Showing posts with label Jake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jake. Show all posts

Thursday, 5 November 2015

TB - April 2007

Throwback Thursday - Scroll to the bottom of the month and read up. Or click on the earliest post in the month (to view the post and the comments) then keep clicking Newer Post until you finish the month.


This is way easier to read than the last Throw Back post when I was deep into a serious depressive episode. In April of 2007, lots of my friends were commenting on posts, especially Steph, and I can often still hear their voices in my head when I read their words. I am am excited to learn more about the late Spring and Summer of 2007. It seems like it was a month when I was figuring out summer work and trying to find a new roommate. I can't really remember what happened! Was that the summer I started at GeoConnections? Was the new roommate Jake? It is strange how hard it is to put together a timeline 9 years afterwards. Guess I will have to keep reading to find out.

Noted Post: Near the end of the month I posted about a late night interaction with Taylor. I can remember the good-bye that I described and how touched I was by her sweetness and slurred compliments. It was a very strong moment, early on in our friendship. I like that, 9 years later, she is still reading my blog.

Wednesday, 22 September 2010

And So It Is Named

I like to name my houses. It tends to happen naturally, when you listen to people talk about places they live they tend to have a name for the house, though it is often related to the address. I find that a tad boring and in Ottawa, stepped it up a notch. Especially moving into my second house, which was an epic mansion (may it rest in peace) that was falling apart but totally worthy of a great name. So far in my life, these have been my houses...

1984 - 1985 - Cambridge - I was born in Cambridge, Ontario. I lived with my parents in a small house until I was one and a half. I obviously don't remember it, though they have shown it to me a few times since.
1985 - 2003 - Paris - So, the first two are named for the towns. I only lived in one house in Paris so instead of calling it by the street, I always just say Paris. The house was sold this past summer.
2003 - 2004 - Rez - While I was living in residence, Glengarry House, at Carleton Steph, Em, and I called it Glen, to distinguish it from the other residences on campus. However, after moving out it just gets referred to as Rez.
2004 - 2006 - Glen - This house is named after the street and even though it could get confused with my residence house, especially as I was living with the same people, it never was.
2006 - 2008 - Le Manoir - It was this mansion that inspired the need for awesome house names. I wanted to make it sound ostentatious, so picked to name it in French. It means The Mansion, however we have always pronounced it so horribly that it would make anyone who speaks French cringe in pain. It seemed like an ever revolving door of roommates there (including Ami, Em, Anna, Wes, Jake, Jer, and a few others) but they all called it Le Manoir.
2008 - 2010 - Die Höhle - Following in the foreign languages vein, Jer, Em, and I decided to name the next apartment in German. This was because the outside of it was very ugly, a big grey 1960's box of a house in a beautiful Victorian neighbourhood. It look like a German war bunker. Translated it means The Cave and again we mispronounced it terribly, much to the dismay of the one friend I have who speaks German. During the second year Linds lived with us and later on JennB, they both called it Die Höhle.
2010 - 2010 - The Cottage - We got the cottage when I was 16, so sometime around 2000. About 4 or 5 years back my parents tore down the original building and set about building a house on the beach that they could eventually live in full time. Well, the time has come. They sold the other house and live at The Cottage, though the name remains. I have never really lived there, but I would consider it an important residence in my life.

"So what about the new Toronto apartment?" you ask. After about a week, Kristen and I set about coming up with a name. Our landlord is Jewish and we live in a fairly Jewish neighbourhood. (Though there is a Catholic Church right down the street from us that plays its bells all the time and I have seen actual nuns there. However, I don't know where our closest Synagogue is.) We are basing this assumption about our neighbourhood on the number of people we see in yarmulkes walking on the streets, that the local grocery store has a huge kosher section, and the ice cream parlor sells kosher brownies. It seemed fitting that the language we pick for naming this one be Hebrew. This was easier said than done!

Hebrew uses different letters, not just some fancy two dots above the 'o' like in Die Höhle but a totally different thing all together. Hebrew does not have an Alphabet it is instead considered an Abjad. (This means it is a segmental script containing symbols for consonants only, and the vowels are optionally written with diacritics or 'pointing'). We decided that we wanted to called it Grown-Up Apartment. We are working hard on this place to make it nice and to avoid that student feel. But, even with all the online translating sites out there, we couldn't find out how to say that in Hebrew. We had to settle for Adult House (which has some funny connotations on its own). I'm sure, like the other houses I have named in languages other than English, I am screwing this up horribly, but we have called our place...Which seems to be spelt in the Latin (or Roman) Alphabet, which English uses, as something close to Rrunuv Bayit. Obviously pronouncing it is also challenging. The 'Rr' is rolled but then the rest of Rrunuv sounds like it is spelt and Bayit is more like 'buy-it'. Though I'm sure this is wrong. When in a rush, we will sometimes refer to it as just Bayit, and that is currently our wifi name. Now, I need to go and finish painting, unpacking, cleaning, and in general settling in, so that Rrunuv Bayit can live up to its name and truly be a Grown-up Apartment.

Monday, 16 March 2009

Media Photography - PR

Food Areas and Greenhouses
By Christine Sweeton

Tuesday, 22 April 2008

The Cave

I had originally decided to name the new apartment The Cave. Then I thought about the fact I named the current house, Le Manoir, which is French for The Mansion. This is because the current house is a beautiful, huge, three story, three bathroom, Victorian home on the canal. The new place is a three bedroom basement apartment with small windows, exposed I-beams, and low ceilings. I didn't want to switch from using French back to a simple English name for my new home. Since the outside of the new place looks like a bunker for the second world war, I decided to translate The Cave into German. I asked the current boy roommate, who did an exchange to Germany in high school, what it would be and he told me Die Höhle. Since he told me over MSN, I didn't get to hear it pronounced and figured it was said 'Die Hole' but I have since found out it is more like 'D Hool.' Either way I think it is an awesome name. I think Em, Jerrica, and I will be very happy in Die Höhle.

Monday, 28 January 2008

Jake's Picks

I don't think I have mentioned him before but Jake is the New Boy Roommate. Anna moved out a long time ago with her boyfriend, The Original Boy Roommate, and Jake moved into their old room. Anyway, he went through my pictures (before their upcoming Facebook debut) and decided I was wrong and that these two were my best. Obviously the second is Tower Bridge, but the first is the bank of the Thames at low tide, I think tidal rivers are so cool.

Wednesday, 28 November 2007

2lbs Of Cheese Whiz

I went to Walmart this evening with some of my roommates. I only needed to pick up a few things, one of them being some Cheese Whiz. They had a special on the large jar, and were interestingly out of the smaller jars. I went to go and pick up the large one when my roommate said, "My God, what are you going to do with two pounds of Cheese Whiz." I laughed it off saying it wasn't 2lbs, then I picked it up. It felt heavy, heavy enough to be 2lbs. I looked at the label. "Yea," my roommate said, "One kilogram, which equals about two point two pounds." I bought it anyway, but I have to say, it is alot of Cheese Whiz.

Tuesday, 5 June 2007

Toilet Humour

If Women Controlled The World.
I took this from an e-mail sent by James' mom. This is so true as I now share a bathroom with two male roommates, who somehow seem to always leave the seat up and use all the toilet paper, which makes no sense cause..... well never mind.