It's a Bird, It's a Plane It's... Geographers!

Hurray for obscure pagan rituals! Today we celebrated the winter solstice. In my six years here at Concordia, this is the first time I ever hear of the Geography department's winter solstice party. This time, I was invited! Every year, the staff and faculty ride up to the tenth floor of the Library building, go through the boiler room and up onto the roof of the building. From there, one by one, everyone climbs up a ladder to the topmost part of the building. Don't go too close to the edge, there's no railing! At the very top of the building, Dr. David Frost put up a weather station and for the past ten years, the good people of the Geography department have toasted to the return of longer days by this weather station. Traditionally, Dr. Frost would bring up some chardonnay disguised in a 2 L bottle of gingerale. However, Dr. Frost passed away in May and this year's party was also a bit of a memorial. We all poured ourselves a small glass of "Magic Gingerale" and toasted to the sun at exactly 12:00 pm. We were all gathered around the weather station, huddled in our big coats, hats and mitts.

Surprisingly, it was not very cold up on the roof. The sun was shining brightly, there was not a cloud in the sky and there was almost no wind. And the view was incredible. From 13 stories up, Montreal is such a beautiful city and it looked so peaceful. What a view!

Anyway, after a while it did get cold and we took our turns descending the ladder to the lower roof. The lower roof is great too because there's a huge vent that blasts out warm air so it was very warm waiting there for everyone else! We returned to the Geography department to enjoy refreshments, such as fougasse, hummus, cheese, fruit, cookies and eggnog heavily laced with brandy. Yum, how can you go wrong?!

A Stitch in Time Saves... A Lot of Searching

Seeing as Christmas is coming, I once again started my own annual crusade to find the impossible. I have been conducting this search for a few years now and so far... nothing. You see, we have an advent calendar at home that my parents made when I was very, very young. It's made entirely of felt and it's essentially a wall-hanging. It features a big Chrsitmas tree with two kids, a boy and a girl, hanging decorations on the tree. There are also a few animals hanging out around the bottom of the tree, too. There are 25 little velcro pieces on the tree and for each day in December you put up a decoration; again, made of felt and painstakingly handcrafted by Mom and Dad. Anyway, I put this calendar up every year and it's been our little tradition for as long as I can remeber. My brother always lets me put up the snowman ornament and he always puts up the gingerbread man. On Christmas morning, one of us will put the star on the top of the tree. Amazingly, my brother and I would remember from year to year who had put the star up and we would take turns. Essentially, this calendar is an integral part of our Christmas tradiations. I love that calendar. Unfortunately, so does my brother. Now that we're getting older, the debate has been who will get the calendar when we move out of the parental digs? My argument is that obviously, I got it first, I'm older, so it's mine! Probably not a totally valid argument, but it's all of got! In all honesty, I think I'm more attached to the thing than he is... I am just way too sentimental!

Okay, I've sidetracked a lot. Back to the point: I've been searching for the pattern for this thing. Mom said that she would happily make a second advent calendar, if only she had the pattern. She knows it was made by Vogue. I've searched e-Bay year after year and I've never found it there. This year, I was smart enough to go to Vogue's homepage and I sent an e-mail to their discontinued patterns department. But... to no avail. They e-mailed me back today to tell me they don't have it. If the Vogue people don't have it, who does? I'm disappointed. I really wanted to find that pattern. Maybe next year?

Now It's Hardly Simple, It's Just Simply Hard

Okay, so I think I'm finally starting to understand this dumb Image Cave program for image hosting. It seems as though any changes you make to your settings take about a day to take effect. So at the moment, some of my photo albums are not viewable because they are "protected". I changed that setting, so I figure that in about a day or so, people will be able to look at my photos! I think, in anticipation of this "exciting" event, I'll add a link to my photo albums on my page!

Last night Mike and I went to the Geography, Planning & Environment's Christmas party. We got a little misplaced looking for the building, because MapQuest gave us the wrong location. Okay, I have only used MapQuest twice in my life, and both times it screwed us up and got us lost. Anyway, MapQuest told us to turn right on Dr. Penfield when we should have turned left. But we finally found the Samuel Bronfman building. Turns out it's Concordia's Jewish pavilion. Ironic, no? Can't say I'd ever gone to a Christmas party in a Jewish building before! Anyway, we had some fun (how could you not with free food and drinks?). We didn't win the raffle, but I ended up winning the door prize; a nice box of truffles. I won because my coat was in the right place at the coat check. So it's actually a good thing that we were late or my coat would not have been the winner! So getting lost was not all bad...!

It Must be Because of the Seasons

The amount of snow we've gotten so far today is RIDICULOUS! Oh well, I don't have to go anywhere until 8:00 tonight, so in the meantime, I can just watch the snow falling outside my window and laugh at all of the people struggling through the drifts! Just kidding. I actually consider myself lucky that I don't have to deal with that today. I hear the driving is pretty bad. Be careful all of you driving people!

I LOVE CHRISTMAS! It's been a pretty busy week with all of the holiday stuff starting up, and I love it! Steph, Kim, Chrissy and I had our gift exchange at Baton Rouge on Tuesday evening, and last night a bunch of us from the DEIA got together for dinner and that was a lot of fun, too! For the past two days I've been wrapping Christmas presents, which I thoroughly enjoy as well! And the pre-Christmas activities are not over! There's still the Geography department's party tomorrow night! That makes a party every second day this week... maybe at some point I'll even be abke to start my biology paper, which is due the first day back at school.

Here's something fun: I posted some photos on an image hosting site so anyone reading can go and see some of my pictures here. I'm not too excited about the site, though. I can only put in 10 MB of photos for free, so size is very limited. If I want to put in more photos I'm going to have to start deleting other photos to make room, which is really pretty annoying. Anyway, at the moment there are photos from Cuba, Quinn's farm, and an in-progress Christmas 2005 album. Oh yeah, and I posted photos from the last Beaconsfield Golf Club staff party but for some reason the album doesn't show up on the main page. So if you want to look at those, you'll have to click here instead. I've been trying to fix it, but it doesn't seem to be working. Anyway, take a tip from me: don't use Image Cave for photo hosting.

Photo Time!

I've finally motivated myself to put up some photos! I've been procrastinating for way too long! Here we go:

Mike and I put up my Christmas tree last Saturday. Isn't she pretty? You gotta love the stockings on the fireplace, too!



And then, I decorated my bed! How festive! That's an old Christmas "banner" that my Mom made when I was really little. We used to hang it over the fireplace. Until now!


Okay, I'll admit that this photo is two years old... but it's my favourite New Years pic, and I thought I'd post it, just for old-times sake. Are you feeling nostalgic, Kimbo?

Okay, okay, this last one is a testament to my procastinatory habits. I've been meaning to post this pic for 6 weeks now! Would you believe we actually bought all those pumpkins?? I have no idea who's pumpkin I'm holding in that photo, but Mike's holding mine. Oh, and I think that's my most favourite pic of Dave ever!

The Guilt Complex Makes me Write

Don't worry, I'm still here... I'm still alive. It's just that right now, the world of Nancy is DULL! Nothing exciting or new to report. Class IS over though, which is nice. And I wrote my one and only exam this morning, and it went well, so that's nice, too!

But is this news blog-worthy? I'm not so sure!

Anyway, I've been meaning to post some photos of my Christmas tree. Mike and I put it up on Saturday. Maybe I'll get around to that at some point. And that's been the most exciting event from the last 2 weeks!

I gotta have me some adventures!