Category Archives: Recreation

Here’s a general question for those of you in the know:

Where can I go to get a couple hundred photos printed? By a couple hundred, I mean that’s about how many I’ll be printing by the end of it all, but I don’t have to have them all done in one go; I’m quite flexible about when I want these. Basically, I want to cover my bedroom walls with photos of my friends and family but I have none. (I kid you not.)

I also want to get some photos done for a personal project that I’m doing and — Oh! While I’m at it:

Where can I go to do colour printing? I’ve got some general images that I want to get printed out but the printer I have at home only prints in black and white. Do any of the UBC libraries offer colour printing? Does AMS CopyRight in the SUB basement do it? And how do you use one of the UBC library printers anyway? I confess, having never used them before, it intimidates me. 😛

NaNoWriMo, that gloriously crazy creative endeavour that’s taken over my life every November ever since the first year of the IB Diploma. What is it? An attempt to write a 50 000 word novel within 30 days — from scratch. I certainly wrote 50 000 words in both years of the IB (whether they were finished novels or very decent words are completely different and irrelevant matters). Whether I was courting death, or, at the very least, pure exhaustion, I’m not sure. Certainly for some reason I couldn’t manage to write many words last year when I had significantly less to do in first-year uni than during my IB years. Then again, I was winging a story about anthropomorphic mice based on a dream I had when I was about twelve. Needless to say, that didn’t go very smoothly and I gave up Nano for lost after a few days into it last year.

This year, I’m faring better (at least significantly so for the first two days of the month). While I’m writing my story out in a whole bunch of segments and have no clue how to connect these possibly completely unrelated segments together by the end of the month, that’s okay. The point is, I’ve written almost 5000 words to date and have also got three midterms this coming week which I’ve yet to prepare for (!). That’s okay though — I figure being overly busy is my personal key to success and not only will I manage to survive in school, I’ll be able to complete my Nano as well. At least, this is my now daily prayer for the month of November.

So cheer me on!

The other day I took it into my head to get off at the UBC Hospital and see if it was a shorter route to Swing Space than the bus loop.

When I alighted, I decided to purposefully follow the Science students in front of me and look like I, too, knew where I was going. Of course, when they entered Woodward, I had to keep walking in a different direction as though that was what I’d intended all along.

It’s amazing what you come across when you walk a different way.

Did you know, for example, that we actually have a building called Rusty Hut? Don’t worry; I didn’t. Nor had I ever come across the Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratories

I also threaded through the Civil Engineering building (feeling like a complete fraud all the while I was walking through it — do you think there’s something wrong if I feel guilty just walking in another part of campus?).

Now anyone with a sense of campus geography will probably be able to tell at this point that I was not really going in a very direct route to Swing. I arrived five minutes later than I would have if I’d taken my usual route, but you know… those were a pretty cool additional five minutes for what I saw.