Wishing my Mom a very Happy Birthday today :)
Up at 6.30am and I'm telling you I was not a happy camper. There is not enough hours in the night for me to get a good night sleep over here. I went in for genetics today and I was barely able to keep myself awake I decided to go home and try and catch up on some sleep. But my room was absolutely boiling. I think there's like underground heating under my bedroom cause when I got back the place was absolutely roasting. I slept like crap even with my window open a crack. I didn't sleep cause my room was too hot so I finished off my homework that's due in for 5pm today. Struggled through it and I wasn't able to 100% finish it but I tried my best and just submitted it. I then sorted out my pictures from my Seattle trip and put them on Facebook. I Facetimed home to wish Mom a happy birthday and also tell them about my fun trip over the weekend. I then sat down and started on my Seattle blog. I had to get it done cause my blog usually gets posted Tuesdays or Wednesdays so that meant getting all four days typed up today and plugging the pictures into the blog also. Took me about an hour to get it all together. Our printer is also out of ink, completely out of ink, so I took a run over to Best Buy and bought some, as well as doing a bit of food shopping for the essentials.
Tuesday March 17th
HAPPY SAINT PATRICK'S DAY EVERYONE!
Celebrating St. Patrick's Day a little differently this year.. No parade, no craic with family/cousins and also no extravagant amounts of alcohol this year.. It's a quiet one! Had two classes today and I made it to both! (Even after 10 hours of sleep I'm still exhausted after the weekend!). Seeing people around campus wearing green is brilliant. Apparently there's a tradition over here that if you don't wear green on 'St. Patty's Day' you get pinched. We had our first ever pop quiz in recreation behaviour. Yes, you heard me. A pop quiz. We had another group discussion in class again today and this time, the group opted for a trivia style which was great. We called our team the Paddy's. First off Ian wrote our name as Patty's on the board but we corrected him :P Our team ended up winning the quiz (our prize was to do an Irish jig, we said no....). This evening, Fiona and I were invited over to my Missoula families house to have dinner. The menu today was a traditional American-Irish corned beef and cabbage dinner. Now before ye start gagging at the sound of it, it was absolutely delicious! The corned beef is not the type of corned beef we at home put in our sandwiches, it's pink beef that looks exactly like the bacon we'd usually have with cabbage (or turnip if you live in my house :P ). Shannon also made soda bread which was INCREDIBLE. We had roast potatoes and also some sort of potatoes that were baked in a sauce and they were insanely good! And as well as this incredible dinner, Shannon had made bread pudding (which is apparently an Irish dessert?!) and she also made an unreal chocolate mousse cake type thing. It was amazing!
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| The table all set up :) |
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| Corned Beef and Cabbage Dinner! <3 |
So I'm still absolutely exhausted after the weeeknd.. Trying to catch up on sleep, I'll get there eventually :P Had genetics, nothing that exciting and then had ornithology, also not that exciting :P I came home and had some of the soda bread that Shannon gave me from yesterday evening as lunch and then I sat down and scrolled through some of my rangeland ecology notes for my exam tomorrow - not fun! I watched the new episode of Supernatural tonight while going through my rangeland notes and doing some last minute cramming for this exam.
Thursday March 19th
Today we had our bird quiz as per usual and then afterwards we went out and did some bird watching. We saw song sparrows, a northern flicker, some European starlings (that are invasive), we saw some black-capped chickadees and we also saw American robins, which I might add are HUGE in comparison to our little robins back at home. Then in the next hour off I spent it reading over some more notes for my rangeland exam, not sure what to expect for it to be honest. I'm hoping it won't be that hard. It ended up being okay. I've sat exams that have gone worse and I've sat exams that have gone better so I hope I do okay in it.
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| *photo from Google images* - A Northern Flicker |
We had recreation behavior after this which consisted of us listening to another groups presentation. After this class I had a meeting with my group to discuss our presentation which will be happening on next Tuesday. We are presenting a paper about the satisfactions people get from marine recreational fishing. We are incorporating a game into ours to hopefully keep the class interested and we plan to ask them a lot of questions also to keep their attention and possibly award them with sweets for answering our questions. I'm happy with my group we had a lot of laughs so it was fun! :D
After this I went straight home and had my last slice of homemade soda bread that Shannon made me before making my chicken enchiladas for dinner :D
This evening, Sarah was throwing a surprise party for Austin at our apartment so friends of Fiona and I were over and friends of Austins also came over as well as his family. It was a really nice relaxed night and lots of laughs were had listening to Austins Dad talking about his stories from the military.
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| Sarah with Austin's cake :) |
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| The gorgeous Oreo cake :D |
I didn't sleep at all last night, my room was way too hot (again) and I was awake from 4-5am and then opened my window to try and cool it down some bit.. I ended up not going to my lectures this morning simply cause I was so tired. I'll be able to catch up anyway in no time this afternoon so I'm not worried. So today was basically spent hopping from one homework assignment to the next. I started off with my rangeland ecology summaries and then moved onto doing some genetics homework as well as working on my part of the group project that's to be done next Tuesday. All fun and games! I did get one summary done and half of the genetics homework done today so I guess that's progress at some level?
This evening, I got pizza from Albertsons for dinner and it was square. My pizza tray was round. It bothered me so much! Can I say first world problems or what?! Hahaha.
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| First World Problems -_- |
Waking up at 6.30am on a Saturday is never cool. I had left my window open last night to try and keep my room cool but that didn't work so I had to open it even more this morning. That did the trick and I slept soundly until the doorbell rang at like 10 am or something? I think it was Kate cause her and Fiona had to go an file their taxes this morning. I went straight to work doing more of my rangeland summaries as well as working on my blog a little bit. So far I've had my 25th post and I also hit 1,500 views a week or two ago which is insane! Before I leave I would absolutely love it if I could hit 2,000 views but I think that's being a little ambitious of me seeing as views have slightly dropped in the last few weeks. But anywayssssss, today, Sarah, Fiona and I did a massive spring cleaning of the apartment today cause we have health inspections tomorrow.
I also got to Facetime Sarah from home today so that was nice to have a catch up! :) This evening, we went out to Best Buy and helped Kate buy her new camera (it's gorgeous!). We then went to a place called Cafe Rio Mexican Grill where we had a gorgeous dinner! I've never had Mexican food before so I wasn't ambitious, I went with a quesadilla cause I know what's involved with them :P And my god was the food to die for! We took a quick trip to the dollar store and then got dairy queen as dessert :) We're way too good to ourselves!
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| My Chicken Quesadilla :) |
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| Our Mexican Dinners! |
Sunday March 22nd
Woke up at about 9.30am and lay in bed for a while before getting up and showering. We've no idea what time our apartment inspection will be at but they're officially supposed to start at 11am. Absolutely gorgeous day today! I have to spend most of it inside on my laptop writing up a grant proposal for ornithology and also getting my part of the group project done before our group meeting at 4pm today. I'm hoping to get the proposal out of the way as fast as I can so I can start studying ahead of time for my exams. This round, I'm hoping to do a little better than last time although I'm really not that pushed about exams this semester. I feel like I do enough with the continuous assessment :P
We had our apartment inspection early this afternoon while we were all in the middle of studying. Everything was good, they showed us how to properly turn the heating off in our bedrooms so at least I won't be roasting at night anymore :P Nothing of interest happened this afternoon, I worked on my ornithology proposal got 3 out of the 5 pages done.. It's actually so hard to try and come up with stuff for it >.< At 5pm I had a group meeting and we were in the room together for two hours trying to sort out the activity we were going to do.
Monday March 23rd
Happy Monday everyone! Today, nothing very exciting happened, I had my usual 8 am genetics lecture followed by my 10 am ornithology lecture. I then went home and worked on my ornithology proposal that is due for wednesday at midnight. It's five pages long and has to include an introduction section, methods, and a summary/significance section also. I had my final group meeting for our presentation tomorrow which went very well! We had our meeting in the room which we would be doing the presentation so that really helped us all out. We drew up a practice board for jeopardy and also ran through what we would be doing. I got home roughly 6.15 pm today. Absolutely starving so had a quick dinner and then got doing some study -_- .
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| This was an example of some of the stuff in our group presentation :) |
11am start with rangeland ecology today. Then had an hour and a half off before heading over to do my presentation. Shayla and I got in a bit earlier and we got our board set up and we were ready to go! Libby wasn't teaching the class today as she went into labour so we have the Dean of the Forestry school - Mike Patterson teaching our class from now on. We got our presentation done which took roughly 40-45 mins so we were delighted with that. We enjoyed and someone said it was one of the more fun ones - yay!
This evening, I spent studying for my ornithology exam. I'm taking it tomorrow seeing as I won't be here on Friday so it's super nice of Kris to allow us to take it early! Pretty Little Liars was also on tonight! Season 5 finale. WE KNOW A'S NAME. This is huge! And already, the PLL fandom were out in force with theories. I can't wait for season 6 to come back in June!!
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| Delightfully rainy day today. It also snowed today too! What the hell Missoula?! |
Wednesday March 25th
Didn't go to my genetics lecture this morning seeing as it wouldn't be on the exam. And also, I wanted to cram for my ornithology exam.....but my alarm didn't go off.. I did manage to wake up at 7.40 am though, but I had planned to be up an hour earlier than this -_-. Oh well! Fiona and I met Kris at her office at 9 am. She brought us downstairs to the ornithology lab and gave us the exam to do in here.... UNSUPERVISED! I shit you not. The trust levels the lecturers here have in us is crazy! We had an hour to complete it and I got it done. I think it was okay, I can never tell with exams anymore. And also, seeing as 70% is considered a bad grade here it makes it incredibly hard to do well. But anyways. I had got a text from Shannon last night to call over if I had some time she had baked me some 'treats'. So during our hour off, Fiona and I strolled over there and outside Shannon's porch in a lunch box she made me what are called Devil Dogs. I'm not entirely sure what they are, but they taste nice! It's a tradition in her family that her Mom used to make them Devil Dogs before a holiday (vacation) which I thought is super sweet! I'm so spoilt rotten :P I met up with Kate for a while and then came back home and sat down to some study. I'm cramming for my genetics exam that I have tomorrow so that should be fun! That is all this evening consists of :P
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| Shannon's Homemade Devil Dogs :) |
Okay guys, so I'm leaving it at that for this week. Tomorrow (Thursday) is just going to be me studying, going to one class, and then taking my exam. After this, Kate, Desiree and I are going to get some Dominoes as well as taking a quick trip to Albertsons to stock up on some stuff ahead of Spring Break! Just like mini travel shampoos and stuff so that the weight of my bag isn't ridiculous :P
Thank you again ever so much for reading this weeks blog post! My next post will be about the couple of days I will have in San Francisco, and that will be followed by my Las Vegas trip afterwards - two separate posts because I'm hoping for a lot of pictures! Spring Break starts March 27th for us - we fly out from Missoula at 6.25 am and excited is an understatement! Cannot wait! I will be back in Missoula April 3rd so you can expect to see me back on Shannen's Travels within 3-4 days of getting back! So thank you very much again, and I shall see you soon <3
Thanks for reading,
- Shannen
