Longest. Post. Ever.

This past week has been hellava busy. So this is going to be a hellava long blog posting. But I promise that it will be full of pics and debachery, so I think that's a fair deal, yes?

On Tuesday I saw Sloan at the Commodore. Sloan was wicked good live... and I enjoyed the opening band, the Yoko Casionos, especially this one song that I believe was called "Loose Cannon." I'd never been to the Commodore before, so it was pretty cool to finally go there. Wednesday was Aggie BBQ, as well as Ladies Night with some friends. Every Wednesday the Aggies make a big dinner, but this past week's was the best - Indian food! Plus a wine tasting, where we learned about, and then got to taste, a Quail's Gate Botrytis^* affected late harvest riesling. Then it was off to Cafe Crepe, where the drinks are cheap, for some pre-drinking before we headed out to the Caprice.

The premises of Ladies Night were as follows: (a) no boys, (b) everyone wears a little black dress... as evidenced by this photo, taken in Cafe Crepe just before we took our tequila shots. And no, everyone in Cafe Crepe wasn't staring at us^**, why do you ask?

And here is a photo of all of our shoes^***. Mine are the boots & the fishnet stockings. Yes, fishnet stockings.


And here's a photo of me & my roommate, Danielle. We are bringing sexy back.


Thursday marked the beginning of Halloween week with pumpkin carving at Ag Sci^****. In preparation for the big Aggie Halloween bzzr garden^*****, a bunch of people got together to carve pumpkins to decorate Ag Sci. And this is a photo of me, playing in a big pile of pumpkin goo. Mmmm, pumpkin goo.


Now, I can't even remember the last time I carved a pumpkin, but I have such fond memories of doing so during my childhood. Every year my dad would take my sister, Nancy, and I to the pumpkin patch and we'd each get to choose a pumpkin. Nancy would always search through the pumpkins for the smallest, roundest, most perfect little pumpkin she could find, whereas I would always choose the biggest one I could find. And then, as now, I was a tiny little kid, so the pumpkin usually ended up being close to the same size as me. This year, I decided to buck tradition and chose the smallest, roundest, most perfect little pumpkin that they had. And this is what I carved:

I think this Aggie bull is my favourite of the pumpkins that were carved that night:


And the next day (Friday) was the big Aggie Halloween bzzr garden:

And it was morphinomenal, thanks to appearances by the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers:


Other examples of those present at the party were: various women in uniform:




... a hobbit, V for Vendetta, and some bloody ax murderer character...


... a dude in a plastic fro and Bob Ross^******...


... and even Che Guevara^*******



And me? I was Lara Croft.























One of the coolest things about Halloween parties is that you always have an opening line to walk up to complete strangers and start talking. Like, "hey there, Indiana Jones, we are both archaeologists!" and "Hey there, why are there two popes? Is this some sort of schism?"

Oh yes, and did I mention that Aggie Halloween bzzr gardens feature a mechanical bull?


Before you ride the mechanical bull, they make you sign a waiver, so that if you get injured or die, you or your heirs can't sue them. The thing is, pretty much everyone at a bzzr garden has been, well, drinking bzzr. I distinctly remember having a conversation about this with the person in front of me in the line up to ride the bull - I mean, how can you possibly sign away your right to sue when you are under the influence, right? So, in my wisdom that the waiver probably wouldn't hold up anyway, I decided to sign my waiver "Lara Croft." And they didn't even notice.

Now you may have heard rumors that, later on in the night, when I was drunk enough to knock over a giant speaker, I answered the challenge of "Matt says he will ride the bull naked if someone will ride it topless." I can assure you that such rumors are completely baseless.

Oh ya, and the police showed up and confiscated our hard alcohol, just because we didn't have a license for it. When they first got there, people were going up to the cops and slurring, "hey man, cool costumes!" That probably didn't set a very good tone. The cops didn't look too happy at any rate.

In the end, I managed to find my way home on the bus and fall into a completely unrefreshing drunk sleep, wherein I wake up every half hour or so, certain that I am about to die of dehydration, manage to gulp down large quantities of water that I can actually feel enter each and every one of the trillion or so shrivelled little dehydrated cells in my body. And then, since I had promised I would, I actually got up in the morning and went all the way downtown to the Pan-Canadian National Day of Action march & rally against war, despite my ridiculous hangover! My hangover was so ridiculous, in fact, that I was still hung over by the time I got to the next Halloween party, at around 8 pm Saturday night. This party was a house party, featuring such noble traditions as the keg stand^********:


I should have known that this would be a crazy party when the first thing I saw after I walked in the door was this:


Now, seeing as I was still hungover, I decided to take it easy (translation: no keg stands for me). And so I merely entertained myself with shooting people. Since I had lost one of my guns the previously night, I had to use a backup gun, the silver one shown here:


Also shown in the above picture above is Deanna, who is going to be my assistant coach when I become the coach of the Canucks. We have a foolproof coaching strategy to motivate the players.

A highlight of the night for me was when my friend Laura (the candy corn witch) and her friend, Little Andrew (Disco Stu), treated us to a performance of Jack Johnson and Radiohead songs. The two of them have amazing voices and it was just beautiful to listen to.


Here's a picture of Laura's friend, Geoff, listening to the music. Geoff has sponges stapled to his shirt - his costume was "self absorbed."


So, that, my friends, is how I spent Halloween weekend. And I will leave you with one last photo: it's me as kick-ass Lara Croft, standing on a table, with a sponge in my utility belt.



^*Botrytis is a fungus that they put on the grapes, which apparently puts holes in the grapes, causing water to evaporate from them, concentrating the sugar and making the wine sweet. Mmmm, fungus.

^**this was to be expected, as Cafe Crepe is on campus, so everyone else in the restaurant was wearing jeans and hoodies.

<sup>*** You may recall that I have a slight obsession with footwear.

****For the uninitiated, "Ag Sci" refers the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, of which my program (Nutrition) is a part. More correctly, it is the Faculty formerly known as the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences, as they changed their name recently to the Faculty of Land & Food Systems (*cough* stupid *cough*). But old habits die hard, so we usually refer to the Faculty, the building in which the Faculty (other than the Nutrition & Food Science programs) is housed and the people within the Faculty as "Ag Sci."

*****There is this strange rule at UBC that you aren't allowed to advertise the availability of alcohol at events on campus, so Beer Gardens at UBC are called "Bzzr Gardens" instead (except the Pride beer gardens, which are usually called "Bqqr Gardens").

******Bob Ross is my friend Dave B. He told me that I had nice guns. When Sharon started laughing at this, he innocently said, "That's not what I meant.. I was trying to say something not dirty</sup>!"

^*******My friend Jamie informed Che that it was highly unlikely that Che would wear a T-shirt with a picture of Che on it

********I friggin' love that the picture of the keg stand on Urban Dictionary is a BRIDE doing a keg stand. That rocks.