At this very moment, a low pressure system is moving to the east directly outside my window. A very obvious spiral formation of clouds is circuling overhead, but peeking through the clouds are bright rays of sunshine. In the field below, two ducks are resting in the marshy pond that has melted and remained there. The real pond further off in the distance is starting to melt away from the centre, but the edges are still frozen. Swallows swoop down to the field, looking for worms that have been forced to the surface by the moist soil, but shortly after, they flutter over our house to look elsewhere.

I just scanned some more images yesterday… now they’re up in the Photos section. More will come up soon, I expect. Enjoy.

So today when I got off the Greyhound at Royal York, I decided to go the MEC. I knew that I had to go back there eventually since I needed to find a replacement handlebar clamp for my front LED bike light, but I’m just never in the area. This was my chance.

Except I had my camera with me, which meant I walked all over downtown looking for nice pictures. I simply wanted to walk along streets that I had never been exposed to. My general route spanned from Royal York Hotel to Harbourfront at Spadina & Lakeshore all the way to Bathurst and Lakeshore back to King and Spadina where MEC is, including a heck of a lot of detours.

Sailboats were tied up near the Toronto City Centre Airport, swans were swimming around the docks looking for bread-generous tourists, old warehouses rusted away awaiting renovation into loft condominiums, the Malting Co. decayed next to the community centre, and St. Mary’s Catholic Church rose above the skyline of “west of Spadina”.

I can’t wait until I get my film developed. I think I might drop it off at Black’s in Guelph, since Pond’s Foto Source hasn’t been very satisfactory lately. Their machine got chemicals on my film, ruining a few of my photos last time… I have yet to take that up with them.

OK so if I don’t finish my recap of the birthday weekend now, I’m not going to ever finish it up, and I won’t remember all the things that happened.

At the retreat, after the celebration time on Friday night, it pretty much turned into time for people to socialize and reconnect with each other. It was fun to meet people from the Mac and Waterloo campuses. I was pretty tired by that time, but somehow I managed to have enough in me to jam some sweet tunes with The Tom and some dude from Mac (I think, I can’t remember his name though); The Tom played some mad bass, the dude frilled it up on the electric, and I whipped out some steady drum lines. That’s the way I like to kick it back a notch, to just play some music.

The cabin wasn’t the greatest, but I’ve had worse. It was too warm, and so that bothered my skin (I’m one who would rather freeze to death than sweat it out). I guess you can’t expect to get good sleep at a retreat, especially with “rustic” proportions. Sure I wasn’t comfortable, but I didn’t really mind it. Some things I found quite hilarious was the inauguration of Andrew Middleton with a new nickname.

Saturday started off really well. With a nice hot shower! If anything makes life better, it’s hot water. A decent breakfast and another worship set to get things rolling followed. Playing with this band is just awesome. They’re all so talented, but so fun to be with. Sprimmer was on drums, Paul and Laura on guitar, Shuesty on piano, Steph on violin, I played bass and Mere and Heather sang. This band can just pick up a new song in a few minutes, and take an old song and make it new again. And their attitudes are all in the right place.

Most of the rest of Saturday morning and afternoon just went by really slowly, as it was mainly training on discipleship group leading and target-areas. This is all important stuff, but when you’ve not had enough sleep the previous night, it’s quite easy to fall asleep or drift off! I really thought the campus time near the end was effective, as it caught up the committed CCC’ers in the plans for next year, showing them how they could be involved and focused.

After really rushing back to Guelph with Shuesty, Alan, and John Yao(!), I went downtown by transit to pick up my sister Sarah at the Greyhound Station. We didn’t have much time to talk as we sprinted to St. George’s Square just in time to make the 51 Gordon bus at 6:15pm. I really didn’t want to spend another half-hour downtown.

We had a little bit of dinner — ravioli and pasta sauce!! — when Liz showed up to pick us up to go recording! Actually, Thomas was the one who rang the doorbell. Shortly after, we were at Adrian’s getting ready to sing BGV’s for Liz’s CD!

Adrian’s studio is actually a section of his basement apartment, but it’s really a neat setup. I wish my room was stacked with that kind of stuff next to my computer…… *drooling*. We (Thomas, Christine, Beth, Heather, and I) spent a good deal of time singing melody tracks, harmony tracks, and ad-libbing tracks so that they could be multiplied and made into a huge crowd-sounding background. It was really neat actually. The time went by so fast; it was so enjoyable. Can you tell I like to sing?

My older sister Clara (expectedly) appeared as we were recording (although we were in a different rooma and didn’t notice). She rented a car and drove from Kingston to be in Guelph for my birthday! Pretty nice of her.

After that song, everyone else left except for Liz, Adrian, and me. We then recorded some pennywhistle for another song! Talk about awesome!! That was so cool! I have never had the chance to hear my pennywhistle with so much reverb and delay so that it sounded like in a large concert hall. I wish that could have just gone on and on and on. What’s really funny is that we never recorded a song-length single track or tune that I played. I played a whole bunch of snippets, and Adrian will take that and meld together a super-snippet of pennywhistle. So if I decide to play it live with Liz at her cd-release party or later on, I’ll have to practice the ultra-snippet so that I’ll sound like how the cd sounds! It’s quite interesting and yet challenging, which I like.

Having finished the final recorded note of Liz’s cd, we drove off to the massive Joint Party that was at Katie Vikken’s (and Sprimmer and Ashley and Jacquie) place. My goodness there were a heck of a lot of people there! I got there after my sisters so I never really had a good opportunity to introduce them to the whole bunch, which I kind of regret. But the people in the living room sucked me into their in-progress game of “Four on a Couch”, apparently the CCC party game favourite this year. The party was a March joint birthday party for me (18th), Tim (19th), Becky (20th), Kristen (22nd), and Katie (23rd)!! Holy that was awesome! They had like three birthday cakes, one of which was angelfood cake, which is really light - hence “angel” food. We got to blow out our candles together, and Tim revealed his wish to me, but revealed wishes never come true! But I’m not going to tell. This wish better come true, however, at some point…

The rest of the night was just chatting and stuff with people, which isn’t my cup of tea, but I try. I realize that it’s also easy for other people who aren’t really talkative to get lost in the fray, so as an untalkative person I try my best to talk to my other untalkative friends, since I know how it feels! Even if it’s my birthday (party).

My sisters and I didn’t stay for way too long, since there was apparently a time change that night. We’d be “springing forward” and hence losing an hour, so we wanted to get home so that I could get enough sleep before church. The reminder came from Heather MacGregor, who was in contact with her friend from New Zealand who was “falling back”… this message was passed around throughout everyone at the party, and there even was an announcement made so that no one would forget and end up going to church late the next day. Turns out, we were all just a little bit wrong…….

I want to take this time to say Happy 20th Birthday Katie!! Even though I’m now typing this past 12 midnight through to the 24th of March, and the post is dated for something like Tuesday so that it seems earlier, I think your birthday is still important enough to send you greetings when it’s too late (or early, depending on which time you’re looking at!!) Don’t you worry, you’ll get a gift from me that will rival your Happy Hands gift to me!

[still more to come]

This past weekend has been simply amazing for me. Let me attempt to remember all the things that happened.

On Thursday night, it all began. Jess wasn’t going to see me on Friday for my birthday since she was going back to the Soo early in the morning for the weekend… so she totally surprised me when I got back home late in the afternoon with some sort of Irish cream cheesecake that was sooo good. It ended up being almost my dinner! And she gave me a really thoughtful birthday card which I will gladly cherish.

Liz dropped by during dinner and before I left for discipleship group ACNFOG so that she could leave with me some music to practise with for recording. But not only that — she also gave me a new pennywhistle for my birthday!! It is in the key of D, which is good since I already have a C. Funny thing is, I was talking to her about possibly buying myself an E-pennywhistle so that I could play in one of her songs, but later we both separately found out that E-pennywhistles are very rare and expensive!! This is another gift that I will not forget.

Through Friday night and morning I had a great struggle trying to get my Environmental Science proposal finished. I just really didn’t want to do it and couldn’t get myself to. The assignment seemed meaningless and my paper ended up being quite the piece of garbage, I think. I rushed to campus around 2:00pm to hand it in, then returned back home to pack and rush over to Meredith’s home for my ride to Edgewood.

CCC MacGuelpherLoo had a Festival of Planning retreat on Friday through Saturday, and it was just awesome. Being in the band that lead worship on Friday night and Saturday morning, we left earlier than most — we left Guelph around 3pm. Somehow Shuesty and I went way too far on Victoria (practically to Guelph Lake!) and then decided to take the scenic route via the Haunted Bridge since we were already late enough. We have pictures to show that we visited the Haunted Bridge and came back alive!

Setting up, practising, and leading worship Friday night was simply fantastic, just amazing. I just love the band since everyone is so easy to get along with, so musically inclined, and so passionate about the same thing: God. We just played and sang and praised God that whole Friday night.

The CCC Guelph people also managed to break out into “Happy Birthday” at the end of the last set, which really surprised me and caught me off guard. But it was very thoughtful indeed.

[more to come ]