wow

I'm so tired. I've just been waiting for it to be 10, so I can go to bed without feeling like a total loser. Even though I've been nodding off on the couch for the past hour. I was just about to go to bed and noticed a message from Tiresa about big news from the dept of ed. They're cancelling the P.E.! They're going to bring them back next year, but at a lower grade, so at least 2 years of kids won't ever have to write them. For those of you not from NB, the P.E. is something you have to write in math and English in grade 11, a standardized test that is thus a bit of a farce, and not an entirely accurate picture of how you're doing in English or math. Teachers always end up freaking out a bit, and then completely teaching to the test, which is just stupid. That's not a test of the kids' comprehension; that's them knowing what's going to be on a test. Anyway, the fact that they're cancelling it is strange, especially now with the test only 2 months away.

This week was just awful. Meetings until 5:15 Tuesday and Wednesday, and then we had to stay at school for an entirely useless 'help your kids pick courses' fest until 7:30 tonight, where nobody even came to see me, natch. No wait, I lie, I had another teacher sit with me, and some kids that we both taught came to chat and ask us why we had to be there. Good question. A couple of good things did happen though. One of our supply teachers, who happened to be pregnant, went in to labour yesterday, on the last day she needed to get in order to qualify for maternity leave. We covered for her, of course, and were all very excited, and glad to find out everything went well and she had a little girl (she already had 2 boys, so yay). I covered one of her classes, and it was all grade 9s, who I know all of now, and they were all like 'oh, Miss S, we love you! are you going to be back next year? you're the best teacher! you have to come back!' and so on. Just when I think I've decided for sure that I'm outta there in 2 months, these little bastards make me feel guilty for even considering not returning in the fall. It's not entirely up to me where I'll be, I'm definitely going to explore my options. At the very least I'd like to be teaching a combo of art and something else, not just art. I also had my official evaluation yesterday, which went swimmingly, so if I'm still here next year, I will very likely get a permanent contract. Big load off. I wasn't worried, really, but you always worry a little bit when you know you're being evaluated.

I really have to go to bed now, my eyes hurt. Anyone want to go see 13 Going on 30 tomorrow night? There's a sneak preview.

*sigh*

well due to a miscommunication with the carpool this morning (not my fault), I waited at one woman's house while she waited here. I booted it to work, in my own car by myself, to arrive not as early as I wanted to, to photocopy a bunch of stuff for my 3 new classes. I got whistled at by somebody in my grade 10 class when I stepped out from behind the desk, but since I didn't see who it was I just ignored it. Plus, I was looking pretty hot, so who can blame him. That, sadly, was pretty much the highlight of my work day. New classes are exhausting. You have to go over all the rules and expectations, where the bathrooms, fountains, fire exits are, why they shouldn't throw scissors, why art IS important and how they can all pass if they put in some effort. 3 times.

So that was fine, I was looking forward to my prep and then to going home at a decent hour. Since I didn't have to drive anyone, and couldn't see staying late, I figured I'd be able to skidaddle. Wrong. There was a meeting for grade 11/12 teachers after school, which I won't bore you all with the details of, but suffice to say it was completely idiotic and not at all useful with all the stuff we've already done (PT interviews, progress reports, and report cards coming out this week). And, as usual, it was totally unnecessary that I be there. I doodled, covering 3 sheets of white paper. The music and phys ed. teachers, beside me, read the textbooks for the law class that's usually in there. They tell us we have to go, try to make us feel important, the 'specialty' teachers, but we're not, and we know it, and honestly, I'd rather be useless at home, or at least in my classroom, than be made to sit in a meeting where my input is meaningless. Good times. So I left school at 5:15, more than 2 hours after I sat my ass in the chair at the start of the meeting. And don't even think about commenting on how early we get out at the end of the day - we get only one break, in the morning, and lunch is 42 minutes.

I have to go eat some chocolate.

a collection of four chicken pieces. In the classical style.

Child Prodigy Compared to Mozart

Easter goodies / fun with photoshop

Happy Easter!


A little gift for the messengers among you.


My sister sent me this one, I've seen it before though.



enjoy!

Lucky me! Marks have to go in first thing Tuesday, which means I have to actually mark a bunch of stuff, tally them up, and then fill in bubble sheets. I really, really don't like the bubble sheets. We have to bubble in 2 comments for each student, which is stupid. I don't have 2 comments for each student. The choices are totally stupid, like 'finds subject diffucult', and there's no 'good', just 'superior' and 'satisfactory'. To me, satisfactory is almost insulting, so I try not to use that one, unless I want it to serve as a written *shrug*.

The Easter bunny found me this morning, at Grant's house. How did you all make out?

wisdom from the Mike's Hard box

If you lose your sense of direction, find your sense of humour.

Life is a mystery to be lived, not solved.

You'll find that all great ideas seem absurd ar first.

Looking back won't get you ahead.

(my favourite)
Mike's is hard. So is prison. Don't drive drunk.

amazon.com kicks ass

I know, supergiant companies are evil, but they just make everything so easy. And cheap. I managed to get 3 books (Bill Bryson's In a Sunburned Country and Notes from a Small Island, and a book for Grant), as well as the movie You Can Count on Me for like $50. Granted, there's exchange on that, but with free shipping and my mom coming up in a week, it's a great deal. The weird thing about them though, is that 'gold box' feature. Sometimes it seems to know me really well, like when it suggests a set of pretty green ramekins, or a DSL router. Other times it suggests these weird wine re-corker things, or like, an iron. Odd. I did just check my 'new releases' page of recommendations though, and they're bang on. I can't remember if I mentioned having watched My Life Without Me, with Sarah Polley, but I did, and it was great. You should rent it. Amazon told me to pass that along.

Grant and I are thinking about buying an xbox (yes, I'm thinking about it too). My question to you all is, do you have one, or do you have another gaming system, and what would you recommend? xbox seems to be a good price and have a good following, but I know Microsoft is sort of evil, and there don't seem to be many games. I'm pretty happy with racing games and Tetris, I'm more about fun / puzzle-type games than, say, Grand Theft Auto-type...pick up some hookers and beat them-type games. There's a system at Costco that's $300 for the system, an extra controller, the dvd remote set-up thing, a Star Wars / Tetris combo game (I don't know how those two go together, myself) and a racing game. Seems like a good deal.

My big plan for tonight is to print off my tests for tomorrow. I have to do 2 different ones for my 2 grade 10 classes. They're basically exactly the same, but with either 'period 2' or 'period 3' on the top, and a few questions changed around. My grade 9 one is all made up, and the 11/12 class doesn't write until June. As of tomorrow after school, I'm officially 75% done. Pretty crazy, this term went by super fast. Easter is this weekend...my dad's coming up for a day, Erin might be coming down, tough to say. I think we're going to have supper on Sunday with Grant's family. In honour of Easter, I bought myself a bouquet of tulips at Costco. I'll take a picture later, they're quite nice.

so not trendy

why is it that at American Eagle, all the clothes look like somebody has been wearing them constantly for a week. They're all worn and tattered, and wrinkly. Especially the guy stuff. I don't really like the 'new clothes smell', but I do want my stuff to look new. I can go to Goodwill for used shite.

all about posting

Lissa Explains it All
This little gem I stumbled upon a few years ago, and recently discovered it's run by like, a 14 year old, but she knows her stuff. It's really good to get you started, if you want to break away from the blogger templates, or just spice things up a bit. Figured I should give some credit.

My other 2 boyfriends.


this guy, I think, needs no real introduction.





this guy, we know and love as Mitch. I didn't want him to feel left out of my photo-love. He's very intense here, showing off his climbing prowess. This is one of my favourite pictures of him, which is lucky, because it's also one of only 2 pictures I have of him in total. Other than the naked ones. hehe.

oh, yeah

and I dyed my hair red. "spiced tea" actually. I like it, as do most other people I ran into today. Grant's parents were a bit shocked, but that's the way with parents. It's a wash-out, so in a couple of months I should be back to semi-original colour.

a treat for the lay-days

I am a comment whore.

Jenn says so.

so sue me.

Went to see Hellboy and Walking Tall. What to say about those movies. The first was decent, reasonably entertaining, but you won't lose anything by renting it. The second....well. I love "The Rock". I'm a little disappointed though, he was going by his real name (Dwayne Johnson), but is back to his good ol' WWE name for this one. May have something to do with the fact that the movie as a WWE production. Regardless, he's a hottie. Certifiable. And, as expected, he kicks some serious ass in this movie. He also gets his ass kicked a bit though. You know, keepin it real. It's 'inspired by' a true story, but I'm not sure how much has to be true for that description to hold water.

We watched Something's Gotta Give this weekend too, it was pretty good. Keanu's such a cutie. I couldn't really get past the 20-somethings going for old man Jack, but other than that it was good. I think we're going to watch Runaway Jury tonight. It didn't appeal to me at all originally, but everyone I know who has seen it said it's good, so I'll give it a shot.

In other news, I had guests in today to talk to my grade 11/12 class about pinhole cameras, it was pretty interesting. One of them is coming back Wednesday to help build the cameras. I'm pretty happy, because before I took this job, I had never even heard of a pinhole cameras. Don't tell my students! haha. I have to be honest, I'm not liking my job any better. I do love the staff, but the job itself, not so much. However, in 11 weeks I'll be done, and hopefully sometime before then I'll find out what I'm doing next year, and hopefully it'll be different! whee!

Music | Sarah's Edge

My sister has known this for years.

2 annoying things

Chocolate milk is good forever, right? But not really. I had some, and I guess it's been in the fridge for a while, because I just poured myself a big ol glass, and took a big ol swig, and it was NASTY. I've never had bad chocolate milk before, and I can't say that I'd recommend it. So yeah, gross. Not happy.

Also, my sweet boyfriend had this roommate who used his computer all the time. The computer was in his room, and this guy would just come in, like at 1am, and then apologize if we were in there. Yeah, no worries buddy. Anyway, in all his usage, this guy managed to rack up 2.7g of stuff. That's a lot of stuff. It's almost entirely mp3s. My sweet boy, being a sweet boy, has been not deleting the stuff, with the plan of burning it onto cds. The thing is, that would take a few cds, and I figure if the guy has lived this long without his stuff, he'll probably manage. I had to move it to the D drive so I can format the C...this computer came with the drive partitioned, so C is relatively small but has the OS on it, but also gets full pretty quickly. Especially when people are loading it with mp3s.

So that's my big plan for the rest of the evening, defragment the C drive. wooh! Yeah, and try to forget about that milk.

buy me this

Please.

edit: ok, the link doesn't work, but it's just to an Apple iBook, 14" screen, with an airport extreme card. I briefly toyed with the idea of buying it for myself with my income tax money, but then realized I need to do other things like pay off my line of credit and buy food.

actual news

imagine that.

Last week, I bought the new Norah Jones cd. Yes, bought. It's good. I listened to it in my dad's rental car, no problems. Imagine my surprise when I put the badboy in my car cd player, and it doesn't play. Not just certain songs, or skips a lot, or anything, it just won't play.

Rage.

Yes, the back of the case does say that the disc is copy-controlled, and may cause playback issues in certain players. To me, not playing isn't so much a playback issue, as a lack of playback altogether. EMI actually has a whole website dedicated to problems with these discs. Naturally, I went ahead and voiced my opinion, but surprisingly, I haven't heard anything back yet. I just don't see how the irony could be any richer here. I try to do the right thing, and pay for the cd, and it won't work. Apparently I can return the cd, but then I wouldn't have it at all, and I would still be angry. So, I downloaded some pirated software which overrides the copy-controls, and burned myself a copy of the disc. IT plays in my car. I'm quite tempted to make more copies and sell them to my friends, just on principle.

EMI can kiss my ass.

gulty pleasures

I have to tell you all about Hershey's chocolate filled Classic Caramels. I have a bag in my desk, and I snarf a couple whenever I have a chance. They're delicious. I'm not a big Hershey fan, I'd take Cadbury any day of the week, but I can't resist these bad boys.

I also harbour secret admiration for Phil Collins' music.

in other news

I bought an optical mouse, and I'm loving it. The mouse that came with this swanky computer sucked hardcore, so now we have a fancy light-up one. oooh! it's quieter too, all the better for playing minesweeper with.

details

as per G.G.'s request, some personal info. I try to keep the revealing details to a minimum, but so long as we're all keeping to a fake name / first name basis, I guess some details can't hurt. Most of the relevant stuff you already know, have gleaned from my random postings, or found out in my 100 things list. Maybe it's time for a new list? I'll see what I can come up with. I'm 24, I teach high school art. I'm trained to be an English or Resource teacher. I've been with my boyfriend for over 4 years now, and I really don't like the word 'boyfriend', it sounds very jr high. We met at university, he lived down the hall from me in residence. There isn't a really romantic story behind it, I'm afraid. We were friends, his roommate was my roommate's boyfriend. We started dating, I really did try to do the casual thing, but that's just not me, so after a few months of that we decided we were a couple. We've been living together for...almost 3 years now, but even that started out as just as more a 'we need to get out of residence and it's too expensive to live alone' than a 'whee, let's play house' thing. We moved in together in the summer; we (I) got a cat in the fall, and then another one the following summer. We've talked about getting married, but not officially, and aren't really in a big rush.

now you know.

whee! finished

almost. 6 hours of PT meetings is TOO MUCH! I didn't have a lot of people, probably about 15 altogether. Nobody is overly concerned with how their children are doing in art. Can't imagine why. I don't like feeling like my job doesn't matter. I'm not pity-hunting here, it's just a fact that to most people, my job has no impact other than to fill time. The courses are mandatory, but not required for anything beyond being in grade 9 or 10. You can fail all your specialties, I'm fairly sure, and still pass the year, because who really cares. You can't take the upper level courses, but that's not an issue for most kids. Anyway, I'm nearly 3/4 done the year. I don't know what I'll be doing next year; I'm going to do some looking around. Grant is applying for jobs all over the place, so maybe he'll get some swanky high-paying job and I'll just leave with him. maybe.

Tomorrow is PD. I'm exhausted, so going to have a little nap. Nothing good is on tv tonight, except Survivor I guess. I love how shows give you like 8 episodes per year. Well worth the money those folks at Friends are being paid!