Tales of Gardening Feats

My mum, brother and I took the time this afternoon to get some flowers for my dad's grave and plant them. I finally brought the plastic green dividers that I bought from the school's rummage sale last year. I also finally got to dig up old useless roots in the soil and plant living things in the bed. Like LIVE flowers. Anyway, it's looking a lot better now. Such a pretty day...

Some cute LOST gifs made by an SA goon.

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I was working the last two days so I hadn't posted. One of the things I noticed is that students were definitely going insane. Secondary 1 to secondary 5... they were all going positively insane. It is warm, it is green, and it is SUMMER. I got fed up with having nobody and nothing to back up any discipline cases (especially being a supply teacher), so they were treated to a two-day WTF marathon where anything went. Fortunately, the more sensible ones were plodding along fine, but the crazies were just absolutely crazy. These are 17 year old mental cases I'm talking about.

If it were up to me, I'd have expelled their asses a long time ago, or just let them go out to the workforce and try their stupid antics and see how long they last when their boss asks them to do something and they defiantly yell "NO."

Tales of Gardening Woes

The beans actually haven't sprouted at all, despite a week and a half of rain and waiting. On the other hand, the bed has produced two shoe indentations smack dab in the middle of it.

I don't understand. I planted a dozen of these things just as my mum explained it. I watered them every day that there was no rain. I even pulled out all the stupid weeds that I - OH NOES WHAT HAVE I DONE!??!

(No, actually I know the difference between them. Don't worry.)

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My hayfever became so intolerable last night that I took a Benadryl and promptly fell asleep for much longer than I usually sleep (yes, even on unemployment days months). Then today I kept all the windows closed and became agoraphobic.

Staying Clean While Travelling

My brother finally returned Thursday evening. The first thing he did was take a shower. The second thing was eat mama's congee. The third thing was take a nap. (Thus sums up my brother.)

When we folded the laundry earlier today, he held up his white shirt and said, "Oh wow, it's clean."
"Why didn't you guys have time to do your laundry or shower while on tour?"
"That's because we didn't have time. There wasn't a shower on the bus."
"Well, I mean when you have a day off you could rent a motel room and just shower or something."
"That's because we had too many expenses on our off days so we didn't get any."
"Well, I figure one of your expenses could have been, oh, maybe... do your laundry, and another one would have been, um, take a shower? I'm sure your fans would appreciate a non-smelly band when you perform."
After a pause, I mentioned that they could have gone to a science lab somewhere along the way and get a free shower that way. "You know, the chemical showers?"
"Where would we have time to go to a science lab?"
"A school... you know, just step in there, ask to use their shower of some sort..."

[On second thought, they have showers at a gym and in the locker rooms at school as well so you could just go in there instead. I didn't think of that at the time because I spend all my time teaching science for chrissakes.]

Anyway, his very nice girlfriend is also visiting this week, so they're out picnicing at the moment. It is finally a sunny day, after weeks of rain rain rain RAIN cloud rain rain cloudrainrain SUNrain. In the meantime, I have completely opened my windows and am right now experiencing the hayfever that I should have been going through weeks ago when everyone else had it.

SCHOOL SAVED THANKS TO THE GOVERNMENT

In other news, I was called to go up to the school yesterday morning. I had arrived after a press conference given at the school, stating in much pomp and pagentry that the school will finally receive money to build its extention for the high school, thus saving these students from being shipped out downtown in the future for years to come. (That is, until all these elementary school kids get up to high school and then there may be even more problems.) As for the lack of news coverage online... well, there was apparently a communiqué sent to everyone but only Global news came by and there was a short 2 minute segment yesterday at 6pm.

Words cannot convey the anger.

Do it with EMOTICONS. >:( >:o >=( :@ >:t >>>>>>P

Two kids set fire to their geography textbook next to the tree on our lot. Then they took off. Then I ran outside with a bucket of water to put it out. Then I went to school to find the policière but nobody had a goddamn clue where she was. Then I came home and blogged about it.

I'm just waiting for the old lady upstairs to get home so I can get her to find the cop.

ADDENDUM: I finally got hold of the old lady upstairs, whom I successfully related the story to in my terrible, terrible French. She was quite nice about me bothering her on her lunch break and offered to call up the policière from the school and leave a message (since she calls the most often) and I left the bag of smouldering textbook with her.

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I should probably also tell a bit of backstory to this. During this school year, there have been incidents of drug use and breaking and entering in this building, since the students at lunch and after school have absolutely nowhere to go except other people's private property. They especially like to break in to the basement apartment because the entrance is in the back of the building. The old couple's daughter lives downstairs with her husband and family of three young girls.

Needless to say, there has been almost no action taken by the school or police, other than taking down reports and handling phone calls. Finally, there was enough of the neighbourhood disgusted by this that the policière of the school had a meeting with everyone to inform us what was being done: sensitisation pamphlets. Essentially, NOTHING. GOOD JOB, SCHOOL.

Metablogging

Since Davy and brem have lately taken some time to explain certain aspects of their blogging activities, I thought I would talk about mine today. Though I highly doubt anyone actually cares about these points because my own blog doesn't sound serious enough to merit such commentary.

1. I write about absolutely anything. I think this is fairly obvious. My most natural trait is to excessively brood over one topic and then completely change line of thought. On the other hand, there are limits. I don't talk about more personal things beyond feelings and events.


2. Completely unilingual. This is because I don't actually function in any other language. I'm chinese-illiterate and I can't even carry on a normal conversation with my mum in cantonese. Despite living in the middle of redneck Quebec City, I have very limited french interactions with the community beyond going down to the local pharmacy and buying a lotto ticket when the jackpot exceeds 20 million. Really, it's that pathetic.


3. OMG don't even think of sticking this thing on a search engine. Being a class A super-introvert and also a highly traceable professional (high school teacher), I am very sensitive to people invading my privacy. I don't mind the random readers or trusted acquaintances and friends who come by (hi!) but I would rather erase this whole blog than let one of my charges get a hold of any of my entries, and with good reason.


4. Reason be damned! If I think something is stupid, you know I'll say it. If I think something is awesome, then you're free to skip the crude 4-part LOST sketches and follow-ups of why I think Mr. Eko should be crowned as the new king of the LOST island.


5. No posts because of winter solstice, the beans' sprouting, and the crossing of paths of Mars and Jupiter. I don't have a regular schedule. This is because when I do work, I tend to get cranky and I won't have much to say that is newsworthy. Also mentioned before, I skip writing when I'm in Montreal or otherwise travelling. Then I can come back and whine about it, like Cowtown.


6. Above all, I write for myself. Yes, I get embroiled in thoughts of "Waaa Jorgh is the only one who left a comment!" and I admit, I'm not a very good responder because I don't actually answer him. But my blog wasn't initially meant to inform, educate, and entertain my readers. In fact, it was meant for me to vent and sound pompous to myself. I am entitled to such a space, and I'll be damned if I'm not going to exploit it!

This degenerated pretty quickly. Anyway, to compensate for this lack of journalistic professionalism, please enjoy the following sketch.

Confused old man???

Sketch

I thought I would post a sketch that I made a while ago but forgot about. I think it captures the feeling almost perfectly, which is why I like this one. (On the other hand, it is not a very good quality scan.) 

Arigato, minna-san!

Attribute the absence of posts during long weekends to travelling.

I had some great moments this weekend. One was jamming with Davy on his gui-tars in his fantastic loft downtown Montreal. Not that I know how to jam on a guitar. Jorghnassen kareoked to Davy's strummin' to the oldies. He also invited us to taste the 99% chocolate-with-warning that left some of us (Jorgh and I) quite shocked at its profound... cocoa-ness.

Related to this thought, we made brownies this morning before I came back to Quebec. After a few chunks of semi-sweet melded with oil, flour, eggs, sugar, and even more oil, I wondered why one cannot eat the baking chocolate in a similar fashion as mentioned above. Of course, the answer lies in the fat content and the nature of the product. I also discovered that the cheaper the chocolate, the less you're likely to enjoy it. (Case in point: milk chocolate Easter bunny priced at 89c ... before Easter.)

I also had a nice Schwartz lunch with friends yesterday, followed by a pretty entertaining game of Cranium. Unfortunately, Jorgh and I were an over-powerful team, since we had the greatest factor of communication between ourselves (6 years of experience and counting) compared to Johanne and Rachel's teams that knew each other for barely 5 months. Also, Johanne's boyfriend Francis was clearly more francophone than his anglophone game-handling skills could compete with, which did lead to many hilarious moments for which we all did applaud in merriment and good show. (Push versus pull?)

My most unfortunate change of plans was to discover that the learning center cancelled my Thursday and Friday dates, but wanted me to come in tomorrow. SEE BELOW. Unfortunately this message was left on the answering machine on Friday when I had already left Quebec (and my mum only told me in the evening), and today is a holiday. I hastily left a message on their machine Friday evening from Montreal... So they will probably already have either someone else scheduled for tomorrow, or I will find out in the morning if they confirm this message.

EDIT: No, my mum misheard. It's 2 Tuesdays from now, not tomorrow.