Closing Update for 2017

Sneaking in one final blog post for 2017. This will be my 39th of the year, marking the year with the fewest blog updates since I started in 2009. I'll blame the period in time when I had three jobs, one of which was full time and night shift. Not much time and not much energy. Here's hoping for a more blog-heavy 2018.

The year with the most entries by a huge margin was 2012. In January I had just returned from Mali, and later that year I started Human Services Foundations, my first year of college. Passions ran hot in 2012.

I had to briefly return to Kitchener to do a little bit of work. I really hope that I didn't get food poisoning at that dinner party, because during my night in Kitchener, I ate a -lot- of leftovers from that party. No romaine lettuce, though. I don't think it was from that party though, as no one else that attended the dinner got sick.

My landlord tried to illegally increase my rent again and refuses to show me my lease, and is now asking me to court again. I'm going to try and get him to pay the court application fees and use the opportunity to get a copy of my lease. I don't know why he acts like this.

My aunt and cousin's visit is over. We gave my cousin a bunch of our old videogames, a dress, and a Lego set. Although each of us contributed in each gift, I was the one tasked with picking out the Lego set. Don't ever let me go Lego shopping, apparently I can't control myself. I wound up getting the largest, flashiest, most expensive set I could find.

My aunt gave my mom a painting of a phoenix, my brother some homemade jewellery, and me a note/sketchbook with a homemade cover including an engraving of a gryphon.

New Years lunch with grandparents didn't pan out for unavoidable reasons.

Ending the year on a bit of a sad note, one of the people who attended the Summer Program each year that I was involved with it, suddenly passed away shortly after Christmas. Young woman, about the same age as me. Some pre-existing health issues, but nothing that indicated serious concern that something like this might happen. Large personality, added a lot of flavour to the program every year. The loss of her presence will definitely be felt.

I'll close it with that. As always, my New Years resolution is getting my G2 driving license. Here's to 2018.

Christmas 2017

Christmas 2017 is now over. I spent the actual day quite ill with fever, difficulties digesting, and weaving in and out of consciousness due to extreme fatigue. The previous day I had been a bit gaseous, and then Christmas morning, I woke up without much of an appetite, and then within a couple of hours I was laid out, sweating, and almost delirious. Most of the worst of it was done by midnight, so it really was a bug set just for Christmas day.

Boxing day, I still had difficulties with digestion and was still fatigued enough to take an involuntary nap in the middle of the day, but the fever was gone. Today I seem to have my full energy back, and just a bit of lingering digestive issues. I never had a headache or respiratory issue, which I find are the most uncomfortable symptoms anyway.

Neither my mother or brother caught it. It's speculated that it might have been food poisoning, but I haven't had anything different to eat than them, since I've been at home for about a week. The only time I ate anything different from them was when I went to my roommate's dinner party last Friday. But since Christmas was on Monday, that leaves a 2-3 day gap between the party and when I got sick. Apparently there's an E. coli outbreak in some Canadian provinces, including Ontario, which is being spread through Romaine lettuce. One of the dinner guests brought a salad, and apparently E. coli takes about three days to manifest, so maybe that was it.

For Christmas this year I got some boots, which was inspired by the fact that I was telling them about how I just wear running shoes throughout the winter, and it gets awkward when the parents of people I support bug their kids to wear boots when I myself don't bother. I got a new wallet, which was a long time coming since the section with all my cards on my old one was literally being held together with Scotch tape, and I also got some paint supplies.

Me and my brother pitched in and got mom a deep freezer. She also got some cooking gear and a toolbox. My brother got a couple video games, an Alpaca scarf, as well as some other fashion stuff.

Family decided we were all going to do a dessert this year. Brother made nanaimo bars, mom made a red velvet cake, and I made a blueberry pie. I decided to do the blueberry pie since it was my entry and the hottest selling item at an old college bake sale, but since my mother and brother are acquainted with my grandmother's signature wild blueberry pie, I felt it might be an unwise choice matched with this more discerning audience. End result was alright, although the crust had the issue of cracking and leaking like with my last attempt.

My aunt and cousin are coming over today and staying overnight. Then on New Year's Eve, we're having dinner with some of my grandparents. Then it's onto a New Year and a new semester.

Finals and Christmas

Finals are done and I have all my grades back. They haven't been officially posted yet, but since I've got the results for each individual assignment and the grading scheme for each course it's possible to figure out my final averages. They're good. Predictably, I didn't do as well on the tests as the assignments, but overall, my grades are a cut above average.

After the initial awkwardness of not knowing the University's systems and getting bit for it, the courses wound up feeling easier than I expected. My academic advisor told me to avoid 100-level courses for next semester, so maybe things will get a bit more challenging in January.

Christmas is nearly upon us. I still have some Christmas shopping to do. Usually I'm pretty good at picking presents for people, but this year I can't think of anything original, and there's nothing I even really want.

Tomorrow my roommate is having a pre-Christmas dinner. It's slightly peculiar because he's really getting into the Christmas spirit despite being Muslim. I guess Christmas has become pretty detached from religion. I pulled out my old artificial Christmas tree from the back of the walkway closet. Still has blue tinsel and a tree topper as well. Last year's roommate wasn't a big fan of Christmas so I didn't do any decorating. Over the past three years, I have had three different sets of roommates on Christmas. And that's only if you only count my time post-student housing.

Going to have Christmas proper in Guelph. I'm bouncing back and forth between the two cities throughout the holidays.

Fruit Paintings

So, I finished my final written assigment. It was for East Asian studies, and the topic was comparing Northeast Asia (China, Korea, and Japan) with Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Brunei). This kind of went along with my criticism that the final exam was too focused on Southeast Asian nations, when they had only been covered in one of ten lessons, only four of them were expanded on, and none of them were included in the text. It was validating to see in the project description that further research would be required, as information would be required that was not covered in the lessons or the text. So how was I supposed to prepare for the final?

I did get my grade back for the final, and I will say that I did more than twice as well as I thought I would. But that's... still not good. I only need 2% on this final assignment to pass this course, and despite not doing well on the final, I am at least meeting the class average at this point in time.

Since the last written assignment was comparing the different Northeast Asian nations, about  half the research was already done. I just condensed the information in the previous assignment, focused on what unified them, and then compared them to Southeast Asia, which required new information.

Recently, I painted a bowl of fruit. I always looked down on people who did that. I was like, "Why would you paint a bowl of fruit when you could just take a photo and perfectly reproduce the image?" But my art course has really changed my perspective. One time I bought a painting because "It looks crude compared to the others, but it's my favourite for some reason". It's interesting to revisit that decision, as now I have plenty of reason for why that one would be my favourite. I'm like "Wow, there's such an impression of depth and these colours just vibrate together". Yeesh.

Me and my brother and cousin recently hung out. We were originally going to go to one of the great lakes, but I had to cancel our original hang out date due to conflicting obligations. When I offered a tentative time in late November, they both jumped at the idea, but I guess it didn't occur to any of us that it wouldn't exactly be swimming weather.

We went to Hamilton and cruised around until we found a spot where we could access the beech.  Hamilton has a reputation for smelling bad, and when my cousin and brother showed enthusiasm to access this place, I felt they already knew about this reputation and that my input would just perpetuate a stereotype.

But when we got out, both of them were like "Wow, it smells bad" and I was like "Of course it smells bad, it's Hamilton" and they were like, "If you knew it smelled so bad here, why didn't you say anything?" and I was like "I thought everyone knew that Hamilton smells bad"

We visited a place with a bunch of boats. Some people sent a hand signal at me, so I sent one back to them. My brother and cousin asked if I knew them. I said I didn't, I was just improvising. Then we got kicked out.

So eventually the smell, the cold, and the hostile boat people chased us away. We got to see some cool birds, though. Some swans, and also what might have been a flock of common merganser. I've seen hooded meganser and red breasted merganser, so if those were actual common merganser, I think I've sighted every type of merganser.

Anyway, we eventually had to retreat. Since the original idea was to paint something, my cousin invited s over to her place. She and my brother decided to paint a bowl of pears and pomegranates. For some reason, I got overambitious and tried to paint a conch shell. I would not recommend this for new painters. The top of the conch came out okay, but I couldn't make the bottom look concave.

Felt real bad when my cousin and brother's fruit paintings came out nice and my conch shell looked flat. But I've since painted a bowl of fruit and now I know that is a far moe achievable goal.