Last weekend me and Lee-Anne were in Guelph for my brother's birthday and we stayed at the Comfort Inn. This is exciting for a specific reason. Six months ago we were in Guelph for my birthday and we stayed at the same hotel. At that time I was still fairly new to diabetes and I was being pretty strict with my diet. However, I got surprised by the person serving breakfast because I thought it was self-serve. So when she offered me a waffle I panicked and accepted.
I used strawberry jam instead of maple syrup because I thought the berries might offset some of the unhealthiness. Obviously it didn't. My sugars bounced out of target range, I think for the first time since diagnosis.
So this time I decided to intentionally eat the same thing that put my sugars out six months ago to see if my body reacted any differently. Same location, same meal, and even the same server. I asked for a waffle and I slathered it in strawberry jam. My sugars spiked but they stayed in range!
It's pretty cool to see that my body is capable of doing something it wasn't able to do six months ago.
Yesterday me and Lee-Anne went to the Conestoga College Doon Campus to meet a friend of mine who works for the college, but used to run a youth employment program in Guelph that I attended. If you don't remember, I graduated from Conestoga Doon. I'd spoken to this guy over video chat a few times over the past couple of years, but I hadn't seen him in person since he used to work in Guelph (which was a while ago), and I hadn't been to Doon Campus since I moved out of student housing in 2015.
While I was there I ran into an old instructor of mine. I've seen him in person before, as I'd run into him on the Iron Horse Trail and we'd caught up once over video chat. It was cool to see two of my primary contacts from the college while I was there. I think there's only two other people that still work at the college that I'm as familiar with.
The campus hasn't changed drastically. I got to see the remnants of their COVID measures. They had plexiglass barriers in front of the Information Desk, where I used to work. They had racks of medical masks available to the public with signs that read "Masks STRONGLY Recommended", but I think I only saw one person wearing one.
I get it. The safety measures have been getting less prioritized but the messages aren't factually incorrect, so the language used for them seems kind of strong at this point but it's hard to know when to modify them. At this time we have a lot of signage that's a little out of sync with the current societal attitudes.
They added a Starbucks. Before, we only had a Tim Horton's and you could get Starbucks brand coffee at the cafeteria. So now you have one more option.
Vending machines still accept cash. At the University of Waterloo they have gone completely cashless, but Conestoga's not quite as close to the cutting edge.
Sandwich Central in the Cafeteria is now a sushi place. I wanted to see if they still had a stirfry station but it wasn't open. The daily soups were still in the same place.
The section of the cafeteria known as the Blue Room isn't blue anymore. They revamped it with more subdued and varied colours, but it's still called the Blue Room for some reason.
The Sanctuary, which was a a secondary cafeteria, smaller and slightly more intentional in design, is now called The Venue and it's a sit-down restaurant. When we went in I was surprised to be approached by a server.
The Coz-E-Corner, which is like a micro-cafeteria that has a Subway and a Pizza Pizza is still in the same place and branded the same.
The Aboriginal Services Office got moved to a new section of the school. It's not in as public a space, but they have more room and it's next to the Indigenous Garden. The person that used to run it left to work at the University of Waterloo, which I already knew, but when I saw that the office wasn't where I remembered it I was a little worried that they'd scrapped the concept once that guy left.
They've also fully rebranded to Be-Da-Bin Gammick, which means "Place of new beginnings". When I was a student, the guy in charge was trying to get away from the term "Aboriginal" because being "abnormal" means "not normal", so "Aboriginal" sounds like "not original" when they are actually the original people to live on the continent. But for recognition they had "Aboriginal Services Office, Be-Da-Bin Gammick, Place of New Beginnings" printed on the front of the office in entirety. Now it just says "Be-Da-Bin Gammick" without even the translation, which I think is cool.
They still had an "Expect Respect" slogan displayed. I used to work for the Respect Campaign, but at the time they were phasing out the term "Respect" for "Student Life Leaders"", so I was surprised to see that there's at least some remnants of the original Respect message this long after I graduated. Happy to see it.
The Atrium, which is like a really wide set of giant carpeted stairs where I used to hang out, looked smaller then I remembered. We went and looked at the house I used to live in, and that looked smaller as well. It's a pretty common phenomenon to think things don't look as large as they did in your memory, but that's usually only for childhood memories, and the reason is that the things didn't get bigger, you got bigger and so they look smaller in comparison. But I was fully grown in college, so it's weird that everything looks smaller.
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