life

Life has been slightly stressful lately. Juggling work and school was a challenge, especially when studying for and writing 4 midterms - but the last one was yesterday, so I'm now officially half-way through the semester and the end is in sight.

Today is also March 1, which marks the beginning of a month that promises to be crazy and stressful too. I am adding another class to my already full courseload. This one meets on 3 Saturdays from 9:00-3:30 so I'll be losing a number of weekends. To balance out this extra course, and because I've been feeling overwhelmed lately, I'm cutting back my work with A Rocha to Thursdays only for the month of March. Hopefully the extra day will give me the time I need for the extra coursework. I'm sad that I had to do this, but it's only temporary and I'll be back at it soon enough.

To add to the stress (although there's some excitement here as well), we will be moving to our own condo at the end of March. For those of you who didn't know, we bought it a number of months ago but have been renting it out until now. We're both really excited about the move because it'll be so nice to be done with renting - plus I'll get to paint! No more white walls staring at me from every corner! However, the timing didn't work out wonderful, as March is my busiest semester with school and we'll be moving the weekend before I start writing final exams...not ideal.

Now for some other news. Last weekend, Mark and I were relaxing in the living room when we heard/felt this dull bang or thump. It made us think someone had dropped something really heavy somewhere in our building, but we poked our heads out the window, didn't see anything and didn't hear anything further in our building. So I said, "Just wait 5 minutes and we'll here sirens if it was anything big" and we went back to our tv show. Then, 5 minutes later, the sirens began. We rushed to the window and sure enough, there were a number of fire trucks rushing down the road. We looked around, and there was a huge fire across from our building - far enough away that we had no concern for our building, but close enough to be a spectacular view. I took a few photos which don't do any justice to it because it was dark but I'll post them anyway. Turns out the sound we heard was the explosion that started the fire. Here's a news update from CBC.