Feels like home to me

So I spent the weekend with my family in Edmonton. We were there celebrating my grandmother's 85th birthday in what was basically a 48-hour party, though the official shindig was only 4 hours long. It was amazing, I got to see my old boss and my Edmonton friends and have great visits with my family and see some people I hadn't seen in over 9 years.
Feels like home to me.

-Laur

Skills

So I got my new camera almost a month ago and it has been so much fun to play with. Please enjoy these pictures from the last few days, including Princess Xander under the patio table. It was actually too hot for him. What a princess.

-Laur

A year of firsts

On Saturday I went to my first friend wedding. My dear friend Marisa Williams became Mrs. Josh Tierney. When I think about it my first instinct is to scream in terror, because I AM SO NOT READY, but it wasn't my wedding, and Marisa was ready. And now she's someone's wife.
I think it's so cool that she got married. She planned the whole event so perfectly, and it looked so beautiful and I know everyone there had such a great time. She should be so proud.
Today she and Josh flew to Paris for a 2-week honeymoon. I know they're going to have the most amazing time.

-Laur

It's not every day

that you find an elephant in front of a museum. Not a taxidermied, stuffed woolly mammoth, but a real, live African elephant wearing a sign around its middle. No joke. I was at OISE for an interview-type thing and when I was finished I decided to take my new camera (yes, I bought it yesterday after school) for a walk over the the Royal Ontario Museum to take some pictures of the new building addition that I STILL haven't seen.
So I'm walking along and I inhale through my nose (something I try not to do downtown because my mucus turns grey, sorry for the TMI) and smelled...elephant. It's a very specific smell, elephant. I can't really describe it, but I can tell you that I've been to zoos with elephants enough times to identify that smell easily. So I look at the crowd forming down the street and lo and behold...an elephant.
Apparently the ROM is putting on an animal exhibit of some sort this summer and today was the kickoff; the Metro Toronto Zoo was kind enough to donate the time of some handlers and 1 large African elephant, 1 juvenile male Bengal tiger, 1 Grevy's zebra, 1 massive Clydesdale horse and a 1 tiny and spunky Shetland pony for the cause.
I was so close to that elephant that if I had stood in line long enough, I could have had the chance to feed it a pellet of hay and touch it. I was scared, I'm not going to lie, so I didn't do it. Now I really wish I had. I did take a bunch of pictures, though, until my battery died (first time, had to drain it) and I went back to the subway instead of going into the museum.
What an adventure!
-Laur

The upshot...

Well, it's all over. It's amazing how a person can spend months building up to a certain day and then feel slightly bereft, because a day is only 24 hours no matter how you shake it.
Ed Formal is over and I feel bereft. Not in a weepy, unhappy kind of way, just in a gently missing kind of way.
The evening was AMAZING; from an organizer's point of view, it could not have gone any better. Dinner wasn't right on schedule but everyone got to eat, so there were no complaints; the music was good even though the DJ didn't stick to the playlist I gave him, and the professional photographer took hundreds of pictures. Both Don Dippo, the Associate Dean of Education and Steve Sedran, FESA's president, gave great speeches despite the lack of attention coming from one particular side of the room. Even the seating plans were relatively uneventful, again with the exception of one particular site.
We sold raffle tickets and gave away some gorgeous prizes, photos from the school in Kenya we support as well as several pieces of African art, and finally, everyone was very vocal in how much they enjoyed themselves.
On a sad note, there were a number of thefts committed at the event, one of them involving my own faithful pink Kodak V803 digital camera, so bye-bye pictures. My friends have been super about sharing their pictures with me, but it's not the same. I'm eyeing a Canon SD1200IS (yes, the one from the commercial with Avril Lavigne) as a replacement, but I'm going to have to cut into my Europe fund to get it. I can't go to Europe without a camera, after all.
There will be more pictures eventually, but for now I have to focus on my last 3 days of placement, my final evaluation, applying to more boards and cleaning my disgusting sty of a bedroom.

Forever in blue,

-Laur

Won't you please, please, please let me get what I want

I feel like I've been waiting for this day forever. Everything that I've been doing for FESA since January has been geared toward May 15th, and in 20 minutes...well, it will be May 15th.
In the words of Penny Lane in Almost Famous, "It's all happening".
Tomorrow night Ed Formal 2009 will coalesce into red and black sparkle and shine, a ballroom full of music, lights and 500 people will spread out before me and I will be, for one brief evening, sitting on top of the world.
I hope it's amazing.
Won't you please, please, please let me get what I want.

-Laur

P.S. Grey's Anatomy just broke my heart.

Someday I'll fly away

I'm going to Europe this summer. Isn't that just awesome?
Here is the trip I'm going on: European Highlights. I'll see England (but I'll be arriving 5 days in advance so I can take my time), France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands before coming back to London for an evening and flying home the next day.
I'm so, so excited. I think it's going to be so much fun!
Here are some pictures of some of the places I'm going to see: