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: