On Health, Transit, and Sustenance

Since returning from Montreal for Chinese New Year at the end of January, I eventually had another day of supply teaching. Then the next day I developed the flu. And boy was that terrible. I suspect that one of the kids (or all of them, who knows where their grubby hands might have been) had been working on making their teacher sick, and seeing that their regular teacher was not present decided that this was the next best thing.

What made it worse was that in the next morning I had to shovel the nicely packed layers (more than 2) of snow that accumulated on our parking lot, way beyond the level that the contractor had said he'd remove, and the two feet of snow that the street plow generously piled just at the end of the driveway. This was the same morning I was supposed to get to the school again to supply teach that day, and I received an angry call that morning that confirmed my suspicion that I would probably never supply teach there again. And then I got sick.

I did contemplate just driving over the snow (as I have done with the Rav4 going to the Waterloo school), but after removing enough to inch the car through the passage I realized it would have resulted in yet another trip to the garage, and a separate trip to the hospital.

Anyway, I spent two weeks with a fever, then a cough and congestion, and now just a cough. On the positive side, I did have scheduled an interview at another school, when that school (the one with the interview) called the day before and asked me to work at the same time. (They suggested working around the interview so I agreed.) It turns out that the principal was sick, so I was briefed by the vp instead, during the one break in the day that I had. I also managed to expose six different groups of kids with the flu virus, so the cycle of revenge is complete.

***

The Ottawa transit strike is over, so Donnah is now back in her rented room and not stewing in the flu germs in our house. However, it turns out that the city of Ottawa did not "save" $3 million a week that the buses ran on, but lost money from offering free rides to entice people to trust the bus company again. Many people predict that because the bus strike allowed many commuters to make rideshare opportunities (and people met their neighbours who work in the same buildings), the bus company may lose lots of permanent riderships and have to cut back on expenses like, say, the bus drivers. (Oh, but weren't they striking to get better working conditions? Not if there's no business and money for it, buttheads.)

As a follow-up to the previous post, the NCC is now proposing an even bigger waste of money for the interprovincial bridge. Besides the one proposal that their own contractor told them would be the best choice, they are spending an additional 5 million dollars and even longer to make assessments. Ultimately, they will still choose Kettle Island because it will still be the cheapest and least environmentally impacting choice, and then everyone living in the affected region will poop their pants in agony while everyone else will poop their pants from the stupidity.

***

Horse meat burritos, and an overly-buttery, flour-less chocolate cake. Happy Valentine's Day!

Ms C is tired :(

It snowed during the weekend. (Yeah, no kidding.) The entire region is literally wheeling like mad to get out of the mess. However, I've had no problems with the Rav4. (Except for the door lock mess.) It's driven through piles and piles of snow and I am still in one piece.

The first priority a few weeks ago was to fix the giant meter-long potholes that the city is legally required to fill up. Now the first priority is to dig out everyone from their snow packed mess. Then the second priority should be to fill in the giant meter-long potholes the city now has to refill, along with all the new ones.

Thousands of giant potholes. I'm sure people from Montreal would love getting their 50$ times a thousand.

Jorghnassen and I have been making lots of different bread things with the breadmaker. Some have been ugly as hell, while others have come out relatively eye-pleasing. However, there still lacks a certain Montreal bakery charm that these delightful homemade loaves can't seem to recreate. Nevertheless, we've had a ton of stuff so far and now we've already reached the bottom of the 10kg of flour. @_@

Anyway, whoever wants to come visit can now be treated to pizza, boules, and other random things coming out of the dough setting, as well as the weird bread mixes that we create...!

How do you get clean windshields?

0 - buy windshield wiper fluid
1 - throw out screwed up windshield wipers
2 - buy new windshield wipers from Canadian Tire Parts Source.
3 - start singing "Joy to the World" when the new wipers clean anew the windows.

A year ago when we got the Rav4 from Jorghnassen's father, everything was great. We got the car in great condition, despite its 10 years on the road, the snow tires are nice, and it is a great drive. I even got used to sitting high up, even though it can still sometimes unnerve me if I think too much about it. We had all sorts of work done on it to get it driving on the Ontario roads, like e-testing and safety certificates. I learned a lot about cars, and I still have much more to learn. (Like how to check/change the oil...)

The one thing that I learned the hard way is that you don't mess with the blades. I somehow managed to ruin all three blades over the year.

I changed the driver side from winter to summer last year, but then the other ones wouldn't budge. They were stuck, and no amount of yelling would get them off, but I convinced myself, "Whatever, they still wipe. What's the difference!?"

Sometime in the middle of the year, the passenger side wiper became warped from, oh I don't know, the summer heat? I didn't know they could do that...!

Fast forward to winter this year, the one summer wiper wouldn't budge either. The back wiper blade also became frozen to the windshield one day, and I pulled it too hard so the middle came loosened and never wiped properly again. So I was stuck with the summer blade through the snowstorm during the new year to get back from Chicoutimi to Waterloo. Yeah, you know. That one. I'm amazed we actually survived!

I got sick of all this mess yesterday, while driving to school and trying furiously to look out any of the windows. They were so dirty that I almost had to get out to spit snow wash the windows just to see outside.

When I approached the people at Parts Source, I was afraid to look like a clueless, idiot girl who ruined the windshield wipers of her partner's car (...). Fortunately, they were really, really friendly. They had a database of all the models of cars, and found exactly the right parts that were needed. One of the salesservice people even installed them - however, not without a lot of struggling. They were *stuck*.

"See the hook?" Uh huh. The completely paint-peeled bare and rusty hook. That damned thing clutched the bane of my existence since I started driving the Rav4. "I'm thinking it's because of all the rust buildup that they got stuck. But now you're good!" She grinned, probably with a sense of satisfaction after struggling with the damn thing for about 15 minutes. The new ones are designed to be much, much easier to remove. Hooray!

... And yes, I started singing when the wipers finally removed all the crap.

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.

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.

KITTY KITTY KITTY KITTY KITTY

It has been a long day furniture hunting throughout the KW area, but we finally secured a mattress set, sofa set, and some more affordable furniture locations to furnish the apartment that, at the end of the day, was signed over to Jorghnassen. The super had a sweet white cat that she had taken in as a stray barely a week ago and was planning to keep, that jumped on my lap and was making all sorts of cute purring noises and nuzzling and was so adorable that it makes me almost weep from its adorableness and cuddliness. Too bad I'm allergic to cats :( and dogs :( and other various cute furry things :( and dust mite poo. >:(

Jorgh's parents were kind enough to come all the way to Waterloo to hang out here for the week, driving up to the outlet mall, driving down to southern Kitchener to the Brick, driving in circles around the area to the numerous (and pricey) furniture stores, and treating us to suppers abound. Tonight was the Raintree Cafe, where they were quite pleased that the waitress could speak en francais. It's not impossible to find people here who can speak French, but it probably felt like a godsend to Jorgh's parents who spent all this time trying to stumble around in angloland with whatever angloish they could muster.

Also, it snowed. SNOWED.

Is there snow yet where you are? 'Cuz this is just weird.

Projected Movie Title: Snowstorm!

Characters: The usual gang

Setting: Inside a freezing school, today

Plot: Hapless new teacher Ms C makes doomed wish for a freak snowstorm in Quebec so she doesn't have to work the next day. Massive storm hits the day before students are to go back to school after the break. Hilarity ensues.

Really?: Well, nothing actually happens. Because knowing my luck, I'm sure there's going to be school tomorrow, despite the 40 cm of snow being dumped in our region.

Point of story: To torture kids at school.

Vieux-Quebec is a bit deserted at this time of the year, since it's grey, dull, and quite chilly for a fall. The following pictures are of Rue St-Jean, probably the most frequented tourist street in Vieux-Quebec due to its large number of stores and approximity to the big Gate. 

Rue St Jean 

Even the paving stones were kind of dull. 

Contrary to what you see, there is no snow in Quebec. Really. 

I can't remember why I took this picture. 

I tried to get the car started, considering that no one's used it for two weeks and it's been dipping below freezing point. Lo and behold, it had problems. Fortunately, I used my very limited knowledge of cars (actually, I looked in the manual) and managed to get it to start. There's about 4 cm of snow on the car here. 

On Saturday, it snowed in the morning. This is a view of the backyard. (The neighbour cut down the huge tree in his yard during the summer, and this is all that remains of it. Then our landlord decided to do the same thing and cut down another huge tree in the backyard. Now there's way too much sun coming in the building. I can't wait until the winter really comes and blows at us like a hurricane.)