Pesky Plants

Two more days of Orientation activities are down. Yesterday was another frosh-less day, as moving in continued for the first years. In the evening we had a social event for all the Math leaders. This involved heading to Columbia Lake and playing the survival game. I played this a number of times back in grades five and six, as a nearby forest was the perfect location. The basic idea is that food stations have been set up in the vast playing area, and those assigned as herbivores must collect a certain number of distinct food items. Other players are carnivores and must catch herbivores. Then there are also hunters and diseases and natural disasters to help thin numbers.

I didn’t expect to be doing that much running around, but I had fun as a carnivore. Of course, hunters traveled in packs and since I only have two lives, I was killed pretty easily. I think there must be some rule about the time span in which consecutive deaths can occur. I was granted another life and made that one count. We played a few other games, and then went back to campus for some BBQ’d food. I skipped the movie that was being shown, and hung out for a while, then helped with some cleaning and wristband organizing for the next day.

As it turned out, I helped with registration stuff this morning. As an icebreaker, I’ll tend to work on setting up and running events, so I won’t actually spend a whole lot of time with the frosh in team Tsunami. So I missed the initial team gathering and getting-to-know-you intros. But I’ll have an opportunity to meet the team later on.

Most of the rest of the day was spent at Waterloo Park, running a whole bunch of games for the teams. With some people named Lino and Dan, I was in charge of Ultimate Soccer … which is soccer and ultimate played at the same time on the same field. Lots of fun! Unfortunately, we seemed to generate an inordinate amount of incidents requiring first aid. We had three that I know of, which probably puts us near the top. But frosh are resilient, I’m sure!

The afternoon seemed to turn out quite well, despite the heavy showers we had in the morning. Once the sun came out, things dried up pretty quickly and made for a nice, if somewhat hot, afternoon. We finished things off with an address by the Dean to the students, and then we gave them their frosh kits and most importantly as a new Mathie, their pink ties!

Oh, my legs are very tingly right now. One of the Frisbee discs went beyond the park boundaries, so I went through the cheap plastic fencing to get it. The plants there are nicely equipped with very sharp … somethings. Hey, plant biology is not my thing. Anyway, my legs were very exposed and I received a ton of pricks. It’s funny, because it feels like a lot of very tiny needles all over my shins and calves, but there’s almost no visible evidence. There were some very fine droplets of blood scattered here and there, but besides those I’d be hard pressed to pinpoint an actual place where I got stabbed.

Another oh. I have a new roommate: Lars from Denmark. Virginia’s dad brought him by yesterday where I got to meet him and talk a bit, and later on he ended up taking the room vacated by Dan. Really nice guy, things should be just cool with him around. He’s an upper year mech eng student, but doing some international study and work. He and his girlfriend have been around a few places in Canada the past few weeks. I’m not sure of the entire story of how they came to Waterloo, but the girlfriend getting a job looks more complicated than they planned, so she’s heading back to Denmark on Sunday and he was looking for place in town. We talked for a couple of hours tonight, as both of them will be here for the rest of the week, and it’s interesting to compare our two countries or even just North America vs Europe.

Anyway, tomorrow is another early day, so I’m heading off.