All I do is attend Christmas parties

I kept meaning to blog, but there was too much going on. Plus, I'm leaving in 12 hours and my suitcase currently has 2 pairs of jeans, 3 pairs of socks, and 1 pair of underwear. There is clean laundry all over my bed and my room is a mess...

Seems like all I did this week was go to Christmas parties, which is bizarre b/c up until now, I hadn't gone to a single Christmas party in Toronto. The reason why I suddenly had so many is b/c I've met a bunch of new people this year, and I'm also staying in Toronto later than I usually do.

• Last Saturday - Tina's potluck


• Tuesday - Centre for Cellular & Biomolecular Research (CCBR)
  • Party in the middle of the afternoon, but we got a free drink and appetizers, but there wasn't much by the time I got there.


• Thursday - Probabilistic and Statistical Inference Group (PSI, aka, my research group)
  • Sat around eating cupcakes for Ofer's belated birthday and twizzlers telling jokes for an hour.


• Saturday - Toronto Chinese Alliance Church (TCAC)
  • Went with Elsa and Phila to Aaron's church's Christmas party. Free dinner :). The bread was really good. I had about 2 loaves... The program was pretty entertaining, though I was struggling to avoid food coma. It probably would have been funnier had I known the people performing/talking.


• Saturday - Nastassja's party
  • Party #2. Not very festive, but it was good to catch up with Nastassja, Jen, and Ron. I was pretty red.

Jen was pretty red earlier, but I easily surpassed her with just a single one of Nastassja's mojitos

The red faded as I discussed business with Mr. Appel

I missed the annual Shaftesbury South End Alliance Christmas party this year (it was on Friday). I just made up that name, but it's the people I'm friends with from Shaftesbury, but I wasn't friends when them when we were at Shaftesbury. You guys know who you are. North enders need not apply.

Other random things this week:

• Semi-friend's master's thesis presentation
  • Novel application of graph cuts, but not enough results and overly simplified experimental conditions. He was getting drilled pretty bad by the committee afterwards and he wasn't able to answer some pretty basic questions. It was kinda painful to watch and I just wanted to shout out the answers :s. I had to do some stuff, so I had to leave halfway through the questions and I'm not sure how it turned out.


• UTCCF Christmas / going away dinner
  • Met up with UTCCFers for a Christmas / going away dinner as "Little Jon" (Jon Fung) was leaving the next day to go back home for the holidays. We did the familiar Baldwin, but went for Korean instead of Kowloon.


• Indoor beach volleyball
  • Dinner at some ramen place near Finch station with Mike, Christine, Michelle, and Newton, then 3+ hours of indoor beach volleyball, meeting up with Tina, Donna, and other beach bums. Not many people were there, so we took over 3 courts and played 2's. The net was low, so I had a fun time hitting :). It was pretty fun. Afterwards, we went for *more* food. Korean again... I left my ball sac and balls in Michelle's car :s


• UTCCF Christmas / going away lunch
  • Michelle (different one from above) called me at 9:30 am on a SUNDAY. That's just inhumane. For future reference, the general guideline is to not call me if you see a single digit on the clock in the morning. She is lucky that Tony picked up b/c I would not have gotten it. I went to bed without setting my alarm clock and my cell was off. I met up with the UTCCFers at Pho Hung for lunch.