My cousin Tanith and her partner, Ben, after winning the Montreal Junior Grand Prix Competition
So it has taken me awhile to get this up, but we had an exciting weekend the first weekend in October - my cousin, who has been involved with figure skating for years (ice dance in particular) won her first major international competition (and her first major international competition ever!). Unfortunately, the only downside to this is that Tanith is training in Detroit and skating with an American partner (Ben, who is a beautiful dancer and a very nice guy!), so she is competing representing the US instead of Canada. When she stood on the top of the podium and they played the Star Spangled Banner I was torn between being so damn proud of her I could hardly stand it and being so disappointed that they weren't playing O Canada. However, I'd rather she skate and win for the US than have to give up skating, which was becoming more and more of a real option if she had stayed in Canada. You can see more pictures of Tanith and Ben at Montreal here and here (I apologize for the quality, but I was pretty far away - you can get an idea, at least!) and these are pictures of Tanith and Ben during taping of a swing dance number for Tara Lipinski's tv special that was on last spring -- 1, 2, 3, 4. Aren't they the cutest??? And they're so good! They blew the competition out of the water in Montreal - the second place team was getting 4.7 and 4.8 (out of a possible 6.0), and Tanith and Ben were getting 5.2 and 5.3. It was pretty exciting.
Life is going pretty well, I guess. I'm definitely keeping busy, as the lack of attention to this page shows! Besides school (fourth year courses, and trying to keep/pull my marks up to consider grad school) and all the reading, there's the English DSC (Department Student Council) of which I'm co-chair this year, and at this point it's averaging two meetings a week!!! Of course, I get to do neat things like be on the hiring committee and the USC, which oversees additions and changes of courses and things like that, but it's a very time consuming project! Then between going to Montreal and home for Thanksgiving last weekend and having two of my closest friends visit within two weeks (which was great - I miss you guys so much!) and going to Ottawa in 8 days and planning a Halloween party with my housemates ... and so on and so forth. :-) It all adds up pretty quickly. However, I'm having a great year - my housemates are really wonderful and we get along very well, and I'm enjoying all of my courses. There are some worries and stresses, of course, but I don't need to get into those here.
Well, I thought I had all kinds of things to say, but I guess this is it. Or, at least, all that pops to mind at the moment, and I really should go and do other things. No promises this time on when the next update will come, although I'm assuming that after I go see Jekyll & Hyde in Ottawa, I'll have some news to share. Yay Chuck! I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving (if you're Canadian!) or just a great weekend. Bye for now!
