New semester, new beginnings

I am grateful for God for seeing me through the first week. Earlier this week, I was panicking about my workload and felt pretty overwhelmed. Made some resolutions including backing out of this weekend's College retreat, so that I could work on a paper. Feel like I can breathe a little easier and can cut myself some slack, and taking some time to blog. One tiny miracle this week was finishing my book report for my class on Wed. My friend was superbly impressed that I pulled it off because I had told him I had not started reading when I saw him on Tue afternoon, as I was going in for my class! Started after dinner and worked through most of the night, reading over 170 pages of John Cassian's book entitled Conferences - an ancient work dating back to 300AD. Thank God that he even gave me a good illustration to help me better understand the reading!

I have completely new housemates this year. One of them is a Hong Kong parentage but raised in Singapore. He's a 3rd year Economics student in UBC. He's one mean cook and cooks almost everyday, with full works of boiling soup and all (can immediately see the Cantonese influence). And I get to benefit from the extra soup sometimes - yes! He's quiet and clean. The other 2 are also guys; both are good friends. One of them turned 19 last Sunday and he's a Filipino Chinese with Canadian citizenship. He's just transferred to UBC, doing 2nd year Economics. Finally the last one is a Canadian and he is from British Columbia, his family lives about 45 minutes drive away. He's 18 and turning 19 at the end of the year! His major is in Religious Studies and does even more intense work than I do at the graduate studies level, including Classical and Biblical Greek and Latin! He sleeps with choral singing playing on his computer all night long.

Both the young lads lived in a catered dormitory residence last year and neither of them cook. So they've been surviving on take-outs and frozen dinners. Last night I cooked some rice and curry and offered them to my housemates. It was a real hit and they all felt it had a good level of spiciness - which means it was too spicy for me! Har har, yeah it's a joke. So yeap, I'm keeping up my tradition of collecting boys... a whole house of them this year. I think they're really easy going, and so far, I find it easier than sharing with girls. Keeping my fingers crossed and keeping up my prayers. A little bit of noise doesn't bother me. They've set up a 20' TV complete with home entertainment DVD set in the living area. Boys, especially young boys, and their toys. They've not been watching it though cause the TV didn't come with a remote control! It's been pretty quiet so far. Generally they're not too messy and don't dirty up the place, or are ok with washing up if I tell them the dishes been left out for too long. My ex-housemates visited me this week and found the place cleaner than when they were living here ... and they are 2 girls.

I love my new super big room... can bring in an entire 2-seater sofa and turn it more all 360º, which is amazing. Still in the same apartment, but occupying the room at the end of the corridor, intended for disabled. For the same price of the other rooms, it's a blessing. Even put up some nice gel-ly friends on my window. Check it out.





It's kind of tricky trying to shoot these gel-ly gems because the camera is pointed at the window and the light outside is quite bright. I'm learning to keep the camera in the shadow and try to aim my camera at the object, which with a 'point and shoot' camera it automatically tries to focus to the wall behind! You can see what I mean if you click on the first photo.