Saturday, January 31, 2009

I Survived!

Last night I lived through my first night shift (11pm-715am) at the hospital! After recently finishing up my Health Care Aid practicum, I was offered a job as an HCA in the continuing care unit of the Three Hills Hospital. During our practicum, all of our shifts were days, so I was extremely excited to learn all that goes on while everyone else is fast asleep, and see if I have what it takes to actually handle working the shift without crashing. For the past week I have been busy doing Evening shifts for Home Care, so I was a little worried about my first night shift experience being a bit of a double shift... but I made it through, and loved every minute of it!



While coffee might have had some hand in helping me, I was able to make it through both shifts back to back, and remain fully alert and energetic until after leaving the hospital, at which point even a hard floor looked good enough to sleep on.



I am looking forward to my next shift!

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Little Adventures = Big Fun

This past weekend Kyle and I got to attend a Three Hills tradition- The Christmas Tree Burn! People from all over town came, with trees in tow, to spend an evening burning them all together. I was so surprised to see the amount of people that showed up... but considering the free hot dogs and hot chocolate... plus awesome fireworks and a huge bonfire, who wouldn't want to come?! It was a really fun evening... next time we'll have to remember to bring some marshmallows and a really long stick!



On Sunday the weather was absolutely beautiful, so we got out our new snowshoes (thanks mom and dad!) to give them a try in some of the open fields around the town. They worked great, and we had a blast just walking around in the snow. Can't wait to find a good trail to hike through in them! Hope everyone had an enjoyable weekend!


Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Twilight



I know, I know. Everyone is talking about it, everyone is reading the books, watching the movie- I guess you could call it some kind of fad, and yes with much resistance to my best friends encouragements back in the summer I humbly gave into my curiousity, and fell in love with Stephanie Meyers characters and story plot allow with the millions of others.

I really didn't know what I was getting myself into when I innocently decided to watch the movie one night before going home for Christmas, I was just bored and wanted some background noise while I knit. It wasn't long until I was hooked, finding that I could somewhat identify with these characters, and sitting in suspense, anxious to see how their lives and the story would continue to unfold.

I eagerly picked up the first two novels in the series, Twilight & New Moon, on my way home chronicling the relationship of Bella, a girl from Phoenix who moves to Washington to live with her dad when her mom remarries, and Edward a vampire who has been seventeen... for a while. Edward's family has trained themselves to survive on the blood of animals, but Bella's 'sent' is almost too much for Edward to maintain control of himself, but his immediate love for her is too strong for him to stay away. He has been waiting for 'his mate' for over 100 years, and now that he's found her, a human, he is intent on learning to control his thirst for her through many turns and twists of events that continually challenge the love they share for one another.




My little sister, Jordyn, stole the books from me when I got home and had the first two read within two days, and then I took her to go see the movie. Click to see Twilight Trailer. It wasnt' until last friday that we were able to find the third book.. it was sold out everywhere we looked, but found it at costco (yay we love Costo!) I am currently on the third, while I wouldn't surprised it Jord was already done the fourth.



Alex refuses to have anything to do with the books or movies... so Jord and I with our newly found vampire powers (that sounds so silly, but we're just really into it, all in fun of course) attempted to turn her to our side... with no success...




Yet.


It is a really fun read, and opens you up to a world filled with adventures that could never be experienced in this life, which is what I love so much about reading. Through soaking up words on a page you can travel anywhere, be anyone and be apart of things that wouldn't otherwise be possible. I recommend it to anyone who is even a bit intrigued.

Well... Back to reading Book Three, Eclipse!

Happy New Year

This New Years Eve my family decided to try out some fondue recipes for dinner, which turned out to be a great success. We had planned to do some moonlight snowshoeing afterwards, but because it was so cold outside we decided against it, and sadly didn't have another opportunity while I was home, but I am excited to get to use my new snowshoes soon!






(This is actually really cool... get a marshmellow and put it on a stick, then cover it in melt chocolate, and let it harden. Volà, you now have the perfect hot chocolate stir stick!)






However, new years was still a lot of fun just spending the time with family... and on January 1st my grandparents were able to come down to visit, so we had a lot of fun with them, especially our intense game of rumikub... and trying to beat Matt, Alex's boyfriend at barrell of Pirates (same as monkeys but i guess the giant kinder egg company has something against monkeys haha)



Hope everyone had a great new years!

My Family

The last day I was home for Christmas we decided why not get some shots of our family too... and so i set up the camera on timer and ran through the snow so I could be in the photos too haha. Here's some of them.














Monday, January 5, 2009

Rimkey Family

The Rimkey's have been friends with my family since Alex and I started going to Warminster Elementary School, and playing on all the different school sports teams. So it was fun to be able to photograph their family this Christmas too: ) Here are some of the shots.















Love:Amour:Liebe:Amor

This Christmas was filled with many exciting events, one of the highlights being my Best Friend's Engagement! When Katrina first told me the news i was completely in shock, and she was probably freaking out wondering why I was frozen and not saying anything... but after an hour the news started to finally sink in and my excitement for her and her fiance Paul slowly began to show itself on the surface : ) You can read her story of how he asked her on her blog "Fotografia de me Vida" (She's a languages student, hence the español)... its really cute.

Here's some of their engagement photos I was able to take for them : )

















Lee Girls

This Christmas Break I had the opportunity to use my Nikon to do a few different photoshoots, the first one being with a family I used to babysit for, and love. Lianne and her two girls Robyn and Georgia are so beautiful and it was a pleasure to take pictures of such gorgeous models :) Heres a few shots taken in their backyard forest. All are still not edited, I got the Aperature 2 program for Christmas, but have only been able to try out a trial version on my sisters computer, so long story short these ones have not been edited at all but I hope you enjoy!














Joyeux Noël

So I realize I am a little behind on posts, but as you can imagine, a two week visit home for Christmas didn't turn out to be as relaxing as I had hoped with some down time- but I am happy that I was able to use that time to visit with family and friends. Definitely the main reason for going home in the first place. So now with some extra time on my hands I'm afraid I might be bombarding my blog with posts... I hope they are all interesting to read, and see pictures of.



One of my favourite things about going home for Christmas is the amount of snow we get living in the 'snow-belt' of Central Ontario. So i was overjoyed to see all the snow of course....



... and the Charlie Brown Christmas Tree my dad had cut down on our property and stuck in the snow in front of our house, complete with one Christmas Ball for decoration...






... I also love the way my mom decorates the house so beautiful for Christmas, it makes everything so festive and feel cozy too...



And of course, Christmas always means traditions such as eating a bunch of random but delicious finger foods (a mixture of everyone in my family's favourites)and watching Its a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve, going to my Nana and Papa Smith's for a yummy Turkey dinner on Christmas day, and then to top it all off, going to the local Chinese food restaurant to hit up the buffet with the Bell Family on Boxing Day, and then getting to visit our Aunt Cyndy : )


Hope everyone had a wonderful Holiday Season!