Kelley Bromley

Well, we were going to go to the Bayswater Tea Company on the weekend but never got around to it, so we went after work today. We had a quick supper of meatballs and veggies and off we went! We got several new varieties of rooibos, and I’m so excited to try them! Here’s our list:

• 50g of Dragon Heart Rooibos, it has dried dragon fruit and strawberries and a hint of spice, it’ll make a nice ice tea.
• 50g of Fire and Spice, a nice mild chai without the cardamon pods and chunks of bark, lol.
• 50g of harvest moon, with pumpkin and papaya, also will make a nice ice tea.
• 50g chocolate and orange peel, a lovely dessert tea.
• 50g Latte Macchiato, with cocoa and coffee beans, smells like dessert!
• 100g Cream Swirl, a rooibos with dehydrated yogurt which is supposed to taste like plain rooibos but have a rich texture.

I normally don’t go for the fruity teas but they had a rooibos ice tea sample which was fantastic, but too much sugar, and I’m willing to bet these will make a refreshing drink :) (more…)

Well, today Lionel and I started week two of the 13 week plan. The worst part is I leave for Quebec for a week next Sunday, and we did week one, then Lionel’s parents visited for two weeks, so our schedule is kind of screwy, lol. We’re going to do week two, and then when I get back redo week two again and continue with the rest of the plan.

So here are the stats:
5 min warm up and stretching
11 sets of run 2 min, walk 2 min (44 min total)
Time: ~50 min, 6.25 km including warm up
Average Speed: 7.5 km/h
5 min cool down

Cardiovascularly I’m really improving I think. I could still have a conversation with full/half sentences, but by the 7th set my legs were jello. Lionel told me to slow down, but I told him even if I slow down my body won’t get any lighter, and it’s the pushing motion with my quads that was giving out, lol. We finished though! Today was the hardest session for this week’s training, but we’re going the uphill route on Monday! (more…)

Today was the first session of our 13-week training program which builds you up to run a 10k race. We won’t really be officially starting because we’re going on vacation soon, so we’re just going to repeat the first session over and over when we have the chance until we’re home again. In either case, we ran 1 min, then walked 2 mins, 10 times for a total of 30 minutes, for a distance of 5 km. We were supposed to do 12 laps, but I had to meet with Weihui to play frisbee at 7:30, and I played for about 45 minutes with a bit of running. (more…)

Hello mommy, this is daughter,
I will call you, cause I oughta!
Life is very, very busy,
All the experiments are making me quite dizzy!

Tried to call you, tried to ring you,
But the fact is, it wouldn’t go through!
I want to wish you, a happy Mother’s Day,
But instead the busy signal took my voice away!

I was thinking, you’re quite lively,
Perhaps you’re out, going jiving!
You and dad make, such a scene,
When he’s spinning you around from floor to ceiling!

How’s the weather? I hope it’s nice,
I bet you’re still chipping, at the ice!
It’s so lovely, here in Vancouver,
It’s so hot out that I cannot even hoover!

Who am I kidding, St. John’s is better,
Who cares about, the weather?
I want family, and Sunday supper,
But instead I do a PhD and suffer!

But dear Mommy, fear not distance,
Cause I’m coming, home for Christmas!
In the meantime, you’ve got daddy,
And we both know that he can be quite handy!

Miss you! (more…)

Lionel and I were going to go to SuperStore today but since we’re leaving for about a week on Wednesday it wouldn’t make much sense to buy fresh things now. We had to get out of the house because they shut off the power from 8am to 8pm for maintenance. Lionel had hot water, but it was cold when I got in! Yikes! And almost no water pressure…

Well, we got off at Sasmat to bring back the books to the West Point Gray library, then we went to the Tea store on 10th. It was great! They had all kinds of tea, and you could buy either 50g or 100g quantities. The prices were better than the store on Broadway as well. We got Jazz Vanilla Rooibos (100g) which is LOVELY – it’s got vanilla and bits of hazelnut in it, and it tastes like dessert even without sugar. FANTASTIC! We also got 50g each of creamy earl gray, which has more bergamot oil than regular earl gray, and also some Irish Breakfast which is made with Assam black tea instead of Ceylon black tea like English Breakfast, so it’s supposed to be stronger. It cost $2 more per 50g for decaf, so we just went with caffeinated.

Then came the horror… we walked down 10th Avenue. 10th Avenue with its 20 foot hedges creeping onto the 3 foot sidewalk and HUNDREDS of hornets the whole way! Lionel had to coax me forward. I was soooo scared…. stupid phobia. I felt like I had an exam that I never studied for… you know that adrenaline rush? Shaky all over… quite embarrassing. To get past some really bad places where they were hovering all over the ground and on the hedges I had to close my eyes and Lionel led me through. I don’t think he liked that much, heh. He made the observation that I didn’t get stung once on the way through, and I seem to be able to walk through all the buzzing if I have my eyes closed, so maybe I’m getting used to it. I wouldn’t want to do it again though! I felt shaky and sick for a few minutes afterwards, heh. I’m such a wuss.

Anyway, after that we had a nice walk down Broadway and had lunch at Adeleas, a Mexican restaurant. I had pork enchiladas and Lionel had a chicken and mushroom quesadilla, but of course we split both so we could both try it, heh. They both had ancho sauce on them, which I didn’t like at first because it’s an interesting combination, but in the end it was quite good. The meal was mostly meat and cheese, some vegetables would have been nice, but I liked it. It came with an appetizer of freshly fried nachos – WOW! SO GOOD! Very thin and delicious… and freshly made salsa. Yum!

After that we walked to Granville to get the 98-B-line to the central library downtown, for a total walk of 5 km :) The library architecture was breathtaking. I should have brought my camera. There were 6 floors and everything you could think of, although I don’t think I’d go there again because it’s just too big… it’s so hard to find things! You can order 50 books/year free of charge to be delivered to the nearest branch, so I think I’ll do that. I thought looking through the shelves would be nice, but there are thousands and thousands of books on many floors! Impossible! I got some books on card making because the scrapbook books weren’t very good, and some books on how to start running. Lionel looked up some computer graphic books but didn’t take them out in the end.

We then head back home and stopped at Blenz to get an Iced Mocha – wow, rich and delicious. I hate to think how much cream went in it, LOL. After we were home for about an hour the power finally came back on! We read a little then headed off to bed. Overall a good day I think…. except for the hornets 8O (more…)

Today Lionel and I walked from 10th Avenue to granville at a strolls pace, looking at the shops. Got a nice tan though :) (more…)

Lionel and I planned to go running today and play some frisbee after, and when I got home he had a lovely supper ready of ribs, his famous turkey mirepoix gravy, sweet potato, peas, and carrots. Delicious! We were stuffed afterwards of course, so we waited until 8pm to go for a jog. I didn’t really feel like going, but after we were outside it felt good. We jogged 2.5 km, then played frisbee for about 45 minutes. It was really fun! We went in when it was starting to get dark. Our throws are really improving! Lionel enjoyed himself and is going to help me practice on the side in the future :) (more…)

Well, we had our first unofficial Ultimate Frisbee practice on Friday at 7pm. It was unofficial because Ke and Ody aren’t back yet. Weihui, Shengcai, Xiulian and I practiced tossing it around for awhile and were starting to get a hang of it, but when we tried increasing the distance I sucked! LOL! Xiulian went home for supper and Bin joined us for a few minutes, then it was just Weihui and Shengcai and me. We ended up playing for about an hour and it was really fun – lots of running and jumping…. afterwards I went on a short, 1.25km run with Lionel.

I had a blast and felt great, but yesterday I was in so much pain! My butt hurt from all the lunging to get the frisbee, and my hamstrings and the back of my shoulder hurt as well…. and then there’s today. Even sneezing hurts, lol. My ribs weren’t bothering me at all yesterday but today… yowza 8O Lionel thinks it was all the twisting, LOL. When we used to do all the twists in aerobic class it never used to affect me and I used to wonder what muscle this was working… well, apparently twisting to catch frisbees and throw them is a bit more intensive, heh. The good news is that if I’m sore everywhere, that means I used lots of muscles, so frisbee is good exercise, hehe. It also remind me how out of shape I am :P (more…)

While many people seem to forget the other side of school – this foreign “social/private life” seldom talked of – I myself am having some difficulty becoming the ideal grad student who does experiments by day and writes papers by night. It seems like a lot of people are that way though… certainly many people in my lab do this without batting an eye! It’s admirable, but I think they find it easier because their significant others, family, and friends are all thousands of miles away. Myself, I love spending time with Lionel when I’m not in the lab, and I have many hobbies which I find equally important as school to keep me sane, lol. I still feel guilty for not being totally devoted though… I mean, if everyone else is, what does that make me look like? Thankfully I am ignoring this fact because I know I’d just go crazy if I didn’t have “me” time, LOL.

I was actually talking to Blair about this when we had lunch on Friday. We went to the new Cafe Crepe on campus – the first time I ever got a panini and my god are they fantastic! I took Lionel there for lunch the following day, LOL – anyway, we talked about all kinds of things, but she pretty much shares my feelings about the “ideal grad student.” Basically what we’ve worked out is that the grand experience of grad school, from the classes to the supervisors to other grad students, has made us internalize this idealized image, such that we both feel guilty even when we are away from the lab, at home, watching TV! It was great to hear that I wasn’t the only one who thinks I should be cramming knowledge in my head during advertising breaks, lol. We don’t really know how this internalized guilt was placed in us, but it’s brilliant really – the perfect built in drive to keep grad students producing. We’re determined not to succumb though :D

In other news, I found out Blair has been dating a guy since February – a South African guy! She met him at international orientation (Blair’s from the US). She didn’t mention him until now because she wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a passing thing, which is smart in my opinion. It might be cool if the four of us could go somewhere to forget our daily toils, lol. Either way, I told her she can’t go wrong with South African men and we both agreed the accent is quite charming :D (Loves ya Lionel!) (more…)

So I’ve gotten it into my head that I want to start an online scrapbook business (see previous posts). So I go onto the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) website and try to find some books which would go into more detail on Canadian import laws, customs clearance, and tax handling. I reserve about 8 books, and get an email that one is ready to be picked up. I must say that the library has a great selection – the catalogue looks very similar to Amazon and they have like 20 branches and you can get 50 books a year delivered to a branch near you, which for us is about 3 minutes away. Anyway, we go to the library, have a terrible time parallel parking on a Broadway with 4pm traffic, and then find out that UBC isn’t considered a part of Vancouver :? I have to go get a Community Services card on campus to be eligible for VPL access…. yet I was able to get an electronic PIN and order books for myself. Ugh! (more…)