Hello Folks! I had a great summer filled with four popped tires, cowboy hats, fire resistant coveralls, visiting two of the three coasts of Canada and a minor concussion; however that is a story for another time and another place. I am super excited to be back here to take on the coming school term and making my mark as an Editor-in-Chief. I don’t have any major plans to change anything; I mean why fix something that isn’t broken? There are a few minor changes with our look, such as our headline fonts and the headers of the pages.
But Oi! It’s been a pretty crazy and busy few weeks. Catching up on things after Orientation Week was a pain. It is amazing how long it takes to catch up after about a week of ignoring your e-mails. Lesson learned: A few minutes a day is much easier to manage than a few hours on the weekend. Plus there are much better ways to be spending your weekend than slaving over e-mails and catching up on class work and what not.
Anyhow, I don’t know about everyone else but this September seemed to have been a touch more eventful than last year. It was perhaps due to the fact that I spent way too much time on campus as a first year. Another lesson learned: Get off campus whenever you can. There are some pretty neat things that go on around Waterloo. Things like the St Jacob’s Market or even the Kitchener Farmer’s Market are worth checking out. Fresh groceries can make any good dish even better. I am a bit of a foodie :D. However, if you have a tight budget like most university students, go check out the Asian market in downtown Kitchener. It is called New City Supermarket. Pretty great place, you can get boneless chicken breast for the same price as a package of chicken thighs at Zhers or Valumart. It is really quite a deal; on the other hand you have to deal with the slightly lower cleanliness of the Asian market.
Back to the fact that it has been a more eventful month. This month I saw a guy wipe out on his motor bike. Pretty scary actually, I guess he miscalculated his turn, but man, being a speed devil is most definitely not worth it. This man got thrown from his bike as a result of his momentum alone; he didn’t hit anything before he wiped out. His bike ended up against the curb and he was laying on the ground a metre or two from his bike. He got up immediately. He seemed a little shaken up but other than that he was ok. By the way, he was wearing full safety gear, a full face helmet and an armoured jacket. So that was most definitely a contributing factor. A similar thing happened to me this summer, except I was on a mountain bike and I didn’t quite get up immediately. I actually spent five hours in the emergency room waiting for a doctor to come see me. I don’t really remember the night, however I have been told that I could not tell them what the date was and I kept asking the same questions, such as, “Is today Saturday?” Actually to this day, I don’t know what happened. I remember being on my bike, starting to lose control. Then… nothing until a few flashes at the hospital and that is it.
Other things I saw this past few weeks include two friends getting into a fist fight over something stupid, a cop pull across two lanes of oncoming traffic to break up a large mass of people, then a few metres from that I saw a handful of people lighting up a joint… saw another cop pull over two taxi’s to settle a fare dispute between the drunken passengers and the driver. It was a pretty crazy month and that isn’t even counting the awesomeness that was Orientation Week and the madness that was involved in the first production week. The craziest thing is that when those two friends were fighting, there was no indication that they were friends. They started going in a dark alley and when we went to get the nearest cop, it was the one who was settling the taxi fare dispute. The cop dismissed my roommate, claiming he was busy and someone else would attend to it. I am not sure about you, but I think that a fight is a bigger deal than a taxi dispute. Arguably the cop was right, the fight eventually calmed down after one of the guys just arm locked the other until he calmed down.
Back at home or my apartment, things were not so calm either. There was a fire alarm at 3 am one morning. A total of five people evacuated the building… our building is three floors with about twenty people on each floor and only five people evacuated. It really makes you wonder how well people can sleep through fire alarms. Another thing is we got locked out of our laundry room and our mail box because our landlord failed to give us that set of keys. This leads to my next point about mail; one of the guys who used to live where we live now came by and picked up his mail yesterday. One piece of mail had a new debit card in it, which is most definitely something you don’t want a stranger picking up. So lesson learned: update your mailing address. Unless of course you are moving to a super new address that the post office doesn’t know exists yet. Then you are stuck between a rock and a hard place and all your mail will get returned to the sender, which isn’t fun to deal with.
Going back to the Iron Warrior, I hope to be able to keep the high standard of quality that the Iron Warrior has come to be known for. I plan on introducing a bit more sports content and hopefully we can get enough advertising to have a few colour issues throughout the term. Other than that as far as the reader can tell I don’t think that much will change. If anyone has any great ideas, come out to our meetings or drop us an e-mail, if you are feeling really classy you could even slip a note under our door when the office isn’t open. Further details about when and where we meet, where our office is or how to reach us by e-mail are all listed below, so come check us out.
Finally, I would like to thank the people that helped me transition into Editor-in-Chief and made my first production weekend relatively smooth and painless. You are awesome! I will buy you all more cookies in two weeks.
To everyone else, go out and enjoy the last few days of summer. I know that the fall officially started on September 22nd, but it is still plenty warm enough to be considered summer. I’m from Calgary, if that explains the previous statement. If not, know that it snowed in Calgary last week and that it snowed throughout the lovely spring month that people in Ontario know as May.
Cheers,
Roy Lee
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