Colleen Says...

I talk, you listen... and leave me comments.

Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Lisa's coming home!!

In just days my baby will be home!!! Here's a pic of us when we went to visit Jeff at Moxies Chinook. Lisa's starting back at moxies on thursday, and by christmas i will probably be back there too. Yay it'll be like the summer all over again.. except colder.. and with more christmas :)



Meanwhile, this is my 2nd last week of classes and theres just over 3 weeks until i'm all done exams!! Can't wait till everyone comes home for the holidays. Akiva and I have so much to get done, including watching crazy french movies, watching me get a tattoo, making a webisode, and lots of skipping and handholding (that was his idea).

Love you guys!
Colleen

Monday, November 28, 2005

family ties

I said i would post this, and i think i'm finally strong enough to type it up without crying, so here goes. Last weekend my parents and I went up to visit my grandfather who is in the hospital suffering from cancer. This is just me getting out some of my feelings the night after I first saw him in the hospital:

This is so hard. It was all I could do to hold my tears until i was outside in the hospital hallway with my dad. I hate that he can't be himself anymore, I hate that he's cooped up in that little room all by himself, I hate that he is too weark & tired to seem to care when i know he does, and I hate that my grandparents can't live together anymore. As my eyes get blurry with tears i just pray that I can get out all of my tears tonight so that I can be strong tomorrow. Much More Music is killing me right now playing the saddest songs one right after another. First of all - Nickelback - Photograph, sad cause it's filmed in Hanna where i'm sitting right now, then Coldplay - Fix You, and then the Tea Party - Heaven Coming Down. Maybe it just all seems sad to me because i'm sitting in my Grampa's room at the retirement lodge, alone. Here because my grandparent's house no longer belongs to them as of this month, alone because my parents are staying at my uncle's, and sad because this room is filled with pictures and memories but no grampa.

Here's a picture from earlier this year when everyone was still back in that old house, you can even see one of his cowboy pictures on the wall in the background.


I recently found this article in the Hanna Herald about my grampa (Albert Galarneau), i thought it would be nice to save:

Hanna Herald — Hanna’s Albert Galarneau and Elwood Tolton received lifetime achievement awards at the Canadian Finals Rodeo this year.
Galarneau’s son, David, accepted the award for him because he was in the Hanna Hospital and unable to make the ceremony and accept the award in person.
Tolton, who attended, said he was treated very, very well.
“They gave us rooms, box seats at the rodeo and even limo service down to Northlands.”
“I felt honoured that the Professional Cowboy’s Association was honouring us old fellows,” Tolton said.
Both Galarneau and Tolton became involved in rodeo life before the Professional Organization of Cowboy’s was formed, in 1945. [...]

Galarneau entered his first Rodeo in 1931 at Calgary under boys Steer Riding but it was not until 1936 that he won his first trophy, a silver buckle from the Sundre Rodeo.
The next year he and his horse, Ireland, won the North American calf roping championship.
He had bought Ireland for $17 but lost the horse the year after the rodeo to sleeping sickness.
“I have owned thousands of horses over the years,” Galarneau once told the Hanna Herald, “he was the only one I ever lost to brain sickness.”
His bad luck with horses flared up again when another horse was struck by lightning after being put in the pasture.
Galarneau began to borrow horses from his son, David, from then on, he said.
David Galarneau said he was always proud of his father and can remember accompanying his father to the rodeo in 1962, at 13 years old.
In 1978, Galarneau accepted a silver and gold belt buckle and the honour of being called Pioneer of Rodeo at the Calgary Stampede.
David Galarneau also remembers his father’s excitement after having been inducted into the Canadian Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1986.

(http://www.hannaherald.com/index.php?id=427)

I'm so proud of my gramma and my mom too, being so strong through all of this. Look at us, 3 generations of Galarneau women. My grandparents have been married for almost 70 years now, since my gramma was 17! My grampa is her life, without him .. oh i don't even want to think about it. When we were visiting him in the hospital, he wasn't having a very good day and he was so tired, so we were about to leave and my mom gave him a hug goodbye, and he (the tough guy that he is) said to my mom "you can give me a kiss". It was the most special moment, i just want to record all of this here so that i will be able to look back and remember.

I think i'll leave this post at that. From all of this i think i've learned to cherish my family more, and always say i love you because you never know what can happen.

Love,
Colleen

Saturday, November 26, 2005

I dyed my hair!


Back in brown and lovin' it... see?


Just wanted to show you cause i'm so happy with how it turned out! Excuse the Pjs, i was all ready for bed, that's my bedtime pose.. clearly.

So many more pictures to show you from our night of completely rez-typical events, but they'll have to wait cause it's now 6am and i'm TIRED.

Nighty night,
Colleen

Monday, November 21, 2005

i should be studying i should be studying i shouldn't be blogging i should be studying

Now that that's out of the way, i will blog even though i should be studying:

My fingers hurt from attempting to learn a new song on the guitar. I never play guitar for enough weeks in a row to build up callouses on my fingers so they allllways hurt when i pick it up again. Dammit! the piano doesn't hurt when you play it.. the saxophone doesn't hurt when you play it.. why does the guitar have to hurt when you play it? oh well it was the only rez-friendly instrument i had and i want to learn it so i'm going to no matter how much it hurts.

We went to Aussie Rules on friday night.. what fun!! Yay pianos and loud music and singing along to everything so loud that even now (monday night) my voice is still hoarse. K tell me it isn't way too cool that we took up the entire back half of the bus on the way there (note the beer in peoples' hands):









And i'm not lying i swear.. we had EVEN MORE FUN when we got there!

There was dancing & singing:









Secret telling & posing:









stage dancing & girl carrying:









And winning this free drink card from the gorgeous piano player man (ahem) for singing the loudest!! Wooohooo, no wonder my voice is dead!










Most of all there was just tons of standing on our chairs singing really loud, and spilling beer. Okay mostly just the first part, but there was a good amount of beer spilling:










Oh and just when you thought that was the end... after, there was a bunch of cab riding and pizza ordering and waiting and pizza eating with ranch dressing. But.. i didn't get pictures of that, i was too busy eating pizza.

The next morning i got up at 8:00 to go to a group meeting for Operations Management. I wasn't impressed. Then i went out to visit my grandparents in Hanna. My grampa is in the hospital and this was my first time out since my grandparents sold their house and moved into the lodge, so it was a really tough trip for me. It was also hard on my mom seeing her dad in the hospital and it was all just so emotional. My grampa has cancer and it spread to his bones and then throughout his entire body so he won't be getting better, but once he's stabilized and there's room for him he'll probably move to the nursing home wing of the hospital. Since we had no grandparents house to stay in anymore, i spent the night in my grampas unoccupied room at the lodge (the room is right across from my grammas room) and my parents stayed at my uncles. At one point i had to get all my emotions out on paper, so i wrote a few paragraphs and cried all over the paper and smeared the ink. Maybe i'll type it up and post it sometime, if only just because i want to be able to look back on it some day in the future when it's all over.

Well, thats enough depressing for one entry, maybe all the fun and all the sadness balanced out into lukewarm feelings :)

Love,
Colleen





Wednesday, November 16, 2005

ooooh shopping spree

yay, i love the feeling after a shopping spree when you're like "holy crap i love all this shit i bought!!". Danielle and I went to market mall and both bought a good amount of stuff. I got the cutest argyle print sweater, a pair of nice dressy jeans, 2 really good casual shirts, 5 of the cutest undies ever, a pair of earrings, and then i got some big black poster boards to make a picture collage for my wall, and we got these big crayola window markers and i drew a huge mural on the main window of our apartment. Its so neat these markers dry like that window paint that you see in store windows. I couldn't take a pic cause it's so dark out right now but i'll take one during the day tomorrow and show you all.. i can't wait to see what it looks like in the daylight.

Oh, devastated am i.. cute boy that sits in front of me in class has a GIRLFRIEND. Ahhhh. All. the. good. ones. are. taken. At least i found out before i embarassed myself by asking him for coffee or something. Time to move on i guess, now theres no reason to even GO to accounting. Oh, well i guess LEARNING could still be a reason.. pffft who am i kidding.

So, I had my last midterm on monday. I am officially free now... until finals start. Oh but before that i have my oral french exam, so i guess i'm free till then. Except i do still have an accounting quiz that i have to do good on, but until then i'm free as a bird. Oh wait, next week i do have a french test and dictation. But i mean.. that means for the rest of the week i'm free. WHO AM I KIDDING, i'll never be free.

Eeeep, Dec 1st is the deadline for 2 things i want to apply for. The first is the co-op program for my business school. You have to apply for the program and they accept you based on GPA and other extracurricular things, and then once you're actually accepted (you find that out in january) then you apply for specific jobs/work terms. So really that's a whole other process within itself since the average person applies for over 10 work terms at a time. EEk, i'm scared. But it's something i really want to do.. make decent money while gaining experience.. it's something that is really worth postponing my graduation for. And hey.. i'd still graduate at the same time as Ryan who only takes 4 classes a semester!

The second is the buddy program for the international business students association. I would be applying to be a buddy for an international student coming to study business at Haskayne for next semester. I think that'd be awesome and not only would i gain the experience to put on a resume, but i'd get to take her/him to see a bunch of neat things in calgary that i haven't even seen in a long time (zoo, calgary tower, etc). Plus, with living in rez it's awesome cause chances are that student will be living in rez too, but having my parents in calgary means they could always pick us up to take us somewhere or lend me the car for a while to show the student around.

Man, all of that would make me REALLY busy. That is probably a good thing considering at the rate i'm going this semester i watch like 3 hours of TV every night. And 2 during the day. Oh lord i watch a total of 5 hours of TV a day. SAAAAVE MEEEE.

I spose i could dig up some pictures considering all i really talked about today was what i did TODAY, and i didn't take any pictures TODAY so i will have to dig up pictures and tell you about what i did some other DAY!

On thursday some of us from rez went to Cowboys, now i won't get started on my night cause i felt terribly ill (hadn't even drinken) and tried to have fun but.. well i won't get into it. But before we got there was fun! Now, being on the train and taking pictures, i thought it seemed like we were taking pictures for an album cover. SO i wittily named our band "Somerset" and our other friends who were sitting across the aisle were "Bridlewood" because that's the train we were on! Then of course it had to have some sort of J.LO inspired title .. what better than "On the Train" (beause 'on the c' doesn't have the same kinda ring.. u know.. her album 'on the 6' as in the 6 train? no? oh god).

The night before we went to the Den to celebrate our first night of freedom. YAA first day of "reading days". What fun! Much more fun than stupid crowded Cowboys.. less stabbings too.






First, we ate the most amazing cupcakes in the world (www.cravecookies.com) that Scott brought over, drank martinis (very strong martinis), and waited for Danielle to get ready (Danielle: Heyyyy! Jerk!! I can't believe you took a picture!). Then it was on to the Den, gotta love that 4 minute walk to the bar.






On the left is my friendly neighborhood Reza, superawesome guy. Look Reza.. you're on the blog!! On the right are my homegirls Brandi and Lindsay, we had so much fun that night after the den eating pasta and talking about how stupid boys are.






I guess it's true what they say: you get what you give! I'm sorry Fabian! Now i know what it feels like when someone plays with your face.. look at the fear in my eyes!!

Alright blogger is being CRAZY and it took way too long to make this post cause firefox shut down on me 9 times!! So, this is where it ends, and i will come back and fix all the formatting later because right now blogger seriously won't let me move some of these things into alignment. How frustrating.

Love,
Colleen

Sunday, November 13, 2005

question for the commenter...

If you, the "cute boy who sits in front of me", read my blog and therefore know that i have a crush on you... then why do i have to be the one to talk to you? Why can't you say something now that you know? Or better yet why can't we strike up a conversation on the computer instead? Why do you insist that I talk to you?

RIDDLE ME THAT MR. COMMENTER!

PS: i don't think you're scary, i just like to take my time with matters of the heart
PPS: you're really cute

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

winter knits

Alright so remember the toque i made as my first fair-isle knitting project? Well now i'm attempting mittens to match. Now yes, i have made mittens before, but those were crochet. This is knitting, and fair-isle at that, so it's going to be much more difficult. They could end up looking like crap -- rather, ONE could end up looking like crap, if it does i surely won't make the other one. Hahah. I dont have a pattern cause they're all too complicated to follow, so i'm going to just make it up as i go along.. how hard could mitts be? It's just a tube with an extra tube hanging off the side for the thumb. Well, i'm sure i could find many ways to screw it up so keep your fingers crossed for me. Here's a picture of my progress so far:










The pictures annoy me a bit because the purple is actually much more purple and not blue at all. Anyhow that mitten so far just took me one long night of t.v. watching, so i'm hoping they'll be done before my hands get too cold in this arctic climate.


Is it bad that i drink diet Pepsi like it's water? I would actually like to know how much it will diminish my quality of life or shorten my life span if i keep drinking 1 or 2 cans a day. Sometimes you have to weigh the dangers with the happiness it gives you and see if it's worth quitting. I'm a pepsiholic.... i'm addicted to PEPSIHOL!!!

Alright thats enough for now, short and sweet (to give you extra time to read my previous post the size of alaska).

I'll leave you with a pic of us girls when we went to the Den a few weeks ago:


Love,
Colleen

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Maybe it's just the good mood talking...

but everything is so wonderful. I am currently dancing to the poppiest songs EVER in my dorm room. Good thing nobody else is in the apartment right now, hehe. Yesterday i was cleaning my room and listening to michael jackson, which quickly turned into dancing to MJ and occasionally picking up something off the floor and putting it somewhere else. Finally i had to ask Akiva for some songs because i had used up all my good room cleaning songs while dancing.. so he told me to get the Pussycat Dolls song "Beep" which turned out to be GREAT and i danced that away too. Needless to say, as soon as i started talking great pop-dance songs with Akiva, the room stopped being cleaned. Oh well, some things are just more important than others!

Anyhow, the point is.. following that pop excitement, i started looking up more songs today and found this blog: poptastic.blospot.com which is just a big list of a bunch of awesome poppy songs and links to download the songs right from the page. Man it was awesome. So thats what brings me to my present state of euphoria and i thought i had better blog now while i'm in a good mood.

So another topic of discussion today is school. Those of you who talk to me on somewhat of a regular basis know that i've been totally swamped with studying lately cause i have had a torrent of midterms and projects and tests lately. The situation was made worse when i got sick and had to miss a midterm, therefore deferring it to the only other date which was yesterday (saturday) right after my regularly scheduled accounting midterm. SO yesterday was the day i had been working up to for 2 weeks, and it went good. It went good yes it did. It was odd cause i thought i would do SO good at OPMA and i pretty much was worried i'd fail Accounting, but coming out of the exams i think i probably did just about the same at both. So.. maybe i won't fail accounting after all! YAY. This also contributes to my good mood.

Now, recently when i've been telling people about all this school stuff, the topic of University in general comes up. Now i know that UofC doesn't have the greatest reputation from the student satisfaction point of view. I think we're something like dead LAST on the students rating in the McLeans magazine. But i feel the need to explain to people that for me and all the rest of the BComm students it's different. The business faculty is named the Haskayne School of Business for Mr. Haskayne who donated a whole CRAPLOAD of money (something like 7 million i believe, i don't have the urge to check these facts however) to the faculty a few years ago. That being said.. we're probably the most funded faculty in the University ... go figure, the business grads from UofC end up making lots of money that they like to donate back to the school, and company's like sponsering stuff so that they get their names out to all the students that they hope will come work for them. Plus we have a great CO-OP program that links students to companies for work terms that give the students great experience in a real company plus real salaries and give the companies good labour for cheaper and in some cases future employees.

Alright so aside from all the financial stuff that makes Haskayne look pretty good compared to the rest of the UofC, there are also social aspects that make me happy. I was trying to explain this to my friends and to my parents and i don't know if they actually understand, so i'll try and explain it once more. Haskayne is not like the other faculties. First of all, at UofC 101, before the year even started in 1st year, you get arranged into your 'houses'. Yes, it's like harry potter, there are 4 houses in haskayne, 3 of them are named after sponsors and one isnt sponsored yet so it's called 'haskayne house'. We all got tee-shirts that corresponded with our houses. OK i'll admit, apart from that first day, we haven't really done anything house-related yet. But still.. what other faculty would DO that? None i say, none.. cept maybe engineering, they're as crazy as us. Here's a pic of us at uofc 101 in our house shirts - we had a scavenger hunt AND a BBQ that day, kickaSS.
So anyhow, that was us last year at the beginning of our first year of university. That year i met lots of great people like Ryan, Katrina, Nikki, Kendall, Chinese Ryan, Jackie, and many more. (Also i continued to hang out with friends i knew from before from highschool and summerstock and work and such, but thats another topic.) Anyhow, so i met all those people in my various classes, most of which had 200 or so people in them. I became really close with Ryan and Katrina and also hung out more with some highschool people that were in Haskayne too like Josh Chow, Reid Heskes, Mike Sandst, and the likes.

Now that i'm in second year, things are changing. We find ourselves in at least 2 haskayne courses per semester (instead of the measly one we had all year last yr) and those classes have a maximum of around 40 students. So, now we're in smaller classes, but we recognize almost everyone from at least one of our larger classes from last year. Now, just because we recognize them doesn't mean we talk to them. It's so odd, take my accounting class for example.. i recognize TONS of people that i've either had class with before or met through other haskayners during the year last year or at BSD (which was awesome and i met so many people that i had seen all year but never talked to, great time to meet.. at the END of the year). So yeah, i recognize all these people, but my friend Ryan is in that class, so automatically at the start of the year i went to sit with him. So my regular spot is with Ryan in the second row on the right... and accounting doesn't have a group project and u can't really talk during that class... so i haven't even really met any of the other people in the class. Therefore i will spend an entire semester in class with people i recognize but not get ANY closer to knowing them. CRAZY its crazy and dumb.. i wish we were all friends (and not only because i have a crush on the guy who sits in front of me, but that is one reason). But i figure, at the rate things are going, if the same people are in my class again next semester we might get a bit closer to meeting and maybe by 3rd year i'll start talking to more people. If this progresses as such every year.. by fourth year i should pretty much be able to talk to almost everyone that has been in my class, which makes for a lot of acquantances. What other faculty (again, other than engineering) would be able to do that? I don't think that by your 4th year in social sciences you recognize almost every other social sciences student in your year and could potentially have a conversation with them. SO THERE. We're different, and i like it, and i look forward to being friends with EVERYONE.. and more than friends with the guy that sits in front of me in accounting. Hehe.

Well, congratulations to everyone who sat through that discussion. I won't even get into my analysis of residence because that would be 4 times as long as this one.

I thank you for listening..
and even if nobody is listening, at least in 4th year i can look back at this post and see if any of this is true... and if i am, indeed, engaged to the cute boy who sits in front of me in accounting.

Love,
Colleen

Ps: oh giant paperclip, how i love thee
I spose i should get a picture of a Haskayne thing not a science theatres thing. Perhaps i'll snap some photos of me in front of the stock ticker or something. Yeah that sounds great. Look forward to that, k? hehe

Friday, November 04, 2005

My blog is worth...


My blog is worth $564.54.
How much is your blog worth?



I found this while surfing someone else's blog and their blog was apparently worth 0$ so i guess i'm doing okay. Although i have NO clue how this dollar value is calculated. Maybe i'll put some research into that. I'd like to think my blog is priceless but if someone gave me 564.54$ for the time and effort i put into my blog i wouldn't complain!

Colleen