Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Remember that time I told you about Farm To Fork? Would you believe that they are down to the last 2 days of their crowd sourcing fundraising campaign? And so far, they’ve managed to raise – at the time of writing this blog posting – $10,990 of the $15,000 that they need to do the great work that they are proposing to do.

In case you haven’t read my previous posting, what they are proposing to do is, simply put, to connect people who have healthy foods to donate with the food banks that need those healthy foods to provide to the 1 in 40 Canadians who don’t have enough food to eat. Yes, you read that right – 1 in 40 Canadians use food banks every month.

Raising $10,990 is a pretty amazing feat – but they need $15,000 and they need it now! So check out the Farm to Fork project and consider making a donation - whatever amount you can spare – today!

Tags: charity, doing good, Farm to Fork project, food banks, food security, nutrition

Why can’t every weekend be a long weekend?

This weekend was so freaking wonderful. I mean, there weren’t any crazy awesome adventures, or really even any hijinks, and barely any shenanigans. But there was sleeping in – a big plus to any weekend, in my humble opinion¹ – and there was a nice combination of relaxation and getting shit done.

Friday night I did a whole lot of nothing. It was awesome.

Saturday I ran 18 km with Alicia, followed by brunch. We planned our route such that we ended up at the Tap & Barrel, where a couple of other friends also planned their run to finish². Alicia’s hubby met us there with their kids, and good brunch times were had by all. After that I had to go home, quickly shower and get ready to head back to Vancouver for Kalev’s birthday bash^3,4, which consisted of seeing the new Star Trek movie⁵, dinner at Banana Leaf, drinks at Craig’s, then clubbing at Junction. And here’s the awesome present that I got for Kalev:

In the box is a mug with a bunch of famous gay people on it, but you only see them when there’s hot liquid in the mug. Without hot liquid, you just see a bunch of closet doors.

*Extra* old.

He seemed to really like the mug, but didn’t seem overly impressed with the “Extra Old” rum^6,7.

Sunday was a day of homework. Because I had two papers due on Sunday, plus a bunch of other homework that I had to work on. I also watched the Penguins-Senators game because apparently hockey is still happening⁸. It was quite an exciting game, despite it being low scoring. The goaltenders were both outstanding⁹.

Today, after a glorious sleep-in, I had some pancakes for breakfast, then went out for a run along the pier, where I was chased by zombies. And then I got a whole bunch of domestic shit done – groceries and laundry and meal planning and picking my outfits for this week¹⁰, AND, mostly importantly, I finally got around to moving most of my office stuff from my living room to my spare room, which is now my office¹¹. It’s not totally set up yet – I’ll take some photos once it is – but my desk, filing cabinets and bookshelf are all in the right places¹² and I’m sitting at my desk typing this. It’s pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.

And now, alas, the weekend has come to an end. But this week is looking like it will be a good one – it’s only 4 days long¹³, I have a massage appointment after work tomorrow AND then I get my new teeth on Wednesday! And there are some interesting meetings to be attended and interesting projects that I’m working on, so I think it will be a good week. And now I am off to hit the hay!

1. Something I don’t get nearly as much as I like these days! In fact, for the next month the only weekend I’m not in class is the weekend that I’m going to the Island to run the half marathon, so I’ll have to get up early on the Saturday to catch the ferry and then early on Sunday to run the race. It’s madness, I tells ya. Madness! [↩]
2. They are training for the Scotiabank half marathon, which is a few weeks after the one that Alicia & I are running, so they had to run a 14 km today rather than an 18 km. [↩]
3. Even though Kalev’s birthday isn’t for another 8 days, he celebrated it this weekend ‘cuz I’m not available for the next one billion weekends. [↩]
4. The ample Skytrain riding that day gave me lots of time to do some homework. Hooray for multitasking. [↩]
5. My movie review: I liked how lots of stuff blew up. Yay! [↩]
6. I make myself LOL! [↩]
7. Kalev’s ample rum supply, almost half of which appears to have come from me, has prompted talk of a rum-based party. And my half birthday is coming up soon. So stay tuned for that! [↩]
8. Who knew? [↩]
9. In related news, I totally have a crush on PJ Stock. [↩]
10. #mayehalth ftw! [↩]
11. It used to a guest bedroom/Devon’s office, and my “office” was the back of the living room. The living room gets a lot more sunlight, but it’s nice to have a separate space for work, where I can shut the door on my work when I don’t want to think about it. [↩]
12. Plus, I figured out which outlet the wall switch controls in this room, so now I plugged the floor lamp into that outlet and can now turn the light on much more easily than before. Hooary! [↩]
13. Well, except for the fact that I have school all weekend, and then work all the next week and then school *again* the following weekend, so it’s a 13-day week for me. Crap. [↩]

Tags: birthdays, long weekends, random stuff, running

Where does the time go? I keep thinking about things I want to blog about, but then suddenly 9 days go by and I haven’t blogged a thing! I can give you all the usual excuses – work is busy, school is busy, being on my own means I now have to do all my chores for myself… but blah, blah, blah. Whatevs. I’m here now and in an attempt to get all the things I’ve been meaning to blog about out of my head, here’s a rapid fire blog posting of All The Things.

In The Latest Froggy News:

The final two frogs do, in fact, have names. As you may recall, I named three of my five new frogs: Copernicus the Second, Froggymodo, and Apricot. The final two frogs are named Count Frogula¹ and Beyoncé².

In the Trying To Be Healthy Department:

MayHealth is going swimmingly. It’s actually been quite helpful to me to be organized on these two tasks – meal planning and laying out my outfits for the week on Sunday – as I now don’t feel stressed out having to make these two simple decisions every day. Plus, my meals are much healthier when I actually plan them out, because I’ve given some thought to making them balanced, as opposed to making a decision solely based on BETH HUNGRY!

Training for my half marathon in June is also coming along. Due to the aforementioned omg-I’m-so-busy, I’ve really only been doing the long runs on the weekend, and maybe one other short run during the week. So I’m not expecting to break any records, but I’m sure I’ll be able to finish! I’ve done the last several long runs with Alicia, which has been awesome, because (a) it’s really nice to have company when you have to run for ~2 hours, and (b) Alicia is in much better shape than me, so I’m having to push myself to try to keep up for as long as I can. I’m not really great at pushing myself, so I need the extra inspiration!

In the Things-I-Missed Department:

Yesterday was my car-iversary! Little Zaphod Beeblebrox the Car is 4 years old³! They grow up so quickly.

In the Distraction Department:

Dr. Cath, when we were out for dinner and beers and absolutely no other reason whatsoever the other night, introduced me to an app called Rando. The idea behind the app is that you take a photo and Rando sends it off to some random person in the world who also uses the app. For every photo you send, you get one in return from some random person in the world. If said random agreed to have their location revealed, you will get to see where in the world that photo came from too. So far, I seem to be getting a lot of photos from South Korea, though I’ve also gotten ones from Texas, Brazil, and Paraguay.

In The Knocking Goals Off My List Department:

I’ve been slacking on some of my goals for the year, so to make myself feel better about that, I decided to use my May Health meal planning to help me work on my “make 10 new meals I’ve never made before” goal. So I actually made two new things I’d never made before last week alone! First, I made lamb shoulder chops on a George Foreman grill. Since I was being all organized and planning ahead, I even marinaded the lamb for 24 hours first. It was delicious. Next I made some bison stew! It was OK – the bison ended up a bit tougher than I would have liked and I thought that the stew itself could have been more flavourful (though putting in a bit of extra Worcestershire sauce gave it a nice little kick).

In the Colour-Me-Surprised Department:

There are some condos going up across the road from me and based on the drawings of what the building was supposed to look like, I thought that they were restoring the facade of the old ~ 6 story building that was there and then building a giant glass tower on top⁴. But apparently not, because they’ve completely demolished the whole building:

I’m hoping that they are going to at least build it to look like the old building, because I quite like how this neighbourhood looks, with the classic old buildings along the street.

On the plus side, for the moment at least, I have a much better riverview than I used to!

In the Ongoing Saga of My Teeth:

I just realized that I haven’t updated y’all on my teeth situation. The last time I mentioned them, I’d just gotten my prototype crowns and veneer and was soliciting your opinion on them. The next step was to go back to the dentist and tell her the things I didn’t like, which she then fixed⁵, so now my teeth are beautiful! Except they are still prototypes, as she had to take impressions of them to send off to a lab in Quebec, where they will make exact replicas of these beautiful teeth, except out of porcelain, which I have to go back to the dentist to have cemented onto my tooth stubs.

My appointment to get this done isn’t until next week and it’s super annoying because the prototypes are held in with “temporary” cement, which isn’t super-duper strong. A few days after my appointment to fix up the prototypes, the veneer fell off. The veneer pretty much just looks like a press-on fingernail, which gets “pressed on” to your tooth which has been shaved down a bit so that the veneer doesn’t stick out past your other teeth, so there’s not a lot of surface area to do the cementing (as opposed to crowns, which cover the entire tooth stump, so there’s tonnes of surface area). The day it happened my dentist was at a conference in Seattle because dental emergencies only happen when your dentist is out of town, and I had to call around to find a dentist whose office was open on a Friday afternoon and who could take a random stranger in to fix their tooth. I found one and she glued my veneer back on… which then fell off again about three hours later, even though I was being very careful and not biting with my front teeth or anything. She glued it on again the next morning and that time it lasted about 6 hours. At that point, I gave up on her as a lost cause, spent Sunday without a veneer⁶ and went to my own dentist first thing Monday morning. She glued it back on with some slightly stronger temporary cement, which held it on for 8 days. She glued it on yet again and, knock on wood, it seems to be holding up⁷. Ever since the first time it fell off, I’ve been very carefully not to eat anything that require biting with my front teeth – I just cut everything up with a knife and fork and put it in my mouth on the opposite side to the veneer, all the way back to my molars. On the plus side, I’m eating less because eating has become so very annoying, which is helping me with my weight loss goal. Also, I can’t bite my nails, so my nails are actually growing quite nicely. Poor tooth structure = everybody wins! (I’m sure as soon as I get my permenant crowns and veneers next week, it will all go back to the way it was before, and I’ll have my nails bitten down and gain back the little weight I’ve managed to lose!)

In the I Haven’t Been on a Proper Vacation in More Than Three Year Department:

This is a biggie and probably deserves its own blog posting, but who knows when I’m going to get back on here, so I figured I’d better say it now. I haven’t been on a proper vacation since I went to the Dominican Republic back in January 2010! I mean, I’ve been on road trips and I’ve been to Toronto (and Montreal) to visit my family several times since then, but I haven’t been on a real fly-to-somewhere-and-see-the-sights kind of trip. And, as I’ve lamented before, I’ve never left the continent. But all of that is about to change! I’ve booked off three weeks in August and, thanks in large part to a very nice tax return this year, I’m using that time to go to Europe! First stop will be four days in London, England, where I will be hanging out with my mom and two of my aunts, before we hop over to Dublin for our 11-day tour of Ireland! I’m Irish on my mom’s side, so I think it will be fantastic to explore our roots together! After that, my mom and aunts are heading back home, but I’d staying on an extra week. I haven’t yet booked what I’ll be doing during that time, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to go to Greece and relax on the beach. Because after two weeks of running around doing all sorts of touristy things, a week of relaxing in the extreme heat some like just what the doctor ordered.

So, yeah, that’s some stuff that I’ve been meaning to blog about since forever. And now I’m up past my bedtime and will probably regret staying up to write this when the morning comes. But it’s Friday AND it’s a long weekeend! Now I’m off to hit the hay!

1. Name courtesy of Dr. Dan, who earned the honour of being Count Frogula’s godfather for coming up with such a cromulent name. [↩]
2. To clarify, she was named after the performer and not the giant metal chicken. I feel the need to clarify, as I have been asked which of those two she was named after. *cough* Dr. Cath *cough* [↩]
3. She’s also fully paid off, which is pretty kick ass. [↩]
4. Which is how most of the buildings in my ‘hood are built, including the one I live in. [↩]
5. She just put some extra acrylic here and some extra acrylic there to add a bit of length to the ones that were too short and fill in the gap I didn’t like – and voila! [↩]
6. Translation: Hiding away from civilization so no one could see my horribleness. (OK, it actually wasn’t that bad, because it’s not like the hideous tooth stumps that are under my crowns. It’s just a bit too short and a bit far back compared to the other teeth and I don’t open my mouth wide when I talk or smile, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. But still). [↩]
7. It’s totally going to fall off again, now that I’ve said that. [↩]

Tags: cariversary, food, frogs, goals, random, travel

I had a weekend of classes this past weekend, with papers due and presentations to be prepped and oodles and oodles of case studies and book chapters to read. So, naturally, Thursday night I found myself baking¹.

I forgot to take a picture of the chocolate fudge oat bars that I made, but they pretty much looked like the picture on the page from which I took the recipe. They were made with all things bad for you – butter and white flour and sugar and sweetened condensed milk, which must be ounce-for-ounce the highest calorie substance on earth – and therefore were pretty tasty, if I do say so myself.

Procrastination FTW²!

1. I have a classmate who actually painted her house in the most productive bout of procrastinating – procrastipainting? – I’ve ever heard of, so in the grand scheme of things, baking is pretty minor. [↩]
2. Except in the losing weight department. Then it is a procrastination epic fail. [↩]

Tags: baking, chocolate fudge oat bars, procrastination

I’ve long been absentminded, but I can now add “Professor” on to that, for, as you will already know if you are linked in to me on Linked In, I have a shiny new title to add to my resume: Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Health Science at Simon Fraser University.

Adjunct Professor, unlike the regular kind, is a title that signifies that one is associated with the university through their professional work. For me, that includes collaborating with researchers, supervising practicum students, and hopefully doing some teaching as well¹. So I’m not quitting my day job, but rather awesome-ifying it² as one of the things that I really like to do is bridge the academic world with the world of health services, and this title signifies that bridge.

Dr. Snow, Absentminded Professor

1. I don’t have anything set up teaching-wise as of yet, but I have some ideas! [↩]
2. Well, I should say “further awesome-ifying it”, as it’s already pretty awesome. [↩]

Tags: academia, rampant narcissism, work

Where the hell did April go¹? It seems that tomorrow is the last day of the fourth month of the year. Which means that we are just one day away from the May Health Challenge!

As you may recall², last year some fine Guelphites put out a challenge to anyone who is awesome enough to take up said challenge. And that challenge is to set a small, but challenging, health-related goal for the month of May. And then tell people about it – because research shows that publicly stating your goals makes it more likely that you’ll stick to them. Last year, my challenges were to (a) eat breakfast every day³ and (b) do some kind of exercise every day⁴, as those were two things I’d found I’d fallen out of the habit of doing when I turned my life all topsy-turvy by taking on a part-time MBA program in addition to my full-time job. I’m happy to report that those habits seem to have stuck with me, as I am in a routine of eating breakfast most days and am actually on day 121 of consecutive days of doing some kind of physical activity⁵!.

For this year’s May Health Challenge, I decided to again look at what bad habits I’ve fallen into lately – and thus come up with an area where I can work on re-establishing a healthy routine⁶ and one thing immediately came to mind: I haven’t been making dinners at home very much recently. And when I do, they have more often than not been of the quick – and not quite as healthy – variety. In fact, reading Mark’s⁷ blog posting about his May Health Challenge, I saw this statement which pretty much sums up my dining of late:

I eat out because of convenience (laziness), a perceived lack of time (poor planning), or as a social event (I have good friends).

The thing is – I actually love to cook! I love to take fresh ingredients, chop them, mix them, season them, and make them into a feast of deliciousness! I like to put on some music and dance around the kitchen as I do so. On occasion, I even do so with a nice glass of wine. But lately I’ve just not been that organized, so even if I do feel like cooking something, I don’t have any of the things I need to cook something wonderful – and that is if I can come up with an idea of what I want to cook. When I’m busy – as I have been at work and school for more months now than I can even count – I tend to feel overwhelmed by end of the day that making even the smallest choice seems impossible. What should I have for dinner? I have no idea. I’ve already made 100,000 decisions today and I’m all out of decision-making capacity!

Happily, I know exactly the fix for this problem of mine: meal planning. If I actually sit down on, say, Sunday evening, and plan out my meals for the week, I can then (a) not have to make last minute dinner decisions and (b) plan out my grocery shopping accordingly, so I have everything I need when I need it, thus resulting in a less stressed out and more healthily fed Dr. Beth.

Here’s my plan for this week – since May 1 is Wednesday, I figured I’d get a head start and include this whole week:

Friday I’ve marked in a “school night”, since I have class on Friday and will go out for dinner with classmates⁸. My challenge isn’t that I have to cook for myself every day, just that I have to have planned my meals. I think that even just being more thoughtful about making a conscious decision about what I’m doing for my meals will help me be a little more aware of what I’m eating, rather than just kind of going along not paying much attention and suddenly realizing I’ve eaten at restaurants more than half the days in a month.

You’ve probably also noticed that I haven’t made a plan for Sunday just yet. I actually just sat down and planned out the other nights tonight, in preparation for this blog posting, and kind of ran out of steam. I’m taking suggestions if anyone has any good ideas!

For my second May Health Challenge, I’m going to do something that doesn’t, at first glance, sound like it has anything to do with health. I’m going to pick my outfits for the week on Sunday night, when I do my meal planning. “But what could this possibly have to do with health?” you ask? For me, it’s about my mental health. I find that on weeks when I pick out my outfits for the week and line them up in my closet so that each morning I can just grab an outfit and put it on, I feel so much better than weeks when every day I get up in the morning, am completely indecisive about what I want to wear, scramble around to find a shirt that goes with the skirt I finally picked, then am not able to find the sweater that goes with that outfit⁹, and on it goes. When I can just grab and outfit and go, I find I get to work feeling more relaxed/less frazzled and ready to take on the day!

So there you have it – my May Health Challenges! What are you going to challenge yourself to do this May?

1. Not to mention January through March. [↩]
2. “May” recall! Get it?? I slay me! [↩]
3. Which I accomplished. [↩]
4. Which I managed to do 26 out of the 30 days of the challenge – as the 31st was reserved for celebrating! [↩]
5. As part of 101 things to do list to do some kind of physical activity every day for a year! [↩]
6. This is actually a good time to set up a new routine, as I recently broke up with boyfriend, so all my routines that I’d established over the last ~a year we’d been living together are gone anyway. Yeah, I just revealed my breakup in a footnote. I’m a heartless bastard. Or one who doesn’t like talking about this stuff on my blog. The jury is still out. [↩]
7. Mark being one of the aforementioned Guelphites. [↩]
8. Going out for meals on class weekends is actually something that I really enjoy – it’s a chance to socialize with my classmates. And in an intense program like ours, the support and camaraderie really does help you get through. [↩]
9. My office is freezing, so I always have to have a sweater. [↩]

Tags: cooking, food, health, mayhealth, organization

I have one niece and one nephew. Why is there no word in the English language that would allow for me to refer to them together?

If you have a brother (or brothers) and a sister (or sisters), you can call them your siblings. If you have a mom and a dad, you can call them your parents. There’s lots of words to refer to your son(s) and daughter(s) collectively – they can be called your children, your kids, your offspring, your progeny, or your spawn¹. But there’s nothing for “nieces and nephews”²!

I went to the all-knowing Google with this important question, and it turns out that (a) I’m not the only person pondering this deficiency of the English language, and (b) there’s been a word coined for this, though it doesn’t seem to have yet caught on: “niblings” (based on “sibling”).

I can’t decide if I like this word. I mean, it conveniently sums up what I want to sum up – a collection of at least one niece and one nephew – but it also sounds like you want to have them for a snack. Thoughts?

1. Apparently you can also call them your scions (thank you, thesaurus!), but I’m pretty sure if you did no one would know what the hell you were talking about! [↩]
2. Similarly, there’s no collective word for “aunts and uncles”. [↩]

Tags: English, family, niblings, random

Even since the death of poor Copernicus, things just haven’t been the same at my house. Every time I’d walk into the living room, I’d automatically walk towards the frog tank to check on the frogs… and then I’d remember that there were no more frogs. And then I would have a sad. And no one wants a sad Beth!

I tried putting my stuffed frog, the aptly named Froggy¹, into the tank, but it just wasn’t the same:

So, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I now have a new fraggle of aquatic dwarf frogs!

So far, only three of the five froggies have names.

This is Copernicus the Second:

He is the tiniest little frog I’ve ever seen, but he’s very spunky. He inherits the Twitter account of his namesake, Copernicus the First (rest his little froggy soul).

This is Froggymodo:

And this is Apricot:

Apricot is actually quite easy to distinguish from the other frogs, as she’s not only larger, but also she’s got a more yellow skin tone, compared to the darker green of the others, and she also has much darker eyes.

This guy doesn’t have a name yet:

And neither does this one:

I’m taking suggestions, in case you have any good ideas for frog names. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

Also, Froggy has now returned to his post next to my laptop, where he belongs:

And all is right with the world.

1. I’ve had froggy since I was about 6 months old. I was born with a dislocated hip and part of the treatment for that involves being put into a half-body cast known as a “frog leg cast“, so when I was in the hospital, my Aunty Wendy and Uncle Harry gave me this stuffed frog, which I’ve had ever since! [↩]

Tags: adorable, frog blogging, froggy, frogs

I put it on my list of goals for 2013 and, after much procrastinating and hemming and hawing, I have finally registered myself for the half marathon at the Edge to Edge in Tofino/Ucluelet in June, along with my friend Alicia! I started a bit late on my training and I have really only been doing about one run per week – but I’ve managed to do the scheduled long runs for the past 4 weeks. It’s week 11 of the 17 week training plan that I usually follow¹, and I figure that now that I’ve registered I’ll be sufficiently scared motivated to do another run or two per week, in addition to the long runs.

This will be my first time doing the Edge-to-Edge and I’m really starting to look forward to it. For the uninitiated, Tofino/Ucluelet² are on the west coast of Vancouver Island, which will mean the route will provide beautiful views of beaches and the Pacific ocean!

Here’s the description of the half marathon route:

It will be a Half Marathon filled with incredible scenery – crashing waves, beautiful views, beaches, and wildlife… expect it all!

This course will wind its way through the seaside village of Ucluelet with a portion of the course running on the spectacular Wild Pacific Trail! The trail is hard-packed and nicely graded with the most amazing views of the Pacific Ocean — absolutely breathtaking!

The course will start on the road and paved bike path for the first 15km of the race and then slip onto the Wild Pacific Trail for approximately 4km and then a 500m stretch along Big Beach (gravel path). Then it’s back on to the road thought the streets of Ucluelet for the final 2 km!

Now to find a place to stay in Ucluelet. Any suggestions?

1. Where by “follow” I mean “I do varying levels of the proposed runs in said plan, but always the long runs. [↩]
2. You may remember Tofino from my 30th birthday surfing trip. I actually have not been back there since then! [↩]

Tags: Edge to Edge half marathon, half marathon, race, running, Tofino, Ucluelet

So I realized that this is the most first world of first world problems, so if you don’t enjoy people whining about how they are being given money, but not in the way that they want to be given money, you should probably stop reading right now. I’ve been meaning to blog it for a while, but was recently reminded about it when I took my giant pile of papers to my accountant to file my taxes. Why did I have a giant pile of papers, you ask? Well, a big chunk of these papers were from my scholarship, and they were completely unnecessary. As you may recall, I have a scholarship that pays for the lion’s share of my tuition fees. The scholarship is sent from the funding agency to my university. I would like for the university to just keep the money for my tuition and then I can just pay the part of my tuition fee isn’t covered by said scholarship. Basically, what I want to happen is this:

What I want to happen

But apparently the department that receives the cheque from the funding agency cannot, does not, or will not talk to the department that takes money for tuition, so instead they think the best idea is to send me a cheque every month, along with a tax form for that instalment (as opposed to, you know, a single tax form at the end of the year). They will do this every month for two years, and then I have to take each of those monthly cheques to the bank to cash, and then I used that pay my tuition fees, which have been split into 7 installments over the two years. So what happens is this:

What is actually happening. You don’t need to be an MBA student to see that this is much less efficient.

That’s 24 cheques, 24 tax forms, 24 envelopes, 24 postage stamps, and 24 trips to the bank – all completely unnecessary, because I’m just giving all the money (and then some) back to the university anyway. Now, I realize that Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable are separate departments and I’m very well acquainted with different departments having computer systems that don’t talk to each other, but really? Surely the people there could do transfers between the departments. And at the very least, I could get one tax form per year instead of 12.

This reminds me of the time in grad school that I had a departmental scholarship and then, partway through the year, I was informed that I had won a university-level scholarship worth $0.00. Upon further investigation, it turned out that they had more university-level scholarship money than originally anticipated, and I was next in line to get some, but they saw that I had a department scholarship, so they weren’t going to give me the university-level money, but wanted me to be aware that I had earned a higher level scholarship. Of course, my department wanted me to get the university money so that the money they had given me could go to someone else from our department, and the university’s reply was that I should give back the department scholarship and then they would give me the university-level scholarship. Midway through the year. Like as if I hadn’t already spent my scholarship money on tuition fees and rent! I’m not sure exactly what the university thinks people do with scholarship money, but I think it’s safe to say that most of us spend it on going to school and living expenses! In the end, my department secretary was able to convince the university to just transfer money to the department, since obviously I didn’t have that money any more, and it made no sense for me to give them money so that they could then send me a cheque for the amount I would have just given them. I haven’t had as much luck in getting the different departments to talk to each other with my current scholarship, so it looks like the monthly trips to the bank will continue through 2013 for me!

Tags: first world problems