♥ OH my gosh, I am totally overwhelmed by all the birthday love I got from you guys! I am going to try and get back to everyone.

♥ Canadians, concerned about vote-splitting on the left? Check out this super-rad website for advice on how to vote strategically in your riding!

♥ I had a pretty rad birthday. I worked but that's no problem because I love my job, and my in-laws gave me a ride home from work (so I didn't have to take the bus!) which was really sweet of them. Then we met them all for supper at this amazing restaurant in North Park, the Linkery, and afterward it was cake and present time!

This is me on my birthday. I don't usually take self-portraits but I felt so nice!


Here is the sexy pile of books I got for my birthday! Actually Uproot and I got the John Adams book/DVDs are a shared present (squeeee!) so I counted that in my tally.



♥ I just signed up for my first online university class! I'm taking Canadian history pre-confederation and I am super excited. I will be getting the course materials in a couple weeks! Yay, history! I got into history with Pierre Berton as a little girl and I've never looked back.

♥ Photos!



We went to the Wild Animal Park, which was awesome. Here are a few highlights (a more involved entry to follow)


Dik dik! I love them. They are tiny and sweet and their noses are for thermoregulation and they wiggle so cutely all the time. I could keep one and it would be friends with my cats.


Here I am sexing up a giraffe.


baby okapi! I am dying of cuteness.

I have a bunch more photos to post, but I will do that later. We did so much fun stuff with the in-laws! I really enjoy spending time with them.

♥ Finally found my camera cord. Now you can see how good my newest tattoo actually looks.


♥ What else is amazing? HRM...oh yeah, I got my photos back from a shoot with this rad photog Rebecca Joelson! I know I could've done better modeling but she was a great photographer! I'm happy with how she made me look but I know I could have done better on my end. I am really unused to doing head shots and so I should have worked on my expressions better but at least two photos came out. And we got to use a makeup artist, so that was a nice change--I usually have to do my own!


♥ Time to go to work!

♥ It is my birthday in 6 hours! Have you donated to a charity yet?

♥ How much have I changed in a year? I don't know, but I've gone through a lot. I've been trying really hard to be a better person all around. I'm healthier--I eat better and go to the gym a few times a week. I have re-enrolled in school (yay!). I have gone through some crazy family stuff--dealing with severe homesickness and my grandparents' illnesses. I have gotten five tattoos this year. I walk talking with my mom this morning and it seems too soon for me to be turning twenty-four. She feels it too. She was this age when I was born!

♥ Have you seen a crab ride a jellyfish? Sea creatures are SO COOL.

♥ The Santa Anas are back! I feel like I am melting. Hopefully it will cool down soon. It is so hot that Henry has been sleeping on his back all the time.



♥ I am going to start returning comments soon, I swear! I am busy with family stuff right now--the in-laws are in town!

♥ Irinka is giving me a haircut next week! I am excited. I've been cutting my bangs and they don't look so great. I used to cut them well! I've lost my touch.

♥ We got an xbox 360 on the weekend! Uproot found this rad game called Viva Piñata and I am loving it. It is hilarious and awesome. In it, you have a garden, and you have to try and attract these piñata and try to get them to live in your garden. Also, having a wireless controller is such a luxury!

♥ it's my birthday in just a week! I am getting really excited. That means it is time to put up my charities wishlist! If anyone would like to donate to a charity for my birthday, I would love it! Here it is! 2008 has been my year of charity. I have donated a couple hundred to charity this year, not to mention Uproot and I are sponsoring kids through Plan USA

♥ my twenty third year has zoomed by. Hopefully I can slow things down for big twenty four.

♥ I have just passed the third anniversary of my first set going up! So much has happened since then. There have been ups and downs of being on the site but the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. My life is so different now and it's all because of this site...

♥ I am eating yogurt with granola for breakfast. MMM.

♥ I am worried the conservatives will win the Canadian election. I hope my mail-in ballot comes soon. I neeeeed to vote. This will be the third federal election I've voted in! Being able to participate is a pretty big deal for me.

♥ I am trying to find the name of a book and it is really annoying. It is about Natives who live on the reserve south of where I grew up and how they found a loophole in treaties 8 and 11 that allowed them to live on some land near the Rockies (just a couple hours west) and how they returned to practicing a lot of things traditional to their culture, like hunting and self-governance. I really want to re-read it. I will probably find it within a few more days of hunting through my home library's online catalogue. Stuff like that is so brain-draining.

♥ the one hour premier of the Office is on tonight! I am practically wetting my pants with excitement. I love that show so much...Katieesq and I are going as Dwight and Jim for Halloween, even!

♥ I need to go get ready for work/take the dog out. I leave you with a bit of old-ass Rin: a self-portrait I did in 2005, about a month before my set went up I really love this photo of me. I don't take a lot of self-portraits so I guess that is why this one is a big deal.

♥ It is extremely ironic that I asked you guys about your allergies in my last blog because this weekend I stumbled on a new allergy:the antibiotic Bactrim! Fun, right? Especially since I have a chronic infection thing going on where only a couple drugs can treat it and bactrim is one of them. Double especially since I got welts, swelling, and had difficulty breathing, and had to pay $100 this weekend for two visits to urgent care and all my various prescriptions. I'm just lucky that my reaction was not super terrible and that we had money in the bank to pay for all this stuff. But, I am okay now so no need to worry.

♥ My current obsessions:

- Antarctica! I can't wait to travel there. It is one of my top travel goals! I saw Encounters at the End of the World this year and it was stunning and bleak and wonderful. Besides, I have long read about the Antarctic explorers--Shackleton, Scott, Amundsen. There's a particular kind of romance involved in the expeditions of a hundred years ago. Anyway, I am going to go to the end of the world someday.

- Ukraine! My ethnic heritage is about half Ukranian and I am just getting into Ukraine. No wonder all the Ukrainian immigrants ended up on the prairies. Ukraine is mostly rolling fields itself...and what a battleground. Today I have been reading about the unbelievable repression that Ukrainians faced under Soviet rule. I can never wrap my head around the horrible things people can do to eachother. I am not often moved by things I read (but I'm getting more sympathetic as time goes on) and today I was just destroyed first-hand accounts of life during the starvation period of the early 1930s. One of my friends traveled to Ukraine last year and she said the people were really unfriendly, but I want to go anyway. It's been rated one of the hardest places in the world to be vegetarian but I don't care, I will eat rice and potatoes for two weeks or whatever. Also, I just watched Everything is Illuminated last week or two weeks ago so that helped re-start my fervor. The land is so beautiful. I guess it looks a lot like where I grew up, but whatever.

- Alberta<3<3 We watched Brokeback Mountain this weekend. It was filmed mostly, if not entirely, in southern Alberta while I lived there. Seeing the places that were so familiar to me made me really homesick. I can't wait to get home. It has been too long and I never imagined how hard it would be.

♥ Ack, I guess I have to go make supper, since I am hungry and it is that time of day. Wish I had some more to post.

♥ The other day I had a strange dream. In it, my friend was singing this song to me:


So I am on a new William Elliott Whitmore kick. I had all his stuff on my old computer, but since it's dead for good, my music collection is stuck on my external. Anyway I downloaded some more albums and I am listening again.

I am so into the banjo! I don't know why, but I have gotten a pretty strong appreciation for it lately, between Mr. W.E. Whitmore and Old Man Luedecke.

♥ This past weekend, secretagenman and his friend Cooper came down from LA to hang out with me and Katieesq. We were all supposed to go surfing but I got that tattoo last weekend so I just sat on the beach and read my book.


We were at the Del Mar dog beach so it was pretty awesome. A dog peed on Cooper's foot and another one gave secretagenman a tonne of kisses. I love people and dog-watching so I was totally content to sit on the shore while everyone else was in the water.

Later we made supper and I made my first ever pierogi! My mom was so proud of me. My heritage is mainly Ukrainian so I was raised on pierogi and cabbage rolls. I am actually going to make more tonight. Now that I know how to make them I am not ever going to pay for them here in the U.S. They are so expensive; $4.50 for 12 instead of the price at home, which is like $3 for a bag of 30. Now I just need to get the motivation to try making cabbage rolls and I will be set.

Here, Katie and I look extremely attractive.


Katie and I in the kitchen (I really like this photo. We look happy)


Supper, which was super amazingly delicious.


Here is secretagenman opening some wine.


♥ Can you believe Ukraine's government fell? It's kind of interesting that it happened now as I am reading this awesome book about the history of Ukraine. I've only read a small part of the book, but it seems that for much of its history, Ukraine has not been self-governing; it's been held by Russia and Poland. So I am not super surprised that their government isn't stable.

♥ Elections Canada called me and apparently I didn't send sufficient proof of residence for my Vancouver house (I didn't have any official bills or anything to photocopy my address from and mail in) so I have to fax over a copy of my driver's license, which means I'll be voting in the Calgary Central electoral district, just like in the last election. I am happy to vote but it feels so useless in Calgary because it's a Tory stronghold.

♥ My birthday is in two weeks from tomorrow! I am pretty excited, as all my inlaws (who I love) will be in town. I always get excited for my birthday, though, so this year is not really any different. The last year has zoomed by.

♥ Oh, and great news: my grandpa of the coffee cup tattoo finally decided to get the lifesaving surgery he needs. He has declined treatment for almost a year so I'm happy he's changed his mind

♥ Okay, so a parting question: What are you allergic to? I'm allergic to bee stings (though not very seriously, as I've only been stung twice, both times on my feet) and dates (the fruit, not the outing, har har)

♥ Today Uproot and I spent some time with our pal _mike_. I can't find my DSLR cord so camera phone photos will have to suffice.

uproot's sparkplug




My coffee cup! It is for my grandpa, who has a nice grandpa-ey smell from the coffee and cigarettes he is constantly consuming. He is never without one or the other. Also, he calls everybody FRED and is a hilarious booming voiced gramps. He taught me how to gamble when I was thirteen. He is awesome and I love him, so I got this.





♥ I got a really great surprise tonight! I am going to be able to take three classes at my online university! After I get back to Canada I will apply for student loans/save/apply for grants and scholarships to fund the rest of it. I am so effing excited!!

♥ I am eating some leftover Mexican rice. It tastes SO GOOD. I loooove this stuff.

Eleeeeection!


Last night I printed/filled out my request to vote by mail. Oct 14 is going to be a nervy day for me! I hope the Conservatives are ousted out but I fear the best to hope for is a Liberal minority. But hey, all I really care about is disabling Bush Lite. I am mailing my request form today, hooray!

So, my Canadian pals, I am going to be sincerely disappointed if you guys don't vote too. I mean, I think everyone should vote (you Americans too) but understandably, Canadian stuff is a bit closer to my heart. If I was an American citizen I'd be getting fired up about American politics (and, I do a bit anyway) but ultimately it does me no good because I can't participate in the process. I don't like debating that much anyway.

SO: get ready! 35 days until the election that really matters

Because I love the middle ages, here is an elephant with a castle on its back. It's marginalia from the Chronica Majora.



I love learning about the middle ages because there's a distinct lack of factual basis for pretty much everything that went on.

♥ Scratch that whole going back to school thing. I was trying to get a loan from the bank of Dad last week and he said yes then but yesterday revealed that the interest rate was guilt for (literally) the rest of his life. So, I decided to just make it work on my own. When I'm in BC I'll get student loans and whatever. I have to revise everything again and I just have to be okay with it. Oh well.

♥ Irinka gave me her old cell phone when she upgraded and now I have a fancy pants picture phone!

♥ I ate frozen yogurt on Saturday night with Katieesq.


It looks great, right?

♥ One month until I am 24!

♥ I am a university drop-out no more! I am re-starting my Bachelor's, only this time I am majoring in History and not Sociology. I'm doing it through an online university based in Alberta (Athabasca University) and I am really excited. I am going to start out trying two classes at a time--I have 6 months to finish each class. I'd like to take on more but I'm unused to working so hard and so I should start it off slow. The first two classes I am taking are History 201 (history of the world pre-Reformation) and Geology 201 (Historical geology; prehistoric eras, creation of the world's topography, etc). Maybe it is boring to tell you guys that but I am really excited so I don't care.

♥ It's now five years since I first tried out university. Five years ago I was in such an exciting place. I had just moved to Edmonton and it felt so grown up and wonderful to walk to school in the crisp fall mornings. I lived in a really nice neighbourhood just six blocks south of the university; coincidentally, my friend Jenanne now lives next door to my old house! For my first semester I lived with my friend Erin (didn't work out so well) and my second semester was with Rosita and it was so wonderful. We were in the same English class and we would sometimes stay home from school to eat pancakes, play Donkey Kong 3 and look on SG all day.



♥ Surfing got postponed! I was feeling really gross yesterday for most of the day so I just laid on the couch a lot.

But, later in the day I felt better for a bit and so I ran out and got a new DS! I have been saving up money in a piggy bank for a while and I decided to use it. I got a pink DS lite! I wanted a coral pink one and got a metallic pink one by accident. Oh well. I don't usually make a fuss about stuff so I'm not sending it back or anything.

Yes, there is a difference. Coral pink vs metallic pink

♥ Uproot bought Okami for PS2 yesterday. I am so in love with it. Here, watch a trailer. Hold onto your socks.


♥ For Better or For Worse ended today! I have been reading that comic for a long time and the storyline has been sucking lately (I still can't get over the whole Elizabeth/Anthony thing) FBOFW still is one of my favourite comics so I'm sad to see it go.

♥ I love summer but I'm longing for a crisp autumn. I love cool-weather clothing the best. I miss wearing my cowboy shirts.

♥ Some mournful, Canadian alt-country in lieu of wearing cowboy clothes! Great Lake Swimmers, to be precise. I saw them first at the Calgary Folk Festival in 2006 on a panel or whatever they are called. I was immediately hooked and perhaps you will be too.


You can hear more if you like