Me weekends.... yarrr

With the flurry of activity that have been my last couple weekends, I think it's time I get off my lazy arse and publish something here. Vaughn is putting me to shame writing deep poetry and expounding on politics every third day. I'm feeling the pressure.

Two weekends ago a big chunk of my class and a good number of the second years headed out to Quebec City for a little thing called Medgames which is a weekend of athletic competition between medical students. Schools from Manitoba east come, and since it's in Quebec, the Quebec schools tend to have the largest representation.

Now Western's reputation precedes them. We usually send a huge group of people (check) sign up for lots of sports (check) and then default all our games because people are usually too hung over from last night's party to get up to play (check). I broke with Western's tradition and participated in as many sports as possible. A waterpolo game where only 7 people showed up. That's a LOT of swimming. In fact, I've never felt like I was going to drown as much as for that 40 minutes. Our frisbee team consisted of three troopers in the foot of snow and pouring rain playing a team of 6. Let it be known we had a 2-1 lead and held them at 2-2 for most of the first half. I hopped back in the pool to participate in a 4×50m freestyle relay, and played some volleyball. But the real kicker of it all was when I got up early Sunday morning to go watch other people, and while waiting for the 4×200m track team to run we realized that there was no 4×200m track team. Except one guy. So me and another guy hop down to the track, in our jeans, and run the relay. By some stroke of genius I was chosen to run anchor. We actually maintained second place by about 3 feet at the handoff to my leg. I pushed hard around the corner, but it became apparent as this chiseled, short-short-wearing guy in spikes blew by me on the back straight that I was quite outclassed. I believe I yelled something like "Hey! That's not fair! You run track!" at him, though I'm not sure he understood me. Language barrier and all that.

The weekend was a blast, and though I ended up making the decision to play more sports and see less of the city, my view out the hotel window indicated that Quebec seemed like a cool place. I'll have to go back sometime.

Which brings us to this past weekend. Sunday a group of people from our class went to a Pistons game. My first foray into the world of professional basketball was a pretty good game. Our seats were up high, but the view was still good. The game was close, a rarity for the Pistons lately, and we even had hope of it getting pushed to overtime, but the Pistons triumphed by two. The atmosphere at the game is pretty fun, maybe not as crazy (except in our section) as I might have thought, but the game was a blast. We stopped off in Windsor at a bar and then headed back late. I even made 8:30 class... at least in body.

In between exciting weekends I still go to class a lot, work on the admissions video, and whittle away the rest of my time doing who knows what.

Thus ends the Art report.

Winnipeg, here we come

This past weekend I got to head out to Winnipeg. You might think that a free trip to Winnipeg for a weekend would get people jumping, with the competition for spots being fierce. And that's where you'd be wrong. However, 5 brave volunteers represented Western at the CMDS (Christian Medical and Dental Society) Western Canada conference. Which begs the question "why are you going to a Western Canada conference?" The simple answer to which is that because the conference was in Winnipeg, they figured us east people were so close they'd just invite us too.

Anyway, Friday afternoon, off to Toronto and the snowy north. Meet Vaughn and Peter Allen at the airport in Winnipeg for a great 45 minutes of hanging out that involved Slurpees and cake and then off to Camp Assiniboia.

The weekend was a good experience. Meeting lots of other med students (and a few token dentists; it would appear that the overwhelming majority in our group is constant) who share faith was cool. The weirdest thing about the weekend was the fact that it really felt like a return to the old days of going on youth retreats. Frankly being at a Mennonite camp and singing and having sessions and all that stuff almost made me feel like I was back then, but once in a while I'd be reminded that I was there with other meds, such as when we did case discussions, and somehow the whole experience felt like ramming and old part of my life into the new part. Which I think is a good thing, it just felt a little odd at times when I'd suddenly become aware of it.

The speaker was pretty good. Really philosophical, we're talking some high level theology going on. Lots of logic, and references to C.S. Lewis, and defining words and Greek and Latin and Chinese and other amazing stuff. If you could follow him and stay with him and catch most of the references he was making there was some really good stuff to get out of it. My main criticism is that when things get really philosophical they can become almost inapplicable in life. And for myself I usually try and see the practical in most things. Though I enjoy the beautiful parallels that (for example) he drew between Lord of the Rings and modern society his talk about everyone being called to sainthood, and sainthood being of the heart, with no concrete method or even decision that can be made to bring it about can be kind of frustrating to attempt to use in life. His other interesting characteristic was being Catholic, and really attempting to show some Catholic doctrine as very important, including some stuff I wasn't too sure about. The bottom line is he made some very convincing arguments about a lot of stuff I'd really never thought about before, so it was nice to stretch the brain a bit.

We had some free time on Saturday afternoon, the highlight of which was doing a high ropes course thingy. This is all with the belaying system and whatnot. The one was a climb up thing with rope laddery sections and tires and 4×4's and stuff up to around 45 feet, and the other, more challenging, involved a "tightrope" of cable with ropes hanging down from above about every 6 or 8 feet, so you walked across with the ropes to stabilize you. The second half of that part was a bunch of small wooden "swings" attached above you that you could put one foot in and had to move across sideways. Hard to picture I'm guessing, this might help you out. Lots of fun, remarkably hard on your grip strength, leaving me with amazingly sore forearms for a couple hours.

Ok, this post is now long, I'll end it here.

Christmas past

Holidays are over, which right now means so is my vacation from posting here. Who knew two weeks could be so short.

It was a wonderful two weeks though. Lots of time spent with family and friends, all very relaxing. We put the tree up as a family, something I've missed out on the last few years with exams going later. As usual my family worked through the regime of board games at home, including a couple new ones we kids gave our parents for Christmas. My success rate was rather low, but I did take Scrabble, Yatzee and most of the Settlers games we played. To be fair, I was teaching them Settlers...

I also have a good friend who has decided to move to Edmonton, so this break was my last chance to see him for the near future. Don't worry, it wasn't one of those emotional goodbyes; we both know that MSN was our primary mode of communication over the previous 200km distance. It should be just as effective over 4000. And since, according to said friend, I don't have a soul, I shouldn't have to worry about missing him or anything like that. All joking aside, it will be very different not to see him regularly, but now I have an excuse to go to Edmonton!

Well, besides all the good food and good singing and good weather (that's a lie) that's about what happened on my Christmas break.