September 23rd, 2013

Welcome back everybody!!

I had another wonderful summer working as a Travel Counselor for the Stony Plain & District Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Information Centre back in my hometown but it is nice to be back in Lethbridge, back in classes, and back to studying as well!

It has been a hectic couple of weeks with the beginning of classes, then Rush Week (s) and Bid Ceremony, but I'm updating now for September. For those of you who don't know (I'm not sure if I've posted it here or not) but I am dating Loring Wiedemann (I attended the Kappa Sigma Formal as his date, and he attended Delta's with me). It has been 5 months already and I'm very happy, although we have had some ups and downs due to it mostly being a long-distance relationship.

Rush was fantastic and yesterday we gave bids to 26 wonderful women. My Little this semester is Jeanelle and I'm super excited because she was the girl I wanted as my little.

This is my family including littles (L), Grand-little (GL), and Great-Grand-Little (GGL)

[Left to right] Kate (GGL), Rachel (GL), Liesl (L), Me, Alex (L), Jeanelle (L), and Alyx (GL)

[Not Pictured] Mackenzie (L), Stephanie (GL), and Katherine (GL)

Needless to say I have a large Greek family!

Classes this semester seem to be challenging but manageable. I'm taking Finance, Management Law, Intro to International Management, Marketing, and Collective Labour Relations. Midterms actually start next week and I've been studying like crazy trying to get everything prepared.

This weekend my family is having an early Thanksgiving. Ashley's boyfriend Mark is back from his Nait camp (not sure what to call it, he's going into Forestry) and I'll be back up in Stony for a Doctor's Appointment so Loring will drive up and we'll all have Thanksgiving. For real Thanksgiving in October, I'll be going to Loring's parent's house in Medicine Hat.

So far that's all there is to tell!

June 16th, 2013

Happy Father's Day!

So I know it has been a while since my last post so I thought I would update you all on goings on in my life then wish you a Happy rest of the summer!

First of all, Loring Wiedemann and I are now dating. We really hit it off after my formal so we started dating on April 21st. He is absolutely wonderful to me and he makes me very happy. Long-distance is hard (as he's in Medicine Hat and I'm back in Stony Plain) but I think we can make it work (knock on wood).

I went down to Lethbridge earlier this month for his convocation. He is now officially a teacher and I can say I'm very proud (even if I only came in to the picture during his last practicum). The weekend was okay, I got pretty sick, even landing in the Emergency room for a couple of hours to a pretty rough bout of nausea but I was fine and life goes on.

Second of all, I finished off the semester well. I bombed my Accounting Final but I did well on everything else. My final GPA for this year is 3.42! Hopefully I can keep this up for the next two years.

I'm back at the Stony Plain Visitor Information Centre this year! I love it there and am happy that they hired me back.

Next week I'll be living with Kelsey Vankosky for the rest of the month as her parents are in Mexico. Looking forward to that!

Aside from that, life is fairly normal, but I'll keep you posted if anything else pops up.

April 6th, 2013

So tonight was Delta Eta Iota's Formal! It was an absolute blast! I would like to make my thank-you's to Kelsie Schlese for doing everyone's hair and make-up without complaining. She is an amazing person who doesn't hear often enough how wonderful she really is! I would also like to thank her little sister, Celina for taking all of our photo's even though she didn't have to! She is an amazing photographer and I can't wait to see more of her work in the futur! Thank you's also go out to Jocelyn and Selena for MC'ing, Kelly Desjarlais and Lauren Mauthe for putting together all of the fun awards, Brendan Obuck for helping with the music selection, the Lethbridge Lodge for putting up with us, all my wonderful sisters for coming out and having a great time, as well as my wonderful date Loring (from Kappa Sigma) for the great time I had.

So, as per usual, most of us got ready at Kelsie's because she's magic with hair and make-up. Her little sister Celina was down for the weekend and agreed to be out photographer when ours backed-out last minute. Kelsie did an amazing job with my hair, I thought it looked absolutely beautiful.

Celina decided that we should all have some artistic photo's taken while we were all done up so here's my favorite that she took of me:

So, as I mentioned, our formal was held in one of the ballrooms in the Lethbridge Lodge. Funny enough, the other ballroom was being rented to the Scottish dancers of Lethbridge so there were tartans everywhere! Once we arrived at the Lodge, all the girls were asked to take headshots and then we took Date and Group photos.

So this is Loring and I

This is my greek Family. My little sisters Liesl and Alex (on either side of me) and my Grand-Little Rachel. 

So here are all the girls with their dates

And here are all my beautiful sisters!

After photo's, Jade gave her parting President speech and then it was dinner. Buffet style with Lasagna or Chicken, salads, potatoes, garlic toast, etc. I sat at a table with Kelsie Schlese (&Matt Hansen, & Celina), Alex Funk (&Brenden Obuck) and Rachel Ann (&Matt Basaraba). Well, my little, Alex, is very special. She loved the potatoes that they had. She loved them so much that when we went back for seconds, she also took her unused coffee mug and filled her place and her mug with potatoes... She also decided that her potatoes were messy so she needed a bib...Let's just say the evening was absolutely hilarious at my table.

After dinner, we had awards. Founder's Award this year went to Jocelyn Hamilton and President's Award went to Kayla Stone, who is unfortunately graduating this year. I will miss her terribly but wish her all the best of luck in the future. She gave a graduation speech that made us all cry (well I cried). We also had fun awards, I won the Harry Potter award (for best skill with a wand). Apparently it wasn't meant as a Harry Potter award but that's what it turned into! After it all was said and done, we all went down to Essie's (which is the country bar/club that's attached to the hotel) and danced the night away. Literally! I had so much fun two-stepping with Loring and dancing to Gangnam Style with the girls. The after, after party was at Jocelyn and Selena's house but I was absolutely exhausted by the time everyone decided to go and my feet were killing me so we went home and watched the original Footloose instead.

I had so much fun! It is definitely a Formal I will never forget! 

April 5th, 2013

So tonight was one of our fundraisers. In conjunction with Kappa Sigma Fraternity, we held a "Womanless Beauty Pageant". It is exactly what it sounds like. We had a few of the Kappa Sigma brothers dress as women and compete in a beauty pageant as a fundraiser for children's after school activities. To vote for you favorite, during intermission you had to make a donation in the contestants box. The contestant who had the largest total donation would be the winner.

The "Single Ladies" dance by Beyonce, even I can't pull off those shoes!

 Our contestants were absolutely hilarious and they definitely rose to the occasion. Our "winner" was Cameron Trockstad. Overall, we raised over $200 for charity. Plus we had a lot of laughs!

March 23rd, 2013

So tonight was Kappa Sigma's formal, I unfortunately don't have many pictures, only one of me, my date and Katrina Kinnee in the sorority (below). Hopefully I will have more soon and they will be posted once I do. Kappa Sigma is the Fraternity on campus and I was asked to go by one of their Alumni, Loring, who I would like to thank for inviting me.

I got ready at Kelsie's (as expected) and she did my hair and make-up. I swear she's magic! She can do pretty much anything with my hair and it'll work (except a French twist, I have too much hair for one of those). Almost all us Delta's who had been invited got ready at Kelsie's.

Formal was held at the Golf Course and it was a lot of fun. They had a lot of fun awards and interesting stories that they shared. It was a little chilly when we went outside for photo's but that's to be expected in March. After dinner and awards, we all went to the Black Tomato as the after party. The after party was a lot of fun; I danced a lot which I didn't expect to do. The after, after party was at the Chapter house but I didn't stay very long because trying to fit like 60 people in that house is a little scary. Overall I had a wonderful time.

March 9th, 2013

So at the University of Lethbridge we have an area called the tunnel. It’s literally an underground tunnel between the library and the Student’s Union building so that students don’t have to go outside on bad weather days. Inside the tunnel, student clubs and University organizations are able to apply to the Student’s Union to be able to paint a mural about their organization in the tunnel. So my sorority, Delta Eta Iota, recently celebrated our 5^th Anniversary and for the past five years we’ve been trying to get approval to paint out mural in the Tunnel. The fraternity has a mural and now that there are two sororities, we wanted to let the student body know about us. We were FINALLY approved a few weeks ago and we were able to paint our mural in the tunnel. The background is symbolic of the Parthenon with five pillars (which represent our five pillars of Leadership, Mentorship, Friendship, Charity and Academia) and in front is our Crest with our motto underneath “Everything has its beauty but not everyone sees it” by Confucius. So we spent all Saturday painting it, it took about 6 hours to paint but it is beautiful and I am so proud of it!

Over the past few weekends we've also been doing "Positivity Boards" Basically, a girl will sit in front of a white board while all of her sisters write nice comments about her on it. Then we take a picture and she can see what we wrote. Its a nice way to bring up everybody's spirits and make all of our sisters feel loved. Here's mine:

March 3rd, 2013

Hi everyone!

Just an update on our current condition here in Lethbridge. Not sure if all of you know but there is a massive blizzard basically sitting on top of us at the moment. Don't worry, so far we're all fine! Alysha's dance was cancelled so we're all staying in tonight. There isn't a lot of snow coming down but, it being Lethbridge, the wind is making things dangerous. From inside it actually looks really cool, all the blowing snow. You can't even see across the street! Just wanted to let everyone know that we're okay. Knowing this place, it'll probably all be melted tomorrow.

Oh, I also got my Management Accounting Midterm back! I had the 3rd highest mark in the class with a 93%!!!!! I think that is the highest mark I have gotten on a University test and it was in accounting none the less! Last semester I almost failed out of Financial Accounting!

Well, that's it for now!