Martha and Susan’s Excellent Adventures

Went out for hot pot and karaoke on Saturday night (my birthday was last week…). We were running late at hot pot, and were worried that they’d start charging us at the karaoke place. Stanley pipes up: “Oh! Where are you going for karaoke?” Greenbox Plus “Okay, hang on” - whips out his phone, finds a number :”Hello, Greenbox? Do you have reservation for Florence Chen?” looking, looking, no reservation. Floz says it’s Greenbox Plus. “Oh, oh, wrong Greenbox” hangs up. New call: “Hello, Greenbox? Do you have reservation for Florence Chen? Yes? They will be late. About half hour. Thanks.” Hang up. Hi-larious! Who has all the karaoke places in the city saved on their cell phone? He wasn’t even coming with us! Hero of the night.

Next randomness: near the end of our singing escapades, a bunch of cops show up and a couple are looking in the window of our room. Then they come in and ask us all for ID. As we’re leaving we notice the whole place is covered with cops - over 20. Danny got patted down completely on his way to the washroom. Lara asked one of the cops what was going on. He said they were performing a sting operation on all the karaoke bars in Sydney. I guess cracking down on drugs, underage drinking, and excessive drinking. But still, a sting on karaoke bars! Awesome!

Boring update: I spent a solid week studying for high efficiency solar cells (retardly difficult course I just took). After still not learning the entire course, I wrote the exam and by some miracle only the questions that I studied were on the exam. Rock on. I also proctored an exam, and marked a stack of final assignments for energy efficiency. The weather’s crap, and my soccer games for the past 3 weeks have all been cancelled, and 4 out of 6 practices as well. Sux. But now we have a rescheduled game (well, 2) on Thursday night, 2 on Sunday, and then UniGames from Monday to Wednesday next week. So I’ll get more than enough soccer in soon enough.

Today in rained, torrential downpour, and it started on the bus on my way to school so I didn’t have my umbrella with me. Luckily at the bus stop at the uni my friend Chris had just got off another bus, and he shared his umbrella with me on the walk up to the Elec building. We both only got half-soaked this way.

I watched Ottawa lose to Disney in the Stanley Cup finals down at the UniBar with a bunch of hockey fans that I met last week, same time same place. Everyone was cheering for Ottawa. As you know, they were slaughtered. But one of the guys had a bag of these tasty gingerbread cookies from Germany. Simon and I had them in Nuremberg when we went there to see a German soccer match. The cookies were excellent, and sentimental.

I had a 2 hour meeting with my co-supervisor. I got some excellent results yesterday (well, the cells are terrible, but any result is excellent at this point) so we had fun analyzing the results. We have another meeting tomorrow with the whole group. I’m excited, because getting results also means that I’ll finish my PhD some day!

Soccer practice was canceled due to the rain too. I like the practice, but I just didn’t feel like running around in the cold today. My knee hurts, and I wanted to go home. And I got to! I ate Michelle’s carrot and lotsa garlic soup, home-made pierogies from the freezer, and cheese and crackers while watching the Muppet Show.

It was a great day.

I got a lift back home from Mel, our reserve grade keeper who’s now playing in both games since Rene (first grade keeper) just had wrist surgery done. Mel bent her thumb backwards trying to make a save in the second game yesterday. On the way home, she said: “Well, I don’t think I’ll be able to write my essay tonight, I may as well just play video games.” That’s when the true horror of a thumb injury set in: “Wait! NO! I CAN’T PLAY VIDEO GAMES! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”