Our Christmas dinner went really well. I bought turkey too large for anyone’s good, but Chris baked it to perfection on first try. My mom arrived the day before Christmas and is staying for a week and Chris’ clan got here around 2. They helped finish up the meal so it was a really good team effort. I really enjoyed having the dinner here. Usually we dine and run because we don’t like driving back to Ottawa late, but since we were home, there was no rush and the whole thing lasted much longer than usual.

Chris waking up nice and early to get the turkey in on time

Ding!

Group picture (Carol’s at the camera) – Trevor had just woken up which is why he is wearing his pajamas and not his “formal” suit that we bought for taking Christmas pictures in.

I got a cell phone which I am still figuring out how to use. I am not promising that I will carry it around with me, but I will have it with me occasionally. Trevor got his weight worth of Megablocks. He still prefers to chew on our portable phone. He also got a “classic” rotary phone toy that we hope will replace our regular phone in his affections.

The return of the blog!!! Yay!!!

I went for a mini Ottawa high school reunion the other day and had a blast. Like any other geeky introvert I had the worst time in high school. By the time the last semester rolled around I would find an empty classroom at the end of the day and bawl my eyes out. CEGEP, apart from being refreshingly educational and fun was sweet, sweet salvation.

I was just thinking about all those high school movies that show your standard high school with their cliques and mean girls and what not. I don’t know whether there are high schools out there that are actually like this, but they’re nothing like my high school. For one thing, most of the kids in my class were really nice. If I ever had lunch by myself, by the end of the day one of girls from my class would invite me to have lunch with her and her friends next time. Yes, there were cliques, but I never really saw a problem with that. People would socialise outside of their clique quite often. There were a couple of real bitches, but with 80 kids in the class, it was the easiest thing in the world to avoid them.

At 16 I really did not belong there. I had pretty decent relationships with about 20 or 30 other girls, but I was not truly close with any of them. I did not share common interests or any particular affection with anyone. Being in groups was even worse. I was a clique drifter and would stay within a particular group of friends for about four to eight months during which I would slowly get bored with any conversation. I would blame this on me having had recently immigrated to Canada and therefore being alien in things that I thought and valued. However, since I am not alone in having hated high school, I conclude that this was just cherry on top of a difficult stage in life.

Hanging out with Alex and Maja the other night was great. We’ve all had hard time in high school and it was nice to be able to look back at it and laugh. Alex and Maja are the first two people I met when I showed up at Sacred Heart. Alex was standing next to me in gym class and Maja was my “big sister”. Big sister is usually an older student you get paired up with on your first week there that helps you integrate into school. Maja is the same age as me, but had an edge because she is Serbian and was therefore the only person in the school who could actually communicate with me in any meaningful way.

We’ve had our annual end of summer BBQ last weekend. Fun was had and pictures were taken. Check them out on Flickr.