feeling jittery

ever since my music therapy internship started a two weeks ago, all i've really been doing is observing, going to orientations, going on tours, and more observing. tomorrow (yah, i know, working on saturday mornings suck) i'll be leading my first official music therapy session. it's my first time leading a session since i've been in school, and first time ever leading a group music therapy session on my own (at laurier they're done in pairs), so uhmmmm....yah. we'll see how things go. and hopefully they'll go well.

mandarin classes and othello

a super nice fellow at my church has started teaching people in the english congregation conversational mandarin. he is so nice. :) anyway, since my chinese is the suck (it is SO bad...i can't even handle cantonese very well) i decided to take up this offer and signed myself up for classes. at first, the lessons were focused on learning the phonetics of the consonants and vowels of mandarin and now we've moved onto actually speaking some sentences. oh dear.

i can now say, ni hao (how are you?), ta shi wo de baba (he is my father), Wo chi Zhangguo cai (i eat chinese food), and lo ren (old person), among a few other words/phrases.

yay! with my limited/broken mandarin, i can now have a very odd and random conversation with someone...given they can understand what i'm trying to say. ;)

anyway after mandarin class, adrienne, jo, and i, took a trip to toys 'r us. omg. i've forgotten how fun that store can be. i think we might have been the oldest ones there that were buying things for ourselves as opposed to kids. meh. it was still good. :P adrienne bought cranium, jo played a random paintball video game (which was kinda like duckhunt, only not as cool), and i bought this:

<-- othello, my favourite board game of all time!!

now that i've bought the regular sized version i'll no longer have to use the tiny miniature travel-sized version to play which is a good thing because i don't know what happened to it. oops. i guess it was too small to keep track of. :P

yay for big othello. i love it. :)

new beginnings

beginning #1:
evening course. today i started my evening course at ryerson. i suppose it's school, but it doesn't feel like it because i'm not a full-time student anymore. also, almost everyone in my class seems so much older than me so instead of feeling like school, it just feels wierd. haha. i suppose i'll get used to it. :P anyway, my prof seems pretty nice and easy to understand, and the people in my class are okay too, no complaints there. unfortunately, the same can't be said about ryerson's demented campus which doesn't make any sense. in other words, it sucks. it really does. from the time i got off the subway to when i tried to find the right bookstore (they split their bookstore into two different places...who does that?!) i got lost. then when i left the bookstore (with no textbook in my hands because apparently i was at the wrong bookstore) and tried to find my class i got lost again. good thing there are helpful people walking the streets of toronto because i had to ask a few for directions...yah. i miss laurier.

beginning #2:
music therapy internship. my music therapy internship starts tomorrow! i can't believe it's actually happening. my degree is finally going to be put into use, and i'll be one step closer to trying to figure out what i want (and not want) to do with my life. here's to trying to create a little niche for myself within the world of music therapy.

beginning #3:
worship team. the new worship team i'm on is meeting tomorrow. after three months of meeting up and playing with the summer worship team every single week it'll be wierd not seeing some faces and seeing new ones instead...weird, but in a good way of course. haha. i am so smooth.

beginning #4:
kingdom kids. i'm one of the counsellors for my church's fellowship for grades 1-5 (how did this happen?! haha) and we had our first official meeting last friday. it turned out pretty good, despite us not knowing what we were doing or what was going on, which ultimately resulted in us starting LATE. oooops. oh well, i'm always open to learning and i suspect i'll be doing a lot of that for sure.

so with all these beginnings i feel it's time for me to say good-bye to lazy summer days of doing absolutely nothing. they were great while they lasted, but now i'm moving onto bigger and hopefully better things.

a different kind of september

the "school bus" is here, but this time i won't be on it.

now that i'm no longer an elementary/high school/university student,

september just isn't the same.

so blessed.

1461 days . 48 months . 4 years
happy fourth justin, i love you. :)

runaway nose, never going back.

dear mr. ragweed,

when we first met you looked so harmless with your green leaves and 'branches' (which seemed to reach towards the sun and scream "hug me!"). at first i thought maybe we could be friends, but now i know it just wouldn't be possible; over the years, your true colours have shone through your little facade. portraying an innocent looking plant. ha! you should be ashamed of yourself.

i have come to realize that beneath your leaves and seemingly innocent demeanor lies an ugly monster whose main goal is to wreak havoc on the lives of others. i mean, this morning i woke up to find my nose packed and on its way out the door. you see, my nose had decided to run away thanks to you. sure there were times when i managed to calm it down and had convinced it to stay awhile, but then you showed up and i found myself back at square one again.

mr. ragweed, at the risk of being too blunt and abrasive, i feel it is in your best interest that you know that no one likes you. with that in mind, i suggest you stop trying to pollute my neighbourhood with your pollen, pack your bags, and get move on outta here before everybody's noses start dripping like leaky faucets. thanks.

sincerely,
sharon

p.s. you owe me money for kleenex.

chinese lantern festival

yesterday adrienne, gloria and i went to the chinese lantern festival at ontario place. we were able to get cheaper tickets thanks to my mom, so we went down with my parents, wandered around with them for a bit, split up, and then met up with them again at the end of the night.

i didn't really know what to expect from the whole thing to see on our way down. i was a little nervous that it would be super cheesy (i.e. a whole bunch of lights on strings in a parking lot or something ), but fortunately i was wrong. haha. it was actually pretty good, although it looked a lot more impressive when it was dark.

we watched two films at the cinesphere (one of the first emperor, and the other on panda bears), walked around taking pictures of all the exhibits, and learned more about chinese history and myths/symbols thank to the info cards that went with the exhibits and the films. the night ended with us watching the symphony of fire fireworks (yay!) from the lantern festival while standing on a bench under a tree which, minus the rain and the blaring traditional chinese music that at times sounded like a haunted polka house (haha), was the perfect way to end a great night. thanks girls. :)

story of the night:
so somewhere in the middle of the festival there was a cool chinese archway that was lit up that we wanted a picture of with the three of us. in order to make this possible, gloria asked a friendly-looking woman to take the picture for us. she said okay and took it, but it was obvious from her shaking and ("aghhh"s and "ohhhh"s) that she didn't feel comfortable doing it. as she turned to go she said, "usually people ask him not me" while pointing at her husband. turns out her husband was the guy standing there smiling at the whole situation while carrying around an SLR camera. darn, he was probably a good photographer.

anyway, since gloria's camera was a film camera there was no way to tell how good (or bad) the woman's pictures were (she took two "just in case".) we still wanted a picture of us and the archway, and a good one at that, so i scanned the crowd and saw a guy carrying an SLR camera AND a tripod. needless to say, i made my way over and asked the guy if he would take our picture for us. (i figured anyone carrying a tripod had to be good, because normal people taking photos just wouldn't.) so the guy took our picture, looked at the picture in my camera screen, and smiled at me as i thanked him and he gave my camera back.

as i was walking away i looked at the picture he had taken and let out a loud "WHAT". the picture that the guy, the "professional photographer", took totally SUCKED CRAP. i had set my camera to automatic flash, but i guess because the archway was so bright it didn't go off, and you couldn't see us at all because we were too dark. the guy wasn't a professional at all (or else he would have known what to do, yeh?) what a fraud.

so moral of this story (which has somehow become way long) is: just because someone carries around an SLR and a tripod doesn't mean they know how to take a picture. posers suck.

oh well, it was still a fun night. pictures can be found here. :)

east coast 2006



last friday we returned from our trip to canada's east coast. i've visited western canada before, and i live in central canada, but this was the first time i had ever been to the eastern side. we flew into halifax, rented a car and visited three provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) in eight days. despite the fact that the all the maritimes provinces we visited were really boonie (even the bigger cities), there were still a lot of things to do, and a lot of things to see.

i don't know why, but for some reason i was really surprised at how many trees there were there. as we were landing in halifax i looked out the airplane window and, i kid you not, all i saw were trees. so. much. green. so. much. nature.

even though at times some maritimers were on the verge of being annoyingly slow (not necessarily dumb, but they just did things so slooooowly), most of them were really nice and friendly. we met a few people who were from ontario as well, and saw license plates on vehicles from all over canada and the states. there was even a biker posse from BC which had rode, literally, across canada.

one thing i really respect about maritimers is their need/desire to be environmentally friendly. seriously, they put toronto's green bins to shame. almost everywhere (including fast food restaurants) people are expected to separate their waste into compost, recycling, and trash, and while there are those kinds of things going on in toronto, people in the east actually threw their things in the right places. haha. :P as a result, everything there is generally much cleaner; the air is cleaner, there isn't as much garbage everywhere, there's minimal to no litter in the atlantic (that i could see)...the list goes on. even the hotels are in on the whole green power thing; they asked you to reuse your towels twice (although i'm not sure if its because they want to be environmentally cautious, or if they're just cheap. haha.)

anyway, this trip was a great trip and i had a really good time. yah i miss the beatiful huge eastern skies and sunsets, and the fact that you could see the ocean out the car window, but at the end of the day there's no place like home.

highlights of the trip:
- going to cavendish, PEI and seeing the REAL green gables (omg. i looooove anne of green gables)
- seeing Anne of Green Gables the musical in charlottetown
- going to my first (and second) ceilidh in cape breton. awesome, awesome music.

...there were a lot more things that we did that i liked, but those were my top three. :)

pictures from our east coast trip can be found here.

so easily distracted...



the other day, while liz was attempting to clean her room (and i was sitting on her bed watching her clean so i could procrastinate from cleaning mine), we found this huge shopping bag with a screaming/super excited little boy on it behind her door. she was holding it up trying to figure out what to do with it when i got an idea, took the bag, and told liz her to get her camera. the next 5 mins were spent laughing our heads off running around trying to think of other funny poses we could do with the bag.

i think our mom thought we had gone bonkers.

...and this is why it takes us forever to clean-up our rooms. bah hah. :P

the Land Downunder.

ahhhhh, Australia.

i've always told myself that i'd go and visit the country, which is also it's own continent, at least once in my lifetime, but lately the thought of going has been on my mind more often than ever before.

i'd love to jump around with the kangaroos, eat bamboo shoots (ermm, and by eat i mean drink bamboo juice from a chinese 'vitasoy-like' juice box) with the koala bears, listen to someone play a didgeridoo, visit the sydney opera house, visit the perth observatory, see a running dingo, put my feet in the ocean, and see the world from australia's point of view...

but most of all, i really love the fact that right now in australia it's winter, which means i'd be getting away from the brutally hot and abnormally humid canadian summer of 2006. :P