Tag: food

How to manage your fridge…and university

University is all about management. You have to manage your classes, social time, and sleep. But if you choose to move away from your parents’ house and onto CMU’s campus, you need to manage life on your own as well, which includes feeding yourself. If you are in dorms and on the meal plan at CMU, that will basically be taken care of for you. But if you choose to live in an apartment on campus, you will need to learn how to manage a refrigerator.

vintage fridge

It’s trickier than you think. Fridges don’t automatically stock themselves with your favourite meals, and it’s very easy to lose food in the far reaches of your fridge. Just ask some of the students who live in CMU’s Katherine Friesen Apartments.

Two roommates in a CMU apartment spoke to the difficulty of not only losing track of food in your fridge, but losing track of whether the food is yours or your roommate’s.

“Last week I asked my roommate what he was doing with the rice and meat dish that had been in our fridge since I moved in back in September,” noted one CMU student. “He responded by telling me that he thought it was mine. To this day we don’t know whose dinner it was in our fridge for almost six months.”

That’s not an isolated case. One student has managed to house a jar of sweet and sour sauce in their fridge from the start of the year, and another set of roommates noted that they forgot a bag of chilli in the back of their fridge for several weeks. Upon discovering that it had turned fuzzy, they decided to keep it as a science experiment.

Not all fridges contain months-old forgotten food though. One student noted that a pack of organic flax meal was the strangest thing they could find in their fridge, which is quite impressive.

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But fridges don’t just contain bizarre items; they also carry items of food that you just can’t get enough of. For current CMU students, it seems as though dairy products (or at least dairy-inspired products) were at the top of the list to have in their fridges at all times.

For one student, a big jug of chocolate milk is the most important thing to have on hand at all times. Whether for breakfast, or after a sports practice, it was essential to have. Another student couldn’t live without a container of yogurt in the fridge. Yet another student remarked that, “Life is good with a block of cheese.” Even a lactose intolerant student said a block of lactose-free marble cheese is an integral food for her to have around.

All of this is to say that university is a time of learning. You’ll no doubt learn how to organize your classes and notes, and possibly how to organize a fridge too. But you’ll also learn what things are important to you…both with respect to what’s important to have in your fridge, and what’s important to have in your life in general.

CMU’s next Campus Visit Day is this Friday, March 9. Spend the day with us, and find out if CMU is the right place for you.

Living on campus: Close to class, closer to community

You live 15 minutes away from here? Why do you live on campus? Isn’t it way more expensive than living at home?

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Well the practical answer is easy. Look at our roads right about now. Look at your thermometer, or, the weather app on your phone. Check your bus schedule, and find out that your daily commute is over an hour each way, and that’s when those Winnipeg buses are actually on time. 

So if I choose to live at home, I can either spend a pile of money on a car, or spend my most valuable resource – time – out in minus-40 weather.

That was enough to sell me on dorm life, and I hadn’t even set foot in Poettcker Hall yet.

The first thing I noticed was how great dorm life is as a stepping stone to adulthood. There’s no one checking in on you, making sure you follow rules or get to sleep at a decent hour, but you don’t have to worry about what to cook (or how to cook) every day. Ted Dyck and his crew take great care of that, and the food is unlimited!

6th year

Right from the start, you find out that there are always exciting events on campus, and there’s something for everyone. From incredibly talent-filled coffeehouses to Blazer game days at the Loewen, and everything in between, there’s always something to do. You’re a 30-second walk from chapel twice a week, Wednesday Night Worship, fellowship groups and many more opportunities to discuss and worship God.

There are some challenges as well. Chances are you will quickly have a new sense of appreciation for your mattress at home, or simple things like laundry machines that don’t require your hard-earned-Bible-camp salary to operate. You might come back to your room on a Sunday night to find 2000 water-filled Dixie cups covering every square inch of floor and table space, but hey, you left your door unlocked so what do you expect?

1st year

Most importantly, living on campus is the best way to experience community at CMU. I’ve lived in dorm, then at home, and now in apartments on campus and it’s clear that I’m closest to the people here when I live here. In my first year, I found myself staying up until two or three in the morning regularly, engaging in deep faith discussions with other first years. These were people going through the same life changes, anxious and stressful moments as me. I can honestly say that I learned more about my faith in those talks in my first semester than I had in any sermon or lecture.

CMU is a community, and the best way to experience it is being present all the time, and engaging in everything it has to offer. Take the plunge, move in, and you’ll feel it.

Thomas Friesen is a senior Communications and Media student from Winnipeg, Manitoba.

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