Blog Archives: October, 2004
Burnt Toast
STOP! Before you go any further, take a moment to pause and think about what the phrase “burnt toast” means to you.
Burnt toast… burnt toast…
Done? Okay, on with the show.
Over the past year, while I was in England, and now with lots of international graduate students around Waterloo, I have often found myself in a position of trying to explain what is “Canadian”. Usually I just give the standard answer.
But every once in a while, somehow the phrase “burnt toast” randomly comes up, and then I’m evangelizing that singularly Canadian institution, Canadian Heritage Minutes. If you’ve watched Canadian TV in the past ten years, you know what I’m talking about. There’s the story of how “kanata” probably refers to a village, not the nation; how a brave telegraph operator stopped a train from entering Halifax just as the 1917 explosion happened; and, of course, how burnt toast and epileptic seizures are connected.
So this afternoon, when a fellow (international) graduate student mentioned that her fire alarm doesn’t agree with her on what the definition of burnt toast is, I told her about the wonders of Canadian Heritage Minutes. We searched, and found all of the commercials available online. You can relive your memories of the naming of Canada anytime, and you can share with your friends!
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Midterm with a calculator
Last night I wrote the midterm for the mathematics of public-key cryptography course that I’m taking this term. For the first time in more years than I can remember, we needed a calculator for an exam. A calculator! In a math class! This cause quite the calculator-finding adventure. First I had to find my calculator, which hadn’t been used in probably 3 years. Then when I eventually found it, I discovered that its batteries were dead, and probably had been for the past 2 years. So I had to borrow a housemate’s calculator. And I also realized that calculators don’t actually have any useful functions on them. Sure, they have things like sin and cos, but who really uses those anyway? Where are things like mod or gcd, you know, things that really matter?
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Thankful for small graces
Although (Canadian) Thanksgiving has past and (American) Thanksgiving is still a month away, I still have a reason to be thankful: overcrowding at the University of Waterloo. More precisely, one of my midterms, scheduled for next Monday, has been rescheduled to over a week later because there are too many midterms happening that week. This works out well for me because I would have had a major assignment due on the same day as the midterm and not enough time to work on both. Score one for poor enrolment planning!
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Some training required
Yesterday I climbed the CN Tower again with Laura. It was a pretty successful venture all around. My time was 15:08, only 17 seconds off my best time of 14:51, and pretty considering I don’t feel that I was well-trained for this at all. (I think the secret to a good time is pacing.) Laura had a great time of around 23 minutes, nearly 7 minutes off her previous best time. And I managed to make fun of a Scotiabank vice-president who was climbing with us, so it was a quite successful evening. When I got back to Waterloo late last night, Heather and Chris had their wedding pictures back from the developer’s for me to look at — that required a bit of endurance too! But like I said before, it’s all about pacing.
I’ve started running with a friend from high school who was on the cross-country team with me then. So I should be in pretty good shape come next April, when the next CN Tower stair climb is. Or should I start considering some other major sporting activity? Half marathons? Long distance biking? What do you think?
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Autumn in Cape Breton
At the Murrays' I spent Thanksgiving weekend in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, attending Heather and Chris”s wedding. Heather lives on just about the north tip of Cape Breton, near a town called South Harbour (the view from her backyard is at left).
Our boat Most of my southwestern Ontario readers (except maybe those in Toronto) will know that the leaves are turning, and Cape Breton was no exception. The hills were blanketed with bright oranges and reds. I traveled with Matt and Cecilia. On Friday we went for a boat ride off the north tip of the island on a sailboat; the wind was calm enough that we didn’t get soaked, but we got to get around a bit and even see some whales.
Heather and Chris The wedding was on Saturday and it was quite beautiful. The ceremony and dinner were in a cute octagonal building along the coast. Heather got the groom’s party up to do some highland dancing and she and her brother played a fiddle duet after dinner. But don’t worry, there was a little bit of geek in the wedding — Cecilia, Matt, and I assembled a slide show of photos from Heather and Chris’ parents on our matching PowerBooks and iBooks.
Look! A bird! Oh yeah, a moose. On Sunday, we went hiking along the west coast of the island. We nearly got attacked by a family of moose. Well, not attacked really, so much as they were on the path when we were walking back and we waited until they left before we continued walking.
From the new Abercrombie catalogue. Order today! It seems, however, that life is demanding retribution from me for such a relaxing weekend away, and forced me to pull an all-nighter (the first of this degree! It’s a milestone!) last night to do quantum mechanics until 3:30 in the morning and then start marking. But all those assignments have been handed in, and tonight it’s a lazy night of blogging and sleeping. Check out the rest of my pictures from Cape Breton. I’ve put one extra here at the end, it’s my fashion model pose. Makes you want to buy that sweater, doesn’t it?
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No traveling
It seems that over the past year this has developed from me writing about a little bit of everything into a travel and picture log. And since I have temporarily turned in my World Traveler badge, I haven’t had much to write about lately. I’ll try to come up with some non-travel related things to say.
That being said, how about some travel information? A few weeks ago my parents and I went to the Stratford Festival to see their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was spectacular. I was in Toronto this past weekend visiting Laura and preparing for our CN Tower Stair Climb. And this weekend I’m off to Cape Breton for Heather Murray‘s wedding.
Glow in the dark magnetic tower I’ll be taking lots of pictures in Cape Breton, but hopefully I’ll also have a chance to label some of the existing pictures from trips this past summer. In the mean time, I’ll have to leave you with the only picture I’ve taken so far in Waterloo. It’s of a magnetic tower our house built for our British-themed party in September. See, it’s a tower. And towers are British. Get it?
