First hints of snow

Ah, midterms are over! Or near enough, anyway (I have one next week... but it is optional). Now that I have time to, you know, shower and stuff, I'm undergoing some sort of Renaissance.
In the past week alone, I've cooked boeuf bourguignon, cog au vin, quiche, salad (vegetables, how I missed thee), tuna steak...
Mmmm! Most of it is frozen now in anticipation for the harsh finals period ahead, but still, eating well again was amazing. They're simply no comparison: when the food is good, you're compelled to eat less and reach a whole new level of satisfaction. And you feel less gross.
I swear, if I had had to eat one more pizza and/or peanut butter sandwich I would have screamed.
I went for lunch on tuesday to the Midnight Kitchen: it's this free, vegan lunch offered cooked by students, for students. They go to supermarkets and ask for the produce that would be thrown away at the end of the day, and cook MASSIVE quantities of delicious, vegan food. The whole kitchen works on donations and volounteers. Tuesday there was curried chickpeas, granola crumble, beats with carrots, and grapes! Yum!
In other news, there are the first rumors of snow set for today. We should be on the lookout for flurries... All my Canadian friends are giddy as schoolgirls, rubbing their mittened hands and going on and on about toboganing and snowmen; the rest of us (also know as the Sane Ones) just groan in anticipation of this first, irrefutable sign of winter.
Halloween in monday! We should really get around to buying some tacky decorations at the dollar store, or carve out pumpkins. We'll see what happens this year. Alot of my friends are just completly burnt out or still have to study for midterms (for some reason, this year seems to be alot tougher on everyone), so it will probably end up being a pretty quiet Halloween...

Thanks Garci for posting on my guestmap! I love your blog (I just wish I could read spanish better...).

Beata's silly comment

It probably warrants SOME explanation, so here we go:

Reply with your name and
1. I'll respond with something random about you.
2. I'll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I'll pick a flavor of jello to wrestle with you in.
4. I'll say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. I'll tell you my first memory of you.
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I'll ask you something that I've always wondered about you.

Sun!

Just a quick update to say: the sun is shining today!

For the first time in literally weeks (I'm inclined to say months, but that might be an exaggeration), it isn't raining.

It's amazing how different the city looks today. I feel as though I'm falling in love with Montreal all over again.

Explanation

I'm sorry for the pathetic lack of updates... Midterms have taken over my life.
Really. At this point, my roomate sees my friends more than I do.
Hopefully, by monday afternoon, things will start looking up!

Happy Thanksgiving!

For all of you Canadians out there, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.
As I'm pretty sure only my family actually reads this blog though, I'm assuming I'm the only one who got to munch on some good turkey this weekend.

I'm not even Canadian, and I still got to have two Thanksgiving dinners!
The first was at my friend Joel's: his family had come over and cooked for the most part of Saturday, with amazing results! Turkey, stuffing (vegetarian-- a disproportionate amount of my friends are vegetarian), cranberry sauce, pumpkin pies, for starters, but they also added a french twist with a plethora of cheeses, terrines, saucissons, tartes au citron, good bottles of wine... I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven. It was lovely.
My godfather's daughter, Mathilde, spent the weekend at my apartment. She had never had a real Thanksgiving, and I daresay she was rather impressed. She was especially happy to be able some typical french food again!
The next day, my friend Robin organized a potluck dinner with just a few friends. Everyone brought some essential part to the Thanksgiving dinner, and we all settled on her rug. Predictably, the guitar came out and it ended up being quite the relaxing evening... Before people started leaving, Robin asked us what we were thankful for. No one really knew how to formulate what they had to say!
I'm thankful for my friends--good support is essential, and they've definetly been there for me-- as well as for telephones and planes, because they really work, and make me feel like my family isn't so far away after all.

The weekend was so relaxing... so much better than last weekend! I mostly slept off my cold, and attemtped to study for my midterm on wednesday. Next week is going to be rough-- I have three midterms! Library runs, anyone?

Already tuesday!

It seems everyone I speak to has had a bad weekend.
One thing I find that helps is simply the wonderful people that I've gotten to know here. Seriously, when I go to class, I'm happy to meet up and talk with my classmates.
Today I bumped into a friend (who, hands down, had a worse weekend than I did), and he invited me to lunch. When I got there, I found half a dozen other people; appearantly they have lunch every tuesday and thrusday! It was great-- chilled out atmosphere and I got to appreciate the last of the good weather. It's so good to find comfort in little things.

Long weekend of insanity

I pretty much had the worst, longest weekend ever.

A friend of mine ended up pretty knocked up (due mostly to gravity) so I spent all of saturday night and sunday at the hospital.
What makes the situation worse was that we were meant to go to a concert together, but the bouncer wouldn't let my roomate or me in because our tickets were ripped, so he sacrificed his concert to stay with us instead. As my roomate said: "A good deed never goes unpunished".
It was pretty scary when it happened though-- at first we didn't think he was doing too badly, but when he started throwing up and forgetting things, we promptly called an ambulance.
Well, at least spending the better part of day in a hospital gave me a taste for what it will be like, didn't it? I found the nurses incredibly rude-- not only did they not tell us once what was going on (we ended up waiting from 2 A.M. to 6 A.M. before they told us that we shouldn't have waited this whole time and might as well go home while the test results get processed), but when I snuck in to check up my friend, I found a nurse repeating instructions to him in french. Now, my friend doesn't understand french, had a concussion and trouble speaking, and you could just tell that he was getting more and more flustered and confused. I intervened, explaining that no, he clearly cannot speak french, and could he at least try to speak to him in english? The nurse just curled his lip at me and told me to translate instead. Arghhh! Go quebec for hanging on to your culture, but a hospital is not the place to do it.
Anyway. The night feels like a dream-- the three of us (my roomate, his roomate, and I) didn't really feel time pass; it's been more like this long, long experience. When I finally fell assleep I just passed out and drooled all over my pillow. Now I have lots of strange pictures on my camera and snippets of sleepless conversations from various moments in the night playing over and over in my head. All I can hope for is that in a year or two, we'll all laugh about this...
It didn't exactly help matters that at the time that all of this happened, our apartment was FULL of mostly strangers (my friend from high school had come over to Montreal for the weekend with her roomates and their significant others in tow); such bad timming!

Now I'm behind on my readings and freaking out about impending midterms. Time for a run to the library!

Exam Schedule

I checked my exams schedule yesterday:

Dec 6th: bio
Dec 7th: bio
Dec 8th: bio
Dec 9th: psyc
Dec 12th: bio

Note #1: Dec 6th is the first day of exams
Note #2: Dec 10 and 11 is a weekend

I seriously have no idea how I am going to deal with this. It's not humanly possible.
Now I know why biology students say the U2 is the year of Hell.

It doesn't help that I booked my flight for the 23rd of December... I don't know what to do. Should I spend a week in London with my brother? Should I go back to Washington D.C.? Should I stay in Montreal? The problem is that everyone just heads home as soon as they exams are finished. Arrgh!