A blizzard can't keep Winnipeggers in

Last Thursday the weather looked a little something like this.

crazy blizzard

And this was after a week of beautiful weather. I mean, beautiful. The sun was shining, the snow was melting – there was no windshield. Anyway, I digress, the point is that last Thursday on the worst day of the week Christa and I had our IPP event, Children’s Rehab Rockout.

But like the hearty Winnipeggers that most of us are, people braved the blizzard and reduced visibility to make it out to the Pyramid to get together and listen to five great Winnipeg bands. It was such an awesome night! All the bands did an amazing job; we even exposed quite a few people to bands they never heard before but really enjoyed.

Pizza from Presto Pizza

Prophet

Mas Headspace

Crowd at the Pyramdi

Rena from Power and J. Williamez

Acidscar

Belle Air

Belle Air

I want to thank our hosts Rena and Holly from Power 97 and Mr. Jeremy Williams, aka J Williamez. I also want to thank all the volunteers for braving the weather to help us and.  My five bands; Mãs Headspace, Acidscar, Prophet, Belle Air and The Beasts for offering us their talents for free.  Without you guys this event would have been nothing, and thank you thank you for not cancelling on me last minute!  And to all the people who came out that blizzardy night to rock out to raise money for kids with special needs words cannot express my gratitude. You helped us raise $1,500 for the Rehabilitation Centre for Children Art and Jam Program, so kids with special needs can learn and love through art!

Photos courtesy of Denise Meilleur

Dreams keeping me up and keeping me thinking

One week to go until my IPP event, the Children’s Rehab Rockout.  Holy crap, only at week left?!?!  Where did the time go?  It seems like only yesterday that it was last March and I sat in the Park Theatre watching the second years present their IPPs with sparkles in my eyes and a lump on my heart of what was to come in second year.

But here I am only one week away from the biggest project of my life to date and the end of my post-secondary education, at least for the time being.  Next week I will for sure get into how excited I am, but this week I thought I’d talk about how my anxieties are manifesting themselves in my dreams.

I’m having stress dreams, and remembering every horrifying moment of them - I think.  I’m the type of person who hasn’t remembered a dream in a LONG time; so long I don’t even know when the last time I remembered one until last week. 

Last week was by far the worst yet.  I woke up in a cold sweat around three in the morning after I dreamed I neglected my girlfriend’s baby.  She had left the baby in my care and I forgot all about him.  By the end of the dream he was crying bloody murder wanting me to change him, feed him or just plain pay attention to him.  I was totally devastated by this dream; I thought this was some premonition to the fact that I was going to be a horrible mother.  So I checked out the website Dream Moods.  It said that forgetting about a baby means you feel over overwhelmed by the responsibility of taking care of somebody else, like the five bands playing at my event possibly.

Dream Moods in general says that dreams about forgetting signify life’s anxieties, an unconscious desire to leave something behind.  All of which could be true but not all necessarily involving my IPP.  This year has seen people leave from my life and will see the end of my time in school, so there really are quite a few important things that have left my life or will very shortly be leaving my life.  This new chapter in my life is SUPER exciting; I’m finally ready to move on, let go and let love in.  But obviously my subconscious isn’t quite ready to leave some things behind yet.

Learning Lessons on the Job

So I so totally screwed myself when putting together a brochure for my work placement this January. The organization wanted a brochure to highlight the film side of their organization, so after talking to them about what they wanted – an old fashioned film kinda look - I set out to find some amazing pictures to fit the look.

After some searching on google images and looking through the organizations archived photos, I found exactly what I was looking for: a great photo of the outside of the RRC campus on Princess Street, some old fashioned film reels and the best, most amazing photo of Buster Keaton with an old video cam. So I started putting it together. I spent hours cutting out this picture of Buster Keaton to make it look just right and then added a shadow to make it look somewhat real. It looked amazing! Everyone was super excited about it and thought it looked great, until someone asked the question I should have asked myself days before.

American actor an filmmaker

“Do we know the copyright laws with this picture?!”

Me, “No. Damn it.”

The Buster Keaton photo is absolutely epic, and ever since we decided not to use that photo – the organization could potentially be fined $2,000 - it’s been so hard to find a replacement. Ugh I’m so mad at myself. I KNOW better than that. After a search that lasted WAY too long, the organization and I have FINALLY agreed on a photo we both like for the cover but we don’t love it.

At least I’ll know better next time.

Adventures in Ringette

As some of you may or may not know I’m suppose to write a blog every Friday for school, but this week I’m a little late. As usual, I procrastinated because I really didn’t want to believe that I was back to school and back to doing homework. Today I woke up and said to myself, “there is 7 more weeks of school and then you’re done, so get your freaking act together.” I can really be persuasive when I want to be.

This week I’m going to do something I haven’t don before in my blog, I’m going to use pictures to talk about one of the first IPP events that went down this weekend. Ashton Friesen and Melissa Marlatt had their fundraising event for MS called Move Your Soul. It was a ringette tournament and social, and they literally knocked it out of the park. These ladies seemed so cool, calm and collected that it was impossible to know whether they were panicking a little on the inside, especially with all the youngins at the social last night.

Before you see some pictures, I want to tell you a little about the ringette tournament. I had NEVER played ringette in my life, and neither had the majority of our team. So for the first game we played Friday night we knew we were in trouble when the other team showed up with matching jerseys and we had yellow pinnies. We all felt like the Mighty Ducks in Mighty Ducks 1 and thought briefly of a moment of grandeur when we smoked our opponents, like they did at the end of the first movie. But sadly we had no Emilio Estevez and we never reached our full potential. Regardless of whether we lost both our games by like 7 points, tied or won, our team had an awesome time supporting the fight for MS and Melissa and Ashton – really that’s what it’s all about.

Go CreComm Pylons – I really want to know who chose that name, we could have thought of something way better.

The Pylons

Lauren's game face

My game face

Our team getting instructions on the rules

Me in action

Lauren celebrating something, but I don't think it was a goal