Family and Friends

I have to apologize for being lost of the blogsphere lately since I know a lot of you are used to me writing fairly frequent and it's that I'm still trying to find the time to do everything I do in a day besides writing in my blog, especially writing it in 2 languages; I could do it before since I had lots of free time but not so much anymore ;)

This saturday I finally met Nelly, she is a blogsphere friend, we met through our blogs, forums and mails, but we finally met in person and it was a great experience since it felt like a long friendship and is hard to remember that we've met for such a short time once you feel like that. What is it that makes us feel like that? Being an immigrant with no family in our new country? Chemistry? both? I don't know, but it felt really good and we spent such a good time we hope to repeat it some time soon :)

We also received our cousin on saturday; she is from Venezuela but was in Vancouver studying english and now she is in Toronto with us for 2 weeks, we are really happy to have her in our house and it's the first member of our family to set foot in our house :D We are showing her Toronto and she loves it! even more than Vancouver ;) So I'll be even more lost from my blog since I'll be spending my free time with her.

Conventions

I love the fact that you have something to do every week in Toronto, that is something I was missing in Venezuela, and not only you have something to do, but sometimes you have a LOT to do ^^

This saturday we were at the Toronto AnimeCon 2008! It was really cool since we love anime and there was a lot of cosplay (people dress as anime characters) and a lot of things to buy! We bought 2 anime figures, 2 t-shirts and 10 manga books! :)


We also went (that same saturday) to Canada Blooms, which is The Toronto Flower & Garden Festival. Pretty cool too, the smells were so wonderful and the flowers were beautiful!!! I'm just posting one picture here but you can see a lot more in my picasa album, by the way, it was HUGE! I don't think we saw everything there was to see, we were already pretty tired from the AnimeCon xD


After that you would think we were pretty tired and we were, but even though, we went to the movies xD We saw the new Dr. Seuss movie Horton hears a Who, it was GREAT! We really enjoyed it so much! and I don't remember the last time I laught so much, pretty cool, I recommend it! :D

My job

I received a lot of comments asking me to talk about my job, yes, it's true, all of them in the spanish blog, but I decided to post here too ^^

I started to work about a month and 2 weeks ago in a company called Konverge; it's small (around 20 people) and it has a parent company that it's a loooot bigger :p My job is as a developer in .NET, C# and SQL, everything Microsoft, and at this moment I'm there as a paid intern thanks to Career Bridge but I really hope that they offer me a job with them after being there 3 months (or less ;))

I've always been (since my graduation xD) a Java girl, so developing with Microsoft again has being a little bit hard, even more when my husband is Linux/Apple hahahaha, but oh well, I can do it and accept the challenge. Java and Microsoft can live in peace with me ^^

My official working hours are from 9am to 5pm but we can get there until 10am and obviously go home a little bit later. You have 15 minutes to eat but nobody is taking your time so it's up to you what you do with your time :)

We have a foosball table where we have tournaments from monday to friday at 5pm ;) and everyone is invited so you can imagine it's a very nice place to work.

Most of the people are a love to be with and the others are nice and the working environment is really nice. The computers are great and we have huge monitors :) Ah, and it's only like 10 steps from the subway in downtown, so it's really well placed! And thanks to that, my winter has being so fun! :p

I think this just about covers it right? ;) And sorry if my style is not like always or made big mistakes, I wrote this falling sleep ^^ So now to bed! Questions? comments?

Family doctor

I just came back from my family doctor first appointment :D

Last week I found the college of physicians and surgeons of Ontario web page where they have a huge database with all the doctors in Ontario and other characteristics like the languages they talk and if they are acepting new patients.

I read in forums that the database is not up to date and sometimes you would call doctors that say are acepting patients and wasn't true, so I was ready with an excel sheet with all the doctors close to home or work that speak spanish and were acepting patients, and also a few more that say wasn't acepting but I was going to try with them either way; at the end I had more than 20 doctors to call.

I'm at home, I'm going to start calling and choose for my first call a woman really close to home (less than one block from here!) and what do they tell me? The doctor is taking patients! When do I want my appointment?...hahaha... too easy... there must be a catch.

We went today, filled our medical history and waited to talked to the doctor. While we waited we heard another girl saying that the doctor told her she would receive a letter in 2 weeks saying if she was accepted but since she was living so far away it was probably that she wouldn't; we live close, what will happen to us? They call us to see the doctor in different rooms.

Igor's appointment: She asked where is he from, what does he have, talked about his history and told him about the letter in 2 weeks, that in the letter would say if he was accepted.

My appointment (after Igors): Asked about my history, why was I there (I needed an excuse besides finding a family doctor, and I actually need a doctor really soon so it was easy) and told me that new regulations demanded that I waited 2 weeks after filling out the history to make the second appointment (physical exam), but she didn't told me about the letter and she actually told me "don't make the appointment now because they are not going to let you, but please in 2 weeks call and make it, don't forget it".

So, now I'm waiting my 2 weeks, but I think I can be pretty sure I already found a family doctor ;) I hope the web page I'm giving you will help you too ^^

I hate this!!!

I'm so sorry to follow such a happy post with one that is making me so mad and so nervous, but I can't take it anymore, my head is going to explode, and although my mum told me not to worry, I can't help it.

Have you seen this?
Ecuador follows Venezuela, sends troops to Colombian border
Ecuador and Venezuela have moved troops to their borders with Colombia
Chavez ordered 10 battalions of troops to the Colombian border Sunday and closed Venezuela's embassy in Bogota.

That freaking crazy monkey in Venezuela's president's chair says Bush is messing in other people business and he goes and does the same, this time jeopardizing my family and my country :'(

With a little help from my friends

My mum is an economist... How many times in your life do you need the knowledge of an economist? I don't know about you but I seem to need it at least once a month! I need it to understand some bank statements, for bolivares/dollars options, housing costs and options, loans and interests, taxes, and all those "fun" things we all have to deal with once in a while.

I was always able to get home and talk to her about it, and even after a while one of my best friends (yes, you, Juan Jose) learned so much about it that he was the one that helped me at work. Hey, he even talked with my mum sometimes ^^

After I came here I didn't really need her help with that kind of things because the opportunity was never there and I used to think that when the time came, I could always ask her over the phone or video conference. Well, the time was here, I got homework from my course (java programming) and it had to do with mortgages and interest rates! What did the teacher say about the formulas? Look in google!

So I was ready to start homework and started to google the formulas... nothing... nothing yet... hey, something! but I don't understand it :S... look some more... something else, same problem... Then I think, how can I ask my mum if these are Canadian interest rates and everything is in english? Translate everything? Too much work and without sure sucess. I'm hopeless... what happens if I fail the course? Nothing really, but I don't want to fail!! What should I do?

I'm seating in front of my monitor, trying to understand everything and little by little I start to understand a few things, but at this rate I won't be able to complete my homework in time. I open my messenger and look who is connected, ummm, one of my nice co-workers is there, does he know about this stuff? I ask him and can't believe the answer, he really knows! He even has a minor in economy, humm, what are the odds?

After work he helped me with the things I didn't understand so I could get home to start programming. After more than 11 hours programming (5 after work on friday, 6 on saturday) homework was ready :D So, what did I get from it? You can't replace family but you can always find great people that can help you and will do it gladly. Thank you Ryan!!, you were a big help in more ways that you can imagine ^^

ps: Yes, I'm a big Beatles fan :p