Book Club!

So I took a week off to travel to Saskatoon for two days and then to Calgary for five and during my stay in Saskatoon I not only got to go to a friends family wedding but also I got to join some of my old classmates for a book club meeting. Since I've moved back to Regina it's been pretty hard to stay in contact with most of my Saskatoon friends but occasions like these give me chances to re-connect with some of my dearest friends!

At book club we have taken up the tradition of all reading books we want to read, not forcing each other to read genres or authors we don't like. It's a pretty good way of doing it because we all have such vastly different reading habits that we would never agree on only one book to read.

Some of the books read included: This Dark Endeavor by Kenneth Oppel, Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake, Divergent by Veronica Roth, Beauty Queens by Libba Ray, and Sex on the Moon by Ben Mezrich which I now have!

For my book club selection I read an old favorite of mine, Pride and Prejudice. The thing that makes it different is that I read an electronic version on my new Kobo that I got for my graduation! I've read the book a few times before and it always keeps me entertained with the humour, good writing and wit. Although it is one of my favorite novels I always end up disappointed by the situations these fictional women are in. Make's me very glad to be born in my time!

So just a short post but as I am currently writing this from the Saskatoon airport it will have to be. Have a great day!

My experience in the LIT program at SIAST

I'm currently in the Library and Information Technology program at SIAST here in Saskatoon and so far it's been a pretty interesting experience. 

I started this program in September of 2008 with high hopes: I had just spent a year saving money to move to Saskatoon after a failed year of university in 2006/2007. I joined the program with a group of women of all different ages who had the same interests as me, and for the first time I felt accepted for being who I am by this group of strangers. Finally I could relate to people and discuss issues that I couldn't have brought up in my other groups of friends. I spent a fantastic first year learning about cataloguing, reference, children's literature, young adult literature and going on two placements in school libraries! 

What I didn't know was that I was about to fail three classes and be kicked out of SIAST for a semester.

It felt horrible, and for a while I thought about quitting school for good because this was the second time I had failed out of school and I felt like maybe, it wasn't worth it anymore. Instead of being a "Debbie downer" I decided to come back to school with a better attitude and better time management skills, because I wasn't about to quit something as important to me as this program is.

I passed my three next classes of the second semester of the second year with my first library group. I then came back and joined the new group of Library techs in 2010 and I will graduate with them in May of 2012!

For those of you who don't know, studying to be a Library Technician is incredibly hard and our program in Saskatoon has the most academic classes of any LIT program in the country. It's a challenging field of study that people don't really realize is important to our society.

Yes, this program has caused me incredible amounts of stress, but it has also allowed me to grow as a person and become a mature adult who is accountable for my mistakes.