Building bridges

Janvember (when November feels more like January) is almost over, so only about five months of winter to go. Woo hoo! Though I despise the cold, I do enjoy sitting by the wood stove sipping my chai latte on cold days. And not having to go to work…I like that a lot too.

Ray and I haven’t done anything too exciting lately, other than the usual – working out (Ray does spinning and power yoga; I do weight training and running), volunteering (Ray with Citizen’s Advocacy and the Humane Society; me with the grade 3 students), and hobbies (Ray carves stuff out of wood; I train Juno to jump over and run through things).

Nick’s been keeping himself busy at university. For one project, the Civil Engineering students were all assigned to teams and had to build a model bridge. Each team’s bridge was tested to see if it could hold 150 pounds of sandbags. Nick was very relieved that his team’s bridge held up – apparently quite a few didn’t – and his team got the 4th highest score.

I’ve never been nervous about driving over bridges before, but it’s a bit unnerving when you realize that someone had to graduate at the bottom of the class.

This past weekend, Nick took part in the Queen’s Startup Summit. It’s a weekend-long event that kicks off with a Friday night dinner and speeches from technology and industry leaders. On Saturday the delegates come up with ideas and form teams. They then have 24 rather intense hours to develop their ideas and create a business plan, including coding, design and market research. Nick and his team were the last ones in the building Saturday night…well, Sunday morning, leaving at around 5:30 am to squeeze in a quick snooze before getting back to the drawing board.

I pulled a few all nighters at university too…for far less noble reasons.

Sunday afternoon the teams pitched their ideas to a panel of judges, à la Dragon’s Den, with cash prizes going to the top three teams. We got an excited all-caps message from Nick Sunday evening telling us his team had won 3rd prize, and that one of the judges, a venture capitalist, was interested in hearing more about their idea. Without going into great detail – in case I’m at risk of copyright infringement or something – their proposal related to an app that would make grocery shopping more efficient and reduce food waste.