I was going to post a bit of an update earlier today, but I ended up sleeping since getting home. Of course, now that it’s 1am in the morning and I’ve just finished watching another episode of Iron Chef America — I decided that the best thing to do instead of just falling asleep would be to read Andrew’s blog, and specifically his post about his weekend travel’s. Needless to say, here I am writing mine.

I went home on Friday to go to a friend’s birthday party. That wasn’t really too new in itself, but the bus ride I was on was different. I ended up on the bus that doesn’t take the 401 and goes through the back roads and through the smaller towns on the way to London. As we were passing a sign that said free corn and also included a small horse buggy manned by two Mennonites that were selling syrup — the whole entire bus came to a stop just off the road, close to a ditch. The bus driver casually got out of the bus and decided to help himself to some corn and purchase some syrup!

That same bus driver was also responsible for breaking more laws in relation to stoplights then I’ve seen anyone else do in a while. We ran 3 red lights. I’m not talking about lights that turned red while we were in the intersection, no, we straight up ran 3 lights that turned red before we got to them. This guy was intense! We also stopped to let off a passenger in a spot right next to the sign that so clearly said no stopping. Possibly because it was on a sharp curve of a one lane road. How does this guy even have his license anymore?!

The bus ride back wasn’t as exciting. It was pretty standard all in all and I thought that the weird transportation sighting from the weekend were over.

As I got off the local bus on campus, I decided to go visit the plaza as I had nothing to eat or drink really and I was at least really thirsty. Now, we have a railroad track that crosses the edge of campus and I had to go across it. And there was a train on it. You’re wondering how that’s exciting. Well, it was stopped, still running right next to the crossing. And there was no one inside. That’s right, a whole train was just sitting there for anyone who sort of felt the urge to become a train engineer at that very moment. Maybe if I wasn’t so tired I would have taken this situation on as more than just an offer =P

As I was deciding where to visit and spend some money in the plaza, a man in overalls and with a bunch of pens in his chest pocket passed me. He also had a sub and a fountain drink in hand. It clicked in my head that that was probably the engineer from the train that was just casually sitting on the tracks. At this point I had to make sure, that this entire train was just left running at a crossing so this guy could get his early lunch — so I followed him back. Sure enough, he got on the train.

So there you have it, if you feel like some food, just park your train on the crossing and just sort of hop out and leave it all running and open. As long as you get tired and unenterprising students like myself passing by, it probably won’t get stolen XD

Don’t really expect anything significant here until around the 22nd, maybe not, because that will be celebration day. 23rd may be Don team go out day. 24th I hear is party in residence, while being on duty, day. 25th is something else. 26th and 27th is celebrate friends birthdays days. 28th is back home day. 29th is something else. 30th is Sanya’s last chance day.

And so with today’s game, our volleyball season comes to an end. I would like to say it was one of the most fun intramural sports experience I’ve had so far. First of all a huge thanks to Matt, Matt, Matt (see a pattern there?), David, Andrew, Vanessa and Linda for a whole lot of fun games. We had a bunch more people on our roster, but these are the ones that made it every time, and considering we won 3 of our 6 games with only 5 people playing, that counts

Our last game was close. We started off by winning the first set 25-13, and losing the second set 22-25. I think maybe we could have had the second set, we just got off to a slow start, and when we started working them again we were just a bit too far behind. We lost the tie breaker set 13-15. As you can see, it could have gone our way. But I’m not even angry, I’m being so sincere right now… (is that song ever going to get old, nah!).

What I also want to talk about is teamwork and fun. And the reason it comes up is simple. Today, we had fun. Which I feel is a lot more important than the experience that 4 people got on the opposing team. Yep, that’s right, after the first set, they literally almost sat 4 people on the sides and definitely didn’t play them in the tie-breaker set. I mean, yes, I would have liked them to play their weaker players as it means we probably would have definitely won. But that’s not it. Who makes a team with friends and tells their own friends to not play just for the win. That mentality never made sense to me. Ever. We lost, and I’m sure every person can say it was close and they personally had fun. Sure those 4 may have won, but were they even part of the team in the first place?

Hopefully we can get most of this team together for maybe next fall. It would be pretty awesome, we were all kinds of sweet sauce by the end of the season, and half of us can’t even jump to reach the top of the net! XD

I went to Mongolian Grill today, which is delicious, with Greg, Joe, Mike and Adam (sorry to anyone that didn’t go). The food was good as almost always. We even had a spicy round which technically we all lost, because none of us managed to finish our dishes. My strategy of dulling the burning with sweet pineapples hugely backfired because the wet pineapples soaked in all of the Cajun spice XD Greg was making the ‘oh’ face ventilating his mouth, and even Mike, loving hot food, admitted that what we made definitely had some kick.

Earlier, we’d noticed a magician making those blow up balloon toys for a table close to us. I explicitly stated that if we don’t get a show, that I’m not going to enjoy this experience! So, right as we were paying our bills, the magician showed up at our table.

He had a rabbit in a hat. No, seriously, he had a real rabbit in a real hat. The rabbit was hella creepy, it sat and didn’t move and just stared at Mike the entire time. We petted it, to appease it and not eat us.

The magician was pretty sweet, he did some card tricks, and despite being a card shark himself, Mike couldn’t quite spoil them in the face of the magician. I guess that’s why he’s the professional, his name was Barry and we got his business card.