And if the snow buries my neighbourhood...
You know, I have to hand it to them.
When 6 inches of snow falls in Toronto, you just know that all the buses will be cancelled, traffic will be a disaster, no planes can land, and everyone will be complaining about the "WEATHER."
When 6 inches of snow falls in London, 20 people instantly die of shock, intercity trains cease functioning, and the newspapers dig up as many old people as possible to talk about how they never saw anything like it in 300 years.
Since the snowstorm on Wednesday, I haven't heard a peep about cold, snow, traffic, the horrible-ness of life in winter, or the like. In fact, people here handled this pretty stoically. When the snowstorm was in full throttle on Wednesday afternoon, I ditched my bike close to school and took the bus. But lots of people continued to bike.
Anyways. There's something really nice about it :)
After seeing 3 zambonis clearing off the skating rink on the lakes yesterday, I judged the ice fit to walk on. I took a photo-jaunt since it was such a nice day, and I was finished school early.
Selling hot drinks in the middle of the skating rink from a cart pushed by his bike--and cheaper than the cafes. That's entrepreneurial spirit for ya.
This couple was so cute to watch... the guy kept twirling the girl around, and they just looked so happy. I saw them walking across the street later, and he carried her skates while they held hands. Awww! *melty*
A view from one end of the skating rink to the bridge. That's a dang lot of snow to clear off!
Skating under the rising full moon.
We finished our 2-week workshop on researching users for our upcoming furniture design. We visited an elderly club in Frederiksberg twice and talked with people there. The first time, they were playing 'banko' (apparently a Danish version of 'bingo', without the letters) and I ended up winning twice! When we went back the second time, we brought with us a design game we made based on a quadrant matrix:
Basically we just cut out a bunch of different design objects and furniture, and used words like 'beautiful', 'practical', 'comfortable', and 'familiar', to describe the axes. The axes went from plus to minus, so that people could place things on the board in comparison to each other. i.e., 'I think this chair is less beautiful than that one, but it is more comfortable.' It turned out to be a really good way to get the users looking at design and we found out a lot about their aesthetic preferences (they tended to be attracted to thinks that were familiar to them, and things that were practical).
We presented all our research today, and I feel really excited for our course intro on Monday. I like our instructor, he's the kind of teacher who really inspires students to do good work. It's hard to explain, but sometimes you can tell when a teacher is insecure about their teaching; they can't really tell who has put in effort and who just skimmed the surface of an assignment, so they end up being hard on people who produce good work and overly-praising those who don't have much to show. Or they just praise everyone, hoping that a good feeling will rub off and make everyone want to do more work. Those instructors are mediocre--a hardworking person will never feel like they got good feedback, because someone who spent 1/20th of the time on their project will get just as much praise/feedback.
This instructor just expects that we will do good work, he trusts that we are intelligent, mature students who want to get as much from this course as we can. You can tell from the way he talks to us, gives us our assignments, and organizes the class. And that trust makes me want to not disappoint him. He is also really well organized and that is a HUGE plus in my books. I hate it when instructors just can't get it together.
Okay, totally unrelated. When I switched over my computer last year, I lost some important Tea Party music. Early recordings and acoustic stuff, rare. I had originally gotten it off a great website called the-river.ca, which stopped hosting their music ages ago. But I found a torrent and now I'm listening to a wonderful radio recording of The Tea Party covering 'The Maker.'
PS. I'm sorry Jeff Martin, but your new band sucks bum.
*nods*