Happy New Year! Bling!

Happy New Year, 2008!

Got another 8 hours of driving to go. At least we aren't lost. :P

Christmas 2007

Yes, this is my hand.

The ALEX Show

My mighty brother is having his graduation recital at McGill on the 16th of December. I don't know much else besides this at the moment, but I'll be updating this post when I get more details other than "PLZ COME TO THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY IN MY LIFE."

Anyway, he wants everyone to go to this event. Absolutely everyone. So if you're in Montreal on this day, please go for me, because if I can't make it (which is possible) I will be very, very, very sad, and I want everyone to tell me that he played like the genius he is. :(:):):)

EDIT: So he finally sent me the details. It's in Pollack Hall, 8:30 p.m. on the 16th.

EDIT 2: My, how terrible is this? He didn't even invite me to his Facebook group until I asked him where the thing was. >:(

Tourtière!? NOT. It's called MEAT PIE.

Ingredients:
Crust

• flour


• baking powder


• salt


• egg


• water


• milk


• brown sugar


• shortening

Meat

• ground pork


• veal


• onion


• celery


• garlic


• salt and pepper


• allspice or other spices

Low heat. Cook meat.


Oh wait. Chop celery and onions. Chop some more. Really small. Until Jorghnassen says it's small enough.


Dump it in. Mix it up, yeah.


Cook it low forever. Stir once a year.
Ok, an hour or so.


Take out the rivers of fat. (Seriously, it filled an entire bowl.) Cool overnight.

In the meantime, make the dough. Cool overnight too.


Roll the dough.


Cut the dough. One big disc, one little disc.


Fill the dough in a muffin tin.


Before!


After!


It said "EAT ME."

Colm Wilkinson

There were some problems. The moment we arrived at the Centre in the Square, the downtown Kitchener theater, we knew we were in for a bit of a mess. My purse malfunctioned, sealing the tickets and everything else inside and I almost had to cut it open with scissors. The people vacantly strutting about were on average older than Colm himself. Some obnoxious couple was sitting in front of us calling out crap, when he was trying to make friendly banter with the audience. The same couple's big heads were in the way when he broke out with the "Bring Him Home."

Nevertheless... the theater was indeed as acoustically awesome as Dennis (who is a teacher at the school and who coincidentally happened to be attending the show) claimed. The staff was friendly, the price of parking was not too embarrassingly high...

HE WAS AMAZING!

Let it be known that you haven't heard Danny Boy until you've heard it from an irish ex-pat who defined the roles of both the Phantom and Jean ValJean.

Happy birthday, Jorgh! -xox-

Run for the Cure (no 2007)

Regardless of the reasons, I didn't participate this year. :(

Telus Tells Us That Customers are Dumb and Should be Taken Advantage Of

Today's rant is not so angry and not full of rageahol, but it would have been ... about half an hour ago. I forgot by one day about topping up my cell with the Pay and Talk thing through Telus, and I was in for a mean surprise when I filled it this morning just before driving off to work in the Rav4. The account balance was zero, no thanks to my stupid memory, and the rate was now nearly doubled from 25c/min (ridiculous anyway) to a terrificly gouging 40c/min.

I was absolutely livid all day, but I didn't have time to rage at any service reps until I got home a while ago. I spent the whole day rehearsing in my head all the irate customer phrases that I always read about, where people make seriously silly or amusingly irritating demands to the service people.

I, myself, have never done any sort of negotiations (read: angry raving) in that sense, since I'm such a square that I follow the laws and regulations and other ridiculously arbitrary rules imposed by some faceless authority.

But after reading a few articles in the last few weeks about negotiations, creating opportunities, or just punching your way through a crowd (which I have had to do more recently like through Oxford Street, without the punching), I felt ready to give them the most convincing ANGRY IGNORANT LADY CUSTOMER conversation. The following dialog is an embellished paraphrasing.

Me: I just topped my account this morning with this card, and I want to know why my rate has changed.
Rep: You let your account go to zero. The rate goes up when you recharge. That's how it is.
Me: Wait, so you're telling me that since I missed recharging by one day, I can't get my rate back down?
Rep: You'll have to buy a 50 dollar top up card.
Me: I don't want to do that, that's ridiculous!
Rep: Sorry, that's how it is.

I'm not one to back down anymore, especially being so mad at stupid things lately. Like having to deal with my kids running around the computer class this afternoon clamoring at their classmates' computer components, going "This is not your own! OUR OWN!" (I'm so evil.)

Me: Well, I find this completely ridiculous. I try my best to top up every month, and this one time I miss the expiration by one day and I get this? I want to get my rate back!
Rep: Well we can change that just this one time.
Me: Yeah, you do that.

***ROCKIN'***

OK, well... I don't think this deserves a *rockin'* since I actually negotiated away the remaining balance that I did have, but it was much better to get my rate back by sacrificing the little balance I had, than to pay 50 dollars for another card that I was never going to use up anyway. (You'd have to look at the Telus Pay Per Talk plans to understand more how this works.)

MS Office Excel Still Wins :(

One of the things I have been telling my students (especially the most clueless ones about computers) is that there is software out there that they don't have to pay for. In fact, there is such a massive, continuous supply of freeware, shareware, open source awesomeware, that one never needs to buy software... unless it's for k-12 schools. :(

The software suite I am talking about is MS Office. Nothing really major wrong with it - it's definitely a useful set of programs - but there are a number of things that I can point out that need to be removed, fixing or enhancements. (Formulas, for instance. I don't give a @#$%ing crap about MathType. Stop asking, dialog box!)

On the other hand, the free alternative, Open Office, offers the same functionality for 100% less money. That is, maybe you might have to pay for the electricity and internet connection to download it, but it's freeeeeeee.

However wealthy a person may be, the moment someone says "FREE", anyone and everyone with half a brain would jump on the chance to try it out. Hence, I have been recommending to the masses to use OOo (OpenOffice.org) when their trial software has expired, to avoid going through the "Miss, I couldn't write my essay because Word just expired" crap.

Too bad I discovered today that OOo has one big, huge, black mark on its awesomeness. I can't believe that after 5 years of so many people asking for chart and regression options such as giving the equation of the regression line, and no one has made it yet.

I especially find the second to last comment stupid, about how he believes that because it is open source means everyone is at fault. (We're soooo sorry that we don't know squat about coding. We're soooo sorry that we want to use this program in schools and my students don't know what the crap is going on, let alone how to get a stupid regression line to show up. And on top of that, we're soooo sorry we like your program and want to make suggestions, while nobody asks how this should be done.)

TRIP OVER :(

I wrote a bit about the trip on Facebook because I already uploaded the photos there and on Flickr, but I don't have the link up yet. Well, if you do find the Flickr account, the photos are there as well. In the meantime, here's something you won't see from either of those collections:

Vacation!

I'm on vacation!
It's celebration!
It's celebration,
I'm on vacation....

Oh wait, no I'm not. :(

At least not yet! :D

As soon as these kids write their final exams on Monday afternoon, I'm taking everything home, correcting it all (which is going to be less than last term, as I have half the number of students and exams), delivering them Tuesday morning, and we're jetting off (by car, that is...)to possibly Toronto, and Montreal. And possibly Quebec. I don't know about Quebec, since Jorghnassen doesn't seem to want to take the extra two hours of driving to visit, but I'd like to see my mum at least, and hopefully squeeze in some time with the bunny man and his wife.

Then we're jetting off (literally) to England on the 27th, to attend Jorgh's brother's weeding. (Inside joke.) Oh, that reminds me, I need to get a camera before that. A real camera, not one that takes things like this:



Anyway, time to get cracking... I have another pile of corrections to complete at the moment!

Ms C's Random Food Review: Purple Cauliflower

What: A not-so-gross looking purple cauliflower from the discount pile. Since I don't have much experience with buying vegetables in general, I thought I could get away with cutting off all the darker crappy parts and cook it as normal.

How: A stir-fry with a bright yellow zucchini, onions, and really red wine-soaked mushrooms, and then another time with cream of mushroom.

And...?: It is way freaky when you have a plate of vegetables with weird colours. Even weirder when the cream of mushroom turns purple from the joy of anthocyanins.

Then it gets gross when you try to eat it. Don't get me wrong - I really like cooked cauliflowers, and I even appreciate raw cauliflower (with the weird aftertaste reduced by soaking in some salt). And I barely ever eat raw vegetables... @_@

Well, I don't know about regular healthy purple cauliflowers, but this one tasted like acid. Everything I made was invaded with the taste of a really acidic bite. No matter if I added sugars, cheeses, tomatoes, salt, spices.... Nothing hides the acid.

On the plus side, it doesn't have a terrible aftertaste - it does leave a tingly acidic (purplish) tongue, however.

Rating: 3/5 until someone tells me what the hell went wrong.

Blah blah webcam blah

I bit the bullet and bought one. Another step closer to developing my social networking/dysfunction!

Something to Look Up To

I wish I could only have such hilarious bad comics... 200 Bad Comics!

Conflicting Sentiments

A few hours ago, two girls were standing outside our apartment building. They were from this building, as I recognized the older, pudgier girl who constantly had a sour look on her face, as many tween girls often do. She was cradling around a charcoal grey kitten; or rather, the kitten was clawed onto her hoodie with dear life, as she would wave her arms around to any passerby, calling out to them. She would then stretch the cat out with one hand as the car would drive by. The younger one was waving around an empty box, similarly yelling out to the street, and rushed over to the opposite side to yell out some more.

As I am a sucker for cute furry things, I had an idea of what they were doing. Unfortunately, I cannot follow through my desires, as I am still allergic to such animals. So I can only watch as the mother came out of the building to console the kids, and they were brought back into the building.

Had I any initiative, or less of an allergy, I would have gone out and done as I wanted to do, which Jorghnassen kept reminding me that I could not do. Hence, I can only write how my imaginary conversation with the girls would have followed:

-Dear, what in the world are you two peddling?

"We're selling a cat." She points to herself with both hands, while the cat is hanging on to dear life with all four limbs hooked onto her shirt.

-Is that how you treat a cat?

"No, miss, we're trying to find a good home for it." The other girl shouts out at another car barreling down the road. "CAT FOR SALE!"

-How did it come about that you have this... cat for sale?

"We had it for a while but now my family can't afford to keep this cat." The girls pout and look toward the cat forlornly. The cat is squirming desperately out of her arms, but the girl manages to enclose it in her pudgy embrace.

-Dears, where is your mother or father?

"They're inside..."

-Do they know you're doing this?

"Yes..." Their eyes dart around and they kick their legs into air with the suspicious look that kids give when they are up to something.

-Well, let me talk to them.

"Are you going to buy the cat?"

-Let me talk to your parents first.

The girls lead me to the mother, who is furious at their callous behaviour. (Why? I don't know. She was pretty mad earlier when she took the girls back inside.) On the other hand, the mother confirms the story. Despite Jorgh's objections, I agree to take the cat in. Everyone looks at the cat, now clawed onto my shirt and scratching me as I take it back to my apartment. It now leads a happy life without little girls trying to perform acrobatics with it on the street.

---

Jorghnassen is known as doublebof, and we were comparing our OKCupid match questions.

ST Voyager's Stupid Sad Episode :(:(:(

I regularly visit the SA forums whenever it's open to the public. I justify this obsession: sometimes there are threads that are horrible, hilarious (or both), and often get posted into the SA Front Page like the Comedy Goldmines or Photoshop Phridays.

This afternoon I had the misfortune of reading the "MS-Paint the saddest thing" thread, and some of the things posted there (while not MS Painted) were pretty sad, like the Thai insurance commercials. I only watched one of them but boy is it gut-wrenching: Click this if you feel like crying pathetically.

I had the TV on right afterwards, and it happened to be the Star Trek: Voyager episode called "Course: Oblivion". To summarize: the entire crew and ship came to the realization that they were merely copies of the original Voyager and crew due to some chance encounter on some planet that made exact bio-copies of everything, and their bodies and everything else were breaking down because of some techno-jargon; they had the choice to continue leading their copied lives and to continue heading to Earth, or go back to the planet they originated from to survive.

Of course, things don't turn out so well for them. In fact... let's just say that I really think you should pay just a little more attention to mysterious piles of blobs when you walk by.

Goddamn that was sad. :(

---

Yes, it's been a pretty sad afternoon. What with Jorghnassen killing all the spiders and everything. :(

I have something on my face...

... otherwise, why would those girls be looking at me at that Zehrs?

Jorghnassen, of course, is the reason why.

We walked by an aisle going to the cash register and I looked straight at her, as she stared straight at me. She stopped talking, and the other girls continued oblivious to her silence. I was wondering if the asian (chinese probably) girls at first were long lost cousins or something because I seriously have no idea why that particular one was staring at me for much longer than a stranger would at another person. Then I realized that none of my cousins are anywhere in proximity of the Wawaloo region, and they didn't look anything like anyone else I knew.

As we loaded the things in our basket to the cash, I looked back at the girls who were still standing at the aisle, still curious at first. Now hiding behind a goddamn clipboard that she was holding, she was peeking from behind it and still chatting with her friend and staring at us. At me. Wha-?

After a few more covert confirmations that I was being stared at, I mentioned it to Jorghnassen. The ill-concealed spying from the girls was rather disturbing. By then, we were already moving away from the register, and he looked back and he thought he was actually the one being stared at. Then I got more disturbed.

Now before you think I'm becoming jealous, it was because Jorgh is teaching a course right now at the university, and the girls (or one of them anyway) are probably in his class. He says the spy-girl looks familiar, and he could probably confirm it next class.

I know I'm not always the most restrained of girlfriends in the PDA department, so I can gather that seeing your prof with a girl who *looks* like a university student (but who is probably glad she's not a university student anymore) holding his arm might look suspicious, and smacks of unethical behaviour if one thinks that student-type is in the same class as the prof is teaching. And I know that one has a right to talk to other people in public about people you happen to recognize in public.

Nonetheless, it's not polite to stare! >:(

Final Exams Loom

I finally submitted the final exams to the office for storage. This time around, the administration wants the exams in at least a week before the date because the other times the other teachers only had it ready and photocopied the morning of the exam, which stressed out the admin that now they mandated their request.

Actually, producing the final exam is less stressful than writing one. On the other hand, it is much, much longer than writing one. But if one were to calculate the hours for a student to study, complete exercises, and revise notes on one course, it would probably add up to more, so I won't complain about the amount of time spent over one exam.

On the other hand, the responsibilities in exam making are staggering. Not only do I have to make up all the questions (I cheated, though, and took a lot of them from the damnable textbook), make full solutions of the questions, and mark them fairly, but I consider the following:

• Balance: on a scale of 1 to 10, difficulty should be a 5 or 6, depending on the type of course. The main issue is gaging the class' abilities and the difficulty scale.


• Weighting: more time spent on a certain topic doesn't necessarily correspond to more points in that topic. Hence, the points per question will vary.


• Type of questions: either make it easy on yourself to mark (but longer to prepare) and make those choice-based questions like Multiple Choice, True/False, etc. - or make it hard on yourself to mark (but shorter to prepare) and give open questions that will require pages and pages of student chicken scratch that you will have to decipher and make some sort of logical sense with, only to give half a mark for spelling a word correctly.


• Requirements of the course (and thus, the province): if there are 50 items in the course outline that must be covered, then the exam should cover as many as possible. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to cover nearly half those points this term. :(


• Length: there's a danger that you want to cover everything in the course in the exam, in order to make all the study time worthwhile for the students. But doing so will make the exam much too long to be written in any alloted time slot. Otherwise, you'd have to ask pretty superficial questions just to get everything in. Last time, the exam was too long and I actually had to cut out two entire questions after the exam was written. :(:(


• Approval: who else but the administration will look at this exam? Actually, no one at this point. But if I had been in a larger school with more people having taught or teaching the same course, I would have to collaborate with that person to figure out what will work in the exam and what will be thrown out. Unfortunately, since I have never taught any of these courses before, it would have been better that I had someone else to consult with.

Now I can go to sleep.

P.S. School starts again on July 3rd.

Some music to soothe the beast?

... or to agonize it into suicide?!?

Don't listen to this if you really, truly intend to keep your hearing. You might think I'm kidding, but I'm serious this time.



This one is for those of you who think it is funny to deafen people around you with evil ringtones.

LOST >:(

That's it, I'm not watching it anymore. >:(

The CSS activity/project/homework assignment

Some of you techies out there might be wondering what the heck I am teaching in the computer science class. Well, according to the Ontario curriculum, it's supposed to be the continuation of a Java programming class... but unfortunately none of the students have ever had an introductory programming class (and the teacher doesn't remember her own introductory programming class) and some of them don't even know the difference between a programming language and a command line interface. Heck, you'd be hard pressed to ask them if they could find their computers, like today (she left it in the washroom!?).

Anyway, I thought I would make the course easier by making four units, three of which are completely non computer science-y. The first was computer hardware, which the students learned to identify and put together components of computers that I obtained around town from donations. The second unit was learning about (ugh) software types, operating systems, and ethics of computers. Unfortunately, I was not able to get a hard drive that worked well enough to install an operating system, so no Linux conversions this term. (Not that I know much about Linux anyway...)

The third unit is web page coding; I wanted to step up the difficulty of the course by requiring that they code the pages by hand using (more or less) XHTML and CSS standards. They don't like practicing anything for some reason (which is why their homework marks are terrible), so I gave them a class activity today on CSS layout. This is probably the trickiest part of CSS for me because I never, ever, ever get any CSS layout right the first time. Or the fourth time. Or ever.

They are supposed to be creating the style sheet for a given web page (for a "clueless" client - soon to be obvious). For this, I had to make a web page and some images on MSPaint. The students are meant to set up either an internal or external style sheet, edit the markup language to (almost) XHTML standards, and make a more appealing kind of layout. They are not allowed to change the content of the page.

To tell you the truth, I don't know what the crap I was thinking when I was making the page. Behold, the fast and furious times of the mysterious middle-aged playwright/actor!

---

Welcome to THe GReAT eSCAPe!

Follow the navigation links to view the awesomeist pictures of the show.

• The scooter!


• The Ladybug!


• The cast!


• The chainsaw strummer!

Thumbnail gallery:

News

May 18, 2007 - The lead girl has called in sick - she says she probably has bronchitis (maybe her swimsuit is a bit too light for the show; I might have to cut back on the snow machine use). Now Little Tom will have to play dual roles, as our stand-ins are unfortunately unable to come due to their parents' anger that I have been taking them out of school. It's not my fault they were skipping middle school that day I recruited them; I thought they were just college kids "down and out of luck."

May 13, 2007 - Due to insufficient funding from a small audience this weekend, I've had to close the show for the weekday runs. I'm going to wait until the weekends to put on the show, at least until we get more reviews.

May 11, 2007 - The show has started playing at the Old Barn Theater downtown, and we've had rave reviews from the local hot dog stand!

This is the most exciting show presented here since Hair came and went back in '79! Of course, I don't know if any other shows have been on since then.
-Pete, the Weinermobile

May 8, 2007 - LOTS of tickets left! Great seats! Get them while you can!

May 1, 2007 - I've found the GReAT VeNUe! The Old Barn Theater was slated to be demolished this week, but with my savings, I managed to procure it for the show. It'll be our permanent venue, at least until we get more reviews then maybe we can start touring around the country.

April 3, 2007 - We're still looking for a new director to replace the one who decided to quit on us a week into the practice sessions. It seems the previous director wanted to change the script around, since it was "unbelievably stupid" but I wouldn't hear of it! It's perfect the way it is, and I don't care if we have to scour the whole town for another person who will direct this the way the original script intended it to be. On the other hand, we have a great cast! For a PRevIeW of them in costume, click here.

March 30, 2007 - This week was great! Someone just came up to me on the street and asked if I had a something for a person "totally down and out of luck" and I just happened to have the job position of director for my awesomeist musical! We'll be seeing each other within the week.

March 19, 2007 - After a week of searching and chatting online, I found a couple of people online who are interested in my idea. Next stop, the photocopy place!

March 12, 2007 - I have this great idea for a musical production. So last night at 3 a.m. I scribbled this whole script out and it's called "THe GReAT eSCAPe." It'll have everything, including this awesome scooter that I just bought last week. I love that scooter!

About Me

I'm a 45 year old guy who decided to change my life around after having spent 20 years in the retail industry, selling flaxseed cakes on the streetside downtown. You might have seen me next to Pete and the Weinermobile. I wrote the script and I star in the next sensational musical production, THe GReAT eSCAPe!

Links to Great Sites

THe GReAT eSCAPe - the next big MUSICAL SENSATION

Flaxseed Cakes - the next big NUTRITIONAL SENSATION

---

This has to be either the most awesome chainsaw-solo filled musical ever, or the most atrocious waste of money ever.

Long Holiday Weekend

It doesn't feel like a real long holiday weekend coming up, for some reason. In the last two weeks, our school has been tied up with AP examinations for registered students. Unfortunately, not all the schedules for every student is the same depending on what they were registered to write; so for days when there were very few students not in exams, the classes were canceled. So there has been at least one day that I did not teach any classes. Instead, I had to invigilate these 3.5 hour marathons of student BO.

Then there was that day last week when the weather warmed up to above 20 degrees, and the uncontrollable apartment heating was still ON. Jorghnassen and I were melting in the apartment, even with the windows wide open and ceiling fans tornado-ing noisily away into the night. He would check the thermostat often during those sweltering days and proclaim the temperature in approximate terms: "It's around 90 degrees." I'm no imperialist-unit type, so I will assume that means "stupid hot."

Anyway, last week I woke up at 1 pm on a day when I had class that started at 12:45 pm, completely drenched in sweat and realizing no one and nothing had bothered to wake me up. (You'd think the school would call, but by that point no one realized how messy the week's schedules were becoming.) Also, realize that this means I had to have slept through 4 alarms. I stumbled about, blindly through the heat ripples in the air looking for my cell phone that failed to wake me up through three of those alarms. I called the school to tell the secretary that I was not feeling well at all (due to the misery of the apartment heat) thus I would not be going to class, to which she kind of kept a professional phone voice and informed me that it would be taken care of (while she more or less stifled a laugh since I had told her the day before how uncomfortable the apartment was becoming).

That afternoon, we bought a fan. Canadian Tire is getting cheaper with their bonus money. >_<

It's been two weeks and I haven't seen some of these students in class for many days at a time so it doesn't feel like a holiday at all. For what else does a holiday mean to a teacher but some time to take a break from your students? (No, it never means that you don't have any work because any teacher knows that we have pooploads of corrections and preparations to do at any point in time in and out of the year. Part time work my butt.)

Canadian Quarters

This morning's algebra midterm invigilating involved a coin falling from the sky. Or I don't know where. At one point, a student seemed to have picked it up from the ground while doing his exam, and it was left on the table after the exam. I thought, "Wow, this kid doesn't even bat an eye for a CA quarter..." (This is the miser in me.) Anyway, I left it on the invigilator's table (since I am too honest a bum to swipe money from my students, who probably have more sitting in their bank accounts than my pile of leftover student loans). At least it gave the other two invigilators some topic to focus on while mindlessly watching their students this afternoon. "Oh, look, it's the New Brunswick quarter."

Then this article got me thinking: SPY COINS. Oh no, I've got new cheating techniques to brush up on!

Student shenanigans?

Isosceles Triangle Property: This is a triangle that has 4 sides and all the sides are equal and 2 opposite sides are equal and the sum of all the angles is equal to 135.

No I don't think he was actually kidding.

Whine whine

There is one thing I loathe to look forward to in April. Don't get me wrong, April is a great month; great surprises often lurk in April. (Wink.) It's the time of year when the sun finally sticks its spindly million degree nose out and melts the remaining scattered clumps of white stuff, leaving behind black piles insulating the white stuff. (Anyone who lives in Quebec will know what I mean.) And it's that time of year when I get off my sorry butt and start my new yearly tradition of sweaty 5K training, although it's going to be kind of difficult this year with a toenail broken from kicking a clump of hardened white stuff hibernating behind the car tire a few months ago.

No, it's that one thing in April that I always whine about, and it's just around that time of year again. HINT: it's not avoidable, unless I want to get fined by the CRA.

Fortunately, Jorghnassen is also in the same boat this year, having never gone through the scalp-scarring, brain-jarring, seizure-inducing experience of filing his own taxes. So he took the easy way out and paid for Impotrapide. Even with a program for his filing, it is not that simple, as he has now been in two provinces earning incomes and getting hosed by the government more ways than usual.

In the meanwhile, I have to defer the yearly hair-pulling by another week as I have a pile of algebra corrections that are inducing another type of hair-pulling.

Back and Forth, Back and Forth...

"Back and forth, back and forth; I'm beginning to feel like Sisyphus!" -some merchant, Zeus Master of Olympus

Once again, I took to the task of driving back to the homeland, while Jorghnassen had the monumental task of keeping me awake and calling for rest stops at every other service station. Our primary goal was the week-long vacation in our home province. Our secondary goal was to obtain the Rav4's summer tires from Jorgh's dad in Quebec.

Our first stop was in Toronto, to attend the pre-wedding Ning fling at a Dave & Buster's out in the middle-of-nowhere-Toronto. All I know is that one of the Ikeas was next to it. (I-KEEEEE-AAAAAHHH...) I haven't seen Ning in a long time, and even then it was a brief coincidental meeting in Quebec City as she was walking in old town with her now-fiancé Steve. They're supposed to be getting married this week. So happy...! :)

After spending overnight in Toronto with my cousins, we spent all day driving to Montreal, and then I spent all evening correcting Calculus final exams. The marks had to be submitted the next morning at 8 a.m. by email, otherwise I would have had one hell of a commute. I called Davy up as soon as I arrived, certain he would be having his party, to send my regards, and he promptly told me to get our butts over there. Unfortunately, I could not complete my corrections until 10 pm.

By the time we arrived, Ian had already scuttled off, having waited all night for our arrival. On the other hand, Ivo had been asleep and appeared half-dead on our arrival. Then he slept some more. ;) We spent the rest of the evening chatting, sipping tea and whatever else was left, and singing more Beatles songs.

Checklist of Montreal/Quebec Things to Do Eat:

• eat poutine


• eat poutine from Ashtons


• buy maple syrup in cans


• buy bagels by the dozen


• eat and buy tasty bread


• buy or eat own weight in cheese and curds


• eat sushi (!?)

(The last one actually makes sense if you remember what my mum does for a living.)

My favourite thing to do with friends is to make food for them. (Heck, any excuse to get the old roomies together.) So we ended up having one supper in Montreal with homemade sushi (unfortunately not Sushi Sunday but still good).

I managed to secure some of SUMS' doorstops Calculus textbooks for the school. Another reasonable excuse to make this trip's expenses tax-deductible. :)

Eventually we made our way to Quebec, but none of my siblings could make the trip. My bro is recording a new album, so all his evenings are taken up; my sister was entertaining her 'rents-in-law. And arriving in Quebec... my mum was working. Alas, we were also booked for pre-Easter supper with Jorgh's parents and brother in downtown Quebec, so we had virtually no time to go anywhere nor do much shopping. :(

I do feel like we ate a lot though...!

I was pretty bushed by the end of the week. And I still had to drive back to Waterloo, and then the next day yesterday was the first day of school.

... also I had to stop in Toronto for about an hour or so to drop off the bags of bagels, cheese curds, and beans for my cousin. We got back in Waterloo at about 10:30 p.m. and I worked late into that night at making new lesson plans.

Ooh you can bet your sweet patootie I'm completely off my rocker. I made a class blog for my computer class and I think it shows. (In order not to let random strangers get to this blog from the other one, or vice versa, you'll have to ask me what it is.)

Roadkill Calculus

The roads are littered with sad hairy flattened corpses of unrecognizable animals, now that spring pounced upon the region. It started as soon as the ice and snow started melting, some weeks ago, after some sudden snow storms and sudden sweltering sunny days. It all resulted in the now five or six new splotches per day, covering the asphalt like mini misplaced rugs. I have to drive by them twice a day; the morning, when they mysteriously appear as fresh bloody mounds, and in the afternoon, when they are no longer mounds but pancakes.

Arriving at school, I have to check the underside of the Rav4 to make sure there are no crazy stains or small animals lodged in or under fender and bumper. It only makes sense that there are so many little buggers killed per day - this is farmer country, indeed. But to have so many of them pop up in a semi-urbanized area like Waterloo is astounding; I don't even have to go out to the farmlands to note the appearance of fuzzy wuzzy's cuzzy and friends, 2D in the middle of the street. Although the appearance of the fox last year did raise our suspicion that this "city" is not all that city-like.

Speaking of roadkill... the calculus class is wrapping up tomorrow with the final exam bright and early on Saturday morning. I am fortunate that I only have a mid-sized pile of final exams to mark, input into the gigantic spreadsheet file and send the marks by email to the school before Tuesday. Dear readers must have noted that I have been particularly busy in the last three months, playing BG and BG2, oversleeping, making crafts, hiding out in ultimately sad, sad malls, eating and writing about it, and generally whining.

Actually, besides not jogging, it's not much different from when I was mulling about unemployed. So, no, I don't have an excuse for not blogging.

The result of all this is that I am finally allotted a week off, after 12 weeks nonstop of "working." :)

Though it doesn't change the fact that I still have to avoid driving over lumps of flattened fur on the road. :(

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To change the tone, as I often do, especially with all the crap I wrote about roadkill, this is the cutest thing I've seen all year. So far. :)

Another BG Portrait

Ah, another excuse to procrastinate. Jorghnassen wanted a ranger portrait before he would start playing BG2 with me.

Oh The Embarrassment!

I spent all night and part of the wee hours preparing the final exam for submission to the administration this morning. Felix could attest to that, having helped me cobble together one last question that I had taken two hours to think about. Fortunately I had been working on the outline for the final exam this weekend, so I didn't need to check how to split up the marks. But it is not enough to simply make the questions before submission; one must do the entire exam and write up full solutions to them. I gave up at around 4 am and went to bed...

... only to wake up as Jorgh was frantically pulling at my covers telling me it was 8:30 a.m. (And I normally arrive at school at 8. Because classes start at 8:30.)

After sheepishly calling the school to tell the secretary that I would arrive at 9, I bumbled about looking for work attire. The only thing my sleep deprived brain did tell me was to put on my suit jacket, but I only managed to find a summer tank to put on underneath.

Someone forgot to turn on the heat in my classroom again (as usual) so I spent the remaining time freezing with a tank top and jacket. At least it helped keep me awake while I was trying to make coherent sentences. I think there was at least one instance of uttering something like "thingy," when I explicitly told them never to do that themselves. (Their language skills are much better than mine, however, though their logic processes are completely baffling.)

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Speaking of logic...

Ms C the math teacher my butt LOL

Wait, I took my nap today. I can't say it's because I was tired... :(

My sister's in HK

She is on a three week business trip to Hong Kong, and for yet another year she has been away from home for her birthday. This time around, though, she seems slightly more irked about it than before ("I don't care it's my birthday, it's just another day blah") and on her blog (dirtbaginhk.blogspot.com) she kind of laments being even further away.

So she's getting a picture response from me, to have her look forward to a birthday something when she gets back:

LOL Kids

Not the first "???" fan pic that I have come across while teaching, but I thought I would show this to you for the hell of it. I just found it on the back of one of the quizzes I am marking, and yes I am giving it back to the student with the comment.

Some of them still don't know my name, despite it being displayed continuously on the blackboard.

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I updated Norm's link so now it goes to teh awesomest webpage evar! And both Jorghnassen and I are looking forward to possibly seeing him in Waterloo next week. Raintree Cafe!

A Chinese New Year Tale Told With My Ugly Calligraphy

Happy New Year! That is what I wanted to write to my mum.

I asked Felix last week to help me write the message, as I am nearly completely illiterate (in Chinese). Felix gladly obliged (I think), and sent me an image of the computerized version of the message:


My knowledge of the writing process consists of my parents telling me when I was in kindergarten, "Here's the order of the strokes you should write in. As for the actual characters, here are the million different characters you will need to memorize just to be able to read this paragraph." Of course, the million characters unanimously decided to elude my brain and thus I was stuck with only being able to write my name (at most) and the numbers from 1 to 10. ("100? What's that?" Yeah, I couldn't count to a hundred until grade 2.)

Fortunately, language acquisition and mastery is not limited to the early childhood/late childhood phases, as many, MANY (talented/dedicated/stubborn) people have proven throughout the ages. If my mum can bargain with people in local flea markets in 4 different languages down to 25c regardless of item, then it surely can't be that impossible, right?

I started asking Felix incessantly about the different strokes, such as if the vertical lines were meant to end straight down or had little upward turns at the end, etc. Being as patient as he is, he sent me this other MSPaint file to illustrate:


Oh, OK. So I practiced the writing twenty times before I had something readable, and I sent him back my draft:


The whole reason why I wanted to get it right was because I couldn't write in the New Year card I had made, printed from the Canon 3D website, until I was absolutely sure the writing was perfected. It was far from perfect (pretty ugly, in fact) but I had already been too late in sending the card for the New Year so I just sent it in the way it looks above. The card?


It took me 5 hours to recolour, cut out, and paste together into a functional fancy folding fandangle. And after I had gone over all the ornamentation in the background with an orange gel marker, I realized that I could not put a light pencil draft on top of the gel, which meant that if I were to write the message in ink I would have to get it right the first time.

I messed up the "ma ma" part before I got that far, so I started whining for Felix to help. Thank you Felix!

After sending the card and practicing the writing so often, I kept writing it all week and I am still practicing it. Then I started practicing it on Photoshop. Surely there was some brush setting that would give me that fancy calligraphic result?

The closest I got to a real brush stroke was with the settings of "Shape Dynamics" of "Size/Control: Pen Pressure", "Angle/ Control: Initial Pressure" and squishing the pen shape to an oval with a roundness around 28%. The actual act of making brush strokes is a bit trickier, as it necessitates a starting angle different from the direction of the line. The results are the small ticks at the beginning of the horizontal strokes, while the odd angle that the vertical strokes take was from my inability to keep my hand from making it completely straight.

Unfortunately, the sensitivity of the tablet is lacking. The banana I am referring to is at the end of every single damn stroke - when the real life brush is lifted off the page, it gradually creates a point (or blob) as needed, but this (Wacom Graphire2) tablet does not have enough levels of sensitivity to emulate this point; the abrupt "banana" (or "condom tip") result shows this all too painfully.

Thus ends my tale of Ugly Calligraphy.

P.S. My mum received the card and hadn't called because she "forgot."

What I Did For The Rav4. Also, Happy Valentine's Day!

This morning, I spent an hour and three quarters in one of the saddest malls I have ever entered. It consisted of one corridor not longer than a football field, with the two main attractions being "Dollarama" and "valu-mart." (Two, I was lucky.) The patrons of the mall consisted of little old ladies and men, middle-aged types who were zipping in and out of Dollarama for the poor man's version of Adolescent Disfigured Samurai Tortoises and Akay scrubbing powder, and ethnic minorities of mysterious origins and even more mysterious purpose of "shopping" at a "mall" during work hours. And I was stranded there for another few hours.

What, dear readers may ask me, were you doing in such a godforsaken corner of Kitchener? Weren't you supposed to be at school, teaching the young 'uns their differential operators and vector-valued functions? Alas, comes this particular tale of Redneckia, a.k.a. Frederick St. Mall. Which shouldn't really be called a mall but whatever makes one feel important, no?

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It all started with a snow storm. No, wait; scratch that. It all started when I decided to become a teacher.

Actually it started somewhere in-between.

Having been in need of a car to go to work here in Waterloo, Jorghnassen's father generously donated his car, the 1997 Toyota Rav4 to his son, and thus the Rav 4 became part of my way of life around here. But our new province of residence has many hoops set up for any would-be border crossers like ourselves to make sure that any vehicle we bring with us would make more bureaucratic paperwork for ourselves, and more money for the province's numerous and vital auto mechanics, and its not-so-idle bureaucrats.

Jorgh's already hopped over a few of the hurdles, having gained his Ontario Driver's Licence, Ontario-based Auto Insurance, and other Ontario Brand (R) Pieces of Paper. It was now a matter of obtaining the Ontario Licence Plates, but this required more investment than just driving around town looking for building X, pi, and Dingbat.

According to province-jumping laws, one must send the evil foreign car to an auto mechanic who will then charge a set amount of money to check if this car is not spewing out too much poopoo into the Ontario Brand (R) atmosphere, also known as the Emissions Test, and the mechanic will also have to check if the car is safe for the Ontario Brand (R) Roads, a.k.a. Safety Certificate. Only then will the car be qualified to have Ontario Licence Plates.

I wanted to make sure that we had a mechanic who would be honest and worked well, but what can one do when one is in an entirely new environment, new province a.k.a Car Country (tm), with not many people to look to for contacts?

Fortunately, my boss serendipitiously had problems with his char, which he chatted about briefly to me. It was then discovered that he had a cousin who owns a garage in Kitchener, not too distant from the mall previously named, and that this cousin would be able to do all that auto work necessary.

Thus Jorgh and I were led to this garage yesterday afternoon. It was immaculate and definitely radiated efficiency. I knew that since my boss was related to the man, what was said was what is necessary. We left the car with him for about an hour and a half, wandering aimlessly around the neighbourhood.

Neighborhood might not be exactly what you'd imagine to describe an area that looks like the highway crossed with heavy commerce, peppered with roadside fast food. But if you are ever in the neighbourhood to buy army surplus equipment and a burger, this area would definitely be your best bet.

To summarize, we essentially had nowhere to go for an hour and a half, so we wandered the snowy streets from business to business, looking like hobos (in the Montreal sense, but looking nowhere like residents of this area, who look like hobos to begin with). When we returned, the mechanic said that the car passed the Emissions Test (yay!) but needed a buttload of work done to pass the Safety test (boo); i.e. a moolah-full of work. All necessary.

I scheduled to take it to the garage again today after work, near 1 pm, but the hitch on the plan was the unexpected cancelling of classes today, due to the snow storm. Actually, it was not much of a storm, as it actually passed under K-W and into Hamilton. What it did leave with us was 3 inches of snow on the ground. And the car.

The Rav4 has yet to fail to start in the morning, even after the deepest freeze of the year (refer to Jorgh's blog about the weather, I refrain from commentary). Nonetheless, when 3 inches of snow get dumped on the car, it still needs to be carved out of the white pile. I managed to break the new snow brush + ice scraper into snow brush and ice scraper. It took twice the amount of time to get to school, as several cars in front of me were cautiously inching along the stretch of road cutting through farmland, ironically clear of snow and even blowing snow. Along the way, just before arriving in fact, the secretary called and asked if I had 4 wheel drive. "I... think so?" Good, because I was going to need it. "O...kay?"

I arrived at school and discovered that classes was cancelled, due to a circumstantial massive snow pile sitting in front of the gate of the parking lot that with my integrated traction (or "sort-of" 4-wheel drive) I managed to drive straight through. The secretary also informed me that not only was there a snow pile preventing safe transit of students to the school, but that the other two teachers could not get their cars out of their respective driveways. When I told her about the garage, she suggested that I call ahead and take it earlier, and ask if they would shuttle me somewhere to wait for the projected three hours of work to be done.

Her suggestions worked, and I brought the car to the garage at 9:30. My boss was coincidentally at the garage as well, just having something briefly done for his car. His cousin, the mechanic, then asked if my boss would shuttle me to "the mall" while I waited. "That would save me a trip," the mechanic said. Surely there would be no problems, as boss lives in the area, right?

... "Where's the mall?" the boss asked, as he started the car.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, as we arrived at this mall, very near to the garage, the boss proclaimed, "This isn't much of a mall..." But who am I to take advantage of a lift to somewhere not in highway/furniture store/Burger King wonderland? I got out of the car, and made my way inside to experience all the glory of Dollarama, Home Hardware, and valu-mart.

To add some description of the excitement radiating from this mall, there was exactly one coffee shop, a women's only fitness center, some dinky (old person) boutiques, and the German consulate.

This, dear reader, is how I ended up staring at dyed-big-hair-tapered-jeans ladies and homely old people mulling in front of the lotto stand for almost two hours, until I couldn't take it any more and scuttled out into the unplowed sidewalks. (I would have run but earlier this week I had inadvertently cracked my big toe nail kicking the dirty snow behind the Rav4 tires, that turned out to be dirty ice.)

Finally, I ended up back at the garage, sitting and slowly falling asleep on their couch, until the repairs were completed at 12:15. There were no other events of note, so I drove home. Then I wrote a bit, then I slept for about 5 hours and now I'm writing some more.

Moral of the story: although everyone is nice and polite wherever I go, if the main attraction of a mall is the dollar store........... run away!

Islands in the Junos, That is What We Are

Stephen pointed out that Islands is nominated for a Juno, for Alternative Album of the Year (2006, I presume, tho the album came out 2005). Of course, as I pointed out before, bro didn't actually record with them, which makes it kind of a pity. Nevertheless, it is a nice recognition, and should they win I will still be very happy for him. (Tho for some reason their website is down... @_@ )

While looking for info on the Juno nod, Jorgh found an interview my bro did for some website. I'll let you decide who was being more facetious and who was being more of an ass.

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So finally I have a bit of time to write about some other dull things about Waterloo than food and... food. For instance, the smell. (Yay for a nose that picks up everything. And yay for a topic that will ensure that absolutely no one will come visit us here.)

It smells like something different every day when I walk out into the hallway and to the rear-facing apartment stairwell in the morning to get to the car in the parking lot. Sometimes it smells like someone's cooking. Sometimes it smells like someone's butt. Once in a while it smells like absolutely nothing. That is the day when they clean the carpets.

But for some insane reason, it smells like dog pee more than anything else. And cigarette smoke. And then a mix of both. And other things I fear to mention.

You'd probably say, "Why not just avoid this stairway to stinky hell?" Well, I am a creature of habit and thus after learning of this particular exit leading to the parking lot is the easiest way to the car, lugging two heavy textbooks all the way around a 50+ apartment sized building every morning doesn't strike me as an acceptable tradeoff.

Anyway, if you do come visit (which by now you might say "OMGNOWAI"), with a method of personal transit be it automobile, moped, or bigfoot, you can avoid the corridor of perpetual stink and you are welcome to park on the street.

Ms C's Random Food Review: Grapefruit

What: Grape-fruit. The pink one.

Comments: It doesn't even look like a grape. Besides being spherical.

The recent weather mishaps (in a multi-million-dollar-devastation sense) over citrus counties in the states have guaranteed that our fresher supplies of vitamin C will cost more than it usually should, although supplies are still regular from other continents like in South America. I forgot where we got these pamplemousses from but I assume they are actually from Califlowernia.

Review: Jorgh and I don't see eye to eye with citrus fruits. Basically, he hates oranges and anything that has to do with orange, even artificially flavoured orange crystals (or so I presume) and orange shirts. Though I see that he will gladly devour a tablespoon of lemon juice when he gets the hiccups because, "It works!" Then he gets mad when I get hiccups and refuse to gracefully sip away at citric acid on a spoon.

On the other hand, we both agreed on buying some grapefruits to vary our fruit intake. Tangy and sweet at the same time, the pink grapefruit is a summery citrus that has no need of supplement nor garnish, unlike other kinds of grapefruits, the "Ruby Red" variety is sweeter. It is a fruit thoroughly appreciated when freshly squeezed into juice or scooped out clumsily with a teaspoon. Then the pulp and juice have to be slurped out to avoid waste. One can argue that a grapefruit spoon will help avoid all that mess but I would rather keep my 5 dollars, thank you very much.

Jorgh dumped a teaspoon of sugar on top of his half. Then I had to eat it.

Rating: 4/5 for fruits, but 2/5 for style. >:(

Ms C's Random Food Review: Barley

What: It is called barley.

Comments: One puts it in soups, like Davy showed me that one time he made us mushroom (and more) soup. I remember the giant Ivo pot in which we made enough soup to feed us for weeks afterward, and the peppercorns that had been left in the bottom for one poor sap who had the last bowl of extra peppery flavoured soup-ness. (Lil V should have had that one, knowing how tolerant I am of spices.) But the soup was good, and much of it was because of the addition of barley. I would not have thought of adding it otherwise, nor thought of putting it in nearly all the soups I can possibly add it in.

Review: A small amount in water puffs out into a lot of barley. I learned this the hard way. (When have I not learned anything the hard way...!? #@_@) I have yet to correctly proportion the dry barley:broth volumes, as every time I put a bit less it still sops up most of the broth and expands like a marshmallow in a microwave.

Personally, I don't mind having such a bloated soup full of barley, as I can't get enough of the partly crunchy texture and the way it complements vegetables. It absorbs the beefy taste in beef broth, which adds even more depth to the soup. But alas, Jorgh doesn't think soup should look like wet foodstuff + some water so I have to experiment further.

Rating: A gajillion stars!!!/5 potatoes

Baldur's Gate

Another BG portrait, on a whim. I made yet another bard who somehow rolled 95, thus merited her own portrait for the game. Stupendous stick!

What's With the Water in Waterloo?

I'm trying to figure out why the water is so hard here. It was not that long ago in Southern Ontario that the Walkerton crisis occured, and to the residents in this area it is hard to discuss the water quality without alluding to that e.coli outbreak. The first thing anyone does when they move here, according to some sources, is to buy a water filtration device or water softener. I figure private water businesses make a killing here because there is probably one of these depots at every corner selling their coolers or installation and services. (There is at least one down the street, so I don't think I'm exaggerating.)

We bought an electric water boiler the second day we arrived, and I had thought to boil some of the tap water (still potable, mind you) for tea. And after boiling once, to our great dismay, it left a thick (!!!) film of mineral deposit everywhere inside the container, and I had to wash it out with vinegar to get off all the white stuff. :(

One cannot actually leave dishes or glasses out to air dry, or to leave any spots of water of any size, as everything will be left with water spots as frustrating as being stuck behind an old granny driving down a country road with double yellow lines for the next 50 km.

Jorgh lived here by himself for about two months; while he is not a terrible housekeeper, the bathroom sink and cups were left with a mess of deposit that doesn't come off easily with regular household cleaner (and by that I mean "fantastik" and "blue stuff"). So I dropped a bucket of vinegar on everything and it sparkled like new... for about a day or so. Everything smelled of vinegar for longer than that! >:(

So, what is with the water in Waterloo?

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And in other news, brem makes me a bit sad that I left QC at this time. :(

Ms. C Happens Onto Waterloo

I have been ultimately busy doing a number of things in the last two weeks:

1. Driving from Chicoutimi to Waterloo in the Rav4.


2. Driving around Waterloo to buy some furniture and other miscellaneous things in the Rav4.


3. Driving to the school out in Baden to meet people in the Rav4.


4. Driving to the school out in Baden to work in the last week... in the Rav4.


5. Driving Jorghnassen around in the Rav4.


6. Trying to get Jorghnassen to drive the Rav4.

It is creepy driving around in the middle of winter with barely any snow on the ground. The day we arrived, it was so warm that we were wandering around in our late fall/spring/cold summer day garb, and the temperature refused to dip below the freezing point. In the last two weeks, there has been some snow (or perhaps "crystalized rain") that has lasted a good two or three hours on the ground at a time, and then some more to replace the centimeter that eventually disappears.

I remember a bit beyond two years ago, I had just started my driving lessons at around 5 pm, at the Tecnic school near the Terminus Les Saules. It was snowing incessantly, and terrifyingly dark; my driving instructor was amazingly calm and terrific, and I managed to go through the first few lessons without actually hitting anyone or anything. I even managed at most two drivers honking at me, so I think I did alright.

Flash forward two years, and here I am, zipping around town more or less shaking my fist at every douchebag on the road who doesn't signal, doesn't know how to take turns at the stop signs, keeps sticking close to my rear, and passes from the right. And don't get me started on the crazies who like to drive while talking on their cell phones, because it drives me absolutely nuts.

Also, I just got a cell phone. :| It is a prepaid card with Telus and it costs me just as much money to send as it does to receive calls, and marginally less to send text messages so I would only use it if/when things get bad. Like the other morning when the driver side door didn't let my key unlock it, and the passenger side door wouldn't close! Then I called Jorgh from the parking lot to get him to wake up and stumble down the stairs of the apartment complex, out the door and help me resolve the problem, and all it took was 5 minutes of warming up the car to get the door to finally close. It must have been a ghost...

In other news, I started teaching last Monday at the school. It is quite, quite, quite small; in fact, so small you would think it just opened a scant 7-8 months ago. Which it did. There are exactly three classrooms in use, and three teachers who teach at completely different blocks. In fact, the calculus is the first and only class of the period, and the other two periods are occupied by chemistry and english at the same time. And, until just recently, I had exactly one student in my second period math class: she got promoted to the chemistry class, so I have to compensate that loss of class with two or three club periods at lunch.

I would say that it is an insane amount of work for one or two classes, but I am actually enjoying putting together the class. It entails following the course profile and curriculum of the class, trying to make sense of the crazy-long activities listed in there, and making the "daybook" (lesson plans) for each of these classes.

Now, during the training years, no one told me that I could condense all the lesson plans for each day into a lesson plan that can encompass the whole week, or several days. So I had briefly freaked out during the first two days discussing things with the principal on lesson planning when he told me that all I could do was take the previous teacher's daybook, replace the dates, and submit that as my own. Though it doesn't help that the daybook doesn't make any sense to me in that form.

So I spend the morning teaching, return to the apartment at around 1:30, sleep for several hours (yes, several), wake up and make supper, then work until 3 am writing the day plan. And I do mean DAY plan. So far, I have not gone beyond two days worth of day plans because I seriously don't know how long it would take these students to undertake any of the activities, despite the projected "2 hours" or "1.25 hours" they claim.

For a private school, the control of the discipline is genuinely upon the administration. I actually felt like every student in the class was scared beyond their wits to act out or speak out of turn simply because someone would kick them out of school for doing so. (And the kicking-out-of-school part is a bigger deal for them because they're all from Africa.) It took nearly three classes to get them to loosen up and feel (at least a bit) more comfortable asking a question. Fortunately, they are much more motivated in their learning than other places I have ever been, and they have little or no reason to resort to crazy antics.

Also, I have been told that the taxes were not witheld by the school, so I had a choice between being paid as an individual, or as a business. Thus, I should inquire more about registering as a business soon, as I can claim gas, car maintenance, the equpiment I bought, etc. The others even claim the heavier clothing they have to bring to school because the building is so cold sometimes even this blueberry would shiver.

To summarize the last few weeks in a few words, I would say that I am quite stressed with work but quite happy where I am. :):):)

Except for the hard water. But that's another thing altogether.

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Some sort of design-your-own dancing thing - I forgot why I didn't write anything about it earlier when I copy-pasted this link onto a blank post.