Dragons, Slings, Picnics & Poker…

          Just recently SLU installed lots of new equipment in the Stafford Fitness Center. My favorite new addition is a fitness biking game. The machine has a large flat screen attached to the front of a stationary bike. You can select different modes on the machine to actually bike different courses, distances, and set a pacer to keep you on track. The program keeps track of your mileage and you can sign in with your user ID when you return to the machine to save your stats. It will even set goals for you along the way. My current goal is to bike the distance of a marathon. I’m slowly working my way towards this goal; I am about 50% of the way to the marathon distance. So, in my opinion this machine is really cool, but I haven’t even gotten to my favorite part. There is one mode where to motivate you and set a pace, you chase dragons. The goal is to collect coins and match them to dragons of the same color. You receive points for each dragon you catch. Then your total is compared to others that have used that game. It is a lot of fun! I generally do a 10 minute “Dragon Chase.” It seems pretty easy but when you are chasing them up hills and pedaling like crazy, it gets really exhausting. I have been improving after each chase; I hope to make the leader-board one day. It is a lofty goal… but you know, dream big.

With awesome new additions to the fitness center and a constantly updated athletics complex, St. Lawrence’s facilities continue to impress me. This past week our athletics complex was ranked the 20^th best in the nation by the Princeton Review. It is a huge honor and it is crazy to see the company with which we are on the list, generally the others are significantly larger than SLU. Check out the rankings here!

This week Evan, Bela and Caitlin had their send off events. It was really lonely in the office. With a lot of tours and a busy schedule I hardly saw the other interns this week. Unfortunately, on the way back from his send off, Evan got into a minor car accident and hurt his arm. When Evan returned we went out to the drug stores in search of a sling. Please know that all drug stores in Canton close at 9:00 PM, so we had quite the adventure trying to buy a sling late at night. Evan ended up getting a sling and the campus EMTs were very helpful. You will notice in the photos that Ev is in kind of a rough shape, but I think he will survive. 

This picture of Evan in a sling makes me laugh!

This week we also had an Admission BBQ at the townhouse fire pit. It was a lot of fun bonding with the staff outside of the workplace! We had a blast and chowed down on burgers and hot-dogs. John Gursky, the Admissions Counselor in charge of our internship, will be blogging about the BBQ, so make sure you check his blog out!

Lastly, our town house has gotten really into poker this week. We had a poker night last night. We started off playing Texas Hold’em. I wasn’t very good at all. Our housemate Carl and I were the first to be eliminated from the game. Bela also taught us a new game called “Dirty Queens.” I like that game a lot. It is more based on luck and the wild cards can change the whole game. I included some pictures of our poker night. I did much better with the Dirty Queens game, but it was just a lot of fun hanging out, laughing a lot and relaxing!

So overall, this week was a lot of fun! I know this blog was kind of jumbled with many different things, but so was this week! There is always a lot to do here in Canton and my week consisted of dragons, slings, picnics and poker.