pickles and pretzels

I bought a jar of pickles from Wegman's a couple weeks ago. The Wegman's we have here in Syracuse is supposedly the biggest one in Central New York. And boy is it huge! It's bigger than the mega Loblaws back home and I actually got a little lost by myself when I was there. Well, that's what happens when you're hungry and you enter a ginormous supermarket... you get lost in the food. :) So ever since that trip, my jar of pickles had been sitting in the fridge. Every time I opened the door I would stare at the pickles, decide that I wanted to eat them, then attempt to open the jar. But to my disappointment, I could never open the stinkin jar!!! This is due to a combination of factors: 1) the size of my toddler hands; 2) my non-existent strength; and 3) all jars are made with a nat-proof seal.


Now, what pushed this predicament into the possible temper tantrum territory was that I always had the craving at a certain point in the day when NO ONE ELSE WAS HOME. The first few times, I just shrugged it off and put them back in the fridge. But by the third week, I had to hold myself back from getting on my knees and shouting NOOOOOO at the top of my lungs. (I have to admit, I let myself have a little diva moment and stomped my foot once. Ha.) I just could never remember to ask my roommates for help when they were home. I had tried the hot water trick, the rubber gloves trick, and different physical maneuvers, but nothing worked. Thank goodness my roommate came home early one day and saw me trying to pound the jar until it opened (I really did try everything). Since then, I've been munching on pickles and pretzels. Salt overload. :)


This week has been sort of gross, but it's finally the holidays!!! :) I have a few days off to relax (the majority of the faculty and some students are going to a national conference, so classes are cancelled). Then after Monday and Tuesday is US Thanksgiving! It's more than just one day! (gasp) and it's full of SALES!!! (gasp x2). But I'm coming home, haha. Thank goodness for online shopping.... Heh heh heh. My wonderful friends here in Syracuse are going to have an awesome Turkey Dinner. Here are some random pictures of us at little pub:

Another random tidbit: I spent most of my weekend having an unintentional Harry Potter marathon. I had so many things due this week. But the more I felt stressed, the more I watched. Hehe... :)
'abc' has 2 channels in the states (normal abc with grey's anatomy and another channel called abc family). abc family plays movies every night... so distracting!!! Anyway, I am soooooooo excited for the new Harry Potter movie coming out. I can't wait until I get a chance to visit the theme park! Good thing I was able to catch the special Harry Potter Exhibit at the Ontario Science Center during the summer. Did you? 


Well I hope you have a wonderful non-Canadian thanksgiving non-holiday!


HUGS AND KISSES,
nat :)


P.S. If you were wondering, my roommate got the jar open by using a butter knife as a lever. I TRIED IT MYSELF BEFORE THAT, BUT IT DIDN'T WORK! As they all say, I must have loosened the jar for her. Har har har... :(

why am i sooooo bad at blogging? haha

It's been foreeeever since I've been able to write a blog post. Things are getting pretty busy with midterm season and I can't wait to get back to Toronto for American Thanksgiving. But at the same time it stinks... because I'm going to be missing black friday shopping when I actually live in the States! Before I was at Syracuse, I would beg my parents every year to go black friday shopping with me in the States. Well, I guess it'll be good for my credit card. 
Anyway, since it's been so long since I've posted, I have built up quite a collection of random pictures that I'll have to show you guys as I keep posting (even though the pictures will be from awhile back haha). 
Here's some randomness for today: the SU bookstore! :)


The bookstore hardly sells books. When you walk in, it's just a sea of orange and blue stuff for you to spread more school spirit.

Other than the very cute Victoria's Secret 'Pink loves Syracuse' clothes they sell at the book store, they also sell designer denim and UGGs!!! Haha...

Look what other cute things they sell! Hehe...

So I've been pretty swamped with work lately. I'm currently going back on forth and whether or not I should start a thesis. I came to Syracuse because I love the clinical aspect of speech therapy and there's an awesome university clinic for us to work from, but I also love the research side of the profession. A thesis would be a great way for me to see if I might want to pursue more schooling in the future, but there's so much work and it's super challenging! In the meantime, I have a pile of assignments due next week that are waiting for me. Yuck. 
I'm really missing home and the taste of good asian food... pho here costs $7 per bowl! Isn't that ridiculous??? Haha, can't wait to get back to First Markham food court. :)
Well to leave y'all, here's a picture of me eating (of course, am I ever not eating?) in my Halloween costume. Hehehe... can you tell what I dressed up as?

I'm the classic version of Hello Kitty!!! :) Hehehe...

Ok miss you guys!!! I'll try to update a bit more frequently.

xxxxxoooo nat

ECSTATIC!!!

I walked all the way home from clinic with a grin from ear to ear. I probably scared a few people because I'm basically about to explode in my excitement!!! Do you ever giggle to yourself while walking down the street because you thought of something funny or AWESOME? Well okay it's probably an only child thing. Or just me. Ha. It took a lot of strength to suppress my urge to skip all the way home, but I'm feeling like a rock star because I just had my first session with my first CLIENT!!! I have my own client! Ahh!!! :) It feels great to feel that I'm finally in the right place at the right time. I was only drifting along in my undergrad years, where the only thing I was sure about was how I wasn't sure about anything. Well, the Lord sure is faithful. I know my weird path of Kin to SLP in the States was necessary. :) 

My crazy urge to open the window and tell everyone on the street how great my session was actually came as a displacement of my nervous energy. And I mean SUPER nervous energy. I had been driving myself nuts just thinking and preparing for this one-hour slot. At first, I was a little sad that I was assigned a supervisor whose method of teaching me how to do the session was just throwing me out to the sharks right off the bat. I had heard from my other friends that all the other supervisors were extra gentle and warm to help calm their nerves. Some of them even offered to sit in during their first session! Given my lack of experience in the field as the actual therapist, I felt really lost and just plain not ready. I didn't sleep that well last night, so I woke up early and still, nothing could distract me. 

So I went shopping. 

Have I ever mentioned the power of H&M? There's nothing like a new fall collection to take your mind off... anything! 

I went to do a little price adjustment and to use my 20% off an item coupon from the iPhone app. Woohoo! :) 

That little trip definitely helped clear my mind (and nerves). After I got home, I knew I was prepared for the session, so I picked out a fun 'office appropriate & good luck' outfit and put on my "Graduate Student Clinician" magnetic name tag (that makes me feel super important, by the way). In the end, the client was super awesome and I got good feedback from my supervisor! Hence, the excitement. 

Hooray for a great day! :)

miss you

nat

it's too hot to go to school

          I can't believe I just finished my first week of grad school. The weather has been ridiculously hot-- so hot, that I've spotted quite a few people lounging around in nothing but bikinis and boardshorts on campus all throughout the week. You'd think this was the west coast with a beach nearby! With weather this deceivingly beautiful, it's hard to get my mind into school mode. But at this level, there's no time (or money!) to waste... we already have assignments due next week. Then again, it was only the first week of school, so there was still time to have a little fun. :)

It was my birthday on Tuesday and Camille and Jo were nice enough to stop by Syracuse on their way back up from NYC. This city may not be known for much more than its university, but if you google 'places to visit in Syracuse', the restaurant that we ate at will probably come up. Dinosaur BBQ is featured in the show Man vs. Food, haha. Have you seen that episode? Here's a link to an article about it:

http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2010/06/man_v_food_at_dinosaur_bar-b-q.html

So if you like BBQ ribs, ribs, ribs... come visit and I'll take you there! :)

The next day, 10 of us speech girls went to go celebrate my birthday and we went to watch The Switch at the mall. The little kid definitely made the whole movie, but it was a little hard to concentrate on the story line when closeup shots of Jennifer Aniston kept me pondering about how much work she's had done on her face. Especially in the mouth area. There was just something off about it that kept distracting me! Haha... :( We ended our low-key night by heading back to Marshall Street and having some frozen yogurt at Insomnia Cookies. Yum! :)

Well, looking back at this past week's beautiful weather, I wanted to share some of the campus' beauty with y'all. Enjoy! :)

One of the many paths on campus

Even the backs of random buildings have character!

The Life Sciences Building

The Alumni Building

The beautiful Lyman Hall

Ernie Davis Hall... a university residence!

The ground floor is a stunning... cafeteria! 

The steep hill to my class.
I burn lots of calories every time I walk home.  :)

Lots and lots of frat houses 

My apartment! :)

South Campus

South Campus again :)

xxxxxoo,

nat

love love love and the new york state fair!

Hi everyone! :)

I love you all so much and I'm so excited that you've all been asking me about everything that's been going on in Syracuse. So instead of telling the same stories a billion times, I've decided to blog about my adventures here so that I can reach everyone at once. I miss all of you back home a lot, but I've been adjusting surprisingly well to syracuse. Don't worry, I haven't abandoned all my Canadian-ness just yet. But I'm really loving the super nice people in my program and the program itself! Now I can see why God has led me to this school. :)

We moved in on the Saturday the 20th and it poured like crazy the next day. Thank goodness we didn't have to move in on Sunday... it was practically flooding! My loving family and Jacky's loving family helped me move in and we made the most of the weekend by visiting the mall and trying out some random asian restaurants in the area to see if they were any good. Ha. The chinese restaurant on Marshall was really terrible. I also met my 3 roommates - a sweet girl from Tennessee and two fabulous girls from NYC and LA who studied interior design on the Upper East Side. After my loved ones left to go back to Toronto, I spent some time exploring some stores I had always wanted to go to like Ulta and... Target!!! I looooooove Target! I could spend hours there just exploring the aisles of cheap goodness. Haha. The prices are comparable to Walmart, but the quality seems to be a bit better. I mean, 15 cents for a notebook! Amazing!!!! Haha :)

I got to meet some wonderful people at orientation. There was one other asian girl in my program and surprise, surprise, she's from Canada. Toronto, actually. And to be more specific, she's on Hwy 7!!! What a small world eh? I'm so excited to have met her and all the other nice girls in the program from all over (from little towns in the state to Cali!).

We went to the New York State Fair on the weekend. I was a little sad this year about missing CNE, but man, this place put the CNE to shame. Haha. Rihanna and Travis McCoy were having a concert that Saturday night that we went, but there was just to much to do and EAT to watch them! (Other randos performing at the fair were Aerosmith, Justin Bieber, Sean Kingston, Tim McGraw, Styx, and some American Idol people like Katharine McPhee). As we all know, food in the States is... different. I mean, they allowed KFC to come out with this 'burger' that uses fried chicken to replace the hamburger buns. It has bacon and cheese in the middle! Some of the food at the fair was absolutely disgusting (they deep fry everything!!!), but hey, you're only young once, so I tried some awesomeness. :P

The first and most nasty thing I ate at the fair was... a fried oreo!

Everyone keeps asking about how it tastes and I hate to admit it... but it was SOOOOO GOOD. I also ate a 'state fair must-have' called a blooming onion. They basically take a whole onion and slice it in such a way so that it looks like a blooming flower. And of course, it's deep fried. It came with horse radish and it was also disgustingly good.

I also shared lots of other junk with the girls like funnel cake, roasted corn, and kettle corn.

Lemonade was seriously old fashioned lemonade: ice, water, freshly squeezed lemon. It was so sour!

We also tried wine slushies! I had a strawberry flavoured one, which was yummy, but a bad idea because I hadn't eaten a lot at this point. Yikes.

But I saw some other things at the fair that just felt so... American. Like these pictures, for instance.

A giant rat? Really?

The classic 'Miss Something or the other'.

Apparently, they had the world's smallest horse. And it was supposed to be smaller than a bale of hay. Really. Ha.

A cute bird that was dipped in pink koolaid and a cute pink tractor driven by an old lady in pink.

Anyway, I had a great time hanging out with these awesome girls and I can't wait till we go out again! I will leave you with this picture of a huge vendor at the fair... that spelled Syracuse wrong. Seriously?

Haha, love y'all.

xx nat