Ugh, I've just come back from the world's most AMAZING Christmas dinner. You see, us being Asian we don't just have turkey for Christmas dinner. Oh no, for the last few years, my mother and her best friend have put together this amazing surf & turf style Christmas dinner. After all, everyone eats turkey out of tradition but honestly, seafood is just so much better.

So we comprimise and they prepared a turkey in order to satisfy holiday tradition and then as much seafood as we all can handle. So tonight we started off with shark's fin soup. Then came smoked salmon. Then came scampi, scallops and JUMBO shrimp. Really, the shrimp was the same size as the scampi. Then came a seafood salad which had crab, lobster, shrimp, abalone, and scallops topped with pomelo. Then came a potato salad with boiled eggs and shrimp. Then came a course of chinese vegetables. Then came the roast beef and the mashed potatoes. Then came the turkey. By which point, I was only able to eat the teeniest sliver of turkey with a smattering of gravy. Throughout the whole meal, there was wine (for the adults) and sparkling cider (for the kids) and to wash it all down at the very end, there was Baileys. And for dessert, jello and two kinds of cake - chocolate and mango mousse. Ugh. Being sick never felt sooooooooooooooooooooo good.

Merry Christmas!

I apologize, the blogging has been on hold lately because I've been spending some time at home with friends and family. This year, we're sort of been all over the place. I was back on Monday, Trudy finally came back on Wednesday, Andrea yesterday and Candice will be back tomorrow. I can't wait! We'll have less than 24 hours when all 4 of us are in the same city but since when is that new? Hope all of you are having great holidays =)

This is the post in which I explore and flaunt the newfound joys of unabashed sloth. I finished my semester on Friday and have since been "hanging out" waiting for my sister to finish her exams so we can drive down to Calgary together. This semester has had its fair share of hard work and full-fledged panic, when you write an exam every 3 weeks you get accustomed to a certain level of underlying stress and it was nice to just let everything go. And I mean everything. Waking up anywhere from 10 until noon, not changing out of my pajams, not eating regular meals, eating a piece of cheese for lunch one day and a steak dinner the next, reading a non-medical book for the first time in months and chugging down gallons of cider and hot chocolate. Saturday and Sunday I dragged my butt out of the apartment and forced myself to get some pretty frames for pictures I've had lying around since I moved into my LAST apartment. But today we're headed home! And mama has been informed that we WILL be home in time for dinner so I'm hoping there'll be a table full of tasty things awaiting us! Must pack now...

A quick update on the gingerbread house: We won! As did the peacock and 2 other entries. And the house got a decent price at the auction and it all goes to charity so there's my good deed for the day (especially because I forgot to bring in some food for the food drive...oops!) Our prize - some tasty treat and a horribly awkward dinner with our dean =)

Only 3 more days and I'm done for the semester! Time has never gone so slowly...

Finally some pictures from this year's gingerbread house! The first one is of my own personal favorite entry, it's just so creative! And they managed to incorporate the house into their design (it makes up the body of the peacock). Then some pictures of our own project: our group (minus janet), goalie penguin, and the whole scene.

100 things about me:
1. I'm in the middle of my 2nd year of medical school.
2. I can't remember exactly when I decided I wanted to become a doctor but it was always one of those things I've had in the back of my mind.
3. I have good verbal/auditory memory which makes the learning the 'knowledge' component of medicine relatively easy for me, however my clinical skills are really lacking.
4. The first time I tried to take blood from my friend Sharon, I chickened out and didn't put the needle in deep enough. When I realized the needle wasn't in deep enough, I panicked and just yanked it out of there without first applying pressure to the vein and blood started spurting.
5. Sharon is still willing to be my friend.
6. The majority of my friends in medicine are Asian. I didn't mean for it to be this way, it was just one of those things that happened.
7. Last year in an effort to become more active and meet some new people, I joined the class inner-tube waterpolo team.
8. I'm mediocre at waterpolo but I love it anyways.
9. I've never been incredibly good at any sports and gym and art were my least favorite classes in elementary school.
10. I'm a nerd, I know.
11. In elementary school, my best friend was named Jennifer. She was a year and a half older than me.
12. We've known each other since we were born. Well, since I was born since I'm the younger one.
13. When I was born, her mother bought us matching bears. Hers was named Cuddle and mined was named Yoyo.
14. I'm extremely attached to my stuffed animals. Not only do they all have names, many of them have middle and last names, my sister and I have invented backgrounds for the majority of them (their parents' names, how many siblings they had, the reasons why they came to live with us), and some of them have distinct voices.
15. Cookie (my penguin) came to live with us because her mother died and her father was sat upon by a walrus.
16. Cookie was given to me by aunt and uncle as a souvenir from the Singapore Zoo.
17. Both sides of my family are originally from Singapore and up until last year, I was a Singaporean citizen.
18. I went to school in Singapore for 3 months but left because they were too strict and I was too dumb.
19. I used to think I was good at math until I went to Singapore.
20. My mother thinks math is an incredibly important tool and has been giving me extra math homework for as long as I can remember.
21. I have an extremely driven mother. I blame her for my success =)
22. My mother had me taking piano lessons at the age of 3. The piano teacher had to lift me up onto the stage to perform.
23. My second piano teacher used to take to McDonalds and bought me a dress when I finished Gr. 10 piano. It was a strappy black, velvet dress and I absolutely loved it.
24. I also finished my Gr. 10 in Speech Arts. When I tell people this they tend to mock me by asking me why I needed private lessons to learn how to speak.
25. For whatever reason, I was darn good at speaking. I had a run of wins at the Kiwanis Music Festival between the ages of 6 and 16. When I got my first 2nd place in 10 years, I almost cried.
26. I'm a tad competitive but I've become better and not letting it get out of hand.
27. Sometimes if I'm doing laps in the pool and there's someone else there, I find myself racing them.
28. When there's no one to race against, I hum songs underwater. This time of year it's mostly Christmas carols.
29. My sister is an incredible singer. The girl has pipes.
30. I call my sister "squishy bear" or some variant of that. This started on one of our family vacations when I was teasing her out of boredom.
31. I used to dread family vacations because we would all sleep in one big motel room. My sister and I always had to sleep on the floor and it always smelt like dust. The two of us would be unable to sleep and would have to endure a veritable chorus of snores from my parents and our grandmother.
32. The first family vacation I remember is going to Disneyworld in Gr. 2.
33. My mother pulled my hair into pigtails so tight that my scalp was sore at the end of the day.
34. My favorite ride was Space Mountain and I dragged my mother on it with me. My dad and my sister went on the Teacup ride and 'It's a Small World' but they were too little kid-ish for me.
35. I love roller coasters but 'flippy' rides make me really sick. Kev on the other hand can't handle 'spinny' rides.
36. At the Calgary Stampede, Candice and I will go on all the fun rides together while the boys stand to the side and hold our purses.
37. The one food I absolutely must have at Stampede is poutine. Other favorites include cotton candy and foot-long hotdogs.
38. I have this thing for hotdogs. For our one-month anniversary, Kev made me dinner consisting of normal hotdogs, Pogos, and Kraft Dinner with hotdogs. Though the food was disgusting, it was one of my favorite dates.
39. Now I'm more careful about proclaiming my love for things. I don't think I'd want to eat a meal consisting entirely of perogies.
40. My Junior high used to serve perogies for lunch every Tuesday.
41. Trudy and I used to buy our lunch on Wednesdays (chicken burger day) or Friday (mini pizza day) and we always got a Koala to drink (mango tangerine for me and raspberry guava for her)
42. I'm not very good about eating fruit. You pretty much have to wash it, cut it up and put it in front of me and even then, I still might not eat it.
43. The exceptions to this rule are pomegranate (which my sister peels) and mandarin oranges.
44. Tuesdays and Thursdays are pomegranate nights at our place because they're Gilmore Girls and Alias nights respectively.
45. My favorite Alias character is Sydney's mom, followed closely by Marshall and Sydney's dad.
46. The cancellation of Alias will be traumatic so I've started watching Grey's Anatomy to ease the transition. I'll give myself this year to start getting into Grey's and next year when Alias is gone, the hole inside me won't feel as large.
47. Speaking of holes, my three-hole punch really annoys me. I can only fit in 3 or 4 sheets but I'm too cheap to spend $50 on a really nice hole punch.
48. I'm not too cheap however to allow myself a coffee per day. I'll buy myself a coffee every day even if I'm not tired just because I love the taste/smell/experience that is a good coffee.
49. I worked as a barista for a year. I loved the coffee and hated (some of) the customers.
50. One of my customers asked me out because he thought I was hitting on him. I wasn't. I was just being friendly and thought I was providing good customer service, not just lattes and ham, apple, cheddar sandwiches.
51. I love the ham, apple, cheddar sandwich. The heart of the sandwich is the honey mustard. I still make it for lunch and people look at me strangely because there's fruit in my sandwich. So I guess I do eat some fruit after all.
52. I also really enjoyed the breakfast sandwich. In general, I enjoy breakfast. My sister and I used to love long car trips because it meant that we got to eat McDonalds for breakfast.
53. I have a weakness for good burgers. My ideal burger has really old, smoked cheddar, fresh lettuce and tomatoes, sauteed mushrooms, ketchup, mustard and lots of pickles.
54. My favorite kitchen appliance is the electric grill followed closely by our food processor. It used to be the slow cooker and the toaster oven.
55. I loved the toaster oven because I could cover the tray with tin foil, throw my food on and then walk away for half hour while my dinner cooked itself.
56. The cooking genes in our family seem to have passed me by. While I can cook to survive, I don't enjoy cooking and I'm a fairly lazy chef. I'm not incredibly adventurous and I won't go out of my way to make a good meal unless people are coming over.
57. The points on this list didn't all have to be connect to each other but that made it easier for me. Though 'stream of consciousness' worked well for the purposes of this exercise, I really didn't enjoy 'Mrs. Dalloway'.
58. One of my favorite authors is Hemingway. I read 'The Old Man and the Sea' in the 12th grade and then proceeded to read the rest of his novels. I have yet to read all of his short stories.
59. I don't read as much as I used to and as much as I would like to.
60. I'm a poor essay writer because I try to be succinct and I'm too good at it. I can never think of enough things to say to reach a word limit.
61. Organization, especially when it comes to my notes, is very important to me. I re-write my notes so that the points flow together making it easier for me to learn. I'm anal about bulleted and numbered lists.
62. Indecisive people bother me. One of my biggest pet peeves is when no one can decide where they want to eat after fellowship/church or they know, but they don't want to say anything so that they don’t offend anyone and we end up sitting around for 20 minutes trying to decide.
63. I analyze my own personality to find out what my faults are but when I do, I'm unable to fix them.
64. Some times I think God has given up on molding my character. And then I remember that one of my faults is my faithlessness.
65. I used to think that one of my strengths was my loyalty as a friend and then things happened that made me question that too.
66. The quickest way to lose my friendship is to be fake.
67. I'm suspicious of girls who wear too much make-up and girls who only have guy-friends.
68. Or I could just be jealous of them.
69. I'm not a very girly girl. I've given up showering in the morning because I'd rather sleep and I don't wear high heels because they hurt too much.
70. My feet are a size 8.5 (on a good day) to a 9 and I'm rather self-conscious about them.
71. I have to wear socks when I go to bed or my feet get cold. When I go camping, this becomes 3 pairs of socks.
72. I love camping. Love the woods, love the smell of campfire, love sleeping outdoors. Hate the bugs.
73. I HATE BUGS!!! This includes large ones such as centipedes, bees and wasps. Small ones such as fruit flies and even pretty ones such as ladybugs and butterflies. I just hate bugs.
74. I once cried because a bee flew into the bus.
75. I once cried because of a Tim Horton's commercial about college students away from home.
76. I tend to cry a lot. I'm a fairly emotional person but somehow I get this reputation for being an extremely logical one.
77. I tend to cry a lot. I can't have a fight with my boyfriend (even a small one) without me requiring Kleenex. Sometimes I cry for no reason at all, it just feels good to let it all out.
78. Kev and I have been going out for a year and 5 months. I tease him about how long it took him to ask me out and he takes it rather well. I tease him in public and he still takes it well. Now I'm teasing him online for the whole world to see (and you're gonna take it well aren't ya? I guess I'll find out tomorrow...)
79. A year and five months goes really, really fast when you're having fun.
80. It's 16 days until I'm done this semester and get to go home for Christmas. The first thing I'd like to do when I get back is to go for Towa Sushi.
81. Trudy coming back for Christmas is the best thing since sliced bread and I can't wait!
82. I need to come up with more exciting lunch ideas. I've had a ham and cheese sandwich almost everyday for the last 2 weeks.
83. The last week of my life has been consumed by a gingerbread house competition in which we are entering a non-house. It's actually a gingerbread carousel, the physics of which drove me absolutely crazy. All this distribution of force garbage was not meant for my biology-minded brain. We also built a skating rink on which the "battle of the Poles" is taking place - penguins vs. Santas.
84. I've been building this carousel when I probably should have been studying instead. As a result, I'm miserably behind in anatomy and don't even begin to understand the intricacies of the carpal tunnel. You're stuck between a rock and a hard place. Studying anatomy is better for the future health of your patients. Building carousels is better for your mental health now.
85. I'm at number 85 and I'm starting to run out of things to talk about. It's taken me several days to come up with this list and by now some of the items no longer apply. However, I'm too lazy to go back and revise because like I said, I should be studying anatomy.
86. When I'm procrastinating I tend to either play Sudoku, Freecell or blog-surf. I also like watching shows on HGTV and Food Network about houses I will never have enough money to own and dishes I will never attempt because they involve foreign-sounding vegetables like arugula.
87. I hate arugula. I also hate green peppers, olives, too many onions (a little bit is ok), purple cabbage, eggplant, ginger and most of all, TOFU!
88. People find it strange that I hate tofu because I'm Chinese and grew up on it. I can't help it, it activates a gag reflex. The tastebuds don't understand that it's good for you.
89. I think I'd die if I had to become a vegetarian. While dissecting in anatomy, I sometimes relate the muscles to cuts of meat. Mmm...babyback intercostals...
90. I'm quite the klutz - both in and out of the anatomy lab. In the lab I have a tendency to accidentally sever small vessels by poking too hard with my finger. In the kitchen, I tend to lose my grip on things or absent-mindedly pick things up the lid.
91. I once spilled coffee powder all over the kitchen, cleaned it up and then spilled it again as I was putting it back on the shelf.
92. Funny how I'm back here at coffee again. I seem to talk about coffee an awful lot. My favorite type of coffee is a extra-hot caramel macchiato. Followed closely by an extra-hot hazelnut mocha and an extra-hot chai.
93. I like my food and my showers really hot.
94. A huge pet peeve of mine is hair in the shower. We cover our drain with this mesh netting so the hair won't get all clogged and I absolutely hate having to clear the mesh and dump the hair in the garbage. It gives me the creeps.
95. If I leave it long enough, my sister will do it =) I also hate taking out the garbage because in second year, Andy and I got maggots in our garbage once and it made me want to vomit.
96. Our house in second year was an absolutely disaster. The floors in the kitchen and the hallway were slanted and we were both so inexperienced at living on our own that the whole place seemed like it was falling apart. It was hysterically funny though and makes for some very good stories.
97. I loved my house and housemates in third year, it was the best part of my undergrad years and I never talk to those boys as much as I wish I could. They're all doing incredibly well now and it's cool that we've all gone our separate ways but still chat whenever we can.
98. Now I live with my sister in an apartment that is big, clean, has a swimming pool downstairs and an amazing view, but has no personality whatsoever. I'm looking forward to the day when I own my house, can decorate it however I want with something other than Ikea furniture, add all the homey little touches, and invite people over to make a riotous mess in the kitchen.
99. In this perfect little house I will have a little study with a reading corner that has a side table for the inevitable cup of coffee, and a HUGE desk where I can spread out my textbooks and papers. The perfect little house will also have a very large walk-in closet, a deep red dining room with dark wood furniture and a kitchen with an island and marble/granite countertops. This is what comes from watching too much HGTV. Oh, and the lady from 'Neat' will come help me sort out house.
100. I'm finally done and now I really need to start studying. I make huge lists like this when I can't think of creative things to blog about. But soon enough there will be pictures of my big, beautiful gingerbread carousel up and you can all marvel at it and my ability to waste huge amount of time.

Your Heart Is Blue

Love is a doing word for you. You know it's love when you treat each other well. You are a giving lover, but you don't give too much. You expect something in return. Your flirting style: Friendly Your lucky first date: Lunch at an outdoor cafe Your dream lover: Is both generous and selfish What you bring to relationships: Loyalty

It's funny what boredom will do to you. We've just started a new block and I've had a half-day everyday this week. Well ok, Tuesday wasn't supposed to be a half day, but I declared my own by hitting the 'off' button on my alarm clock instead of the 'snooze'. And while the rest of the world is suffering through end-of-term papers and projects, I've been spending my days brushing up on my Sudoku skills and color coding my anatomy notes. But no more! Today, inspired by HGTV's 'Neat', Jessica and I finally finished moving in. After 3 months, we've finally finished unpacking all of our boxes, figured out where the recycling bins are and made good use of them, hung our pictures (instead of propping them up against the walls) and purged our kitchen cupboards. Ahh productivity...it's almost as satisfying as being done repro.