Habituating Myself

To having coolness available at all times that is. I spent my morning touring my future campus and repeatedly reminding myself that I will, in fact, be able to acclimatize myself to the intimidating size of the grounds. I had been to areas so close to U of T before but had never actually been there. Even though the entire thing is actually quite impressive I will be spending most of my time taking all of my classes a few blocks away at the Rehab Sciences building. Apparently all of my classes will be in the same room. With the size of this school all of my classes are in the SAME ROOM?

I am already loving the fact that the campus is submerged within the city: be gone university bubble! The tour guide today was trained in historical tours but we mostly found out where to score free or cheap meals. There is even a haunting legend about a mason named Reznikoff (sp?) who finds out one of his workers is plotting to steal his money and his fiancee to which Rez retaliates by chasing him with a hatchet. You can still see the hack marks in the door which Diabolo used to shield himself.

The second reason for coming to the city before heading back to the Soo for the summer is to scope out some potential residences for September. So far I've found a pretty good deal at 40 min by transit and 30 min via bi-cycle. But I'd be sleeping in a loft bed. But the kitchen has black granite counters. But the room is small. But utilities, internet, cable...all included.
I still want to get a feel for places a bit closer to campus but this place may be my new home for a while.

After lunch with friends I wandered Kensington Market, bought a really neat-o fair-trade shrug and enjoyed some Smashing Pumpkins performed by two dudes on the street playing some punk cello. I would be infinitely happy if all of my days could include punk cello.

Completed

Just finished reading "The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible As Literally As Possible" by AJ Jacobs (he also wrote a memoir about reading the entire encyclopedia).

He is genetically Jewish but lacks almost any sense of faith or religious affiliation to start but decides to take a year and try to understand how we choose which laws/advice from the Bible to follow and which to ignore. He doesn't do it haphazardly but reads the entire Bible, makes copious notes and gets regular input from a variety of Jewish and Christian sources.
The lesson: there is always interpretation regardless of how literal you're taking things. He does end up gleaning what he wants from it and leaving the rest.

Worth reading almost just for the snippet about his attempt to fulfill the law in the Old Testament to "pebble" adulterers.

My brilliant plan I envisioned while torturing myself with statistics for 5-8 hours a day has been to do book reviews via Haiku. Get some creativity a'flowin. It was going to be just haikus but I'm thinking, at least to start, they will remain supplementary.

Beard: Symbolical
Open Bible quest for truth
Simply agnostic

Things Haiku can teach me if I keep this up:
--how to make every syllable count (a whole book in 17 syllables??)
--how to choose only the extremely relevant

Appraisal so far: needs work lol

Bragging Rights

o

When I get bored I watch TV or read or go for a walk or call a friend....stuff. When my brother gets bored he turns a 6 string electric guitar into a 12-string. What? Not sure where he got his technical ability from but from me it was definitely NOT.

For those of you who understand instruments/music this is what he did:


-17 hours work totall
-total cost $20 (I only had to buy the strings, and a small file set)
-Got the idea from Jeremie, who was only joking at the time

First thing I'm going to address, the controls;
There is no pick-up selector switch, I took it out and put in 3 volume knobs. And yes that is a volume slider, the volume slider is a master volume. Each volume knob controls 1 pick-up, so that is how you select your pickups (this allows for very nice tone controll). That black button is a kill-switch (that mod was actually made BEFORE it was being turned into a 12 string).

Secondly,
That one machine head** (AKA tuning pegs) looks a little funny because there wasn't enough room on the headstock to actually fit it on straight. The nut alone (white thing at the top of the neck before the tuning pegs) took me 4 hours to file the correct size grooves for each corresponding string gauge. That bar on the headstock between the nut and the machine heads was a last minute mod I had to make to make sure the strings have enough downward tension to the nut.
I had the machine heads just laying around.

Third,
The neck is staying very straight under the added weight of 6 more strings, I don't know how.

Fourth,
The saddles on the bridge I actually just flipped over and cut 2 grooves in each one with a dremmel for the strings. Some are better than others, but they all work.


There are still a few problems with the intonation (if anyone knows what that is) that I can't seem to fix, but it's not noticable if playing below the 7th fret

A photo-grapher he is not but I think he'll be ok without that skill.

**the only thing I think about with Machine Head is the old Bush song.

A (possible) New Annual Tradition

What can you do with
1 piece of styrofoam
1 newspaper page
1 straw
2 ft of string
1 plastic bag
some duct tape ??

Try to keep an egg from breaking when dropped from a height. Not just an elementary school project.

LASTs

Yesterday was (sweet murphy brown let this be true) the LAST UNDERGRAD CLASS I will ever take. Yes, I still have 4 exams. And actually another class that doesn't end until mid-July. But those aren't classes and the other is online so not class! Ha! It only took me a lot longer than everyone else but I did it!

The deadline for acceptances is April 22nd. But mine was mailed two days ago. Why not? I know what I want and I wasn't taking any chances. There are still conditions: B+ in the last 4 prerequisites that I am taking. Not exactly crazy difficult but still a bit unnerving. I'd rather be unconditionally accepted but whatcha gonna do?

Some of us went out to celebrate last night. Some of us being people who went through the testing application process together and got accepted. Apparently McGill has made an oops and due to an "administrative error" all offers that were sent out over a month ago are still pending and won't be confirmed for another few weeks. Big mistake on their part. Especially because they didn't bother to tell anyone about the glitch until the day before the acceptance deadline. That doesn't sit right with me. Or with one of the celebrators last night who had McGill as a first choice but has now accepted UBC because she wasn't willing to let other offers slide if McGill couldn't give her a 100% offer. They are going to lose all their first round picks. Bad on McGill this year.

Another switch. Just a week ago I was stressing about whether I'd get THE email or not. Now I feel like the go-to person for advice on getting in.

ps. Happy --th Birthday on the 12th Mark!

Under normal circumstances Gigi (the cat) is NOT allowed in my room, especially not while I'm sleeping (her favourite things to chew are my laptop plug-in and my cell phone).
However, she managed to sneak onto my bed while I was grouchily responding to the idiot who rang the doorbell 7 times at 430am (thank goodness for peepholes). When I returned I didn't have the heart to kick Gigi out, she looked so cute! So she stayed.

And she purred. Purred for hours. Remember those FurrrReal pets? Ever notice how they made the purring so real by just putting plastic box with a marble inside into the cat's head? Just saying.

Something else I learned: she likes the taste of make-up I was too lazy to wash off before bed. Do't you love it when a cat grooms your face for you then grooms their, well, special area?

Completely UNrelated to Fooling in April

This morning I awoke to a email of glorious acceptance. Then I ate breakfast and returned to an even more glorious email of acceptance. That's right, TWICE! Including my top choice school. So I will be (barring any unforeseen circumstances) be living in Toronto and completing a masters to become a SPEECH-LANGUAGE PATHOLOGIST. Something I said, or something my references said, convinced them that I am the right kind of material they are looking for. At both Western and U of T but I'll be accepting U of T because, well, it is a year shorter: pretty easy choice!

Never thought I would have the chance to live in Canada's largest city. Think anyone will suspect I'm not from around those parts? haha\

[Editor's note: Soon I will be an expert on Canadian/Ontarian universities. The University of Toronto will be the 5th university that I have attended/taken a class at. The rest of the list: Guelph, Western, Athabasca, Algoma (just look it up). In fact, although I never took a class there, I got to know the University of Calgary pretty well too. I'm a serial student. I have 5 student numbers! 5 Student emails!]

[Editor's Note #2: Wait-listed at Dal. Well, Toronto wants me, so there Halifax!]