definately trying to hit on me, but we had a great conversation, so I'd like to stay friends with him if he's up to that. I'm off limits for dating :) !! That evening I had a BBQ at Stacey's house with Mark and Jen as well. It was super tasty - we watched Big Brother, at tonnes of food and drank really tasty wine! Yummy!

Today was great - school is definately a lot slower (so far) with only 3 classes! I got to school, breezed through the quiz, then we continued with the introduction to our textbook! The pace is great! Latin 301 wasn't too bad. We reviewed some stuff, then did translations which were a bit stressful. We read them aloud in Latin, and then we had to translate a bit of a sentence or a whole sentence each as the prof went around the class. Not too bad, but my Latin is definately a bit rusty. We got some homework, but I'm done it - I have to look it over.

I met Anita after Latin! I haven't seen her all summer - we both had crazy summers. She's debating whether to continue with her 6 classes (insane) or to cut it in half and do 3 each semester. 6 sounds a bit evil, but it all depends on her travel plans!

TTFN!