springtime in hamilton

i've been loving the weather lately! with the warm breezes, sunshine, and flowers that have started popping up all over the place, it's almost as if you can see and feel life everywhere. i like it.

anyway, i took advantage of the sunny days and walked to and from school everyday this past week! it was so nice being outside and outside looked so nice, so i decided to take my camera along too. :) here are some pics of what i saw:


^my shoes in the grass at the park near my place.


^magnolias - 'love pink'.
(wow i totally thought these were cherry blossoms...guess not, oops.)


^falling leaves - i thought these looked so cool.
(a bee kept harassing me while i was taking these so i guess it liked them too.)


^yellow flowers that spilled over a backyard fence.
(i liked how they looked against the wooden fence.)


^pink, purple, green, yellow, orange, white - i'm loving all this colour!

term three of six

today was the first day of term three.
oh me oh my, i think it's gonna be a doozy. o_O

OT practicum: term two

today i finished up the last day of my second term placement! it was a 5-week placement at a centre for geriatric care and it went by super quick. i have a week off and then it's back to hamilton for another couple months of school. ughh, i'm not ready.

here's to hoping my next placement will also be in toronto! *crosses fingers*

book nook: still alice

still alice
lisa genova

until recently, i hadn't read any books other than the ones for school (which, for the record, just isn't the same) so i told myself, at the start of my placement, that things would change. i started rereading my harry potters (teehee, they still get me everytime), but i also wanted to read something i hadn't read before, so i read two other one as well. the first one was a teen fiction book i found on my shelf (my cousin gave me a few to read the last time she was in town) which was pretty terrible and didn't deserve a review, haha.

luckily the second one, this book, was so much better. it had been on my list of books to read for quite some time now, but i never got around to reading it before this week.

still alice is a fictional novel about a woman (alice howland), a linguistics professor and research scientist who is diagnosed with early-onset alzheimer's. the book basically takes you on alice's journey of living with dementia and her gradual cognitive decline. the story is told from her point of view, which i thought was a really interesting approach.

for a first novel genova did such a great job, but i guess that's what you get from someone who has Ph.D in neuroscience from harvard. :P this book was insightful, well-written, and full of so many moments that made my eyes water and tears pop out. (yah, it totally made me cry on more than one occasion.) i brought it to my placement to read over lunch and was really tempted to just close my office door and read it for the rest of the afternoon, but i didn't(although i kept thinking about it the rest of the day, haha). other than the heartwrenching moments that cropped up every now and then, i found it to be a pretty easy read and i finished it in about two days.

overall i thought still alice was fantastic - i totally recommend it! just remember to have a box of tissues handy, just in case. :)