Two more to go

At supper this evening, my friend Stephen and I were just discussing how unbelievable it is to be able to say that this year is pretty much over, save for exams of course. Only two weeks of classes are left, and then the dreaded exams start hovering overhead, forcing me to spend much more time in the library than I'd like to. I think it's going to be especially hard for me to force myself to study for this set of finals, what with the weather getting nicer and nicer, and the wonderful sunlight lingering longer and longer every evening. Also, I just can't wait to get a move on with my plans for the summer! I've been selected to work as a Parliamentary Guide at the Parliament of Canada in Ottawa, Ontario this summer, and I couldn't be more excited :) Two other Mount A students were selected as well, Liz and Jenna, which is great because I'll at least know two other people before I even get there. I'll be living in an apartment in downtown Ottawa with a 1st year Law student, Martha, and the apartment is so nice, I can hardly believe my good luck! On the other hand, it's going to be tough to not be home for the summer, and it's going to be even harder to say goodbye to everyone here, even if it's only for four and a half months. Fraser will be studying French in Chicoutimi, Quebec for 5 weeks, then working at a children's camp in Naramata, British Columbia for the rest of the summer. Yes, I'll miss him like crazy, but we're both going to be having such great experiences, so how could we ask for anything different? I'm sure four and a half months will pass more quickly than we think...

I've been doing some thinking about my blog lately, and I realized that I don't always bring in the academic side of Mount A too often. I guess I take it for granted that everyone knows that there is a lot of education going on in the classrooms, so I focus on the learning that goes on outside of the classroom. But I suppose that's not really fair, now is it? So let me tell you a little about an academic related event that happened this week. Kirsten, MTA's VP Academic, put on an Academic Awareness Week, including a number of different sessions dealing with issues such as procrastination, preparing for fourth year and graduation, the international exchange experience and choosing courses, majors and minors. I attended the Academic Fair that took place on the balcony of meal hall, and it was a really good experience. There were representatives from each department, desserts, music, the works. Any questions you could possibly have had about your degree or course selections could easily have been answered there. I also went to the International Exchange Experience session, which was very informative, and set out all the options for international exchange. Did you know that there are something like 14 different exchanges available for MTA students? And on top of that, many students prepare and complete independent exchanges to many more countries? There are so many opportunities!

Now for the dance recital! Put on by the Dance Society, the end of the year recital, titled Last Chance to Dance featured jazz, hip hop, lyrical, ballet, swing, salsa and international dances. It was a huge success! We had three shows (one on Friday night and two on Saturday afternoon) and all three were oversold-out, haha. They had to add extra chairs to each performance, and that made for a stellar crowd each time. These are a couple pictures of some swing and salsa dancers, as well as members of the Dance Society. The one above is of Denise, Meaghan, Aldous and I, with a large tuft of Scott's hair, haha.

A picture of me and Aldous with the 4 current instructors, Casey, Lindsay, Mandy and Jerrod, who are all graduating this year, and have passed the Swing Society down to Aldous and I!

A very fun picture of the six of us :)

Some of the Swing dancers also performed both officially and unofficially at two other great events that happened this weekend. Jazz at Jennings is put on by the MTA Jazz Ensemble, and features, obviously, the MTA Jazz Band, as well as some of MTA's finest vocal artists. We Swing dancers, and some wannabes, haha, danced the night away to some awesome music! On Saturday night, the Swing Society also performed at the Society of All Nations banquet, where there was great food, music, dance and other entertainment, put on by many of MTA's international and non-international students. A great weekend all around!

Well that about sums up my life as of late, I hope it gives you a little bit of an inside glance into what life's like here at MTA and all the opportunities that are available for you. As always, please feel free to e-mail me with questions, comments or just to say 'hi' :)

Much love,

Sue

sjhumphrey@mta.ca

Just plain fun!

So this week, this weekend in particular, has been so much fun! A wonderful, well deserved (I think) break from all of the end of term work that's been going on. So, you may be wondering just what on earth this first picture is. Well, allow me to introduce you to one of my best friends, Kelly, who just seems to have a knack for creating animal shapes out of just about anything. It all started in Meal Hall one day at lunch when she starting playing around with rice crispy squares. She made a giraffe, hippo, cobra and a few other very cool shapes. Now, with Easter just around the corner, she treats us by bringing those little chocolate eggs to Economics class and she made these animals out of the wrappers. Now the four in the back (left to right) are a tiger, with me riding it, a lama, with Fraser riding it, a bird and a giraffe. The two in the front are a crocodile and and elephant. Now this may seem really really stupid and lame, but you try making animal shapes out of Easter egg tinfoil wrappers. No small feat, let me tell you. Anyway, I just thought that this was pretty damn hilarious, and well, Kelly was feeling rather hurt that she hadn't been in my blog yet. So Kelly, if you're reading this (which you should be), here's your moment of glory, enjoy it! Feel free to e-mail me if you'd like to place an order for your very own tinfoil animals. They make great gifts. Ha.

Ahh, Urinetown! For any of you theater junkies out there, you've perhaps heard of this fantastically hilarious Broadway musical, but if not, well you'd best go see it if you can, haha! The story line behind the musical is just great, and involves a town falling victim to a great water shortage, and a private corporation taking over the water works and charging people to use the private washrooms they control. As always, there is the hero of the story who rebels against the evil corporation and spurs a revolution for freedom. The picture above is of Bobby Strong, the hero of the story, played by my good friend Brett, a first year student, and Hope Cladwell, the daughter of the man who runs the evil corporation who falls in love with Bobby, played by another friend of mine, Sarah, also a first year student.

This is a shot of the entire cast during the finale, bringing an end to this fantastic musical by Black Tie Productions. The show ran from Wednesday to Saturday, where they put on both a matinee and evening show. The cast was composed of 16 great students and community members with a production team of almost the same size. So, as you can see, it was a fantastic team effort by both Mount Allison and Sackville, with a final product that had me laughing and smiling the whole way through!

Swing dancing!!! And so many other kinds of dancing that have been going on this week, all in preparation for next weekend's end of the year dance recital! So, so, so exciting :0 These few pictures are of some members of the MTA Swing Society, practicing this year's great routine. Unfortunately, I'm not dancing in the show this year as my partner, Fraser, is performing in a play that is being performed the same weekend as the show. But, I helped choreograph some of the routine with my friend Aldous, seen in the picture above doing a Cherry Drop with a wonderful dancer, Mandy :) Aldous did most of the choreographing for this number, and it's set to a song from The Mask Soundtrack, Hey Pachuco, for those of you into Jazz music :P It's a really fast number, and just tons of fun to do :) The Salsa Society, which I'm also a part of, has been practicing really hard as well, and Aldous and I will be dancing in that number, set to Mya's Do You Only Wanna Dance from the Dirty Dancing Soundtrack. Very, very hot, let's just say that, haha.

Casey and Lindsay in an Uber Dip.

Many and Jerrod freestyling because they don't know their solo yet, with Meaghan in the background, joining in on the fun, haha.

So there's a taste of some of the fun things I've been up to this weekend! I also went to a concert on Friday night at George's Roadhouse, a really great bar that brings in tons of great music. The concert featured Jenn Grant, a fabulous singer/songwriter from Halifax, and In Flight Safety, a band that formed at MTA and has gone on to win several East Coast Music awards. They have a great sound, sort of like Coldplay, and put on a great live performance. My friend has some pictures from the night, so I'll try and get them up on here as soon as I get a hold of them :) Until then, keep smiling!

Much love,

Sue

sjhumphrey@mta.ca

March Madness

'Fragments of Recollection' - one of the three plays performed by Windsor Theater last weekend.

Just one of the many posters with environmentally-friendly living suggestions on them.

A 'Campus Climate Challenge' badge that many students are wearing to show their support.

Alex, Me and Colin at the Harper Floor Crawl.

The Harper Floor Crawl - jam packed with fun!

Well, March is said to be one of the craziest months for university students, and I guess we're all starting to feel that very apparent reality these days. What with so many events taking place, so much school work to get done and final exams fast approaching, people are certainly looking for some good distractions from reality. Luckily for them, there are tons of things going on and I'll be filling you in on a few of the events I've been taking part in the last little while.

I suppose we'll go in the order of the pictures I've posted for you this week. So, let's start with Windsor Theater. Windsor Theater is a fantastic theater group here on campus, and they hold several performances throughout the year. Many of the plays are directed by students from the Drama Department, and some of them are original works. A great set of three one-act plays were performed last weekend, and they were all student directed and two of them were original works; Fragments of Recollection, which was a collaborative script, written by the three actors and the student-director, and Salad and Cake, written by a Drama student and Psychology student. The third play was Speaking Well of the Dead, the only unoriginal piece, which was written to commemorate the victims of 9/11 and their families. All three plays were wonderfully done with strong acting and directing all around.

Another big event that's been happening around campus is the 'Campus Climate Challenge', being put on by MTA's Eco-Action Society. This society has been busy promoting simple lifestyle changes that students can make in order to reduce the amount of energy they use, which in turn, is of course better for the environment. They will be monitoring each residence's energy use, and the house with the biggest reduction in their level of energy use will win an energy efficient big screen TV for their house lounge. A pretty sweeeet prize if you ask me! I think it's such a good idea to really promote green living on campus; there are so many intelligent and responsible students here that it seems like the perfect group of people to really band together and make a difference in the environment.

The highlight of my weekend was the Harper Floor Crawl, which happened in my residence on Saturday night. The theme of the event was 'A Tribute to Residence Life 2006/2007'. Since Harper has 4 floors (combining the basement with the first floor) we decided to celebrate the best house parties of the year. 4th floor was Bennett and Bigelow's 'City Slicks and Country Hicks', 3rd was 'Cancun Campbell', 2nd was Windsor's 'Mardi Gras' and 1st/basement was none other than the party of the year, 'Harper Havoc'. Each floor was responsible for their own decoration and clean up, and it turned out to be such a great party! About 250 people showed up, all packed onto one floor at a time, dancing the night away. It was a great time, thanks to great team efforts by each floor!

Well, that's the lowdown on what's been happening in my life and here at MTA the last little while! As always, work is continuing and I have a midterm and a paper on Friday, so I best hop to that. Also, I've decided to run as an Arts Senator, which is a student who sits on both the Students' Administrative Council (SAC) and the University Senate, representing students' academic concerns. I'm also applying to be a writer for our school newspaper, The Argosy, so that's exciting as well. It's true what they say; there are a million and one ways to get involved at MTA!

Much love,

Sue

sjhumphrey@mta.ca

P.S. - As always, feel free to e-mail me with any questions, comments, suggestions... I love feedback :)

It's a small world afterall...!

Britta, my friend from Germany, and I (Campbellton, 2006)

Devan, Kyle, Sakura and I, with our Chinese friend, Jackson, in the middle (China, 2004)

Where the world feels smaller, MTA (Fall 2006)

Fridays were always a good day in high school, because there seemed to be a different kind of energy in the air on those days; everyone was in a better mood, less work got done, and people talked about their plans for the weekend. Fridays are a different kind of wonderful now, and I most certainly still enjoy them a great deal. Friday afternoons are probably the highlight of my week, as I finish class at 1:20, have lunch, go to my voice lesson, and I'm free, absolutely free. That feeling is one that I always look forward to; the feeling that I don't have any work to do that day, because it's Friday afternoon, and it's pretty much my one afternoon off. Wonderful.

Now yesterday, Friday afternoon, I wasn't free like I normally would have been. I had an External Affairs meeting, and then a Bloggers' meeting, but that's alright. The Bloggers' meeting was actually quite interesting, and as the discussion turned to many different topics, it eventually reached a point where I was reminded of a memory from a month or two ago, a memory which reminded me how small the world really is. I was walking back to my residence, Harper, on again, a Friday afternoon, having just come from the grocery store, when I met a Chinese student whom I'd never spoken to before. So, I made some conversation, asking her where she was from and such, and she said that she was from Beijing. I happily informed her that I had visited Beijing two summers ago, and asked if she knew of the Concord College of Sino-Canada, where my exchange had taken place. It turned out that she had actually been a student there, and I eagerly asked her if she knew of Wao Mung, who's English name was Sally, and who was my Chinese partner during my exchange. And what blew my mind was the fact that in a city of over 15 million people, and a world of over 6 billion, she knew just who I was talking about. In fact, they were quite good friends, and said that she would said 'hi' to her for me the next time they spoke. I'm always baffled when I think back on this, and I'm reminded of other situations that I've experienced, similar to this. Like the man from Ottawa I met in the airport in Zurich who was a frequent visitor to my cousins' restaurant in Ottawa, or the girl I met at an interview for the Parliamentary Guide Program who grew up in the town next to mine. And this, this is how Mount Allison is for so many students. You meet people from across the country and around the world, and there is always something in common between you. It's an awesome feeling, and is one that makes you feel like you've finally found home.

The ways that we are able to communicate with one another are the main reason for this 'small world' feeling, I think. I mean, I can pick up the phone right now and call my parents who are vacationing in Florida, or I can call one of my best friends, Britta, in Gommern, Germany, just to see what she's been up to. I mailed her a Valentine's Day package, and even though she lives across the ocean and thousands of miles away, it got to her. My old vice principal, Gilbert Cyr, was our chaperon for two of the trips to Europe I took, and he met someone that he knew in almost every single airport or city we visited. Crazy, crazy, crazy.

Now, today seems like a magnificent day! It's Saturday, for starters, which means I got to sleep in until like 11:00, which is, as you can see in my profile, one of my favorite pass times. The sun is shining in full force, and it's a wonderful 5 degrees. I should go for a walk or something this afternoon... I absolutely love the feeling of spring, and even though it snowed a bunch last night, the temperatures look to be getting warmer and warmer. When I was home for Reading Week, I had my window open and it smelled like Spring. Can anyone else smell Spring other than me? I hope so, because it is such a fresh, happy smell :)

Well, I think that about sums up how I'm feeling about life in general for today! I've got some reading to do, and a Psychology midterm to study for, and hopefully a walk to take, which would be nice. As always, please feel free to e-mail me with anything: questions, comments, suggestions, or just to say 'hi'. I always like to hear from those of you who are reading this :)

Much love,

Sue

sjhumphrey@mta.ca