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: