Hello there! It's been a while so I thought I would catch you up on how things were going.
As you've noticed, I'm not exactly a "micro-blogger"; I don't blog about everything as they happen, and I usually like to wait until I have the time and interesting material to justify a blog post. But, I've been very busy and I don't like leaving such a large gap.
So, what have I been up to? Well, getting ready to move to France, mostly. It has been a long month and a half full of traveling, meetings, paperwork, online research, phone calls, and more paperwork. I am getting my visa application moving, trying to secure residence, looking for more funding, and trying to account for all the little details involved in such a trip. I've never been overseas before, so moving there and living there for an entire year is quite a lot for which to prepare.
I recently attended convocation at York University. Convocation was a word I had not heard before coming to York and it essentially means graduation, I graduated from York University. It was a nice ceremony, not as long or boring as I feared, and it was nice seeing everyone having a good time. My family came down to attend (I'm including a close friend as family here, should she be reading), and it was really nice having them with me. To be honest, I was feeling kind of blasé about the entire experience but seeing them excited, as well as power-rocking to Freddie Mercury on the subway, really helped me get into the spirit of things. After the ceremony, we took some pictures and I got my hands on my diploma! It was very cool to hold the end product of so much work in my hands, at last. I don't have any photos of me in the silly graduates' cap and robe yet but will be sure to upload them here once I do.
My family got me a very cool graduation present, see?
I've recently been wanting to add a little more class to my dress and my mom and I were checking out pocket watches at Ottawa's ComicCon. My family had this one engraved, with "Dallas Kasaboski B.A.Sc. 2013", where B.A.Sc. stands for Bachelor of Applied Sciences. It which was a nice touch, and I really, really like it. On a related note, my mom and I have been working on some wardrobe ideas and I think we might actually get things moving. My mom and I have been in talks to add some Victorian-styled clothing to my attire and she is convinced that with our combined skills, we could do so effectively, and far less expensively than buying it from a store.
Oddly enough, I think about clothes more often than you might think. I like things to be functional as well as formal so I like clothing that is nice to look at but durable. I like not worrying about the clothes I wear and I like when I can look handsome, but then roll up my sleeves and get some work done. May sound pretentious, or the usual fare of a graduate student, but I'm looking forward to the day when my closet is full of nothing but vests, shirts, nice trousers, ties, and other such fancy oddities. I take myself very seriously, I might as well reflect that in my clothing.
Also, we've been working on cape 2.0! Looking back, I haven't talked about my cape that much here, suffice it to say I wear a cape and it is equal parts functional and formal, and I will show you pictures of the new one once it has been designed and actually made.
Lastly, you might have noticed that donation button on the right side of the page. As you may or may not know, being an international student can be expensive, and so the cost of my tuition and living expenses in France is considerably higher than if I were to stay in Canada. I expected this, and have been working toward it, but we can all use help some times.
To be honest, there is absolutely no obligation for financial support. I would like your support, in any ways you can provide whether it be interest, enthusiasm, constructive criticism, or of course financial. I just wanted to give anyone interested an option, so that they could if they wanted to. If you're interested in learning more, about my goals, my hard work, and what you'd be investing in, please check out this blog post in a few days when I upload a letter I wrote for that purpose. I hope you get the chance to read the letter in general because it does a good job of bringing you up to speed on where I am in my life and where I'm going.
Anyway, this was a rather non-technical blog post. I promise that as soon as this paperwork moves out of the way, I'll be filling this post up with engineering concepts and cool ideas. Should you have any suggestions for future posts, comments on anything I've written here, or even just want to say hello, my email address is at the top of this page.
Thanks for reading!
