January and February

I know that I had promised to keep this more updated, but apparently I’m not very good at managing my time. A lot of progress has been made on the school front. I presented my project for half an hour during the Ecology and Evolution Friday Philosophicals. I was lucky because the one professor who likes to interrupt and ask questions during the presentation, leading the way for all the other professors to do the same thing, was not there that day, so everyone saved their questions until the very end.

I also defended my proposal for my project during my proposal assessment. This was the most harrowing experience of my academic career thus far since it was almost like a thesis defence. I had three examiners ask me two rounds of questions for 15 minutes each. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, but it was still rather unpleasant. Luckily for me, I passed with no revisions to be made to my proposal.

I am teaching the lab section of Animal Ecology with Crisia this semester. I have two classes, and I only actually taught them in four formal labs. Then they have to come up with their own independent project (which involves many emails and appointments with students on my part), and I have a week to grade a two-page proposal and a ten-page research paper. Right now I’m in the midst of grading their proposals, and I wonder how I’m going to be able to grade their papers in a week.

Visitors

Eliott and Kevin came to visit at the end of January. We timed it so that they could be in for Western’s Charity Ball. Crisia and Nikhil were also there. We got to look all fancy for one night and all proceeds went to the Big Sisters of London. We went to The Keg for some wine and nice steak dinners then spent the night dancing at the London Convention Centre.

The next day, Kevin, Eliott, and I drove out to the ski hill for some tubing. This ski hill made the Laurentian hills look big and happened to be right in the middle of these suburbs. They had people working there whose sole purpose was to fling or spin people in their tubes down the hill. It was a fun way to pass the afternoon. After that, we picked Crisia up for supper and went to this place called Garlic’s, where everything served there had, you guessed it, garlic. It was yummy.

Kingston

I had learned during the week that followed that my grandmother was in the hospital in Kingston with heart problems. After much deliberation on my part, I decided to brave a snowstorm and head out there on the bus. Eliott, being the wonderful boyfriend that he is, decided to meet me there. A five hour bus trip turned into a nine hour bus trip, and when I got there, Eliott and I found that there were no taxis to be had. We started walking and a nice couple offered to give us a lift. It turned out that it would have been a very long walk indeed.

We spent the entire next day in the hospital with my grandma, who wasn’t too badly off. While I was there, I got to see my grandpa, two of my aunts, three of my cousins, and several people related to these individuals even though only one of my cousins actually lives in Kingston. As I could see, my grandmother was well taken care of. She is now out of the hospital, and I am told that she is doing much better.

Niagara Falls

This past weekend, I got to experience Ontario’s newest holiday, Family Day. Crisia’s friend Megan was in town and had rented a car, which meant that they had to use this opportunity to take a road trip. The destination was Niagara Falls, and I was invited along. This is probably the main reason my marking isn’t done yet. We got there in time for lunch at the Rainforest Cafe.

After that, we found our way to the Hershey’s store for fudge and then decided to experience one of the few haunted houses. This was hardly worth the $10 that they charged, but the only thing that made it mildly scary was the presence of these three small Spanish girls that would scream and clutch onto us. They forced Megan to go in front, while Crisia and I stayed in the back and laughed at poor Megan. There was a guy, who worked there, who would follow us around and grab us and make weird noises when it got too dark to see in front of us.

After that we spent a good amount of time at Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. The most amusing part about this was this video that told you that only 1 in 3 people can twist their tongue a certain way and then asks you to try it in a mirror that was there. Crisia had been there before and knew this was a trick and told me about it but didn’t get there in time to tell Megan. When we made it to the end of the museum, we waited for a full 15 minutes on the other side of that mirror to see if we could see other people making faces in the mirror. There was also a spinning tunnel with a bridge that ran across it. At the end of the tunnel was a crooked picture of a chicken. Megan told Crisia to watch the chicken. She really shouldn’t have.

We went to our hotel after that. We were staying at the Mariott that looked over the falls. It really was a beautiful view. We ended up taking a 2 hour nap and then deciding that we didn’t really want to go out anymore. We ordered in pizza and spent some time in the hot tub at the hotel. We then watched the movie 3:10 to Yuma in our comfy beds.

The next morning, we went out to brave the cold wind to look out over the falls. They really are very beautiful. It would have been nice to go in the summer and take the boat or go behind the falls when it wasn’t so cold. We then drove back in time to make it for the Stable Isotopes Lab Christmas Party. Yes, I know it’s February.

Fall semester

Hello. It’s been a while. Isn’t odd that I’ve been a grad student at Western for over a semester now, and that I haven’t written a single thing about it? I’ve decided now to do things differently than I have been for the past few months. In this post, I will endeavour to list as many interesting things that I did this past semester as I can remember. This will be my last catch-up post (well before a plethora of interesting things happen to me all at once, leaving me little time in which to write them... since I am at school, this is probably unlikely to happen). After this post, any new post should contain information of current events or where I am in terms of my studies or my thoughts about anything that is relevant to me at the time. Since grad school life in London, Ontario is not nearly as interesting as field research in the mountains of Alberta, I felt that it would be more appropriate to proceed in this manner, and that I could probably summarize my adventures as a grad student in this past fall semester in one single post, albeit a very long one.

Although not very interesting, I thought that perhaps some of you might want to know what it is that I normally do here so that you may understand the context in which interesting things happen. As a grad student in her first semester who actually has a summer in the field under her belt, my time outside taking classes, doing assignments and studying for these classes, TAing, preparing for TAing, and correcting assignments for the labs I TA (that is, working as a teacher’s assistant for those who may not understand university-speak) is supposed to be devoted to the preparation and writing of a proposal for my research and the lab work associated with this research. The work associated with classes and TAing actually takes a lot of time, so many grad students feel frustrated that they may not be spending as much time as they would like working on their actual thesis. I occasionally felt these feelings of frustration, but looking back, I did manage to accomplish everything I needed to accomplish regarding my research for that first semester.

Now I must tell you a little bit about my research since it is unlikely that many of you understand. You probably won’t even after this. This summer I caught mice and held different groups of them at different temperatures. After about a month, I took liver and plasma samples that needed to be analyzed in the lab once I started school. The liver samples were to analyze for stable carbon and nitrogen isotope compositions, which tell us about what an animal is eating. My goal is to see whether these compositions are affected by metabolic rate, which affects the amount that an animal is eating. The plasma samples were to analyze for the presence of a stress hormone since differences in stress levels could be a potentially confounding factor. This last bit of lab work needed to be done at the University of Toronto-Scarborough.

As a Masters student in Biology, I only have to take 2 courses. I was originally signed up to learn about these mysterious stable isotopes I mentioned and to take a more advanced course in statistics. However, I ended up joining the Collaborative Program in Environment and Sustainability, which requires me to take and Environmental Sciences course (and which gave me an entrance scholarship!), so instead I only took the stable isotopes course and audited the stats course (To audit a course means to attend it but not be graded for it but it is still marked on your transcript as an Audit rather than as a Credit). I am glad that I didn’t actually have to complete the assignments for the stats course since the stable isotopes class was enough work as it is, with many assignments, a couple major papers, and a midterm and final exam.

I TAed a lab for the Introductory Biology course here at Western last semester. A full TA’s work is only supposed to take up 10 hours of work a week. Some weeks, it’s much more than this, and other weeks, it’s much less than this. For this course, it was often more than this. There is a reason this course is known as TA boot camp. I TAed 2 3 hour labs a week, which came out to 4 classes of around 40 students a week. You TA with one other person and take turns presenting the material and correcting the lab assignments. As a TA for this course, you guided students through introductory practical elements of Biology such as using a microscope and understanding photosynthesis and cellular respiration.

That is it for the boring stuff. If any of you are interested in hearing more details about certain aspects of my everyday life, let me know, and I may consider devoting a post to your question if I have little that is interesting going on at the moment. Some of you may be wondering what it is that I do with my free time around here. In the beginning, much of my time was devoted to getting myself settled down here and exploring. I had a few interesting adventures while doing this including a bike ride during Homecoming that resulted in a flat tire and a long detour.

Since I spent an entire summer with the other Masters students in my lab, I was guaranteed people to hang out with, assuming there was more than one of us in town on a given weekend. At first it was odd how rarely this happened since Nikhil’s family and friends live is Mississauga, which isn’t too far, and Crisia had to fly back to do monthly field work in Kananaskis. This makes it sound like I was the only one who was always left behind in London. Although the others did leave the city more than I did, there were a few times that I also managed to take off for a weekend. I even had people travel all the way out here to visit me for one weekend. I will list these here for you to peruse at your own convenience.

· Detroit: Crisia’s dad lives near Detroit, so one weekend she invited me to come with her to visit him and her two little half-sisters so that we could go to the Michigan Renaissance Festival. Some of you may be aware of how geeky I am and, therefore, how much I would enjoy something like a Renaissance Festival. You can see pictures here. I only regret that I didn’t have an outfit that suited the occasion.

· Visitors: Eliott and Kevin had previously arranged to come visit me during Thanksgiving weekend. They arrived really late on a Friday night with a special surprise in tow: JJ. On the Saturday, we went to the Pioneer Village and the Covent Garden Market. Eliott and I went to the Tegan and Sara concert after supper, while JJ and Kevin did the Lost Souls stroll, which is a ghostly tour of downtown London (yes, we have a downtown). The next day, we spent the day at Pinery beach on the shores of Lake Huron. You can see some of JJ’s pictures here and some of Eliott’s pictures here. A friend of Crisia’s also joined us for parts of this. You can read about his/her/its adventures here.

· Grandpa Smith’s 90^th Birthday: At the end of October, I took the train out to Kingston to meet Jackie, my dad, and my stepmom to drive out to Mountain Grove for my grandfather’s birthday party. The party was very nice, and I got to talk to several family members who probably only remember me as an 11 year old and were very interested to hear what I was doing. Here are some pictures from the party. Afterwards, I spent the night at a motel studying for a midterm that I had the day I got back to school.

· Toronto with Eliott and Jeremy: The weekend after, Jeremy flew in from Vancouver to stay at his parents house while he looked for a job for the summer. Eliott and I, therefore, made plans to meet him there for a weekend. During the week before we were supposed to go, my supervisor asked me if I would be able to go into Toronto on the Monday to be trained in the procedure that I needed to use to analyze my plasma. Although this cut my time with Eliott short for that day, it gave me use of one of our lab cars for the weekend. Crisia also needed to be in Toronto that weekend to meet Kurt to go to a wedding, so we drove in together on the Friday, and Kurt, Crisia, and I went for supper before I was due to meet Eliott at the bus station. Eliott and I then spent the weekend with Jeremy and had supper with Andrew on Sunday night. We spent that night in a hotel, and I left early the next morning for my training in at Uof T-SC, while Eliott caught a bus back.

· Toronto with my mom and Jackie: The next weekend, I took the bus to Toronto to spend the weekend with my mom who was visiting her relatives. It was also important for me to get in touch with my uncle since I would be staying with him when I went to Scarborough to do my lab work there. I spent the Friday night with Jeremy since he was still there, and then went to see my mom on the Saturday. We had lunch with my aunt and my grandpa, and we picked up Jackie, who was staying with Andrew, for supper and dropped her back at a subway station. The next morning, my mom and I went to visit my cousin and her family for lunch before I drove myself back to the bus station to catch my bus and where my mom was to pick up Jackie before going home. I took very few pictures during those two weekends in Toronto, but here they are.

· Lab work in Toronto: Once at the end of November, I drove down to Scarborough for one day to mix the solutions I would be needing for my assays. I did my practice run over two days in December just prior to leaving for Montreal. This worked out well because I drove the car into Toronto to do the lab work and left the car with Nikhil in Mississauga and just took a bus straight home to Montreal. After spending the holidays in Montreal, my mom drove me back to Toronto to run my actual samples, and I just picked up the car there and was able to use it to get me and Nikhil back to London afterwards. Despite initial fears, my lab work in Toronto actually worked out rather well and I already have my results.

· Home for the holidays: I stayed with Eliott for the most part when I came home to Montreal for the holidays. I also stayed with Jackie for a couple days. I did lots of shopping, got to spend time with Eliott and hang out with my friends, had holiday meals with my family, frolicked in the snow, and spent a ridiculous amount of time waiting for buses. Eliott, JJ, Steph, and I found time to get St-Viateur bagels and go skating at Mount Royal. Eliott, JJ, Kevin, Alex, and I spent three nights at a cabin in Morin Heights for New Years. We did lots of skiing and spent one day wandering the town of St-Sauveur. JJ took some pictures of our annual gift exchange, and here are some pictures I took during one of the many snowstorms and during our stay in Morin Heights. The same friend of Crisia’s who joined us in London also participated in some of the events of my stay in Montreal. If you didn’t check out the blog that I linked previously, you can check it out here.