End of Semester Updates

I have had a very busy month. I recently started working at my internship full-time, but am also working on my thesis project - a good chunk of which I've managed to finish on evenings, weekends, and lunches, over the past 3 weeks. So, I haven't had much time to update recently. But that's not to say nothing's been happening!

Yesterday we held our "End of Semester" Beach BBQ and Fireworks Event (for WICS). The day started around 2:30, when we met up at SFU. That morning, I had been to several different stores looking for a bocce set, with no luck, so we first set out to find one. So began the Great Bocce Hunt. We went to Lougheed Mall, where a search of Wallmart was fruitless. We moved on to Sport Chek, which wanted $70 for a set! Angelica found the number for Canadian Tire and we decided to head there next. Luckily, we managed to find a nice set for around $20, and then we were off to the beach.

After some adventures in BBQ lighting:


we finally got started with the cooking, in between several rounds of bocce:


While we were doing this, someone from a fellow group of barbeque-ers approached us asking for something to light their BBQ with. We gave them some of our matches, and thought that was the end of it. But after finishing our food (or so we thought), he came back with two large packages of meat. Apparently they couldn't finish them and wanted to thank us for the matches. They wouldn't take no for an answer, and so we cooked both packages, one of which turned out to be some fairly prime cuts of pork (pre-marinated and everything!).



No sooner than had we finished cooking this free meat, a group of guys came running up to check out all our food. We couldn't eat it all so we gave them some, at which point the last member of their party came running up. I'm sure he didn't know about the food, but it seemed like he had some kind of built-in radar because he made a beeline straight for us. This was, as his friends called him, "The Olumpian" (apparently, a former Olympic swimmer?). He is a little lumpy for an athlete I guess, hence the new nickname. They invited us to their party a few blocks away, but we didn't take them up on it. And that rounds out the day - first we were given free meat, and then it was taken away.

In other news, I have a few exciting things to announce about this year's Grace Hopper Conference! First, I am going to blog about my experience there for the conference (officially!), and second, I won a Google Global Community Scholarship, which should fully cover my trip to Colorado in October! I can't tell you how exciting this is. Over 600 people applied and I really had no expectation of winning. It is an honour and I am really looking forward to going. :D