Of "Heathens", Snow, and Ghostbusters

1. Me and my new love Regent had our first fight yesterday -- it involved a very intense academic tutorial (My Brain = "Yum!") which ended with 10 minutes of all of us praying together (My Brain = "Augh!"). It's not that I don't like or appreciate prayer, it's just that I'm not used to being around Christians all the time, and that I still seperate education from faith in my head. So I freaked out for a while, then went to go talk to my professor. After listening carefully to my somewhat jumbled explanation of why I was so bothered, he had this to say:

Prof: "Do you need to spend more time with heathens? I mean, I don't mean heathens in a pejorative sense, just in.... it's okay to say yes!!"

Me: "Bwahaha! ... Maybe."

I told him that my dad playfully calls himself a 'heathen', and slowly realized both that my perhaps-profession of pastor will involve me learning how to spend more time around Christians, and that also I don't need to lose my 'flight' response entirely (being around 'normal people' sometimes is a good thing). So it was a minor spat really, but an interesting one nonetheless.

2. There was about 3 inches of snow on the ground yesterday morning, and this caused Vancouverites to go bat-shit-crazy. I mean it -- they just freaked out. There was a train derailment, busses stuck on hills, people abandoning their cars, people staying home from work -- it was hilarious, even after I'd realized that the normal lack of snow, the amount of hills, and the dangerous climactic mix of wet roads and near-freezing temperatures did actually make some sense out of all the transportation chaos. Half the population of Vancouver seems to pride itself on wearing shorts no matter what, so a little snow is definately cause for concern. I loved it, even I got sprayed with grey slush while waiting for busses and had wet pants all day. I had a good snowball fight in the afternoon, and got the brief but glorious vision of all the trees swathed in white.

3. I've been hired as a custodial worker at Regent, which means ten hours a week (mostly early morning or evening) of cleaning, tidying, locking/unlocking, and AV help. This morning was my first training shift and I discovered one of the perks of the job -- a backpack vacuum cleaner that looks just like the one from Ghostbusters. Awesome.