yes, hello, I am alive. mostly.

So I realized that everyone else has finally updated their blogs and figured that perhaps now that I am back at school and settled in it was time to update mine as well. So I got here about two weeks ago. Actually, two weeks and two days. It's so good to be back. And the place is so different this year! I mean , its the same place but things have changed. Some for the better, others not. Oh, and I only have 20 minutes till class and I have to run to the room first so this will be short, but hopefully will be sufficient for awhile. So my second year roommate is Aiya from Kazakhstan. She's absolutely off the wall crazy. I love it. I'm so pumped to have her as a roommate. So far we've had some great conversations and I can tell that by the end of the year we're gonna be great friends. An interesting thing about Aiya is that she's a very devout muslim. To the point where she wakes up around 4 o'clock each morning to pray and all that. So I'm going to learn a lot this year I can tell. But strangely, its one of those things that really brings us closer together, both of us being sold out for a greater power. Then I have two first year roommates as well (even though we're in a five person room ... which means that we have extra space because Peter our wonderful friend and maintenance man moved out the extra funrniture). Jn (Jennifer) is from Peru and also completely loco. The number of times she has jumped on me in the hallway is innumerable. Unfortunately for her, the number of times I have dropped her because I waas not expecting a human cannonbal is about equal to that. Someday she'll learn ... But she also has a deep and human side which is important. My other roommate is Elena from Italy. Shes a lot more quiet (a lot more) than the rest of us, but awesome nonetheless. That sounds really bad, as though quiet people can't be awesome, but you catch my drift. Elena is Orthodox (her family is half Greek) so she's going to come to Christian Fellowship with me. Yahoo! Hmm ... 12 minutes to go ... what else is important? It's been strange sort of, even though there are tonnes of new people to talk to and get to know, the most intersting and life changing conversations I've had so far have been with second years who I didn't really get to know last year. It's been good. I got to talk to a guy who lives in my house and studies martial arts as a spiritual experience. It was really an interesting conversation. He believes in zen and such, the discussion got fairly philosophical but I was proud of myself because I managed to follow his train of thought the whole way through without getting confused and lost. Definitely a good night. AFter ten days of orientation, we finally started classes, so this will be my first "real" weekend. And goodness am I looking forward to it. What else, what else. We went camping as a house one night, it was lots of fun. I took my sleeping bag outside and slept under the stars. And goodness were there a lot of them that night. A bunch of other people came out and joined me, it was really cool. And then on Wednesday afternoon when I was doing homework like the good non-procrastinating student I will be this year, Yarin came and invited me to the lake to go swimming with a bunch of other Calgarians (my housemates). So I of course said yes. When we got to the lake there were tonnes of people so we decided to keep walking adn go to the rope swing. Let me explain thsi wonder to you. It's a cliff. And a tree. And a rope attached to the tree. And you hang on to the rope, and scream your lungs out and swing over the cliff and then let go and drop in the water. Definitely an exhilirating experience. SO MUCH FUN! I did it twice, the first time I didn't grab teh rope high enough and so skimmed the water, but the second time I was flying so much I didn't want to let go. Everyoen on shore was yelling "let go, let go!" It was funny. Anyways, I have to run to chem now or ... well ... I'm sure some sorto f consequence will await me! Love y'all and miss y'all.