Cal-freezing

Hello everyone and welcome to Calgary! Today's high is -25 degrees without the windchill. Don't forget your mittens!

Yeah, and the 12 other layers you'll need to prevent body parts from freezing off.

Good lord, why did I choose to move to Calgary again? Why didn't I just do my M.A. in Australia - $32,000 dollars of debt for 8 months of school isn't that bad, right? Better than freezing my butt off.

I can't complain as much as Lorne, who's been building houses in this frozen wasteland. Needless to say, he ain't to impressed with Calgary right now . . . However, the guy does get to spend a month at home starting next Saturday. Sooo jealous. He's leaving me here alone with my laptop and mounds of papers to write. I'm going to need serious human interaction after those 2 weeks. So please, if you love your friend Al, please give her a call between the weeks of Dec 2nd - Dec 15th. She'll need it . . . I'm going to be having full blown conversations with the cat and T.V. by the end of the first week.

Here's a real "Allison" moment: Lorne's been saying how much he misses his mom's baking, so I decided to be a good girlfriend and bake some cookies for him. Baking, of course, meaning scooping the pillsbury pre-made cookie dough from the tube and putting it on the baking sheet. Anyway, would you believe it (and I think you can), I completely burnt them! Good lord, I do not belong in the kitchen. Lorne managed to say "thanks for the effort" in between bouts of laughter. See if I bake for him again . . . which I think he'll be to disappointed to hear.

Anyhoo, Lorne and I had a lovely weekend a few weeks ago visiting his seriously hooked-up friend Teenz in Panorama mountain, just inside the B.C. border. The guy has an awesome apartment overlooking the mountains - so gorgeous. Just what we needed - a calm weekend away from Calgary, school and work. Just chilling out, watching movies, having some drinks, and playing some serious games of Sorry! That game rocks.

Here's some pics . . .

They've been out west too long . . .

Nice eh?

Shock and Awe

Wow, isn't it fun watching the Republican party implode? Finally they're getting what they deserve after taking their country into what could be the most disastrous war ever - definately even with or possibly surpassing Vietnam. That's right Rumsfeld, bow down buddy. Wait, bow down further so we can all get a better shot at kicking you in the ass.

Speaking about war and whatnot, I just watched a documentary in my class that seriously rocked my socks. It was basically about media representation of the war and how the government has controlled it. First off, it pointed out that we have absolutely no perspective of actual Iraqis, beside those which the media construes for us. Really, how many of us are actually aware of how many Iraqi civilians have been killed since the war began? A report by a watchdog group recently reported it could be over 100,000. How come this isn't well-known and reported by the media?

Why? Because the media is controlled by the government. For instance, remember that whole pulling down the statue of Saddam a few years ago? Where we all saw Iraqis jumping and dancing for joy and then this footage was subsequently replayed over and over again by the media? Well, turns out this was all orchestrated by the armed forces. They took a few tanks into the square, turned up a speaker really loud to tell civilians and reports to come out, and proceeded to pull down the statue. It wasn't begun by the Iraqis as Bush would like you to believe. Then, when you look at the actually footage, you realize that there were only literally, like, 30 Iraqis there - and half of them were kinda pissed. The rest of the "crowd" was journalists.

I don't know, maybe this doesn't sound as shocking to you as it did to me, maybe due to the terrible quality of my writing, but I walked out of that class "shocked and awed" (haha). It also had to do with the very graphic photage of dead Iraqis (including children and babies) - definately stuff you don't see on the evening news, because they refuse to air it.

Damn, I've lost my faith in Katie Couric - I thought that was impossible.