Finalement!

So there I was... haunting Jer Z. my American Mistress : )) just don't tell Kansas! Anyway, I went back for my roomies' Halloween bash the weekend before last (and no, I do not mean my *former* roomies, since I still have at least partial residence there - in magnetic knife strip form) It was absolutely amazing to be "home". I was expecting the trip to be really fun and exciting, which it was, but I was caught off guard by how relaxing it was. I had no idea I was so stressed out!

As you can see, my gourd carving skills (depicted above) have really improved since last year. I also carved a couple pumpkins for the party (I know, I know, so cliché, but they were pretty fabulous too!)

And as you can see to the right, I'm not the young 24 year old I once was either. Fortunately JoLo coordinated the volunteer photographer to hide the wrinkles and grey hairs pretty well ; ) Fortunately I'm on the young side for my class here at McGill, so I haven't been too devastated about the ol' 25.

So I've started getting flack about not blogging about anything school related. In true Canadian fashion, all my research is top-secret, but I can tell you that I am *not* getting ready to run two new studies. The first will be adapting a paradigm my lab has already used to reduce stress in telemarketers. The idea is to train people not to focus on rejecting social information by giving them lots of practice. Check out the original to boost your self-esteem here. I'll be using pictures of only the opposite gender to see if it reduces dating anxiety.

The other project I should be running in the near future will look to see how instructions about how to approach a choosing between potential dating partners influences evaluations of who we choose. For instance, we'll ask participants to decide who they'd rather meet, partner A or partner B. Before they actually choose, we'll ask them to list what they might gain by choosing each person or what they would give up by not choosing each person. I hypothesize that people's natural tendency to use one or the other method will create a situation in which "fit" - making the decision the way you would naturally- will make you happier with your selection.

In other news, I submitted a grant application today that I'd been working on for weeks, and pretty much all weekend. So you can imagine my delight when I discovered my French word of the day is "finalement" or finally! If only my dictionary.com word of the day had been serendipitous!

Wrestling Winter

So there I was... a professional women's wrestling match. If you find yourself wondering why, let it suffice to say I found myself asking the same question. The short answer? Because someone asked... and I thought it would make a good opening line for the blog. It was pretty interesting though, reinforcing the try anything once philosophy. For starters, the location was what appeared to be a converted school. It must be a community building now, since we could see a seniors line dancing class going on through the basement windows. I can only imagine the sounds they must have heard coming from above: ) The show itself definitely had its entertaining moments. If you can appreciate a good pratfall, then you could appreciate this - even if you don't speak a lick of French. One of the characters was "American", she spoke English and her "at bat" song was American Woman. My guide for the evening had gone once before and said that in the show he'd seen she tried to get the crowd to speak English and they all booed her. American villains aside, the audience was probably the most interesting part of the experience, at least for this social psychologist. I was amazed to see babies, small children, and then just a whole lot of thirtysomethingish men. While Montreal is generally exceedingly fashionable, this crowd was, well, not. Apparently blue collar fashion is binational (with fashion powerhouse Wal-Mart providing most of the attire).

In other news, today brought the first snowflakes. Too bad too, I'll miss all the people from the office this winter... I wish! But as it turns out, they expect people to go outside in the snow and negative thirtysomethingish degree weather. Anyone seen Doc Opp's fabulous winter hat? Cause I'm looking to steal it ; ) This also means that if you're wanting to come visit you should get on it! It isn't going to get any warmer, hockey season's in full swing, and the leaves are seriously beautiful. It cracks me up to see fallen maple leaves everywhere, some are even primary color red.

Muchlove from Montreal!

Fun with vocabulary : )

So there I was, getting emails from folks wondering how I am. Answer? Sassy and sarcastic as ever.

My classmates organized a board games night on Tuesday, but since we played Taboo, perhaps it was just a game night. I'm proud to announce that the experimental team trounced the clinical team. Fun fact number 1: no one on their team was able to get the clue - it's in the US, rocks with portraits on them. As the token American I laughed and laughed - hopefully you all figured it out, but it's Mount Rushmore. Fun fact number 2: Taboo cards here have English on top and French on bottom, so you may pull up a word only to realize it's French, or worse, a cognate so you don't realize it's French until you don't recognize any of the Taboo words. Fun fact number 3: the French words and English words were the same for the vast majority of the cards, but one card had "terrorisme" for the French, and "rug" for the English word ~ we're still trying to figure out if there's some hidden connection. Anyway, it was a really nice time and I think we had 10 of the 12 in our class there at one point or another, so the sociallizing is starting to get started.

Other word stuff, some French some Canuk:

My car Red, a Chevy Cavalier is a (kA vAly A´)

A stocking cap is a "tuque"

Someone who's super on top of things e. g. very keen to do them is a "keener" - Ads, meet your new nickname

"and Bob's your uncle" - roughly "and that's it!" or "and you're done!" Not quite as good as "and you're laughing" or "you're in clover" but similar. * I think this phrase comes from the Maritime provinces

"Maritime provinces" - The Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, bordering on the Atlantic Ocean. They were politically distinct until joining the Canadian confederation in 1867. - quoted from Answers.com



Couche Tarde - literally "sleep late" but more like our term "night owl" - It's a pervasive depannuer chain whose name, I must admit, still makes me giggle

dépanneur - from the French verb dépanner, meaning "to help out of difficulty" or "troubleshoot"; often shortened to "dep") is a convenience store or independently-run corner/general store or deli.

Labour Day

So there I was... Boston, MA celebrating Labour Day by not labouring. Since one of my former roommates just moved to Cambridge (into the sweetest flat any grad student could hope for) and another just finished her qualifying exams (strong work PollyAnna ; ) and another just frickin loves Boston, and since I'm now a mere 5-ish hours away from the city known for its beans and clam chowder, we all decided to meet up for a reunion.

Trip highlights:
Being asked if I was homesick already by customs agent
Realizing it's time for new brake pads
Speaking English (to everyone!)
Finding myself in the People's Republic of Cambridge (a pub, not a former soviet state)
Being stopped on the street and asked if I went to McGill (I was wearing my t-shirt ok, it's not like they picked up on my use of "eh" or the long o sound in out and about, however I have started to notice these splipping into my vernacular).
Having the guy who asked if I went to McGill tell me not to waste my time there
King-sized bed
Seeing a girl in the park with a fabulous shirt
Seeing the same shirt look even better on Mer about 5 minutes later at Ann Taylor
Seeing the same shirt very successfully getting Mer a handsome fellow to dance with 5 hours later
ktk making an appearance
Seeing some dude with a KU cap - though aparently it was his dad who was the alum
Clam Chowder
Tom's Thai Cooking

Mostly though, it was nice to feel "at home" again with people I love : ))

Frere Jacques

So there I was... a "karaoke" bar in the Old Port part of Montreal. My friend Lisa invited me out with her sister and her sister's boyfriend and a couple other people from "the department" (the Psychology department that is, but I like the elitism implied by there being only one department, so that's the terminology I'll use.) Anyway, the place was described to me as a French song karaoke bar that was supposed to be a lot of fun.

Apparently we weren't the only people who'd heard about the place, because when we got there, there was a considerable line outside, full of completely contented Canadians queuing quite politely. 6$ cover charge, but that included a speed entry (aka no ID required), and an invisible hand marking (no black X's in sight).

So I get in there and the guy on stage is just killing. Everyone in the place is singing along and he's even got a guitar with him that he's playing and everyone in the bar's clapping and really into it. I was really impressed and wondered what the next people would be like. Not too impressed to remember my thirst after walking several blocks in heels (Ok, the heels ended up being overkill, but after my trip up with the ladies in which we were turned away for wearing flip-flops I wasn't going to take chances.) So, being the follower that I am, I waited as everyone else got drinks to see what everyone else was drinking. And let's just say I was both proud and embarrassed to be an American, since everyone in the group was drinking Coors Lite. In their defense, it was the only light beer offered at the stand we were at, but still.

Ok, so we get ourselves a little space carved out on the dance floor and I realize the same dude is still going, with some other song! As it turns out, he played for about a half hour with everyone singing along. Oh, and he didn't have a karaoke machine telling him lyrics either, nor did the crowd.

And then this other group gets up and plays, they've got guitars too, and a trombone and a trumpet too! So I'm concluding pretty quickly that these aren't random people from the audience singing. And this group was really amazing too! They even threw in a couple songs for the Anglos... that didn't go over nearly as well with most of the crowd, but we were happy for the shout out! And after about an hour of that band, the original guy gets back up there. It was just shocking to see these people all know the lyrics to so many songs - and not just rock songs, I'm pretty sure that many of the songs were more like French folk songs jazzed up. I can't imagine getting that kind of crowd response to "The Farmer in the Dell" in the US! And the people there were definitely hipsters, they just happen not to be too cool for everything like our hipsters.

Bonus tidbit also under the title of Frere Jacques: There's a mattress store called Dormez-vous?
Which just translates into "Are you sleeping?" But I love that it seems so familiar!

A blog...

So there I was, starting a blog. According to toothpaste for dinner, anything that can respond to stimuli will eventually blog. And gosh darnit, Canada has not yet sucked my ability to respond to stimuli out of me, so blog I shall. Also, Greg said it would be a good idea... at least until I get bored. But one small problem about this blog thing is that I pretty much hate typing. Maybe it was all the pressure to type 60 words a minute or get a (gasp) "B" in typing my freshman year of high school, but I just don't really enjoy the clickety clacking, the sorta painful wrists thing, etc... So the rest of this blog shall be done in Joe Bob Briggs style tallies.

1 Number of Air-Conditioning units purchased
0 Number of Air-Conditioning units installed by vacationing landlord
7 Number of Cabinets painted
6 Number of times hit-on
0 Number of times hit-on in English
1234091234109834 Number of auto insurance companies called
0 Number of auto insurance companies willing to insure me w/ Kansas Licence and Plates
16:00 Number listed as my bank's closing time, this translates to 4 pm!
18:00 Number listed as bank's closing time on it's "open late" day, yeah, 6pm is late!
26 Number of transactions allowed for checking account with a monthly fee of $3.25/month
5 Number of Canadian dollars extra a month to have caller ID on your cell phone
20 Number of a la carte cable channels I got to choose
2 Number of phone numbers I've gotten... from girls I intend to befriend (1 in the department and 1 w/ a killer shoe wardrobe)
1 Number of fans I was lent by a Grecian goddess
514-236-etch Number of my new Canadian cell phone
7 Number of pounds I've lost living only on what I know how to, and can afford to cook : )
3 Number of times I went to a grocery store with the main motivation being to "interact" with someone face to face
3 Number of times I've seen the "blue screen of death" when my ATI TV Wonder software failed to install properly.
1 Number of CD-roms I checked out from the language library to learn the French
4 Number of minutes it took to get health care card!
5 Date in September that classes start
1-4 Dates in September I'm meeting up w/ the best roomies a girl could've asked for in Boston!
130983412 People I miss!!!