sweet & sarcastic

I turned twenty on tuesday. So far, it doesn't seem any different from before, except that now I can look down my nose at teenagers in general. I got the tiniest, cutest digital camera as a birthday gift from my parents (it's a Pentax Optio S6), which is a much-needed replacement to the antiquated brick-like Canon clunker I had before. Because I have an odd tendency to give overly cute names to inanimate objects, I decided to call it Snap.

Eric proposed to me on Saturday night!

Ecstatic doesn't even begin to describe how I feel. I'm floating on cloud nine, and I don't think I'll be coming back down anytime soon!

My ring is absolutely stunning – it's from Tiffany, and it's the most perfectly beautiful ring I've ever laid eyes on!

This morning I met with my boss and one of the commerce co-op coordinators for my mid work term evaluation (how can summer break possibly be almost half over already?), and the result of the painfully boring hour-and-a-half long meeting was this:

I have been nominated for the Co-op Student of the Year Award.

I know, it's surprising. But from the moment I went into the meeting, it was all, "Sara is a fantastic addition to the organization", "We're so incredibly pleased with the work she's producing", "Her level of maturity and professionalism is astounding", and, my personal favourite, "We'd love to have her back next summer, and the summer after that – in fact, as long as you want a job with us, you've got one." Obviously they're none the wiser about my tendency to browse the web and write self-glorifying blog entries such as this one during work hours.

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I went jean shopping last night, and the whole experience was horrible. There are just no jeans that fit me. I always end up having one of two problems:

1) The jeans are the perfect length, but they are hugely, massively baggy through the legs and the waist. Because for some incomprehensible reason, anything with a 34" inseam or longer seems to be unavailable in smaller waist sizes.

2) The jeans fit amazingly well through the waist and legs, but they're so short that they might as well be capris.

This mystifies me. I'm tall (5'8.5"), but certainly not abnormally so. And I'm not particularly thin (with jeans I'm a size 2) either. So why am I having such an incredibly hard time finding a pair of jeans that actually fit?

My office always smells like food. Usually it's some kind of soup, but occasionally one of the guys will grab some pizza from the little cafe in the next building and then I'll be forced to sit there and pretend to concentrate on my work while the odors of pepperoni and cheese waft all around me. It always makes me so hungry, even at 10:00 in the morning. These guys know no limits when it comes to eating abilities, though. Yesterday I watched in awe as an entire rhubarb pie disappeared into D's stomach in a matter of minutes. E, too, is known to consume massive amounts of food in scarily short timeframes and then complain of being hungry less than an hour later. It baffles me.

Speaking of food: I baked my first cheesecake ever this evening. It appears to have turned out all right, but I can't taste it yet because it's Eric's birthday cake.

I keep forgetting to write in this journal. Last night was the first time I even looked at my friends page in well over a month – I've been so caught up in work and life that I don't get to spend much time on the computer anymore.

Anyway. Enough with the excuses.

Yesterday I went out for Chinese food with some of the people from work. I didn't want to drive there because of my complete inability to parallel park (particularly on busy downtown streets) so we all piled into one car. This car is tiny and I was wedged into the back seat between L and I, who are not exactly small guys. Every time we turned a corner I had to brace myself against the floor so that I wouldn't end up sprawled across someone's lap. I'm normally a pretty big fan of Chinese food, particularly chow mein and fried rice, but this restaurant left a lot to be desired in the flavour department. There was this soup – It might have been wonton soup, but I can't be positive – with these giant gobs of some kind of slimy, greasy greyish meat lying at the bottom of the bowl, and the lemon chicken was so coated in goopy brilliant yellow sauce that I couldn't quite be sure, but I think it might have been undercooked. It certainly ranked high on the slime scale.

I'm still alive though, so either the food poisoning just hasn't hit me yet or I've somehow been mercifully spared from a weekend spent staring into the toilet bowl. This Chinese food was definitely worse than last week's Thai food, which is saying something because I'm really not a big fan of Thai.

You know what annoys me? The weather. Earlier this week it was like summer had arrived, all blue skis and warm temperatures, and I actually wore capris for the first time this year and got deliciously cool raspberry-blackberry-blueberry smoothies from the Heath Food Bar during my lunch break. And then yesterday my little slice of summer disappeared and was replaced with a torrential downpour, which looks as though it could continue at any moment.

Last weekend was nice though, so I took advantage of the weather to go to the Oak Bay Tea Party with Eric. The Oak Bay Tea Party actually has nothing whatsoever to do with tea, so they should consider changing their name since it brings to mind images of white-haired ladies sipping English Breakfast tea in delicate, flower-patterned china cups with gold-rimmed edges and matching saucers. The Oak Bay Tea Party is actually a small fair that happens every year for the first weekend in June – meaning that the huge lawn in front of Willows Beach is transformed into a sticky, noisy mass of cotton candy, small children, and densely-packed rides while the Oak Bay residents turn up their noses at the disruption of their highly-valued peace and quiet and post home-made "NO PARKING" signs along the edges of their carefully manicured lawns.

Eric and I went on two rides there – the Tilt-a-Whirl and the Hurricane. I used to be one of those people who could stomach even the most nauseating of fair rides, but an unfortunate incident with one of the rides at West Edmonton Mall a few years ago changed that. We did the Tilt-a-Whirl first, and every time it started to spin I started to scream. So basically, I was screaming the whole time. And then we did the Hurricane, which was utterly terrifying and made visions of my life flash before my eyes in the first few minutes of the ride, hence the change in pitch of my screams from "screams of enjoyment" to "bloodcurdling shrieks of sheer terror the likes of which have never been heard before". I loved it.

Payday is next week. Yay. I've already earned more than three times the amount I made all last summer, which thrills me to no end. Eric's twenty-second birthday is also next week, and I'm getting a little bit worried because the iPod I bought for him still hasn't arrived, and I wanted to be able to surprise him with it when I take him out to dinner at Pagliacci's on Wednesday night. I've come to the conclusion that shipping companies are inept and are unable to deliver packages within their specified time range, because I ordered it online at apple.ca over two weeks ago, yet the package tracking number says that the iPod is still in Toronto.